Low life
Rambling
Jeffrey Bernard
The Easter weekend in Wiltshire was rather special. It was warm and sunny enough to have tea in the garden every mor- ning shortly after 9am and only Eve and the serpent were missing. Healthy looking rab- bits played in the field beyond the apple tree, cock pheasants strutted along the top of an old kitchen garden wall looking like part of a Chinese print, and two beehives I'd thought extinct erupted lazily all day long. There was a sweet smell from a bon- fire I'd made of dead ivy and brambles and jays and magpies fought over some old bread I'd put on a tree stump. In the after- noons I sat there with my long, iced drink feeling like a pissed badger who'd gatecrashed a Beatrix Potter party. But it was quite beautiful. I could almost hear everything growing. That, of course, is nonsense. I'm getting carried away. I could hear sweet fuck all and to rectify the situa- tion I went inside and put on Le Sacre du Printemps so that I could hear it through the window. It seemed appropriate and I'd been thinking of Miss Rite, as usual, anyway. Then I remembered with some ir- ritation a remark of Stravinsky's that he made some time ago to the effect that there should be no such things as gramophone records and that people should listen only to live performances of music. He should have been locked up in a bedsitter or sat down in a garden 70 miles from the Festival Hall for a few months.
Another source of irritation was and is the love affair Radio 3 are having with Richard Strauss. To escape from him later I switched over to Radio 4 and bumped into Desert Island Discs. The guest was Lucy something, the woman who'd intentionally stranded herself on a tropical island with a man she'd had to marry for the purpose. At one point Roy Plomley asked her what she was doing now — now that she'd finished her book about the experience. She said with a show-jumping accent — that she'd got 'the writing bug'. I couldn't believe my ears. The writing bug? I waited with bated vodka for her to tell us where and how she'd got it, but she was far too crafty for that. It's certainly just about the only virus that's eluded me but give the Lucys of this world a pen and paper and they're infected immediately. (I remember when John Pilger first caught the writing bug. Years ago he reported from Little Rock that 'Night came down like a red velvet curtain.' I'd like to know what he'd been drinking.)
Anyway, I can't get Lucy out of my mind. Not only did she get stranded on her sandy strip without the help of an Arts Council grant, but she says she stopped having sex with her old man shortly after they hit the beach. Firstly, I think that all right-minded people will join with me in proposing that the Arts Council commis- sion a ship on the Green Peace type of line for writers who want to write books about being stranded on desert islands. Secondly, I think we should be told what her husband did for sex after the nights started coming down like so many red velvet curtains and kept coming down. I have managed without sex since I got stranded in Wiltshire on Good Friday but I do have television.
And now, as I sit listening to my first cuckoo in my little Eden awaiting a long overdue invitation from Roy Plomley to go on his programme, I wonder more about his last two questions — what luxury would you take and what two books apart from the Bible and Shakespeare? — than I do about the music. What people choose for
their luxury on Desert Island Discs has often puzzled me. Champagne, for exam- ple, is surely an essential and not a luxury. Marie Antoinette wasn't uncaring she simp- ly had her priorities right although she did in fact suggest croissant not cake. I suppose a telephone is useless enough to be con- sidered a luxury but I think I'd have to choose a large supply of morphine. As for the Bible or Shakespeare they're the last two books I'd take. I find the Bible is one of the most depressing books I've come across and there are far too many words and phrases in Shakespeare that I don't understand. It's a toss up between The Wind in the Willows, The Complete Sherlock Holmes and The Count of Monte Cristo. Monte Cristo is the greatest of plots and revenge is indeed sweet. Treasure Island runs it close but the good guys are a bit wet and I could only like Jim Hawkins if I thought he went into a rapid decline after cashing in his loot or went in search of Long John Silver. And was the Hispaniola fitted out with the aid of an Arts Council grant? Such imponderables afflict me in the solitude of this garden. It is time to return to the reality of the Coach and Horses.
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