Low life
Excuses
Jeffrey Bernard
If I hadn't been invited by the editor to dinner last Tuesday evening it would have been a toss up between attending a talk on the life of the Reformed Church in Hungary by Dr F.Kenez at Trinity Congre- gational Church, St Matthew's Road SW2 at 7.30p.m. or going to a harp recital on the South Bank. I very much wanted to see what manner of men could talk about the life of the Reformed Church in Hungary or play the harp during licensed hours. At least Joyce Paze gave her talk about venomous animals in the Natural History Museum at 3p.m. and I would gladly have gone to that if the Sporting Life hadn't required me to witness the Dalham Ches- ter Vase, an important Derby trial, at 3.15. I am still wondering if Ms Paze included women among venomous animals, but there is so much to do, isn't there? I haven't been bored since I was a child and even then children say bored when they mean depressed. Yes, until you read the Today's Events column in the Times you don't realise how truly rich life is. I also noted with some awe that the Duke of Kent visited the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers at Catter- ick at precisely 11.05 which is five minutes after opening time. I joined up to do my National Service at Catterick on the very day George Bernard Shaw died and it was so awful I was compelled to overstay my first weekend's leave by five months. When I eventually telephoned the police from the Gargoyle Club to give myself up it was 2a.m. and they were whispering, not calling, last orders. I do think timing is important. I know a man who was born in a telephone box and he's still always half an hour early for everything. I get very anxious and it is that awful anxiety which always makes me feel as though I'm missing something somewhere else. Logic
and experience tell me it's nonsense but there it is. I can't help but wonder what on earth is happening at this very moment in the Coach and Horses while I sit here writing to you. Nothing of course or the same old thing which is nothing too. But I'm so distracted I can't help but notice out of the corner of my eye that James Nas- myth, the inventor of the steam hammer, died 95 years ago today. The pot never stops boiling and flights by the Portuguese airline TAP are expected to return to nor- mal today. What else? Well, Rennata Mair (cello) and Linda Ang (piano) are giving a recital at St Martin-in-the-Fields at 1.05.
The thing is I don't believe any of this.
These are purely fictitious events kindly made up to be used as excuses to get out of the office or boring lunches. Some time ago, when Geoffrey Wheatcroft was the literary
editor of this journal, he kept disappearing to lunchtime concerts and recitals at Smith Square. Clever sleuthing by Richard West revealed that he was in fact playing snooker in the Saville Club. How many men will reel home in a legless condition tonight claiming that they have been to Dr F.Kenez's talk on the life of the Reformed Church in Hun- gary? Trinity Congregational Church would burst at the seams if they were all there. I can remember many years ago scrounging the enormous sum of 2s 6d out of my mother every day to go to the Science Museum and Natural History Museum. The half crown was for fares and lunch. I spent it on ten Woodbines and the return fare to Tot- tenham Court Road to look in on Soho. She never thought I'd been to Smith Square or to listen to a talk on the Reformed Church in Hungary, she knew bloody well that I'd been up to Soho to meet my brother Bruce or to try and get my very young leg over. But excuses remain and must be respected. That good poet, Sydney Graham, once set himself up as an 'excuse smith'. He didn't make a lot of money at it but the idea of providing people with excuses at ten shill- ings a time was very attractive. Can you imagine being on your last legs in the French pub in 1950 at closing time and there's a man who can deal with your excuses? Marvellous stuff. (I must put a private note in here for my dear bookmaker, Victor Chandler. Although I've had £50 at 5-1 Manchester United for the Cup — half that bet belongs to a young scoundrel, Kim Kindersley, Gay's young son — I have to own that I still owe him a penny or two from Epsom last year. I think it might have been 30 quid. I do know that it was one of Ron Smyth's horses. No excuses. Nothing in the Times that day and no cellos, harps or ecclesiastical talks in or near Ladbroke Grove).
But the day won't be entirely dull. It marks the day after the anniversary of the death of Rabindrath Tagore, poet, Nobel laureate 1913. Things do keep buzzing and thank God for it.
Previous page
