Low life
Country ramble
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwould like to be walking through a wood carpeted with bluebells and listening to a cuckoo at this very moment. As it is I am stuck here in the eyrie and all I can hear is the raucous screech of the seagulls sitting on the roof of the genito-urinary hospital behind me. With the advent of spring and so the window wide open I can even hear the orderlies clearing away the breakfast plates in the men's ward.
But I am not quite sure why I should have woken up missing the country so. The last time I walked through the bluebells, ten years ago, I seem to remember that I was crying. Not surprisingly really, when you consider I was living with someone. So why the sudden nostalgia for the country, I wonder? It may be because of wanting very much to eat and drink alfresco. There have been eight months of restaurants and kitchens and I have felt trapped but for Kenya and Thailand. There is a pub in Berkshire where you can eat on the banks of the river Lambourn and gaze at the water. Rivers and ponds — water in almost any form really — are the perfect accom- paniment to daydreaming. So is lying in bed skint for that matter.
The other thing that makes me think of the country is a lovely photograph of two barn owls a reader kindly sent me and which stands on my filthy desk (croissant crumbs, a pint of sour milk and a demand for 0,600). I got to love the barn owl when I lived in Suffolk 20 years ago. There were bluebells there too plus meadows of butter- cups by the river, two kingfishers and, it goes without saying, quite a lot of crying as well. I wonder what on earth happened to her? Majorca was the last I heard. But the funny thing is that I have never been really happy in the country for long. What a wv.ste of those cottages. I would dearly like to have one of them back now that I am single and sane. Well, sort of.
I did once have a wife whom I never took to the country and we lasted fairly well until she eventually revealed a certain lack of imagination by going off with my then best friend. Such a boring plot for a story. There was a man in Soho once who had three wives in his time and they all of them in their turn left him for the same man. Sinister. Better story though. And speaking of stories this life hasn't got much of a plot any more. Since discovering the bliss of being alone I don't do anything any more. That is to say I do the same damned thing every day and today I feel like swapping the West End for trout streams and daisies in the summer and log fires in the winter. Just a dream. At least I shall see a few blades of grass now that the flat racing season is well under way. But a racecourse littered with torn-up betting. tickets and a meal on the pavement outside a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street isn't quite the same thing as the country, is it?
The nearest thing to it here is a picnic in a boat with my daughter on Regent's Park lake. Sitting there under a weeping willow, dangling a hand in the water, is the nearest I have got to living what I was brought up to think of as being university life. A Yank at Oxford made a deep impression on me
many years ago. Lots of punting, leather on willow and running up bills at book- shops. I would be grateful if any well educated reader could tell me whether or not it is like that.
Mind you, a university once came to me. Years ago, I was sitting in the Colony Room club one afternoon when who should walk in but E.M. Forster. I was going through a phase of liking his novels at the time and it was quite a thrill to meet the old man. We then struck up a corres- pondence. Later the letters he wrote me were - stolen by a poet and sold to a bookshop. When I was later told that he had once been seen being dangled out of the window by a man in his King's College rooms I got a real inkling of what I had missed by not going to a university. I wonder if colleagues like Auberon Waugh and Geoffrey Wheatcroft suffered similar indignities.
So, what Oxford and Cambridge never got the cricket pitches and weeping willows of Regent's Park got. That's what I call a bloody bad second. A mood indigo instead of a blue.
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