Low life
Wife stories
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the suicide rate goes up at Christmas just like it does on Sundays. I used to find it a time for reflection and self-pity, but now I enjoy it all, apart from the company in pubs of once-a-year drinkers and my restaurants being taken over by office par- ties.
Anyway, I am looking forward to the food even if I do have to cook it myself. This year I have two friends coming for lunch and this time I shall take it easy in the morning and try to remember to put some water in the saucepan of sprouts. Last year they were brown and hard and looked like roast chestnuts. Neither of my friends is young and both of them are out of work. I would like to buy them a hooker each but they will have to make do with whisky and goose. They are past it anyway.
And now I have received the annual lead-up to Christmas which has been for some time the gift of a brace of pheasants from Michael Andrews and his wife June. He must shoot as well as he paints, or per- haps June gets them from a butcher and then stuffs them with shotgun pellets. They go down well with fennel and an apple sauce made with cream. The pellets make good temporary fillings for dental cavities.
Whether or not I can still get a kiss with- out the prop of some mistletoe remains to be seen. But kiss or no kiss I was in heaven last week for two hours. Heaven is in Brix- ton of all places, which is where they film the Obituary Show. Glenda Jackson and Spike Milligan must be hard acts to follow. I thought I was pretty dull and boring sit- ting there on a white throne in front of a cloudy background but the anchorman who quizzed me about my past life seemed sat- isfied with my old waffling. Unlike the BBC (with the exception of Sue Lawley, the heroine of Desert Island Discs), the produc- tion team freed me of inhibitions with a litre of vodka. The remains of it are here with me now. This will be one television appearance I shall not watch when it goes out next month, probably.
But Christmas, and more especially the fact of being firmly ensconced in the Soho flat, have been soured a little by the news that I cannot go to Perth for the opening of the play on 9 January. I keep wondering how Ned Sherrin, Dennis Waterman and the rest of the cast are getting on. I could have used some sunshine too after the dis-
aster of Barbados and some cricket would have been good to watch. So I suppose it will have to be fog and football. What a mix. I don't even break the week up either by going to the races in the winter any more. National Hunt bores me and anyway I don't think this body could take a day out in the open now. And I am determined it should last until the day Graham Lord's biography of me is published.
He telephoned me this morning and in passing said that he had written 35,000 words of it already. I can't imagine what about and 35,000 words seems monumental to me. He is going up to Cambridge to talk to my second wife and I would dearly like to be the fly on the wall of her bar (she manages a club) when they meet. But she sends me her love via Graham so I suppose she is suffering from amnesia.
No, we had some good times. It is his meeting my third wife, Isabel's mother, that worries me a little. She still maintains that I nicked her £100 worth of Premium Bonds when we first met. My turn for amnesia. had only once ever seen £100 when we first met and that was when Anglo won the Grand National. Next Graham has to talk to Norman in the pub. That will be the most inaccurate bit of reportage since they said that Mark Twain was dead.
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