Low life
Strong medicine
Jeffrey Bernard
Another Christmas, another year. As Sue Townsend wrote in the card she sent me, 'Good riddance to 1992'. Christmas I no longer loathe. I must be getting older and I certainly have not woken up on the morning of the day flat broke as was inevitable some 20 years ago. Thirty years ago I looked forward to it with dread, hop- ing for invitations and keeping my options open until the last moment. Shame on me, but then if you haven't got any socks you can't pull them up. I have two new pairs of socks and they were given to me by the sainted Vera, my home help. She gives something every year to all her 'customers' and that is noble and kind indeed. Even a friend of hers whom I have only met once sent me a bottle of 1Russian vodka, the strongest I have ever tasted, called Krep- kaya. Approach with caution.
But the lead-up to Christmas, usually made so awful by anxiety about shopping, was made a great pleasure by none other than Taki himself. First we drank our way through an interview and photo session by the Telegraph in the restaurant he partly owns, Christopher's, and then three days later he took me there to lunch. The fol- lowing week he took me to lunch again, this time at Aspinall's. I had never been there before and I was impressed. A pity John Aspinall was not there. I would be interested to meet him. In one room he has put in a stained-glass window depicting Lord Lucan. There was a rumour years ago that Lucan had committed suicide and that his body had been disposed of by feeding it to Aspinall's lions. I doubt it and I never thought that Lucan looked particularly tasty. How awful to swallow a moustache.
On Christmas Eve my daughter came over to stay with me and the poor girl spent the following two nights sleeping on the floor although she was wrapped around by a large duvet. That day my health took a downward dive after we had been ripped off by an Indonesian restaurant. For the first time in all these years she looked after me and I really felt like an old Dad. I was touched and thought she needed the prac- tice, for God knows how the body will scrape through 1993.
It would have been nice to have given the Coach and Horses a rest on the morn- ing of Christmas Day but I tottered there to give Norman his present, some Fort- num's peppermint creams. They are to him as vodka is to me. He gets edgy if he is away from them for too long. I wonder what Jung would have said about Norman's craving for sweetness. I was once told that he said that diabetics want to reject sweet- ness, which is bollocks but might be true of the Japanese pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor. How do I know the man was diabetic? Because the British Diabetic Association keeps me supplied with useless information.
Then we met our own Michael Heath in the pub, which was a nice surprise, and he came back for lunch. For once I didn't ruin the cooking of it by too much midday booze. The beef was spot on but I carved it quite viciously thinking that it cost a truck- load of turkeys. Another thing pleased me as well. My treasured letter from David Gower I had thought lost turned up under my palm tree standing in for a Christmas tree. A friend had nicked it a few weeks ago, only to return it framed as a present for me.
And now Vera has disappeared. Maybe she drank my present at one sitting. And a Happy New Year.
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