Low life
A load off my mind
Jeffrey Bernard
Iturned on the radio this morning at the crack of dawn as I always do to hear that an organisation called Mind has declared that millions of working hours are lost each year because of stress. So what? I couldn't live without stress. I cherish every hour that 1 cling to cliff edges by my fingertips.
The radio announcer then went on to say that there was something of an archaeolog- ical tragedy taking place near Bristol because of building something or other which would ruin traces of what happened 250 million years ago. I don't give a damn what happened 250 million years ago, just as it is too late to benefit me to know what won the 2.30 at Sandown Park on 7 March 1928, What I want is an archaeologist to tell me what happened last night. They could turn the Groucho Club into a dig. Archaeologists worry me a little, although I must admit to having been nigh transfixed by my walk through the Valley of the Kings and discovering or unearthing a small shed which dispensed ice-cold lager — some- thing Lord Carnavon never found.
An old friend of mine, Bill Haddow, who I was in the nuthouse with 20 years ago, worried me last week by asking me whether I had considered what there was before the universe. I am now worried sick by that consideration. To hell with wondering whether or not is there life after death, I am now sleepless with wondering how it all started. Who created God? Who triggered the first explosion? All of this creates what Mind calls stress and it is just that which enables me to sit in a bar for three hours in contemplation without feeling bored.
All I know now is that there is life before death. This was confirmed yesterday at the diabetic clinic at the Middlesex Hospital. My sainted consultant has at last agreed for me to have an operation to cut out the two cysts on the back of my head. I thought his initial reluctance to have the deed done was because of the possibility of diabetics having heart failures or strokes under a general anaesthetic, but he told me that the only danger was liver failure. I fear not. I have been under a general anaesthetic for 20 years now and my liver and I are still on speaking terms. More than you could say for quite a lot of marriages.
But you should have seen the face of the surgeon my consultant fetched in to have a look at his forthcoming task. They get enormous job satisfaction do surgeons. He looked at my head as a salivating gourmet might look at a roast goose about to come under the knife. They love it. I felt almost sorry for a young Australian surgeon at the Middlesex ten years ago when an infected foot, poisoned by Bajan coral, got better and deprived him of the sheer joy of cut- ting it off.
But the removal of these two wretched cysts will be a weight off my mind and that is almost literally true. I do not wish to be incinerated at Golders Green looking like the Elephant Man. So if anybody here prints that awful phrase, 'Jeffrey Bernard is unwell', don't believe a word of it. I shall simply be having a deeper sleep in the Mid- dlesex Hospital than the one I usually have in the Groucho Club of an afternoon.
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