Low life
Damned lies
Jeffrey Bernard
I've come across more lies recently and during the so-called festive season than it's been my displeasure to listen to for an age. There have been the boring ones, like anglers' lies about the one that got away, that have all concerned the harshness of winters past, but, wherever I go, I've noticed a new and specialist one mouthed by middle aged and older men that concern the fact that they now like to pretend that sex has lost its charm and mystery for them. This is the one that starts, 'Yes, well of course, when you get to my age you forget all that nonsense. I mean there used to be a time when, if I saw a pretty girl, I'd rise to the bait like the next man. But when you get to my age you're past all that, aren't you?'
Confronted and deafened by all that, I bite on a bullet and refrain from saying 'No, I'm not quite dead yet and I do still like the ladies,' but there's no point in arguing. The idiots go on and on. 'Mark you, and don't think I'm boasting, but when I was a lad I had my fair share.' You then again have to refrain from being contemptuous of what you guess his 'fair' share to have been and he rabbits on again. 'Now, don't for a minute think I'm the sort of Johnny who disapproves of a bit of healthy sex, but, let's face it, enough's enough. Mind you, in the war it was a different matter. Some of us, most of us in fact, didn't know whether we'd see tomorrow or our loved ones ever again and you'd have been an idiot not to take your chances when you saw them. But, by and large, I like to reard sex as something for the youngsters nowadays.' Well, it's dreadful cobblers really, isn't it? What's so sad about that particular lie is that it's so pathetically blatant. The poor sod mouthing the words is turned on and only turned on by the very sight and sight only of lovely young girls. Really close contacts of a conversational kind are wasted on such people. Still, we all have to whistle in the dark from time to time.
A time that finds me not whistling or even speaking is when the other big, smug and public house lie is uttered about how we all pay our taxes and rates. Having recently suffered a court appearance over the matter of rates, I don't find myself with a lot to say when the pub bore stands up and goes on
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is on holiday
about the roads not being sufficiently gritted and why the hell aren't they since we all pay our rates.
It's his mate who invariably gets up the next moment and declaims, 'We're all bloody taxpayers here, why doesn't the Government do something about Northern Ireland/the weather/petrol price/ television/or the England football team? Now, are we all tax payers? I know one local publican in whose mouth butter wouldn't melt — and a prominent freemason who swears on the Bible and Rotary rule book who owned up to me the other day that he hadn't paid more than £90 a year for the past ten years in taxes. But probably the worst pub liar is the blazered, suede shoes man propped up in the corner clutching a pink gin who tells you that his marriage has been institutional bliss for the past twentyfive years. While he recounts his years of unsullied happiness you notice his wife staring at him with all the amity of a Colonel of the Waffen SS through eyes that should belong to a sick bull terrier. Thank God for the exception. I met him last week in a pub near Reading. He too was blazered with all the old RAF trimmings. I idly asked him, 'How long have you been married?' and he replied, 'I have, dear boy, survived thirty winters of the greatest severity.' I suppose this is going to be another one of them.
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