PRIVATE PLEASURE FROM A TO Z

bachelor's guide to the joys of living on one's own

BACHELOR LIVING is an art. Even if you think of your own bachelorhood as a temporary twist of fate right up until the moment when your obituarist starts weigh- ing the nuances of 'confirmed' and 'life- long', or if you are merely observing a short pause between third and fourth wives, it is an art worth mastering.

I have been studying it for a mere 15 years (and on a purely temporary basis, of course), but I think I am beginning to grasp the essential rules. First, you should be completely comfortable at all times. Secondly, having reached that• state, you should maintain it with a minimum of effort on your own part, on the principle that time spent on yourself is essentially time wasted.

Thirdly, you should fine-tune your pre- sentation to the outside world in order to provoke just the right mixture of admira- tion and hospitable sympathy. You should not be so fastidious as to frighten people, nor so chaotic as to encourage homely girls to want to mother you, nor so set in your ways as to suggest that marriage is out of the question. You should display at least enough self-indulgence to let the `Id rather watch my flock by nigh!: world know that wifelessness has its com- pensations, but not so much as to reduce your life expectancy.

In short the third rule, as with Zen archery, is to make it look easy, but not too easy. Here, for those seeking this perfect balance, is the bachelor's alphabet.

A is for Accommodation, which has to be right before anything else. A proper bache- lor home has lots of space, unlike the sort of quarters which might fit that outmoded description 'bachelor pad'. You need a library, with a log fire. You may want a room entirely filled with synthesiser key- board equipment and bass woofers; anoth- er for hanging game; one for storing your collection of Napoleonic memorabilia, motor-cycle parts, model railways or (let's be broad-minded) cocktail dresses; yet another where you stop for a last whisky on the way to bed. Ex-army bachelors often like to have a room entirely devoted to shoe-cleaning, although the rest of us regard this as stretching the minimum- effort rule. As to bedrooms, remember that they don't need cleaning or heating until someone is about to occupy them, and the last thing you want is guests on camp-beds in the library: so have plenty.

B is for Blind Dates, not advisable for anyone over 18 — although many desiccat- ed singles secretly long to appear in the televised version.

C is for Clubland. The ideal club for bachelors is Pratt's, a basement with one long dining-table. The menu consists entirely of variants of mixed grill, all the staff are addressed as George, except the lady book-keeper who is addressed as Georgina, and leading nonagenarian bach- elor Monsignor Alfred Gilbey is a regular diner.

D is for Dogs. Bachelors' dogs are eccen- tric, have their own armchairs, and lie around making terrible smells. The late chairman of Britoil, Sir Philip Shelbourne, a lifelong bachelor, kept a mongrel called Brit in his office, fed on a diet of expensive chocolates. Bachelors' dogs are also never more than semi-trained, except for comical tricks. I tried to teach mine to take videos back to the village hire-shop, but it has moved six miles away and the distance has so far defeated him.

E is for Entertaining. If you attempt it at home, keep it simple, keep the booze flow- ing and try for an element of surprise one friend of mine with an oversized bath in the middle of his Docklands studio likes to throw guests into it before the cheese course. Another, an expatriate manager, realised belatedly that corporate conven- tion required him to entertain visiting grandees to dinner at home. Sitting them down to a first course of ungarnished smoked salmon, he picked up the tele- phone and ordered the rest of the meal from Domino's Pizza. 'What fun,' the chairman's wife gushed. 'How terribly clever of you.'

F is for Furniture. Large, club-like, dog- friendly armchairs are essential. A useful DIY tip: if your last wife took all the rest with her, elegant, adaptable tables and desks can be made out of cases of claret and sheets of plate glass.

G is for Godchildren, who tend to accu- mulate. Most godfathers are hopeless at remembering birthdays. I am often told that the solution is to give all seven of mine presents on my own birthday, but easier still is just to wait until they are old enough to be given Spectator subscriptions.

H is for Housekeepers and cleaning ladies, who come in two types. There are those who work for the kind of married women who can't resist offering advice to bachelors: this category is invariably lazy, flirtatious, incompetent and prone to steal- ing teaspoons. Then there are those who actually work for bachelors: reliable, dis- creet, worldly wise and unfazed by burglar- alarm codes. (I have proved this theory five times in a row, with five different nationalities. When I went to live in Kuala Lumpur in the mid-Eighties, the crone in the local shop recommended a Chinese maid who arrived dressed as though for an embassy reception. A married friend berated me severely: I was paying too much per hour, I would be seduced and robbed within days, I was a bachelor fool; just look at the trouble she herself had with the succession of village girls she employed, dishonest, stupid and frequently pregnant. But mine turned out to be impeccable and cooked delicious coconut curries into the bargain.) I is for Inspector Morse, a more appeal- ing model of self-sufficient bachelorhood than the other obvious candidate, Sir Edward Heath.

