Low life
Unfair
Jeffrey Bernard
The annual Soho Fair, held last Sunday, was all right if you knew someone with a flat and dispensing hospitality or if you knew of a watering hole that was illegally but discreetly open. The fact that the law wouldn't grant any pub or club a licence isn't only ridiculous but a national disgrace. What other country outside Islam could have a festival without a cocktail? There's something deeply wrong with the English, and if! could put my finger on it I'd squash it. Anyway, apart from a rather clever juggler and the amazing sight of the so called World Spaghetti Eating Championship, the Fair was its usual farce.
In the car park opposite the French pub there were a few stalls set up by local tradesmen, and one display consisted of two tins of Coca Cola and four of Fanta orange juice. I'd be obliged if anyone can tell me what on earth is remotely interesting, attractive, tempting, unusual or worthwhile about such an exhibition, and if local shopkeepers can't come up with something a little more imaginative then they don't deserve a moment's patronage. The wheels are truly falling off Soho. Strip clubs, dirty book shops, porn cinemas and amusement arcades apart, all the style has gone. It's a sign of the times that even Gaston Berlemont opted to stay at home.
But the spaghetti business was quite extraordinary. It was won by the incredible Eileen Fox, known to all in Soho for the past 30 years as The Fox. Six contestants sat at a long table in St Anne's churchyard and were each confronted by a salver of the stuff piled high and weighing about 1 lb. The Fox very shrewdly poured a glass of cold water over her helping as the starter got them away to a flyer, and the outcome was never in doubt. Only once have I seen her surpass her performance there, and that was years ago. We were standing outside the Coach and Horses on the corner of Charing Cross Road having a sip in the evening sunshine when a Rolls stopped at the traffic lights bearing none other than Errol Flynn. The Fox rushed over to the open window of the car and offered Flynn the loan of her body. He was quite charming but declined the offer. Now the Fox's body could only be described inoffensively in the British Medical Journal, suffice it to say that today she has a quantity of sores about her and is suing an airline for having been flea-bitten on one of its planes. But last Sunday she behaved impeccably. No one was offered the loan of the incredible machine she lives in.
The entries for the waiters' race were a trifle disappointing, but I wish they could move with such alacrity at work. By the time that had been run, I'd had enough of the fair and I retired with my daughter to a friend's flat. She thought it was a club, and I can't think of anything more complimentary than that to say of a man's pad. The man in question, poor chap, has had to rearrange his flat because the table he worked at gave him a direct view into the bar of the French pub. It made me wonder if I could write this column with Catherine Deneuve sitting on my lap.
After I'd delivered my daughter back to her mother, my own wheels fell off. There was a £5 whip round in a certain club and never have I seen people drink so quickly in an attempt to make sure they got their fiver's worth. It was a bit like the daft way some people rush to swill the stuff down before closing time, which brings me back to the crazy business of licensing laws. Scots friends tell me that there's now much less drunkenness in Scotland since they've been open all day. It's the wretched brewers that'll make sure that never happens here, never mind the church.
In conclusion I'd like to advocate the abolition of the pub sausage. The day after the Soho Fair I had the strange experience of seeing a barman drop a bowl containing about 50 sausages on the floor. As he knelt down to retrieve them, I peered over the bar saying such things as, 'There's one behind you, there's another one by the lift and one by that bucket.' It was strangely surrealistic. Once all of them had been retrieved, they were put under the water tap and reinstated to the food cabinet. Of course they were perfectly okay but I don't think I'll ever be able to look a sausage in the eye again. Nor spaghetti, after the Fox's effort.
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