Low life
Drink up
Jeffrey Bernard
I just can't let it pass without comment. That the sheer horror of it should have driven A uberon Waugh to prayer and dragged James Cameron back to the typewriter is bad enough, but that it should have forced another period of 'loss of control' on to me after nine noble hours of abstinence is downright wicked. You, or at least I, can't win. Under normal circumstances, my head Would have been buried in the fairly antiseptic pages of The Times but, since that slopped publication, there's always been tile danger of one's eyes stumbling across the nasty nonsense in the women's pages of the Guardian and, by God, they did that tirh a vengeance on Thursday, 8 February. :11ere, across the top of the page it said, 'It's rie we stopped neglecting the hazards of Underneath, there was a photograph of Mrs Alan Brien who writes under the name of Jill Tweedie. The article was supposed to be a serious c°1nrnent on ,a report on alcoholism just Published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Mrs Brien has managed to latch ,(41, limpet-like, and without the encumurances of a sense of the absurd or any real knowledge of alcoholism beyond, presumably, her own intimate circle of equally serious friends and relations, to the morsels which enable her to give yet another petulant, sideswiping snipe at that revolting mass of pigs known to all feminists as men. She appears to gloat over the story of the little girl who came home to find her father had hanged himself and who then later said, 'Oh, I feel so happy: I went belting down the road to find my mother and tell her we're alright now.' A silly story for Mrs Brien to comfort herself with and an unlikely one you'll agree if you've ever seen a photograph of a hanged man, let alone the real thing.
She goes on to say that drunks are among the most deeply boring people on earth and she remembers a friend 'whose behaviour after four whiskies was always exactly the same: six verses of 'Green Grow the Rushes', one chorus of 'Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road', a short burst of tears as he recalled his ghastly mother and crash, he hit the floor for the rest of the evening.' She really ought to more selective in her choice of friends — or is this what they do in the Blue Lion between editions of the Guardian? In thirty years of flirting with closing time never have I come across such behaviour with the exception of a man who sang all of 'On Mother Kelly's Doorstep' and even he was found to be suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome later. Even as learner-drinkers on halves of bitter we always broke into Pizarro's 'Ich kenne diese Schrift', from Fidelio followed by a verse from 'Every Valley Shall be Exalted'. We never hit the floor. Who on earth does Mrs Brien drink with?
What really strikes me about the appalling article, what I keep mulling over in my vodka soaked mind is a picture in my imagination of Mrs Brien as a patient in Max Glates-alcohol and drug addiction unit at St Bernard's hospital in Hanwell. A third of the patients there were women. I remember how fascinating it was to listen to them in group therapy sessions talking about their pathetic attempts each night to hide the evidence of their boozing from their husbands when they came home. Not being Guardian readers, they didn't actually allow themselves to be discovered writing a novel at the kitchen table when hubby came home nor, presumably, did they break out into 'One Fine Day' after four gins, but what was obviously helping to save them by the time they'd become in-patients was their ability to laugh at it and themselves.
But Mrs Brien doesn't know what she's writing about and proves that by ending her piece wondering why it is that Jews don't make a very good alcoholics. Well, like the Irish, they may be mother-dominated, but they don't have to prove that they're men since the Bar Mitzvah does that for them. Also they have a stronger family unit than other people. But go on writing Mrs Brien and you'll swing them over.
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