Low life
Nine weeks without a drink
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwish I could cope half as well alone in this flat as Joanna Lumley did on her desert island. At least she had a camera crew nearby for emergencies and to have the odd chat with, but she coped very well, cooking the most ghastly looking food out of SAS mess tins. I eat better than her and I have Vera but I have clothes moths like Ms Lumley had sandflies. She was entirely admirable, even looked marvellous in her nine day old clothes and lack of a shampoo and I felt ashamed when I realised that all I do in this, my own desert island, is inwardly to moan and try to keep self-pity at bay. But at least tomorrow I am going to be joined by 35 friends who only cost £1.50 each which is cheaper than the few I have in the Groucho Club.
My new friends are fish for which I have had an aquarium built last week. They will live in water that is being acclimatised at this moment to reach the temperature of the Amazon and the water is also being oxygenated. How odd it is that my other friends all drink like fish but the aquarium will need no additives to make my Amaze- nian friends either roar with laughter or bore the arse off me. As I say, they arrive tomorrow with their plants that will make up the landscape, riverscape, or what you will. They have the reputation for being calming and therapeutic but already I find myself staring hypnotised at a tank contain- ing just gravel and water. Oh, for a mer- maid like Joanna Lumley. Another thing about her was the fact that the filming she did of herself was a lot better than the pot- shots that the professional crew took of her.
But I am going to an island myself prerrY soon and although it is my favourite one, Barbados, that too will be a desert island since Mr Cobb nicked most of my right leg. If you stop to think about it, which Yea won't but I never stop doing, it will b,e impossible to use a wheelchair on a sandy beach and every bar and restaurant worth going to that I know in Barbados is approached by steps. Whether or not I can stay on the wagon out there is another worry. The place was made for long iced drinks and the silence of a waiter approaching you from behind broken onlY by the tinkle of ice in a glass plus that .0 the very gentle surf is the most exquisite music, compared to that of the electric saw outside my window here, plus that of the market stall-holders shouting out the price of their wares.
Incidentally, it is now my ninth we without a drink and I am still getting the odd present of a bottle of vodka. I am 110r complaining. I could throw a party for the staff of the Russian embassy. Along vatb the vodka, I have also had presents of the odd tin of caviar, since which three Os who work in the Groucho Club have offered to wheel me home. I suppose I've had a tendency to be slightly cynical ever since I was a schoolboy. Now I'd go so IM as to say that if I wasn't a mite cynical the' I might have an extremely low JO. That idiot footballer, Paul Gascoigne, was once told by a colleague after he had made a ter- rible mistake, 'You've got an IQ as loW as, the number on the back of your shot Gazza ruminated for a couple of minateAs and then turned to his colleague and aske" him, 'What is an IQ?' But if someone had told me during a break for 'snapping' in the mines 40 Yea!! ago, 'One day you will be loved for yor., vodka and caviar,' I would have PO' poohed the idea and gone on reading al copy of the Times which I always wraPPee my sandwiches in. I think I told you one before that it was during a break one rlaY that a fellow miner accused me of being a Tory because I read the Times. I explaMed, to him that I got the Times primarily f°` the sports pages and then made it worse by' without thinking, saying that I also got y for the crossword. I tried to talk InY wt.ac out of that at the end of the shift but .11 gave me a bit of a shellacking when we got to the surface. Oddly enough, it was the Poles who were the nicest of the miners in that pit and they are supposed to be mad. Not so.
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