Low life
Turn that baby down
Jeffrey Bernard
In the strange game of musical chairs that we play here in West Hampstead the new tenant upstairs who has replaced the great micturator turns out to be a flautist. The wafting lilt of her flute makes me feel like the afternoon of a faun all right, but the howls and screams of the baby that has moved in next door makes me feel like the morning after the last night of a faun. The offending infant is ensconced no more than three feet away on the other side of my kitchen wall. If it has parents, and I doubt a baby can get a mortgage, I am tempted to knock on their door to ask them, 'Would you mind turning your baby down?'
But my lease here runs out in July and I wonder what other hell I shall move to. Probably a house with a tuba-player upstairs and a parrot next door. By contrast I am a very good neighbour. I make solici- tous enquiries when I hear my neighbours sobbing into their pillows in the black early hours, I check to see whether they are still alive when the milk bottles on the doorstep exceed four in number, I don't play com- pact discs until baby has reached for his bottle and they would need to apply a stethoscope to the walls and ceiling to hear the faintest tinkle of the ice in my vodka.
But yesterday decibels from whatever source were the last thing on my mind. I had to go to the hospital to have the first of the vitamin injections which will hopefully restore my eyesight. The stuff comes in glass ampoules and the doctor gave me some to take away to administer to myself. You simply flick the top of the ampoule with your forefinger to break it so that you can draw it up with a syringe. Easy? Try doing it when your hands are shaking slightly. And as for the shakes, they say I am suffering from neuropathy. The nerves are dying because of smoking and drinking. Whatever happened to the art of diagno- sis? If! went to a doctor complaining of a sore elbow he or she would inevitably say, 'Cut down on your smoking and drinking.' How do they know my neuropathy is not the result of having been frightened by a dog when I was a small boy, or of having seen what the butler saw at an early age?
Anyway, before going to the hospital I went into a Greek restaurant in Tottenham Street for some lunch. The place was com- pletely deserted. I asked the woman who owns the place for a table and she shook her head sadly and said, 'No table. I am
sorry, we are fully booked up.' It was, of course, a blatant lie. I was stone cold sober, well dressed and although I hadn't shaved that morning I must have looked about as threatening as a fieldmouse. She obviously didn't like the cut of my jib. The eyes really are the mirror, aren't they? She must have determined that I had an unhappy child- hood and would smash the place up. In fact the only untoward thing that could have happened was that I might have fallen asleep in the kebab and impaled one of my eyes on a skewer, which would have been something that even a first-year medical student could have told her would have been no skin off her nose. In the event it was a bit of luck because the silly old cow drove me into a rather good Spanish rest- aurant round the corner in Charlotte Street.
And now, at the time of writing, it is the first night of the revival of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Nor- man has again invested in the run, which is ten weeks this time. He is no albatross but he makes me feel like an ancient mariner. I hope you buy the script of the play pub- lished this week. Keep it away from the children.
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