Low life
Shock treatment
Jeffrey Bernard
There were two nasty shocks waiting for me when I came home from hospital. No, not buff envelopes. I discovered that the woman who lives above me on the first floor is addicted to pop music which she plays fairly loudly on her radio, and that the woman who lives beneath me in the basement has a rottweiler. Added to that there is another woman who lives opposite who also plays pop music very loudly all weekend with her windows wide open and I can't tell her off because she is black. I resent that. Not being able to tell her off, I mean.
On Sunday I played Beethoven's Choral Symphony twice, not to counterattack the woman upstairs, but to block her out. There are some loud passages in that work but I also resented playing it since I didn't particularly want to hear it. Not twice anyway. The rottweiler bothers me less although I would dearly like to feed him a hand grenade. At least he has his separate entrance but if I sit by my bedroom window and gaze into his garden he looks at me as though he has just heard the word 'bone'.
It has been an appalling week one way and another. The broken ribs are so painful that I have been eating painkillers as if they were jelly babies and I am incapacitated. It even hurts to peel a potato and mashing the wretched things is nigh impossible. It would have been worse a few years ago. As it is my accountant has just held back enough of my money from the Inland Revenue to allow me to take a holiday. What a thing it is when you have to more or less beg for your own money.
So I am going off for a week or two. Where to? I am not sure. Kuwait springs to mind. It is warmer than Belfast. An American couple who read The Spectator have kindly offered me the loan of their house on the Florida Keys but I have lost their address. This is either premature Alzheimer's syndrome or the skull has hit the pavement once too often. But wedged here in West Hampstead 'twixt pop and dog even a week in the ghastly Canary Islands might seem pleasant.
On my short list at the moment are Corsica, Crete and Istanbul. My brother, Oliver, who lived and worked in Corsica once for quite a time and Graham Lord who has recently holidayed in Corsica have told me that my spindly legs would not stand up to the hills and steeps of that island. That worries me less than the
constant reminders one would see of that monumental shit Napoleon. What Dan Farson has written and told me about the low life of Istanbul appeals tremendously. I am told that Crete, away from tourist haunts, is beautiful, but how do you get around? It irritates me tremendously that newspaper and magazine travel editors and writers always assume that you have a car and drive it. The Sunday Times travel section is the most guilty of those parties. I realise that under Mrs Thatcher it is a crime to be broke, but do we all have to have cars as well?
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