Low life
Down-cast
Jeffrey Bernard
one afternoon last week I lost a ..; fbraon igcnootnht teea. nTFihnreegnsacahmb reapenuvdbe .nnienTwgh isIswh sweater ear car morning la received a buff-enveloped rebuke fr,c'i Barclaycard. I went into the kitchen to r'"d it and as I did so I dropped a piece of °7j, and marmalade on to the floor and it ed face down. The loss of the £50 not,s tt eiot furiated me and left me with just a cltiluat. the toast landing marmalade-down has r'" ar ly depressed me and I feel I can no doubt remain an atheist. There can be nohev that there is somebody up there and t"aii hold me in the greatest contempt. 1 sh leave my flat later this morning carrying a white flag. I give up. D'you know, the toast ,aild marmalade has always landed face "°w11. It has to be symptomatic of sftething. Cliche-mongers keep telling me be 'something will turn up' so why can't it ue the toast and marmalade? It may all $.0,und frightfully trivial to you but, you see, It.s the thin end of a wedge of which a slightly thicker section is having lost at least 12lbs while waiting for a cheque from the 4111Y Telegraph.
There is one consolation though; I can't stoP laughing, albeit inwardly. Most bless-
iftlacs are heavily from the gt hat I'm notdisguised. allowed to eatApart marmalade anyway, I vaguely remember having left a `flank of cod fillet in the carrier bag with have weater and by this time the thief will , Come to acknowledge that it is better `tIgive than to receive. And when I think of the men that women have left me for then I can barely repress a chuckle. I remember of °ricebeing given a severance kiss in favour
a property dealer who turned out to be 21Potent. There was also a woman in
famous who, having recited to me the . soliloquy 'You Make Me Sick', luMPed into her car and drove straight into a wall, blinded no doubt by crocodile tears. nob But all that's behind me now and there'll „e less marmalade face-down, so to speak, less that I've decided to give up the pursuit bif women. Until now I've never been anti- t„°°.d sports but at last the chase has begun ty sicken me. It's so incredibly undignified or one thing and it's an elementary fact they're if somebody doesn't reciprocate then eY'r.e simply the wrong person. What one oeeds is a load of self-protective arrogance. marmalade recently — my very last metaphorical pretty incident I hope — I became "„teltY interested in a very obvious-looking ",.°Man; that's to say a well-packaged one. I su,Ifered to make her extremely unhappy but
∎ Preferred one of the ghastliest and
■ ;611eSt men in Soho whom she thought to be i;teady, and 'reliable' since he dabbles in titan, isllirl8, whatever that is. In fact the s as shallow as a single scotch but can ,„a8 a wallet as well as his tail. Now I'mhe V„.„ - well aware of the fact that the easiest way to drive a woman into a man's arms is re- Knook him behind his back so I did the kiv`Ise. I told her that the creep was good, yetalented and a candidate for heaven. as was pretty nasty of me. For the next 20 „r'rs she'll be scraping the toast every mor- ;1'tlg and he'll be dropping it marmalade- si„,""'n. Buttering a man up can occa- th-"allY mesmerise a woman but, as I say, e reverse is usually true, and since I'm cuPP.osed to be 'difficult' and 'wicked' ac- 11°,e11118 to my Soho press agent I can't ich'erstand why some nice woman isn't vi eking on my door. Some shit has ob- y"UslY been saying nice things about me: been a lousy week and Puccini rIn hasn't helped it much. With him being corn- -4e Tv. r of the week I've spent every morning ech.'„Irig from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. When Mimi breaks the heartDs the toast marmalade-side-down it r.
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