Low life
Hall of hate
Jeffrey Bernard
Afew tenants of this block behaved predictably enough after I had a go at them the other week about slamming the door in my home help's face and someone put a notice up near the entrance attacking me and there was a Christmas card — a scrap of paper — requesting me to keep my `pissy mouth' closed. It was rather pathetic and as always with these sorts of people they didn't have the guts to sign their names. They devalue whatever rubbish they write by the omission. Poor, tortured souls.
But I got a card from the nurses at the hospital and also the cleaners which made up for the two hysterics here. So far my mistletoe seems to be redundant but I was tremendously pleased to get a Christmas card from my hero, Fred Winter, and another star of a man, the trainer Peter Walwyn. Would the mornings always bring such cheer and evoke such memories, but this morning, and it is the shortest day of the year, I wake up at 6 a.m. thinking I might die and although I hallucinated some very pleasant Constable-like landscapes in bright colours I was very scared in there for a while. In fact, I got to the fridge and poured myself a large neat vodka which was the first drink I have had since my kid- neys packed up in June. That is nearly six months.
Oddly enough, the unpleasantness of it pulled me round a little. I am learning that fear is far more unpleasant than sickness. In the midst of all this I somehow have to go shopping and continue working and, as for the work, newspapers seem mad at this time. The Daily Express, for example, tele- phoned me to ask for something and when I said, yes, I would love to do it, they told me they wanted it in two hours which is about the time I needed to think about the subject before writing on it, and the accounts departments of all newspapers are at the moment clogged up with an annual inefficiency they call flu, and money owing from Dublin doesn't arrive. The invention of the computer has done nothing to ease the life of the freelancer and if people in accounts had to wait as long as writers to be paid they would be screaming like stuck pigs. After years you would think one would catch up but you don't.
The business about shopping for presents etc. is if anything more annoying. Someone took me to Liberty's last week and it was like being mangled by 1,000 cogs in a machine. There is a lot of guff written and spoken about the disabled these days but the public in West End stores completely disregard those of us in wheelchairs and I was flattened in that shop.
All was forgotten when my last wife paid me a visit. She is light in darkness. Oh well, when I think of her and my daughter by another marriage, I think I may have been twice blessed.
All of that also reminds me of Christ- mases in the country and that's the place to spend them. Christmas fits into the country neatly, nicely and it doesn't work so well put on, so to speak, like a show in town. Nature doesn't get much of a look-in in town and I want log fires, one crisp walk and even an animal or two around ,such as even a hunt or the sight of a goose on a kitchen table and a carol or two. Here in the high-rise hall of hate it will be a French duck confit followed by Casablanca which I don't think I can sit through again and that followed by Jurassic Park at a time when I am already surrounded by monsters. I am still debating in my mind whether or not to go out and pick up some dead-beat or other to bring back here to pull a cracker with.
Potassium levels this year forbid me from eating tangerines, nuts, too much Christ- mas pudding but I like too much and my consultant has not given me a list of per- missible indulgences so I suppose that is what I may have to do: pick someone and chew the fat.
Anyway, I hope you have a lovely time and don't forget to drink a couple of pints of water before you start on the booze. And a Happy New Year.
Previous page
