Low life
Hands-on approach
Jeffrey Bernard
Ican't understand why anyone should possibly want to be Home Help which does, after all, involve not only waiting on people and shopping for them but also clearing up their various messes, but I keep meeting new ones at the weekends when Vera is off.
This last weekend I was looked after by a young Scotsman who emphasised very clearly that my irritability threshold from the wheelchair is getting lower and lower. First of all he handed me a cup of tea with his fingers around the rim and then he handed me a couple of biscuits also with his fingers. Not the end of the world, you might think, but I don't know where his hands have been, and handed a glass like that in a pub I'd send it back. And this morning Vera turned up with a man who is new to the job, showing him the ropes, and he looks quite capable of doing almost any other job you could think of, such as some- thing menial like being a Member of Par- liament. One young man, who was a temporary Home Help to me, told me that he had taken the job on because he liked meeting the different people he had to look after, but, since most of them are a lot worse off than I am and do little else but sit about all day semi-comatose and dribbling, I can't see that there can be much exchange of ideas or anything between them, let alone interest or excitement. On the horizon I can see Vera's retirement so God alone knows whose hands, or should I say fingers, I shall be in then should I sur- vive.
On Thursday, it was two years to the day that Mr Cobb took off my right leg and it took nearly two years for the ulcer on my left foot to heal and last week it appeared again. A swab has just gone off to the Mid- dlesex Hospital and I think that I shall have to take a photograph of the foot soon to keep as a memento. I feel incredibly mat- ter-of-fact about it all and, short of decapi- tation, it's all the same to me. But there is marvellous news from Italy which should cheer anyone up who is falling apart and 60 years old or more.
A wonderful 82-year-old woman in Genoa who runs a brothel is giving her clients aged 60 or more a 20,000 lire reduc- tion on the price of a 70,000 lire short time with her girls. She runs her brothel with the help of two ladies in their sixties and she must be something of a heroine. I wouldn't have thought that her simpatico feelings can be very popular with the girls she employs since, if the customers who benefit from her generosity are of that age, it is likely that a short time could last until the cows come home. And who's to say what a short time is? I can tell you that a three- minute round in the ring when you're on the receiving end can seem like a lifetime, but then I have never been on the receiving end in a bed so I wouldn't know.
Such a service for older men is the sort of thing that you would have thought would have been encouraged by Age Concern and be included in the National Health Service, but then with health freaks like Edwina Currie and then Virginia Bottomley at the helm there is no chance.
Incidentally, I used to spend time cursing Virginia Bottomley as I lay for hours at a time on a stretcher in casualty departments waiting to be attended, but now that she has moved from Health to Her- itage I suddenly find her strangely fancia- ble — in fact she looks positively nourishing. I saw her once in the Groucho Club and, although I thought her very attractive at the time, she was then the Health Minister and maybe because of that she looked incredibly bossy which spoilt her looks. It is bad enough that the Grou- cho Club has been all but ruined by the yuppie and suit membership, but MPs sure- ly sound the death knell.
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