Low life
Bloody Sunday
Jeffrey Bernard
Sundays used to pass by almost unnoticed when I was living in Lambourn. Now, in rhapsodic Kentish Town, I start dreading them from the moment of waking on Friday morning. Why we're just about the only country on earth that makes Sunday a closed-shop, death-warmed-up, roast-beefand-two-veg-at-4p.m. day of utter gloom, God alone knows and I hold him mainly responsible. For one thing the pubs should be open all day and for another why mayn't I have haddock or paella, or bamboo shoots with Fu-Yung chicken slices come to that? Take last Sunday. I spent three hours grafting away in the kitchen trying to get lunch to look good as well as taste good and the bastards turned up pissed at half past two. Lunch is at lunchtime, not teatime. And another thing. I myself am in favour of a cocktail or nine but why do these people have to stay in the pub till closing time when they could have drinks where they're having lunch? They reel in, lean over your stove and ask, 'How's the gravy coming on?' Then they produce a bottle of almost undrinkable plonk, hold it aloft with triumphant and fatuous grins and announce that they've brought you a priceless gift. By the time they're ready to eat the food's overdone and the salad is falling asleep. This week will thankfully be a break from, tradition. My daughter is coming to lunch. She will arrive at 11 a.m. in a sober frame of mind and we will then proceed to prepare fish fingers and chips garnished with an entire bottle of tomato ketchup all washed down with Coca-Cola. We will not spend the entire afternoon discussing sex or how drunk we were the night before, but give her five or six years and we could be.
By the way, speaking of gravy there's a man who's such a Sunday-obsessed nutter that it's an understanding that he makes the gravy wherever he's invited and he actually brings his own ingredients with him. Then there's that strange working-class ritual, so I'm told, of having sexual intercourse after Sunday lunch, on the floor in front of the television set. What is so unattractive about having sex at, say, 5.30 p.m. on a Tuesday I can't imagine. And another thing. They actually recommend 'good Sunday boozers' as being the ones where no women appear, and if there's one thing I can't stand it's places with no women.
But there is just one Sunday every year which I look forward to eagerly and that's the day of the Lambourn Lurcher Show which is held on Peter Walwyn's land at Seven Barrows. I've written about it before so I'll say no more other than that any Sunday with the Walwyns is an exception to the rule of ghastly Sundays. Another gripe I've got is to do with the compulsion I have to buy the Sunday papers. I sometimes think that, apart from the date on the paper, you could pick up any of them and not know the difference. If it's not Nicholson's letters in the review section then it's Virginia Woolf's diaries with colour pictures in the magazine.
A really grizzly sight on a Sunday at midday is the middle-aged, liberal hippy ordering his first pint in the twee Hampstead or scruffy Chelsea local .Just as Irishmen dress up to go to mass before getting pissed so liberals get busy by keeping down appearances. Mine host is overcome by thoughts of Christian charity and puts the odd peanut and cube of cheddar on the bar having ripped you off all week, and I for one can't move for the dogs and children.
It has occurred to me, when I've been stir crazy on a Sunday afternoon, to buy a return ticket to Brighton and spend the afternoon in the buffet car going backwards and forwards until opening time. Then one can go into the pub and listen to the most boring yet fascinating postmortems on what everyone had for lunch and how much of the lawn they mowed or how well they slept. 'Did you see that bit in the Observer mag about this chap who says the world may come to an end next year?'
`No."Well, this bloke — some sort of scientist at Oxford — says if we don't stop dumping sewage in the sea and if there's a volcanic explosion in December north of latitude 60 then there won't be anyone here in two million years' time."Amazing. But did you read about the bloke in the Sunday Times who said that if the Irish get the
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