Low life
Too much
Jeffrey Bernard
There hasn't been a lot to laugh about this past week. After 30 years I'm back to 9st, the featherweight limit, and what's more I now need middle distance glasses to read the bathroom scales. Is a mere 5ft 9ins middle distance? The looking glass has lost its fascination for me and now, as the trembling razor scrapes along the hangdog valleys of my face, I'm moved to morbid curiosity. When the door bell rang this mor- ning I was sure it was the grim reaper but luckily it was the milkman. What worries this incredible shrinking man though is the fact that I've been working on a magazine feature about food and over the last two weeks I've tucked into as much good grub as you or I could want. On top of that, Messrs West and Whcatcroft kindly fed me in the Gay Hussar yesterday — unfortunate name that nowadays — and when Victor suggested the goose he was staring at my neck. Yes, I feel well and truly plucked. Too late, I fear, has come the news that surgeons at Addenbrookes can now play at pancreas transplants. Of course what they should be working on is the cash transplant. Which reminds me, Taki's in town. ' Now what else was I going to moan about? Oh yes, the old gripe about staff hacks on £15,000 and more a year who don't know how lucky they are. Get this. A female reporter on the Daily Mirror was asking Jilly Cooper about the fact that she was selling her London home and moving to the country. When Jilly said, 'To paraphrase Doctor Johnson, I'm sick of London but not tired of life,' the reporter asked, 'Is this Johnson private or National Health?' It's bloody marvellous, isn't it? Here we are, supported only by belt and braces, struggling to make a large vodka last 20 and not 15 minutes, stealing hard- boiled eggs from the counter of the Coach and Horses when Norman's not looking, reduced to 50p each way accumulators, humiliated into seducing those who'll do it for a Chinese takeaway, burning our candle at one end and our fingers with dog ends, writing our sexual reminiscences for a soft porn magazine, recycling tea bags, cadging Sunday lunches, going in for newspaper competitions, smashing our piggy banks and we have a professional journalist who's never heard of Doctor Johnson but who can bank her salary and live comfortably off her expenses. Pass the hemlock.
You know, I just don't know what goes on in schools today. Last week I saw my daughter. She's nearly 13 but her reading is slow and her handwriting is laboured. With luck she may suddenly blossom but I suspect that the priorities at Holland Park Comprehensive School are rolling joints of marijuana and listening to pop. Well, this pop has been asked to get the autograph of one Harrison Ford. Now I don't expect her to ask for Professor A.J. Ayer's autograph but I do hope she's heard of Doctor Johnson by the time she's been deafened by her first disco.
And I'm off to a seat of learning soon. The Cambridge Union want me to do something silly. What I want to know is how the hell they thought to phone me up at the Coach and Horses. There I was, hav- ing a quiet drink with a Daily Mirror reporter and explaining that Magna Carta was not King John's wife and that the Duke of Wellington was not a general but a pub in Wardour Street, when this undergrad- uate homed in on me. You can't give a vodka and history master class without someone getting at you now, and I wouldn't be in the least surprised if God or the devil phoned up next week to ask me to drop dead for some charity or other.
But you, dear reader, can help. On Mon- day a new, improved, paperback edition of High Life, Low Life comes out and I'd like you to buy it — for my sake, not Taki's although, personally speaking, I'd never trust a man who plugged his own book. I get about 2p a copy, 1 suppose, and that's just how much Norman's put up the price of the vodka and lime by. If he starts charg- ing for the ice and soda I might have to write another book with the Greek tycoon, or does the fact that I know that Doctor Johnson invented baby powder entitle me to a job on the Daily Mirror?
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