J is for Jogging, out of the question.

K is for the Kitchen, where we want nothing too fancy. All bachelors should learn to cook, but no carving tomatoes into decorative roses; nor is there time for all that gutting and pickling recommended by Digby Anderson in these pages, much as we may sympathise with his Imperative principles. When cooking for yourself, a meal should (under Rule 2) take no longer to prepare than to eat — not easy to achieve except by frenzied stir-frying, which can have unpredictable results. But the alternative, instant packaged food, is an admission of defeat. I once knew a hopeless fellow who lived on Bird's Eye cook-in-the-bag 'Cod in Prawn Sauce'; perhaps even at this moment he is reheat- ing a Tesco 'Chicken Tikka Massala with Onion Bhaji'. As to kitchen equipment, a microwave is (shameful to admit) a lot more useful than an Aga, except for warm- ing spaniels.

L is for Lodgers. The true bachelor rel- ishes living on his own. He who fills his spare bedrooms with female lodgers is either crippled by Lloyd's losses or in des- perate want of a wife. 'The trouble with girls,' one pompous lawyer told me, brag- ging about his spacious Knightsbridge mews house, 'is that they always leave their knickers in the bathroom.' I say!' A more modest chap in the party perked up. `Do you mean on arrival?'

M is for Mail Order. Bachelors hate shopping, except for cheese and second- hand books (see Supermarkets). The solu- tion to most problems (including, as it were, the ones best concealed in plain brown-paper covers) is mail order. A few plugs seem permissible here: all the cloth- ing that does not come from your very cheap tailor in Hong Kong can be had from the Boden catalogue. Curtains can be obtained painlessly by post in 30 shades of velvet from a company called Econer- mine in Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Wine, of course, comes from Spectator offers. Leather-bound albums from Lydden in Blandford Forum are an instant solution to every wedding present.

N is for Never, as in Somerset Maugh- am's dictum: 'Never do for yourself what you can pay another to do for you.' On this principle, you should never iron a shirt or sew on a button, although you should know how to do so effortlessly if the need arises, and never wash up. Never master anything more than the most basic 'pro-

gramme' on your washing machine, and if weekend guests ask to make use of it, pre- tend not to know which room it is in. In similar vein, practise using the possessive pronoun in relation to occasional helpers and trades-people, as in 'my interior deco- rator', 'my Japanese gardener' and `my Indian take-away chappie'. O is for Oxbridge dons, pastmasters of civilised bachelor living. P is for most Popes, ditto. Q is for Quiche, which we neither cook nor eat. We also never eat polyunsaturated margarine spread. We slap butter on every- thing, and plenty of salt.

R is for Recipe Books. Bachelors rarely follow recipes, but an occasional reference is useful. Delia Smith's One is Fun! is too embarrassingly titled to have on display in your kitchen. Jennifer Paterson's Feast Days is much more suitable, as are the slim volumes on fish-cookery and barbecue techniques by convivial television chef Keith Floyd. The Gentleman Cook (a com- pilation in aid of Distressed Gentlefolk) provides the definitive bachelor dish, sub- mitted by a Mr Gurney of Norfolk: 'Take two pheasant legs, already cooked. Slash with sharp knife and spread with strong English mustard. Wrap in bacon and fry vigorously.'

S is for Supermarkets. The final ignominy is to be spotted leaving one of those Europa late-night places with a sin- gle, telltale yellow plastic carrier-bag which might as well say 'Lonesome Supper' in big letters on the side. The only way to deal with supermarkets is to go once a quarter to an out-of-town superstore and buy a huge quantity of basic requirements, steer- ing your trolley against the general flow of traffic with a look of utter bemusement on your face.

T is for Terracotta, tobacco pink, oxblood red and, in rare cases, matt black — the sort of colours bachelors like to paint their libraries.

U is for You, or rather me, me, me. Bachelorhood is a fundamentally selfish state, and would not be much fun if it wasn't.

✓ is for Venus, goddess of love, whose unpredictable call may interrupt the bache- lor idyll at any moment. Beware.

W is for Will-making, an activity which offers many hours of harmless fun and mis- chief for bachelors without offspring.

X is for ex-wives, of which some bache- lors have several. I defer to Jeffrey Bernard on this one.

Y is for Yachts, racehorses, apartments in Val d'Isere, minor Post-Impressionists and all the other luxuries you can convince yourself that you might one day be able to buy with the money you might otherwise have spent on school fees.

Z is for the snooze in the library after a lunch of mustard-fried pheasant legs and claret, man and dog in their respective armchairs by the roaring fire, one of the simple consolations of bachelor life.