Town and out
Jeffrey Bernard
While I suffered, took part in and eavesdropped a succession of painfully boring conversations this morning in Lambourn it occurred to me that the London alternative isn't a lot better. It's taken me 46 years to get over the ghastly feeling that it's all happening where I'm not and that wherever I am I'm missing something wonderful. At the Lambourn Stores there was the weather, the fact that the school bus hadn't been able to get through, would Fred Winter have a load of winners when the freeze lifts, the price of leeks and have you ever seen anyone as pissed as Paddy was last night. Well, enough of them warned me not to go and live in the country and said, 'You'll rot there', and I know there's a lack of 'stimulus' in it, but what am I missing?
If I'd swapped the Lambourn Stores for El Vino, the York Minster or Parmigiani's it would have been the going rate for 1,000 words for the Observer, we didn't get to bed until three o'clock this morning and, by Christ, you should have seen us, old so and so is screwing young so and so — the lucky bastard and I thought your piece in the Sunday Trumpet was fantastic and who's your agent? It was Maurice Richardson who advised me years ago, when I was in Suffolk, to get to savour bores and, heeding the advice, rural life became fractionally more bearable, but it's only now, wondering whether or not to shoot up to London today and deciding against it, that I realise his advice applies equally to London.
I can think of at least three hacks leaning on our shared bars at this moment in London who'd spend half an hour telling me what a fantastic book they were writing, how some BBC dolt had a blind spot and had turned their play down, how some woman had turned them down or up, or had I heard a whisper in Lambourn recently for anything running at Sandown. The choice between finding yourself trapped by a monologist in a Fleet Street pub and being buttonholed by a stable-lad in the Red Lion in Lambourn isn't that clear-cut. Both arc single-minded — one about himself and the other about a horse — and it really comes down to which one is less of a waste of time. I think that perhaps the most noticeable difference between friends and colleagues in London and stable lads, jockeys and farmers in the country is that the former have problems and the latter seem not to.
I'm no longer sure that an alcoholic journalist full of secret self-doubt, a fear of dying, the sack, age and all the other trivialities they're prone to is necessarily more interesting than the farm-labourer next door although I must admit there's something really bewildering and irritating about a truly happy person. It's as though they're incomplete. Of course, I'm only skimming the surface. There's a branch of the Samaritans in nearby Reading and last week we had the marvellous business of the woman in Newbury, a 78-year-old widow, who hired a man to beat up her ex-lover. The old flame ended up in an intensive care unit and, just as in the cases I was moaning about two weeks ago, the lady perpetrator got off with a suspended sentence. I suppose she might well be as interesting to talk to as anyone I'd meet if I did hop on a train to London, but then again, the dullest conversationalists I've met were all certified.
No, if there is flatter communication in the country, it's probably flatter because it's less bitchy. Sex in the country is a function and not so much a production. It is a suitable subject for a guffaw or, in extreme cases, a shotgun to the head, but it isn't discussed along with rejection slips, auditions, one-man shows and the meaning of life as it is in London. We have weather in the country instead and you just have to get interested in that. The price of leeks becomes as important as the price of the 'starters' in the Terrazza and small talk, like temperament, is a matter of geography. I know exactly what the man in the village shop is going to say when I walk down there for some cigarettes later. He'll say, 'Cold enough for you?' Awful, isn't it. But, on the other hand, if you do jump on that train and walk into the French pub someone's bound to say, 'Did you see that piece in the bloody Statesman last week?' That's awful too.
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