Low life
Sensitive areas
Jeffrey Bernard
Iarrived at Waterloo the other morning after a day in the country to be greeted by an illuminated sign which displayed the latest figure of the Dow Jones Index. I have always been aware of the fact that the people who have run British Rail since pre-Beeching days are quite simply mad but if they really think that the idiots who ply the line between Basingstoke and Waterloo have been desperate to know the value of the dollar or pound during the buffetless journey 'twixt Bournemouth and London then they must be stark raving bonkers. I had been in Kingsclere with the woman who can iron 14 shirts at one standing to see a racehorse, barmaid, Iranian princess and artist friend, which is enough of an eyeful for one day. To be greeted on the morn by financial statistics plus a closed off-licence is too much. You see, the English have got nearly everything wrong including the Government. On Basingstoke station earlier there was a sign in the buffet cum waiting room with the legend 'Piping Hot Soup'. The said buffet was closed and the sign swung gently in a sub-zero draught. Does anybody care a damn in this country about anything what- soever that's important?
Anyway, half an hour later, I sped up the Northern Line to Camden Town on the No Smoking tube wondering when we smokers are going to get carriages marked No Nose Picking, No Boring, No Open- Mouthed Staring At Us carriages and had a strange lunch. My host informed me, over the heads of his wife, my daughter and a retired monk, that women have more erogenous zones than men. I have always suspected this although he failed to include their purses as being one of them. I have known from a very early age just where to tickle a woman's fancy and although they walk grim-visaged to the bank it is with the grimness of someone who knows they have been happy to have been cruel to be kind.
But the start to the day ruined the latter half of it. Buffetless British Rail, the Dow Jones Index and the information that Hera had made Tiresias blind for correctly guessing that women have more erogenous zones than men drove me home to despair and the television only to hear Alan Bennett say that Haydn's wife lit fires with his manuscript paper. When I relayed the information to a TV producer and re- minded her that a charwoman had accidentally burned Carlyle's first draft of the History of the French Revolution and that he had simply sat down to re-write it without chiding her, she just said, 'Well, it gave him something to do, since he hadn't had the leg over with his wife for two years.' Whether that is true is neither here nor there, it just makes me feel ill to think that God must be laughing himself sick as well as keeping the Festiniog Railway the only one open that works without telling you the latest Financial Times closing prices when you get off the bloody thing.
Politicians waffle and expend hot air about how we must pull together but I am here to tell you that we must stick together. The bastards are out to get us. You can freeze and starve in Basingstoke, die of thirst at Waterloo before midday on a Sunday, crave a cigarette to Camden Town and then be told that your libido is a spit in the ocean of femininity. The last winner I ' saw was Slip Anchor. We might as well pack up now and join the queues at Kensal Rise and Golders Green.
Incidentally, I got a letter this week from a reader in New York who wants to know what happened to She who would drown in my eyes. The answer is very simple. She is treading water in someone else's. I caught sight of him the other day and thought it was Father Time for a moment. It's almost beyond belief how women almost destroy themselves when they don't or can't renew their contracts with me, yet they will persist. She who would iron 14 shirts has now forbidden me to smoke in bed. Nowa- days everyone wants a golden handshake, in this instance I suspect in the form of a golden steam-iron. But at least the daugh- ters of home life and low life got along with each other well enough on Sunday. Heaven alone knows what they'll get up to together. I suppose Alice and I will be grandparents soon, making even more shirts to iron and eyes to go paddling in.
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