Low life
Dog-days
Jeffrey Bernard
Last Wednesday morning at the crack of dawn I saw the most definitive summing up of this life as I know it. I was gazing out of my bedroom window contemplating the next round of my contest with God when the dog from the downstairs flat slunk out into the garden and defaecated over some really lovely lupins. The sight of the wretched animal standing hunched and quivering with determination over those flowers somehow hit my nail on the head and I had to crawl back to bed and take another count. I lay there for a while reflecting that I do, more or less, live at the bottom of a lavatory pan. But that dog takes on many disguises you know. He works as a bailiff at Marylebone County Court, he runs several pubs and sometimes he dresses up as a woman with a seventh dan black suspender belt. Well, after a nice soak and a bout of smoker's cough in the bath I forgot him and took myself to Knightsbridge where I had to meet Jeremy. (Yes, he's still barred from the Queen's Elm.) We went into Richoux and had a pot of tea each. Inside each pot was one tea bag. The bill? £1.96. Now it so happens that the man downstairs who owns the lupin assassin gave me a box of 600 tea bags last Christmas which he'd nicked from his place of employment. Incidentally, the gesture was not a by-product of the season of good will but more a toadying one in the stupid belief that I could tip him a succession of racing certainties. Anyway, when I gently remonstrated with the manageress of Richoux and said that possibly two tea bags in a pot might make £1.96 a little more reasonable she gave me an involuntary wag of her tail. Mind you, it's nice to know I'm nearly £600 richer — in theory anyway. If, that is, any reader would care to back me in a tea shop venture.
Later, back in Soho, and to my delight, Geoffrey Wheatcroft handed me a newspaper clipping which proved that lupins do after all flourish, and in Russia of all places. The proof is worth retelling in case you missed Michael Binyon's excellent piece and it concerns the reason why the women players of the Nikolayev Chamber Orchestra walked out of a rehearsal. The conductor was drunk apparently, and not for the first time. One of the women said, 'In the mornings Mr Cebanenko used to come to rehearsals in a terrible mood. In the first interval he and the men would head straight for the bar over the road. After the interval he looked better and became more cheeful, and after the second or third interval we simply couldn't understand his gestures.'
On top of that the orchestra used to drink so much on the bus on the way to concerts that the driver complained to the cultural authorities that he was tired of stopping at every wine shop on the way. It all upset the women so much that they complained to the manager. And this bit I love. 'The manager only remarked blithely, "So far no one has fallen on his music stand".'That man I could go into the jungle with. Binyon goes on to say that on one tour the leading artist got everyone on the bus drunk and that when the bus failed to arrive the concert organiser sent out a lorry from the local collective farm to look for them. Eventually they found the bus abandoned by the roadside and most of the orchestra had disappeared. When they did find them they were in no state to perform and the audience were sent home.
Of course, the other thing that amuses me somewhat is the fact that only the women players complained to the authorities. I thought it was only — and quite rightly and understandably—wives who complained. In mitigation I'd like to say to the dog at the Kremlin who'll inevitably defaecate on this wonderful band of wandering minstrels that they're simply following in the tradition of Mussorgsky and Strawisky as he was known. Anyway, I'd very much like to get hold of a record of the Nikolayev Chamber Orchestra if they've ever cut one and I suppose that their Mozart and Liszt probably shows them at their best much as I loathe Liszt. Should I ever return to Russia I shall make it a point to lay a wreath of lupins on the grave on he unknown musician.
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