Low life
Back to the office
Jeffrey Bernard
For the last three days of my stay in Majorca I moved into my ex-wife's house and stayed with her. The man who would eat sardines on toast for supper every day of his life was depressing me and I had had enough village tittle-tattle from him. It weighs heavily on my conscience now that I came away owing him a bottle of mineral water and two sardines.
But then it was odd in some ways to be in the same house again with Jill after 20 years. Inevitably I cast my mind back to the past and my mind's eye became as a zoom lens honing in on those years. Instant replays galore and some of them surpris- ingly pretty pictures. That is all whisky under the bridge now, but I must be suffer- ing from a hangover. I am tired of spending so much time in the past. It doesn't say much for the present and I no longer have daydreams about the future, although I occasionally see a wheelchair in my Water- ford crystal glass. Thank God that tomor- row today will be yesterday.
But however pleasant I have found my foreign trips, I am invariably glad to get home. There is one awful hazard, though, to be faced on one's return and that is the banal nattering of the taxi-driver between Heathrow and Soho. 'Hot, was it, where you've been? What about the football then? Bloody shambles if you ask me. They ought to sack that manager,' etc, etc. That cost me £32, which is a bit steep. Thank You For Not Smoking should be countered with Thank You For Not Speaking.
And so it was back to the office the fol- lowing morning. The place was almost
empty. A report in the Times said that
more and more people are now drinking at home. As a result of that the supermarkets will soon be outstripping pub profits on the sale of alcohol. It will serve the breweries right. They are not only greedy but stupid.
Any day now beer-drinkers will have to come to terms with the £2 pint and the breweries commit daily acts of vandalism in the name of refurbishment.
If you are not too squeamish and take a morbid delight in seeing just how awful the decline of the quality of life in London is, I recommend a brief visit to a nearby place which is probably the most disgusting pub in England. Its customers match the horror and are probably mostly on parole from maximum security prisons or mental hospi- tals. It is a wonder they don't actually ride their motorbikes right into the bar itself. The bar staff hand out drinks with their filthy fingers (who knows where they have just been?) around the rims of the glasses. It was a good pub 25 years ago when it was run by an alcoholic homosexual, Stefan, who was impeccably clean and an expert at spotting bores and psychopaths from a hundred yards.
Once upon a time it could be said in Norman's favour that he was good at bar- ring bores, but some are creeping back to the Coach and Horses to do their incoher- ent droning and late-night weeping. Dehy- dration is symptomatic of drinking spirits but accompanied by floods of tears it turns the skin into parchment. Perhaps they are crying and drinking their tears because they can't get served. I know my massive excre- tions of adrenalin in the dark of the night prevent me from drying up altogether.
And now I must ask customers to take Norman to task for his awful doorstep sandwiches or to boycott them for good. They are made in the mystery kitchen upstairs by somebody called Mustafa. The bread must be quarried every morning and then cut by Mustafa with a laser. Perhaps Norman should take the hint from my Majorcan adventures and introduce two sardines on a piece of toasted sliced bread.
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