Low life
Fear of living too long
Jeffrey Bernard
Last weekend began as a financial disas- ter when I put £100 on Manchester United to win the Cup Final. As I am particularly uninspired by football and the dreadful peo- ple who watch it and love it, it was purely a gamble that came unstuck. My bacon was saved by Lord Weinstock of all people who probably, with a name like that, avoids bacon at all costs. Anyway, I put £100 on his Rainbow Quest colt, Spectrum, who won at 10 – 3 in a way that suggests to me that he might well take part in the finish of the Epsom Derby on 10 June.
Apart from the little buzz that gave me, the weekend was numbingly boring, so that I even look forward to a visit from Trudy Karamatzov who says, as only a nurse could, that the ulcer she dresses on my so-called good foot looks lovely, although she would stop short of kissing it. God knows what sights she must behold because, to me, the 16 month old wound looks fairly disgusting.
And today is another birthday which I thought I would never see and which will surprise the staff of the Middlesex Hospital, the anti-smoking lobby, Alcoholics Anony- mous and the barmen of Soho. In the days I heeded medical advice I was frightened enough of dying and now, after two years of knowing and listening to Vera and the dis- trict nurses, I feel fairly anxious about the outside possibility of living for too long.
Sitting somewhat trapped in this flat, I have been thinking a lot about the bee that was originally trapped in amber 35 million years ago. I wonder if any bee flying past my windows looks in at me and speculates with quite the same sense of wonderment as I do about that very old bee. The scientists haven't yet told us whether the bee was a worker or a drone, but I don't need a scien- tist to categorise me. I don't think I have ever known anyone who worked themselves to death, but I certainly won't be jogging myself to death as so many people are now doing, particularly in America.
It was from Portland, Oregon, that our editor received some hate-mail for me last week. How incredible that anyone can actu- ally go to the trouble and expense of send- ing a fatuous letter to someone who they neither know nor understand. I know unluckier journalists who have been quite literally the recipients of shit in the post and unlike the sudden lashing out of fist in a temper, it takes some sort of mental imbalance to perpetrate the gesture. Keith Waterhouse and Richard Ingrams have suf- fered at the hands and arses of such lunatics and oddly enough Waterhouse did at one time from Tories who didn't like his left of centre stance, particularly when he was writ- ing for the Daily Mirror. Just imagine shit in the post and bigger shit on the 16th floor in the person of Robert Maxwell. Mind you, I have been nearly as nonplussed sometimes by excessively kind letters from readers and, although I have rather pathetically sought approval from the moment I was born, I wonder too how people take time to be so kind. It could be that both hate and love let- ters are penned by people with lousy judg- ment and ridiculous standards high and low. But to hell with people who write hate let- ters and haven't the nerve to sign them and to hell, or nearly, with those who well- meaningly ramble for page after page. I still have my favourite letter, which I had framed; it was from Miles Kington when he was the literary editor of Punch, and it said: `Dear Jeff, Are you going to do the fucking article or aren't you? Yours Miles.' It speaks volumes, doesn't it?
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