Low life
Travel light
Jeffrey Bernard
In an averagely insane week I was struck Particularly by the news item about the man who tried to hijack a Japanese jumbo jet. He made his attempt armed solely with a bottle opener. This is not to say that I decry his efforts and, heaven knows, I wouldn't dream of knocking such a noble, vital and smile-provoking instrument as your bottle opener. I'm simply overcome with a sort of distant admiration for the lunatic concerned who, despite his obviously psychopathic intentions, did at least get his priorities right when he got up in the morning and chose his weapons.
So many of us, I think, get stranded in this bowl of shit called life simply because we're weighed down with non-essential luggage. A bottle opener is essential and if we could all limit ourselves to essentials we would lead simpler and therefore better lives. The real folly is to weigh' in and out with excess baggage. Wives are cases in point. To have one that you truly love makes day to day existence akin to wading through a bog wearing gum boots. The tattered remnants of good taste prevent me from enlarging on the subject, but believe me, I know.
Well, a bottle opener apart, just what does one need to survive? I suggest a box of matches, two £20 notes, six betting slips, a pen with which to soil them and some contraceptives. The choice of contraceptives, incidentally, is entirely up to the individual but my choice is a bottle of vodka to be taken twice daily after meals. As a matter of fact, did I wish to do something as mad and dangerous as to hijack an aeroplane, I'm sure I could do it armed only with a bottle of vodka. That's by the way. What else? Of course, apart from the matches and money etc, an awareness that all is, if not lost, quite ridiculous anyway.
Also, and I'm afraid it's taken far too long for me to have found out, there are those two weighty encumbrances: regret and remorse. To consider what might have been is bootless. What might have been might have been 15 years without remission with someone like Jill Tweedie or Anna Raeburn and whither your bottle openers, betting slips and frolics in that event? No, your failed hijacker very nearly got it right. He fined it down to the bare essentials although, come to think of it, he probably should have taken the precaution of adding a corkscrew to his equipment.
Then, of course, perhaps he's not ready for jumbo jets and maybe he ought to stick to women. The last time I hijacked a woman I did it with a joke and two glasses of wine. I forced her to take me to Chelsea. Unfortunately she still hasn't forgiven me, which is why I said, at the beginning of this column, that life is not a bowl of cherries but a bowl of another substance. Never mind. Those of us who travel light travel fastest. The only thing that worries me is just where in hell are we going?
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