Low life
Pouring oil on troubled body
Jeffrey Bernard
M y nurse from the Middlesex Hospi- tal, who is a qualified masseuse and who does it professionally on the side, came up to my flat yesterday to give me my monthly going-over.
I had some reaction from readers recent- ly when I described my face as looking like a crumpled shroud and now, for the benefit of those who have been closely following my death, they may like to know that the nurse who anointed me with oils said that my body is now like a thousand-year-old sponge. It absorbed a vast quantity of oil — an alarming amount. I think there will be more to follow because she told me that lavender helps to cure insomnia and she suggests that I put some lavender oil on the electric light bulbs in my bedroom so that they give off soporific fumes. Question, if the lights aren't on all night, how the hell are the fumes produced?
She's also a little knowledgeable about Chinese medicine and tells me that rubbing the flesh of my hand between the forefin- ger and thumb will stop me vomiting nearly every day as I have been for some weeks now every morning when I wake up. I think that rubbing my back must now be slightly like playing a washboard but I hope to God that the gastro-enterologist at the Middle- sex can find out why it is that I keep being sick and shrinking slightly. The nurse told me that her boyfriend doesn't particularly like being given a massage and he must be mad. It leaves me very nearly flowering again and, having just climbed out of my coffin, I'm no longer sure that there is much truth in the cliché that you can play a good tune on an old fiddle.
Speaking of which, I was surprised to read in this week's Times that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber says that pop music has lost its tune. It never had much of one for me. I am full of prejudices about it and I've always thought the beginning of the decline of the quality of life dates from the inven- tion of rock'n'roll. I just can't stand it in the same way that I can't stand, say, capers, tonic water, Portillo and Heseltine and very cold weather. I have to be some sort of snob and inverted philistine and it mystifies me how much space the editors nowadays of up-market newspapers and publications give over to pop music.
I once, in partnership with my brother, Bruce, had a rather silly row at a Spectator lunch with Roy Kerridge and his half-sister, Zenga Longmore, who wrote columns here about her baby after the excellent Alice Thomas Ellis was ditched. Longmore started screaming at Bruce and me simply because it came up in a conversation that we didn't like pop music. I could see what the Beatles had, although John Lennon was obviously an extremely unpleasant man — but being a shit has never stopped Frank Sinatra from singing rather well — but I also had a tremendous row one night in the Coach and Horses with a woman who stated quite cate- gorically and emphatically that John Lennon was the 'greatest poet of the 20th century'.
What was a bit embarrassing was the fact that when she uttered that moronic remark I was in the company of her husband but that didn't stop me from losing my temper and shouting at her. It wasn't even worth making comparisons and bringing up names like Yeats, Auden, Eliot, Hardy and even Dylan Thomas, who so-called experts tell me will only be remembered for three poems. But I shall always remember John Lennon for being married to one of the most awful and hideous women in the world, Yoko Ono. I truly believe, and it is particularly depressing for me, that people are responsible for their own faces and that doesn't say much for either of the Lennons, but maybe an exception to my theory could be the critic of pop, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I think his extraordinary face might be sheer bad luck, if sheer is the right word. But I wish him luck and I wish his wife's wretched steeplechaser, Black Humour, would get his face and head in front for once.
`There's nothing worse than a bent copper.'
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