Low life
Afternoon men
Jeffrey Bernard
Nothing has happened here during last week of the slightest interest to me, except for a visit from yet another nutcase who wants to write yet another biography of me. One is enough in any language and I am sick at the idea of going through, yet again, one of the most boring stories I can think of; that of my life. I could dislocate a jaw with yawning at the idea of it.
The would-be biographer is called Jere- my Lamb and he recently wrote an excel- lent book called So Idle a Rogue — the Life and Death of Rochester. I have already pointed out to Mr Lamb that it will be a waste of his time since he'll be lucky to sell a dozen copies of this book, but he is deter- mined to go ahead with it. It is a big jump from the great Lord Rochester with whom I have nothing in common, not even the ability to write erotic verse or to have ulcers in my bladder, which took the great man away in the most agonising way. But So Idle a Rogue is highly recommended and I wish he'd saved that title for his book about me.
Idle is the key word, since I have done nothing since 8 February when Mr Cobb carved me up. Sometimes I get pushed around the corner to the Groucho Club to have a drink amongst those dreadful busi- nessmen I call 'the suits'. But at least the club no longer allows portable telephones in the bar, and so now all that it remains for the club to do is to withdraw members' rights to talk business and shop in the club, when they should be renting offices for that. The last straw was seeing the other day an advertising bore with a word proces- sor on his table. Such people would be as nothing without their gadgets and dreadful television commercial scripts. But on my last visit to the Groucho, there was so trivial an episode that irked and depressed me so much that I am almost ashamed to mention it. I was talking to one of the more attractive female mem- bers of the staff and she began with some harmless banter about how we should elope together — presumably at my expense. The next day she said, 'Think of all the money we could make from the most awful of the tabloid newspapers. I can see their headlines now, "Attractive young woman elopes with old man." ' The more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me. Old is 70 plus and I am 62 turning 16 in my head. What's more, I am only dead from the knees down, whereas most of the women involved in the Groucho are dead from the neck up.
Such is life nowadays, but I can actually sit on my sofa all day when I don't have friendly visitors and waste my time brood- ing about such unimportant things. It is, I suppose, symptomatic of the boredom I am feeling and which will eventually drive me out of this country for a while, even if it means being stranded in a bar for a few days unable to push myself up a couple of steps to a lavatory. My ex-wife, who lives in Majorca, has invited me out there for a few days and says she will look after me. God knows why she should want to stir up old memories, and she was quoted in a maga- zine last week quite inaccurately as having said, `Jeff only behaved so badly all those years ago to test me to see if I really did love him enough to put up with him.' This is rubbish and the only things I believe to be true in newspapers now are the football results that I don't give a damn about any- way. Perhaps she extended the invitation out of curiosity to see what it might have been like to push somebody in a wheelchair into the sunset.
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