Low life
Diversions
Jeffrey Bernard
Tryas I may I am failing miserably to corrupt my 18-year-old niece Katie. Perhaps corrupt is too strong a word but I do like the idea of diverting people from the straight and narrow and broadening their outlook. There is a faintly disgusting puritan streak which runs through me and I wouldn't wish it on a teenager never mind a teenage relative. I took her to Newmar-
' ket again last Saturday to show her that there's fractionally more to life than God, Bach and stained-glass windows but she amazingly remains almost impervious to the charms of champagne, .Robert Sangs- ter, Steve Cauthen, oil sheikhs, 18-1 win- ners, cocktails -with the aristocracy and fresh salmon. But a little headway has been made. She recently had the revolting ambi- tion to become a journalist but she now admits to wanting to be quite simply rich. I have lured her into an interest in the simplistic business of seeing whether one horse can go faster than another, but she is sticking to orange juice, clean-cut young men and the belief that this uncle is mad. I suppose it's terribly immoral on my part but I would prefer to see her warming her bum in front of a baronial fireplace than warming her hands over a primus stove on _ Greenham Common. But then, of course, when you haven't a lot of future, good causes seem a little futile. It's very selfish and it gets more so with the passing of the years. By the time she becomes as preoccu- pied with death as I am Steve Cauthen will be a pensioner and, for all I know, Robert Sangster might be bankrupt and Taki living on bread and dripping.
But the business of corrupting and lead- ing astray has always fascinated me be- cause I so much enjoyed the diversion.
myself. When I was a pretty young thing of 18 myself I remember the painter John Minton eyeing me cynically as I sipped drinks he had bought me and saying with some sort of glee, 'I've destroyed you,
haven't I?' Well, not quite, I thought.
Those early trips up and down the garden path though were quite delicious in some ways. Having some money in the company of someone young and attractive is like pulling the wings off butterflies. Oscar Wilde was good at it. And let there be no mistake, although young people are un- aware of it, if you have youth and good looks the world is your oyster. Or you can, at least, get away with murder. I shall be eternally grateful to all those poets, pain- ters and writers in Soho in the late 1940s and early 1950s who introduced me to the alternative route to the yellow brick road.
And then it was the business of being led astray that first got me interested in excess
and increasing and pushing limits. So far, it's been like climbing down Everest. And we haven't reached rock bottom yet. Slid- ing down the bannisters is so much more fun than climbing the stairs.
But, apart from trainers, tycoons and jockeys, it was good to meet Henry Cooper again at Newmarket. I remember his left hook with great affection and I'm glad I was never on the receiving end of it. The press have always claimed that Henry's retirement was due to his proneness to cut eyes more than anything else but the truth of the matter was that he'd got gout. As he said, `It's faintly ridiculous for a heavyweight champion to have gout, so I turned it in.' Also there was Dave Prowse,
'1 think you'll lint! the show very arresting, the man who played the monster in black sir. in Star Wars. He weighs 18 stone and is
about 6ft Sins tall. He said he could put two stone on me in six weeks if I went to his gym for workouts. Charles St George somewhat caustically asked if he intended to do it by putting bricks in my pockets.
Meanwhile, I have to go yet again to the Middlesex to be weighed and have the stitches removed from my head. Oddly enough I popped into a pub next door to the hospital the other night for 'the one' and bumped into the man who put the stitches there. Some of these people are quite human when they remove their white coats which is more than can be said for radiologists and their defendants. The ridi- culous letter in last week's Spectator de- fending the frigid radiologist 'blind date' in Paris and calling me a boring little fart got me investigating my Webster's Dictionary. It states quite bluntly that a fart is an expulsion of intestinal gas. That I am not. Neither am I boring before about 9 p.m. I have to admit that there may be an expulsion of sawdust from my head when they remove the stitches in half an hour's time but the only gas in this flat is of the North Sea variety. You can't even commit suicide with it. Last week I wrote a piece for a charity programme and writing for nothing is extremely painful. Yet Spectator readers keep writing abusive letters for nothing and the price of a stamp. I snipe at myself and I really don't need any help. In future, please send the stamps to the Injured Jockeys' Fund. Better still, if you don't like what you read then don't bloody read it.
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