Low life
Serves you right
Jeffrey Bernard
The idleness which has been forced upon me and which I have always wanted so much is beginning to bore the arse off me. Only visitors and meals, which I have no control over, break up the day and are like punctuation marks. I spent the first waking hour this morning examining rain- drops descending the window panes.
What is not so good is that instead of desperately wanting to get out of this flat I seem to have become more and more with- drawn and I may end up staying in bed for- ever. I have to do a job for the Daily Mail on Wednesday at the other end of London and, although a car and a companion have been laid on, I dread the venture and would rather sit on my sofa and watch yet more raindrops on the windows or even watch 'Children's Television'. Perhaps the anti-anxiety capsules the Middlesex Hospi- tal gave me are doing too good a job. I don't even care any more that I look to have lost a fair bit of money on the Test Matches against the West Indies. As for the approaching Grand National, so what?
All this inactivity is quite exhausting and last night I fell into bed at 7 p.m. just after Isabella, the evening home-care lady, who the council has given me since hospital, prepared me too much supper. She comes from what I still call the Gold Coast and communication between us is slight. It is almost non-existent between me and my daughter now. I'm not quite sure why, but perhaps my feelings of boredom are conta- gious.
Her mother hasn't written to me for weeks and perhaps that side of my family has been amputated too. My brothers, on the other hand, are marvellous visitors and God knows it must be a drag for them to come here when they could be out playing. Taki, too, is taking time off from his dubi- ous indoor games and is coming to see me soon. I think the ex-Davis Cup player from the Big Olive would rather meet Mrs Bob- bitt than lose a leg but she would still make his eyes water a little bit. On the subject of Mrs Bobbitt, something I have been obsessed with since she perpetrated her act of amateur surgery, I note with an awful fascination that she is being copied by women all over America. A few of them, anyway. It has always been something of a mystery to me that so many women who don't like men nevertheless marry them. Is it a way of avenging an unsatisfactory father? I can't believe much in the old chestnut of penis-envy. My own, still intact, has nearly ruined my life as a result of fol- lowing the direction it has usually pointed in. An introduction to a Mrs Bobbitt when I was 15 years old might have been a bless- ing in disguise. Perhaps Mr Bobbitt should consult Irma Kurtz, my personal agony aunt, who is about to arrive at any minute to say goodbye to me before she goes to America on Monday. It is to be hoped that she will meet the agony uncle she has been searching for ever since she left school. I shall never go to America again.
Not only could I not go unless accompa- nied, but I think the entire country has gone mad. The pendulum swings twixt the dread Bobbitt and being asked to leave a party if you light a cigarette and being called a lush if you dare to say, 'same again'. I was once asked to leave, or at least go into the garden, in a house in Holly- wood ten years ago when I lit a cigarette. But Aids is reason enough for a charity and lung cancer serves you bloody well right. So does cirrhosis and poverty.,
Previous page
