Low life
Under the volcano
Jeffrey Bernard
What a feckless, disappointing lot you readers are. Somebody, just one of you, might have had the decency to write to me and warn me off my freebee to Lanzarote. I spent a week drinking my Grand National winnings staring at a wall and wondering just why God decided to create cockroaches. Your average Spanish barman wasn't a particularly brilliant crea- tion either. Nice enough but oh, so slow. And what strange people go to such resorts. The courier who organised this little self-catering trip asked me to meet her in a certain hotel when I arrived. I waited for her for two hours. It transpired that she had been sitting in the lobby all the time and I was ten yards away waiting in the bar. How like a woman. Women don't seem to realise that you need a drink until about two days after you have married them. Then they try and call last orders.
But we met up and had a little chat and then, to my horror, she said, 'Shall I tell you my philosophy of life?' It is an awful moment when somebody announces that they are a bore. 'Please do,' I said. 'Well, life is very short. You've got to be happy because you're not here for long. If you don't like what you are doing, then change because life is very short.' I nodded sagely and sent the waiter a distress signal. 'Yes, life is terribly short,' she said again and again. She told me so many times that I began glancing at my watch to see how much longer I'd got. Never have I felt closer to. death. She drove me to a little more than just the one and eventually I crashed out on a sun lounger.
When I woke up, someone had stolen one of my shoes. Just the one. This was not only inconvenient but rather frightening. As an ardent Sherlock Holmes fan I immediately pondered the horrors that befell Sir Henry Baskerville on the Grim- pen Mire after the hound had got the scent of one of his shoes which was nicked from a London hotel. But I think in this instance it was stolen by a small boy in the next villa who seemed rather unhappy. He has awful parents. Some parents are the dreadful penalty that children are doomed to pay for their existence. And vice versa.
But what a dump. Have you ever looked into an extinct volcano? It's the nearest you can get to being a proctologist. There are also all-year-round gales on Lanzarote. They blow hot from Africa and can knock you over if you tip the scales at a mere 126 lbs. There is also an excessive amount of Muzak. For one lunch I had the '1812' overture with the starter and then the `Sugar Plum Fairy' with the chicken and chips. I didn't hear one note of the Spanish music I love in seven days. Why I was eating lunch in a hotel was because I gave up the self-catering business after the second day. I don't much like eating alone in a still, silent room. I like to see the faces 'even if some of them have to tell me that life is so short.
Then one evening I came across a snake on my little patio which gave me one hell of a fright. I hurled a bottle of mineral water at it and there was broken glass every- where. It turned out, on closer inspection, to be a twig and not a snake. The couple in the next villa watched all this and shook their heads sadly, thinking me mad. The Spanish waiters spent time shaking their heads sadly too. They are very good character readers. They twig very quickly that you have elected to fight for the legion of the damned, shake their heads, wish they could join you, but HP payments restrict a married man's ambitions so ter- ribly. The local women were nice. There's something rather poignant about watching a woman on her knees scrubbing tiles and I seriously considered giving the one who did for me a subscription to the Guardian. But the dogs are strange. I have noticed it before — all Spanish dogs are depressives.
But it wasn't all bad. Sitting on the patio in the evening with a long drink and the fallen hibiscus petals swirling around my shoeless foot made a pleasant change from sitting here and staring out of the window into Great Portland Street pondering just how short life may be. I find it a little irritating that she, the Lanzarote philo- sopher, will almost certainly live to be a hundred. She was plump with stupidity, not happiness.
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