Low life
I could scream
Jeffrey Bernard
It was with a tremendous effort of will that I managed to control my thirst last weekend and so did not have to be taken utterly breathless by ambulance to the hos- pital for emergency dialysis. Vera helped me with that problem. Although she is still laid up with her broken ribs, she came round to see me bringing with her a great big box of iced-lollies, and sucking on one of those helps an awful lot without dissolv- ing into an excess of liquid.
This is now my third week without Vera and I intend to make enquiries of the City of Westminster Council as to just what qualifications applicants for the job of home-carer should have. It has become one of the more appalling aspects of life to, so to speak, entertain 90 per cent of her sub- stitutes. You don't expect them to have a string of A-levels, but a bit of an IQ would help so that they could read a shopping-list correctly and not return from their adven- tures in the market and Marks and Spencer with chocolate custard when I have plainly written down steak and kidney pie. Last week I had to show one woman — a woman, mind you, not a girl, — how to string a runner-bean. I don't actually have to have someone to string runner-beans for me, but if they're paid to be here for an hour they can damn well work for that hour.
The council also has a knack of some- times giving jobs to girls too young to know how to look after themselves and, since nobody seems to leave home nowadays until they are practically middle-aged, they are and have always been looked after by their mothers and so haven't a clue how to Doreen's Wonderbra would ride up when she laughed. look after anyone else. Tonight, I suppose I shall have to give yet another masterclass in peeling potatoes to the latest recruit who will probably be a 15-year-old Eskimo, newly arrived in this country and without a word of English.
Having got that off my heaving chest, I shall now pause to scream. I have been on the verge of screaming anyway since this morning when I received a letter from the American Spectator asking me to give them my list of books which I think would make good Christmas presents this year. They want a little paragraph to go with each selection. The editor-in-chief says he needs my recommendations by 18 October. He can have one now. Offer the poor, wretched, bloody contributors some pay- ment. No, I am not exactly gobsmacked at being asked to write a single word for this `prestige tabloid' for not one penny.
By the same post an old friend, Mavis, now living in New York, sent me a copy of a letter she has just written to the editor of the Financial Times defending me against an attack in that paper written by a certain Clement Crisp. I haven't seen what Mr Crisp wrote about me in a review of my last book, but dear Mavis says it was very sour and more of an autobiographical snippet on his past. Anyway, thanks, Mavis, for let- ting me know but no thanks for reminding me how terrible it is for reviewers to write their autobiographies. This week I reviewed the new biography of Francis Bacon by Michael Peppiatt and was asked to write about having known Bacon well and that is the peg that the review is to be hung on. I leap to my own defence now before the hate mail arrives but I don't know Clement Crisp, he doesn't know me and I don't want to know him and I have no reason to read the Financial Times apart from having an addiction to journalism. I remember once an uninten- tionally funny review of a Noel Coward biography written by dear old Frank Nor- man. It was like reading an excerpt from Bang to Rights or a scene from Fings Ain't Wot They Used To Be. Of course, so many book reviewers simply show off how well read they are. Unhappily for me, my learn- ing stopped when L had read Treasure Island and my education only started when I began to read Timefonn.
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