Low life
Go east, young woman
Jeffrey Bernard
My daughter is going to Australia today and I wonder if she will ever come back. I advised her to stay for keeps if she likes it and is happy there, for there isn't much here. She will probably end up with a lifeguard on Bondi Beach. A couple of years ago, attempting to ascertain whether or not history was still taught in schools, I asked her who succeeded Lenin and she told me Stanley Baldwin. Apart from anything else what are the odds against a Russian being called by the awful name of Stanley? And her school chum thought that Magna Carta was King John's wife. I can go along with that. I have met a lot of overbearing women like hospital matrons who could have well been called Magna, but Stanley Baldwin knocked me sideways.
Is there hope for such a girl? Only if she Is very pretty and funny. She is. What I fear, though, is that her addiction to pop music will lead her to a mindless young man. I would like to wash my hands of it all but of course I can't. She also has the strange notion that because people say hallo to me in Old Compton Street or Dean Street I am rich. She should know by now that the only people who are rich are those who work in advertising or those who have inherited the stuff. So, it's bye-bye Isabel and don't forget to write. Brush your teeth, take the pill and don't follow beaten favourites in two-year-old races. What else can you tell a girl? Damned if I know. Anyway, 1 am glad she didn't turn out to be a boy. Nasty little things mostly until they are about 30.
Oh that I could be 18 and setting out for pastures new. Who knows, there might be a boy in Sydney today who is setting out for Soho, London, England. Silly sod. Stay put. If Harold Larwood settled there it can't be bad. It gets worse here by the minute. Too many people have died for my liking. I see faces in my mind's eye — gone forever — that I would love to see walk into the Coach and Horses today. Yester- day I saw a man put out his cigarette on the carpet. That says it all. Most of it anyway. What says it here is that I woke up with a chicken bone on the pillow this morning. Other signs of decline and decay are wearing the same pair of socks for two days running and allowing a pat of butter to melt on my pocket calculator. The fact that I have nothing to calculate is neither here nor there.
Maybe the worst indication of a sort of decline, though, is the business of talking to idiots. I hate unsolicited chat in bars it can occasionally be interesting on trains — but once a man starts by telling me that it is raining or that flogging is too good for football hooligans then I am drawn in and can linger prattling for an age. It is odd that every single stranger who comes into the pub knows just what is best for the 'At least it was a fruitful relationship. country. The idea of the reintroduction of National Service is a favourite topic at the moment. The quickly disappearing rain forests of Brazil is second and permanently on the chart is the matter of the Booker Prize. Most boring of all is a racing man's post-mortems. I am sure we didn't talk like that in Soho pubs 30 years ago but I suspect we talked about money too much, the obsession of writers, poets and painters.
But the smell of burning feathers in the Coach and Horses is awful because we rise every morning like so many phoenixes. You see people walk in like beaten boxers coming out of their corner very gamely for the last round. Norman, the referee, should have stopped a lot of these metaphorical fights to have saved us from further punishment. He, by the way, has discharged himself from the Middlesex Hospital and moved into a very expensive nursing home. I shouldn't be surprised if he moves into Buckingham Palace soon. He knows how to take care of himself does our Norman. He mollycoddles himself and even has his hair cut once a week. Whether he likes the sensation or whether it gives him an opportunity to look into a mirror for half an hour without seeming to be vain I know not.
Still, I suppose looking after yourself like he .does is better than wearing the same pair of socks for two days running and leaving chicken bones in the bed.
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