Low life
Hospital bets
Jeffrey Bernard
The hospital staff have been trying to work out how I can put on some weight. They say that I am quite literally suffering from malnutrition. I wish they would hurry up and perfect pancreas transplants. Any- way, it was quite an interesting five days I had of it, in some ways, although being in hospital is always incredibly boring. There was a man in the bed opposite me who had a heart transplant some years ago and it was obviously horribly successful. A Welshman, and they should have cut his tongue out while they had him on the table. At frequent intervals he would shout, 'What I say is that if you can't laugh then life isn't worth living.' He would look at me when he said that and I wanted to say, 'Perhaps people don't think you're very funny,' but I bit my own little tongue. Nevertheless, he intrigued me. I got on very well with one of the porters there and one day I said to him, apropos the Welsh- man, 'I am very curious about the heart- transplant man. I would very much like to ask him about it but it seems a little too personal and maybe even rude to quiz him. But I would like to know what on earth it feels like to wake up every morning with somebody else's organ in your body.' You don't have to ask him,' the porter said. `You can just ask any woman.'
All the porters there were pretty classy in one way or another. One of them /old me that he had been reading The Spectator for ten years and he delivered a copy of the Times to me every day. Another one, who coincidentally drinks in the Coach and Horses, and keeps his dry white wine cold by stashing it with the corpses in the mortuary, apparently once got the boot from a hospital because of his boozing. He operated one of those old-fashioned switchboards that you have to plug into and when it broke down the electrician they had called in to repair it found a bottle of vodka jammed into the back of it. I knew a hospital porter once at the Middle- sex who took all the bets from all the captive punters in the establishment. He didn't really need to porter but the job gave him the foothold he needed to skin the patients. I once read that there was a man at British Leyland who made a book and they reckoned he made more money than the managing director of the com- pany. But hospital bookmaker can't be bad. You could easily welsh on a winning punter if he was on a drip. But I feel worse now than I did before I went into hospital. I came out to read a piece written by Julie Burchill, the famous novelist, in 20120 Magazine in which she said, 'I wondered how the most brazenly drunken writer around — Jeffrey Bernard — could write a column so consistently leaden and prosaic until I was told by one in the know that he actually writes before he drinks in order to finish before the pubs open. That's not a writer who drinks, but a drinker who writes. . . ' And so on. To be attacked by the Virginia Woolf de nos jours really hurts. I can just about take being slagged off by your average reader, but to have the knife put in by a woman with brains can keep you awake at night.
And make no mistake, Ms Burchill is more than a mere life-support system for her vagina. I have seen her and heard her from a distance holding court in the Groucho Club with some of the finest minds in London. But I don't know where this idea comes from that everything has to be written before the pubs open. It isn't important, but it is possible to drink at home and in fact I am taking sips between these earthbound and prosaic sentences. Dear God, I wish I could write a dirty novel for a £75,000 advance. It puts you so far above your colleagues. And now I have to prepap for a chat-show and I gather I shall be appearing with Irma Kurtz and Henry Cooper. Both of them old chums. A bottle of champagne to the first reader who can guess which of the two is the most benign.
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