Low life
The vodka handicap
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave a book coming out in October which is a collection of old racing pieces written for the Sporting Life and other papers. It is called Talking Horses. To drum up some publicity the publishers, Fourth Estate, are persuading a southern racecourse — Lingfield maybe — to name a race after me on the day of the launch. Very flattering really until you think of just what the title, the Jeffrey Bernard Hand- icap, implies. It will probably be a novice hurdle and there isn't much below that in the prestige stakes. I am not so big-heatled as to have expected a Group 1 race, at Ascot, but a novice handicap hurdle? Still, Lingfield is very pretty and a race-course bar is a better place for a party than a publisher's office. Where isn't?
The lady who looks after things at the publishers also had the very optimistic gall to write to the people who make Smirnoff to ask them to sponsor the Jeffrey Bernard Handicap. They said no and I could have told her that anyone in the business of making vodka can't be daft. It turns out that the boss man at International Distil- lers and Vintners reads the Spectator. In his charming and ironical reply, refusing to sponsor what would have then been called the Jeffrey Bernard Smirnoff Handicap, he says, 'It would be foolhardy of us to appear to condone the level of consumption with which Jeffrey's name is invariably linked.' That is rather like not being allowed on television until the children are tucked up safely in bed. He ends his letter by saying that Smirnoff hold me in their esteem and that they are grateful for my generous and hopefully continued custom. That they may be assured of. I wonder if they were annoyed that I once wrote here that Smirnoff is an effective contraceptive? Bells or Teachers couldn't boast that, not 18 years ago anyway.
My daughter has just started work for the first time and is waiting in a wine bar. I don't mean that she is waiting for opening time, she is waiting on tables. I shudder to think of the awful people she will encoun- ter. It should open her eyes though and I suppose it is better than lying on a bed all day listening to pop music which seems to be a disease most teenagers suffer from. Why do wine bars attract so many boring people? Or is it wine as opposed to beer and spirits that attracts a different tem- perament? Of course wine is a topic of conversation for some people and it is so respectable that several champagne com- panies sponsor very prestigious horse races. Spirits are unconsciously associated with the road to the gutter whereas wine implies an appreciation of the arts. Unless it costs less than £5, that is. I don't know a lot about wine but I can usually pick a good one by looking at the price of it.
And now I must go to Hamley's to buy a plastic bear that can swim. Last week, one of the Groucho Club lovelies gave me a frog and a crocodile to play with in the bath. Yesterday she gave me a shark and a turtle. I tried them out yesterday evening in the goldfish pond at the Chelsea Arts Club. They were terrific but a carp — I think it is a carp — viciously attacked the turtle. And now my benefactor who has turned me into a collector of bathroom toys tells me of this much bigger bear that can swim. I like to see things floating now and it is odd how one mellows with time. As a boy I used to go to the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens in the hope of sinking boats that other boys were sailing. I even designed a torpedo at school which was fuelled by sodium and had a warhead that consisted of a 12-bore cartridge with the shot removed. I was the Barnes Wallis of the lower fifth. Now, my aggression has been transferred to those who make some of us homeless and I am gaga playing with plastic ducks in hotel bathrooms.
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