Low life
Pretty wobbly
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihaven't washed my face since I went into make-up yesterday to go on Derek Jameson's chat show on Sky television. It is a tremendous improvement and I must learn how to do it for myself. I no longer look quite like a crumpled, left-over meringue. It was a pity, though, that they couldn't do anything about the legs. Nego- tiating the stairs to get on and off the stage was an embarrassment. With a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, sans bannis- ter it was a shaky progress. How much more civilised they all were than the teetotal, anti-smoking BBC and ITV peo- ple. A vodka and soda looks like a glass of water and I doubt that my smoking a fag is going to make the kiddy-winkies rush out to buy a packet at 10 p.m.
I haven't liked Derek Jameson very much ever since he sacked me from the Daily Express when he took over about 14 years ago. It was a serious financial wound. But yesterday he was aces and he is the only television interviewer I have come across who lets you get a few words in edgewise. The rest of them are doing you a favour. Well, it's their show, isn't it?
After the show I went to the Royal Academy to see an exhibition to com- memorate the work of Elinor Bellingham- Smith. What a good woman she was in every sort of way. Elinor put me up in her house in Chelsea years ago when I was homeless and more recently we were neighbours in Suffolk. It was routine to call in on her when in the village of Bildeston. She would be sitting at the kitchen table, elegant in her cashmere, with a drink in one hand, and we would tipple and giggle like children sometimes at the absurdity of life. She once gave me a copy of the collected poems of W. B. Yeats and a copy of The Unquiet Grave. A nice mixture. Dear Elinor.
But all that was yesteryear and yester- day. Now I have been up since dawn clearing up my flat in readiness for the cleaning woman who comes at ten a.m. Why have I got a cleaning woman when the very thought of her compels me to wash up and wipe the surfaces? You might as well extract your own teeth for fear of troubling the dentist. I should go the whole hog, do the hoovering and then we could just sit down and drink cups of tea for the two hours she is here. Turn her into a paid companion. That would be better because she certainly isn't cut out to be what I thought all cleaning ladies were like years ago when I was a boy. This one isn't ugly or old enough and she hasn't got a smoker's cough, neither does she shuffle about and moan. Nor does she stop work for tea, although I did once inflict a vodka on her. (The sun in Maida Vale is over the yard-arm before you can say Jack Robin- son. It is the northerly latitude.) I suppose I should go and wash the make-up off now before she arrives and go back to looking as transparent as an amoeba again. Come to think of it there is an amoeba who comes into the Coach and Horses and I suppose you could call his best friend a molecule. The pipsqueak doesn't come in any more and drinks in Lamb's Conduit Street now. Norman, the atom of hot air, is on holiday and the place is almost empty. I like it that way as long as they keep cashing the cheques.
Dear God, the cleaning woman has just this minute phoned to say she can't make it today. Why oh why did I wash up and hide my dirty socks? She says she is coming in two days' time and I intend to make the place filthy by then. I want my money's worth.
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