Low life
Down with cry babies
Jeffrey Bernard The Americanisation of this country and probably the rest of the world is becoming more and more sickening. The cult of phys- ical fitness and the prosecution of the minority of smokers I am getting used to, and simply try to avoid it or step over it as I would a dog's mess on the pavement. They adopted our language and perverted it and now we are using their words in the most awful way as well.
I can remember the time when 'stress' was a word used mostly by civil engineers and the word 'pressure' I used to associate with engine drivers. But both stress and pressure are now dreadful illnesses suf- fered by waitresses, stars and footballers. I refer, of course, to my daughter, Stephen Fry and Eric Cantona. The business of being a waitress must be horribly boring and depressing but the likes of Fry and Cantona should thank their lucky stars that they can experience stress and pressure, two of the things that prevent life from becoming a coma that lasts, on average, 70 years. Skating on thin ice is a far better exercise than jogging.
But what is particularly annoying, even angry-making, to me is the business of peo- ple who have realised the pettiest and biggest dreams that we all have and then can't take it. Sportsmen with fairly humble origins are the worst offenders. George Best, a genius at his best, cracked like a crushed nut and Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins began to behave like an animal when he won the World Snooker Championship. Some publicity freak has put it about that Eric Cantona is one of the great French philosophers. Looking at him in profile you realise that the absence of any forehead would make it impossible for his skull to contain anything larger than a pea.
It may be worth recalling, for the benefit of later readers of The Spectator, the day some time ago I spent with Mick Jagger. We met in the French House and ended up hours later in a seedy club known to all as the Iron Lung. It was said that it actually smelled of failure. By late afternoon, Jag- ger had got rather drunk, rather easily, I thought. Suddenly he started literally weep- ing on my shoulder. I asked him what was the matter and he sobbed, 'I've got all this money and all these birds and I don't know what to do with them.' I suggested, in the strongest language, that he make me a pre- sent of half his loot and the better half of his aviary. At least it stopped him howling.
And, although I can understand and feel sorry for Stephen Fry, he was wrong to walk away. It is also overlooked by most sympathisers of Fry that he cost some peo- ple a lot of money and the likes of mere stagehands their jobs. You don't get in the ring with Mike Tyson and at the sound of the bell for the first round ask yourself, `what the hell am I doing here?' To be seemingly even more unsympathetic, I rather despise the man who thought he had won the National Lottery and who then shot himself when he discovered he hadn't . It would have been one hell of an achieve- ment if he had managed to laugh or just shrug his shoulders as a lot of people could who realise that life is a bucketful of shit. And who the hell are these people who do the so-called counselling and what are their qualifications? I suspect that they are as incompetent and dangerous as the aver- age bleeding-heart, Guardian-reading social worker. I would like to offer my ser- vices as a counsellor to any reader who is finding it lonely at the top. I expect a queue to be forming in Doughty Street out- side our office with, at the front of it, the Baring brothers and the Rothschilds, and, bringing up the rear, the England cricket team. But the reality is that it is the likes of me that needs counselling, whatever that may be. There is nothing worse than having a nervous breakdown and nobody noticing that you are having the wretched thing.
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