Low life
Dog days
Jeffrey Bernard
for just a couple of hours every day until opening time. Anyway, I was a little irritated the next day to see the Observer describe me as being the Spectator's Bohe- mian scribbler. I am about as Bohemian as Jack Dempsey and I have an electric typewriter not a pencil. So many people confuse Bohemian with drunken layabout or bum or would-be painter. There aren't any Bohemians left in Soho now, only a load of mostly clapped-out hacks. The last Bohemian I saw in Soho was Augustus John and that's going back a bit. But the word scribbler is derogatory which hack funnily enough isn't. It matters not a lot but then on Tuesday the Racing Post described me as being lovable and irrep- ressible. I might be lovable to a guide dog and I'm very repressible. What a strange thing to say. Then he went on to call me the somewhat inebriated Spectator col- umnist. I'm not sure about the somewhat. Either you're pissed or you're not.
But I met a bookmaker friend at Ascot who told me a very hard luck story. He has a greyhound dog which was quite good on the track and which he recently retired to stud. It should have brought him in about £300 a week in stud fees. The bookmaker also bought two bitches for £1,500 so that he could help himself to a couple of litters. Now what's choked him is that it turns out that the dog just can't do the business. All it does apparently is eat like a horse. I suggested it might be because the dog had an unhappy puppyhood or that someone in the kennels was feeding it vodka but it remains a mystery. Now he says he's going to try dressing the bitches up in frilly knickers and suspender belts.
Funny things dogs though. I don't have very good memories of the days when I used to go to the dogs literally. I used to go to New Cross on Saturday nights long ago to back the last favourite. One night I fell from near the top of the grandstand right down to the bottom where the bookmakers stood. I must have negotiated nearly a hundred steps during that seemingly end- less tumble. Then when I started in this awful business I had to go to Wembley to interview a bitch who had run up a tremendous sequence of wins. I don't know what you say to a dog but I couldn't even get a bark out of her. No, you can keep the dogs although I suppose it can be quite pleasant to have dinner at Wimble- don dogs of a summer's evening. You can imagine the food. It's what these people think is up-market when they go out. Chicken Maryland or gammon steaks. Both are very ordinary but they have both been awarded a ring of pineapple. Very classy.
Mind you, the catering at most proper racecourses isn't up to much although they do a passable curry at Sandown Park, so it will be picnics in future and flasks of soup during the National Hunt time of year. I suppose one could save a fortune by taking one's own booze. I took a bottle of Pernod to Newbury races sonie years ago when I was addicted to pastis and it affected my judgment badly. My binoculars didn't seem to like it much either. Which reminds me. I brought back a bottle of absinthe from Portugal out of sheer curiosity. We opened it the other day and it is awful. With water it goes not yellow, it is green. But I could tell after a couple that the French government were quite sensible to ban it. Gaston Beriemont says it was banned because it made men impotent and women infertile. I suspect it was because it made the working classes go blind.
Previous page
