Low life
One-legged nightmare
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas interviewed three times last week and I should be pleased to be flavour of the month, so to speak, but I found it very embarrassing, and the questions put to me Simply served as a reminder of what a nar- row life I lead. Racehorses, vodka, Soho and a sprinkling of disgruntled women seem to be the ingredients of a life made even more boring by the fact that at last, after five months, I am getting desperately fed up with existing on one leg.
Yesterday, my wheelchair got stuck in the narrow doorway of my kitchen and I could have screamed. I am also wondering where the ladies are who I was told would still like me for myself — horror of horrors — and not give a fig about my only having one leg, or at least one and a half legs. Anyway, Paul Callan came up here from Classic FM to record an edition of Celebrity Choice. It was much the same as the Desert Island Discs I did with Sue Lawley three years ago but this time I included Elgar's Cello Concerto. Callan kindly brought with him some excellent claret plus a bottle of Absolut vodka, which I think is the best. I heard the programme last Sunday at noon and was fairly embarrassed. I didn't realise I had a radio voice which consists of talking proper.
Then a nice bloke from the Telegraph, Robert Philip, a sports writer from Glas- gow, arrived to question me on the eve of Royal Ascot about my likes and dislikes on the Turf, and how big a fool I have made of myself. Philip also brought with him some excellent claret but I do wish newspapers and the BBC would get it into their heads that I don't pay the rent or the shopping with bottles of booze.
I also have the feeling, and it made me quite paranoid, that press photographers quite delight in the fact that I now look like the physical has-been that I am and now I dread the Evening Standard's forthcoming piece about this flat which is more like a prison in which the food and drink is better than Dartmoor and in which I am allowed to smoke. This old lag no longer puts many bums on the sitting room seats. The com- mittee downstairs thinks otherwise. I call them the committee and what they are are mostly a few harridans and a couple of men who are residents of this block and who sit about just inside the front door in the hall- way. They sit in judgment. My niece tells me that when she was let in the other day by one of them, she was asked, 'Who do you want to see?' and when she said 'Jef- frey Bernard' the reply was, 'Bloody hell, this place is getting like Lourdes.' A slight exaggeration.
The fact that I write this a couple of days before Royal Ascot reminds me of the awful behaviour of some busybody con- cerned with the Westminster Health Authority. Apparently, this man followed one of our angelic District Nurses on her rounds one day and then reported her to those on high for having gone into a bet- ting shop on her travels. He claimed that she spent all of four minutes in there and, apart from the fact that she may have been putting a bet on for one of the people she cared for, there is no law against going into a betting shop, neither is it unethical.
That in turn reminds me of being watched by the Customs and Excise people for six weeks when I was illegally taking bets in the Coach and Horses. Surveillance is an expensive business and on Saturdays I presume it pays time and a half. There is a betting shop next door to my front door and it wouldn't surprise me if one of the people downstairs on the committee is a grass.
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