Low life
Sunday shocker
Jeffrey Bernard
Last Sunday should have been a good and pleasant day. I had no hospital appointment, the weather was lovely and the friend who produced Channel 4's film about me and his girlfriend who edited it took me out to a very pleasant lunch at Lit- tle Italy, a newish restaurant in Frith Street. So far so good.
I came back after to behold a yawning gap in my bookcase and to see that I had been burgled and that my CD player and amplifier had gone. Then I looked in my bedroom to discover that a radio-cassette player had accompanied them along with two clocks. I felt slightly sick and tele- phoned the police because it is the done thing, although they will never be able to find any of those things for me again.
Since then, I have managed to console myself a little by thinking of what they didn't take and I am still wondering how they managed to miss a wallet full of credit cards, a passport and traveller's cheque for £100 and a cheque book. With what they had, they were obviously incapable of car- rying the video machine with their arms full of my CD equipment. A pity that. The video is the only thing that isn't mine and is hired. Of course, I am not insured because it won't happen to me.
The other consolation was that, just before leaving home for lunch, I had grabbed a thick wad of readies, my life belt so to speak, off my coffee-table plus a brand new watch — a special offer — that was originally priced at nearly £500.
On reflection, I find myself wondering about the disc that I had left in the CD player and I am wondering how the bur- glars are getting on with it. It is one of Martha Argerich playing the two Ravel piano concertos and I doubt that their neighbours will be hearing much of them.
This morning, the police came back with a finger-print expert and he said there would be no evidence on any of the sur- faces which they had touched like a chest of drawers full of clothes. They had not moved any shiny new books which I had left lying about and which would have har- boured tell-tale evidence. So, it is back to the hi-fi shops with the cheque book they kindly left me.
I must say that being burgled is an extremely expensive way of improving the quality of one's possessions. I shall now get a new player with a remote control and a deck system enabling it to cope with more than one disc at a time. As for the bedside radio, I shall now get one that is capable of receiving Radio Three with good definition, although Radio Three has begun to bore and depress the hell out of me most morn- ings when its producers nowadays seem to have opted for an overdose of anything obscure plus mediaeval church music which is mostly doom. (When on earth did those monks stop being so frightened of God and death and start whistling in the dark?) But the impotent policemen who came along were pleasant enough and we had a cosy little chat. Apparently, Mick Berry, who used to be the collator at Vine Street police station who arrested me once for taking bets in the Coach and Horses and once again for criminal damage when I kicked a badly parked car belonging to a ballerina, is about to retire and I think he ought to invite me round to the nick for a farewell drink.
I may have told you that, having arrested me twice, the lads at Vine Street once sur- prised me not a little by inviting me to their Christmas party. That was about ten years ago and I shall always remember sitting next to a very attractive female detective her clothes certainly were not plain — who disconcerted me somewhat, just as I was about to chat her up, by revealing that she was armed. Come to think of it, nowadays I would feel really glad had I a girlfriend who carried a handgun in her handbag.
But, in spite of the horror of being bur- gled, the week was also marked by a mere hiccup, though that too was horrific for about an hour. I scratched an itching ear with a matchstick one morning and it broke off leaving most of the match inside my ear. It was quite painful and I telephoned my district nurse, Dawn, to come and get it out. A potentially bushy-eyed girl, she must be the only woman I know who carries eye- brow tweezers and thank God for it. She tells me that she once took what she thought was a lump of wax out of a small boy's ear, but it turned out to be a piece of dope which he shoved in there as he was about to be nicked. Who said small boys were unteachable?
Leanda de Lisle returns next week
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