Low life
Small print
Jeffrey Bernard
Ten days ago I thought I was going to be a job for an ambulance but yesterday I managed to get up and cross my threshold for the first time since I have been in this flat. The first person I met was a neighbour who told me she was a Spectator reader and that was strangely cheering.
Unfortunately there is an idiot who lives directly opposite me on the other side of the courtyard. He knocked on my door three days ago and asked me to draw my curtains. He said it embarrassed him to be able to see me. Since I was simply supine, listening to the Test Match commentary and sipping soup prepared for me by my niece, I can't see why he should have been embarrassed. It then occurred to me that he and his wife had had me under the closest scrutiny since I moved in. In fact the two of them are obviously Peeping Toms. One more peep out of him and I shall do him some damage one way or another when I regain a little health.
But I lie here wondering if I ever will. My signet ring keeps falling off my finger and my watch now hangs and swings from my wrist like a woman's bauble. I noticed in the sad obituary of John Dexter that towards his end his diabetes made it virtually impossible for him to walk. Well, at least I have at last got a flat to sit in and can just about walk to the kitchen and the bathroom. And there's the rub. I sign documents without reading the small print and to my horror I have just noticed that I can be evicted in six months. Not another losing streak, please God.
Anyway, as I say, I ventured forth yesterday to go to Radio Rentals to ex- change the old television I have hired from them for 15 years for a new model. The girl in the shop was amazing. She couldn't even spell Spectator and several other simple words and she filled in a new agreement for me. She wanted to know whether I was married or divorced and I would like to know what bearing either of those two states have on hiring a television set.
Then there was the business of addres- ses. I gave her this present one and my previous address and she asked me, 'When did you move into Bernard?' I didn't,' I told her, 'That's my name.' She was quite ridiculous and exhausting. She then asked me a lot of questions about my 'circum- stances'. I told her that I worked at the same thing that I always had and that I was freelance. She took that to mean that I worked for nothing. (This is almost true.) I managed not to scream at her and fled to a café-cum-bistro opposite in Padding- ton Street called Cats. A pleasant place and full of the overspill of Jewish women who come down from St John's Wood to go shopping in Marylebone High Street. A table of four of them next to me kept me so enthralled I sat there for an entire hour and drank three pots of tea while I eavesdrop- ped. What was so extraordinary about them was that they were absolute ringers for Maureen Lipmann's Jewish woman in the British Telecom commercial. `So I said to him, Sidney, this is my side of the bed and I'll thank you to keep to your side,' and then, 'Of course she's pregnant. Do you know a sack of potatoes when you see it walking towards you or don't you?'
I felt a wry smile on my face, realising how incredibly boring it must have been at that precise moment, opening time, in the Coach and Horses. I think I may well take up tea by the pot, buttered currant buns and Jewish women. At any rate I shall return to Cats but not to Radio Rentals. That silly girl won in the end. The final humiliation was mine, not her spelling. My nose dripped in the cold on to the agree- ment as I signed it.
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