Low life
Unsavoury customs
Jeffrey Bernard
Istill don't see why friends shouldn't be allowed to bet among themselves without interference from the Government, but never mind. The sentence of the court was a £200 fine, £75 costs and £31.12 in betting duty. I was told before going into the court that I could ask to be tried by jury in a crown court but that the case wouldn't come up for about another 15 months. The only advantage I could see in putting it off for that length of time in the hope of finding a sympathetic jury was the consid- eration that I might have avoided the entire confrontation by dying within that time. That is always on the cards but knowing my bad luck I shall probably be betting on the Derby in 1996, a shadow of my former shadow. My lawyer made a really excellent speech to the magistrate but my friends in the gallery who came to lend me support, and in some cases write about it all, laughed too much and the beak didn't like the levity. To cap it all, at the time of writing, the wretched Customs & Excise people are still sitting on the ready money I had on me when I was arrested.
They want to confiscate my £58. This is not over-zealousness but vindictive. I now have to prove to the bastards — and I can — that I cashed a cheque for £50 with Norman minutes before I was nicked. Not all the animals in London are confined to Regent's Park. My sainted lawyer told me that he thought the Customs & Excise men were 'dullards' and I wonder just what it is that makes young men choose such a career. They're still digging up the skeletons of their forerunners in Cornwall and Romney Marsh and they'll probably be digging them up in the Tottenham Court Road in a hundred years from now. Am 1 in a replay of Les Miserables? Mind you I am grateful to them for having driven me to drink. I hadn't realised that up to the time I was arrested I had merely been toying with the stuff.
But isn't it odd that the people who make the law are above it. There is quite a lot of serious punting in the House of Commons and that I do know. I also know who makes the book and he was a Cabinet minister at one time. Anyway, I am going to get rid of the bad smell, so to speak, and I'm off on a freebie to Tunisia today. To be more precise I am going to an island off the coast of Tunisia called Kerkenna. I sup- pose that inevitably there will be a large man of Sidney Greenstreet proportions sitting behind a newspaper by a palm in the hotel lobby. The good news though is that I am going alone. Never again will I travel in a group of hacks, especially with the ones who keep their handbags tightly closed and who bank their expenses. But this is odd. I tried to telephone the man who kindly arranged the trip for me and was told he was out of the office. He was in court, I was told. Oh dear, what had he done? Nothing. He is a magistrate. It's unbeliev- able, isn't it? They're everywhere. There's no escape. My milkman is probably a Special Branch man and for all I know the cleaning lady might be a lunatic lifer sprung by Lord Longford for the Christmas hols.
Anyway, shortly after I get back from Tunisia with the heroin and Aids, we are going to have a party in the Coach and Horses to launch my book of collected meanderings in the Spectator (Low Life, Duckworth £9.95). It can't be that private a party being as it is held in the pub, but I must say to any Customs & Excise men reading this, do feel free to mingle with my friends who are celebrity gangsters and who comprise some of the greatest criminal minds since Colonel Sebastian Moran. I believe Geoffrey Wheatcroft once drove up a one-way street in the wrong direction. But do, dear reader, make an effort to buy the book. I don't know how many copies I need to sell to cover the fine because my pocket calculator can only work out dou- bles, trebles and accumulators. The trou- ble is you have to give books away now to get rid of them unless you happen to be Anthony Burgess. I think what could make books more appealing to the majority of people would be to make them so that you could eat them after you had read them. The author could choose the flavour to be impregnated into the edible paper, so any readers with a taste for sour grapes should buy Low Life.
Meanwhile, should the police or anyone else wish me to help them with their various enquiries, I shall be at the Hotel Grand, Kerkenna, Tunisia until 2 Novem- ber. And if it isn't grand we shall somehow make it so. By the way, do you think they'll search Dancing Brave when he gets back from California next week? He'll have an awful lot of money on him.
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