Low life
Fit for nothing
Jeffrey Bernard
Last week in Salonika a soldier and a laboUrer were each sentenced to 14 Years in jail for raping a 105-year-old Woman. It reminded me of the Moroccan student I wrote about some time ago who raped a pelican and two German tourists on an Aegean island. Thank God we're saner in Britain. A friend tells me that a 76-year-old man in Aberdeen appeared in court charged with indecent behaviour with two schoolgirls. He was given a suspended sentence and the judge told him he wouldn't send him to prison seeing as how the girls assaulted him and that anyway it was his first offence. I personally wouldn't mind all that much if two school- girls sexually assaulted me, but I wouldn't like to have to wait until I was 76 for it to happen. The fact that it happened in Aberdeen makes me suspect that they were probably just trying to get some money out of his pocket.
Meanwhile, the other news item which made it impossible for me to suppress a smile as I read it was news of the death of Jim Fixx, the man who started the jogging craze. I note that he was exactly the same age as me, 52. I have also noted that Geoffrey Cannon, the eccentric who writes about health in the Sunday Times and who is jogging mad, looks 76 although he is nearer 26. These people are courting disas- ter. They are also extremely narcissistic and if they choke on their bran and high fibre I don't give a fig. The only point in exercise and being fit is that it enables you to abuse yourself even more. Those people who live to tremendous ages in the Caucasus region thrive on sexual inter- course and vodka. Sex is better for the circulation than any exercise yet devised by man, and thanks to Smirnoff I have a very low cholesterol level. I can only conclude that if rabbits drank vodka they'd live to be 105 too. I suppose it's an inordinate fear of death that propels people into jogging on yoghurt-filled stomachs. We must all make way for the next generation though. The alternative is unthinkable unless you want to linger on and get raped by Greek soldiers or assaulted by Scottish school- girls.
What joggers and fibre-munchers should realise though is the fact that gossip, and particularly malicious gossip, is one of the greatest progenitors of longevity. Name me a gossip who has been snatched away too soon. You can't. Benign people fade away, and joggers are benign. Put me on a desert island with a malignant. You can spot a malign, unhealthy person from miles, away. Like drunks they have dodgy eyes. The whites are yellow going umber with red streaks. There's a nasty grin that plays around their wet lips when nothing what- soever funny or amusing is being said. Their hands tremble and shake until they have plunged the metaphorical dagger between your shoulder-blades. Then all is peace. They swill stories, expense lunches and unhappy memories. Above all, they understand the human condition, which is something the village idiot can't compre- hend and which is what makes him the village idiot. The village idiot is the man who mentally jogs through life. His is the mind made of the solid fibre and bran of the weather and the cost of bread and
cheese. A Sunday Times health writer could never survive in such primitive and healthy conditions. There'd be nothing to investigate, no knocks.
Just for curiosity, I tried to do a few press-ups a few mittutes ago. I couldn't manage one. Not one. I am also, a failed arm wrestler. Neither of these shortcom- ings prevents me from not dropping dead during a jog or a dig into the cornflakes bowl. I have had alarming moments of short breath in the peace of my bed and I can no longer sprint after buses. But I still prefer to keep my hair — how did you lose yours, Geoffrey Cannon? Bad diet? Lack of shampoo? — and as long as I can raise my left arm to hail a taxi, my right arm to sign a cheque and to raise a glass, and my right foot to trip up a jogger I shall remain moderately contented with the body I live in. The trouble is that health freaks have made the holocaust an unlikely event. It will end up with a whimper. The human race will just jog and diet off the edge of this flat earth.
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