Low life
Nothing doing
Jeffrey Bernard
Now that we are in December, every- one you meet asks, 'What are you doing for Christmas?' — most of the people I meet anyway. The answer is nothing.
The odd one or two then very kindly invite me to spend Christmas with them and their family 300 miles away, in a totally wheelchair-inaccessible house, in a bed- room 50 yards along passages to the lavato- ry, and all the time surrounded by children so liberally brought up that they are allowed to crawl all over you, spill lemons ade all over your cigarettes — the nearest tobacconist is five miles away — and kick and swear at you without being told off.
You are supposed to have bought pre- sents for them and their parents and, worse and most difficult of all, you have to be cheerful and 'nice' all the time and join in ridiculous games, having already made yourself look even more stupid by first putting on a paper hat.
Some time ago and only on a couple of occasions, I solved the problem by asking a couple of homeless tramps to a meal. The first occasion resulted in what can only be described as the merriest Christmas I have ever had. The second time I did this it didn't work, and it is one hell of a gamble to ask anyone sitting alone in a pub on Christmas Day to come and have lunch with you. That was a long time ago and it would now be an even bigger gamble when you consider that the human race is even more disgusting than it was 20 years ago.
Even longer ago there was a memorable Christmas Day when two unexpected visi- tors popped in trusting to luck that they would get some goose and lashings of whisky. They were none other than Dom Moraes and the great hack James Cameron. At first I was bloody annoyed, really annoyed, and particularly at having to put on an act of welcoming Christian hospitality. They were drunk, of course, when they arrived and that as you must know is unbearable before you have caught up.
After a while I became more or less transfixed by James because I kept thinking that this man had actually seen an atom bomb explode, and at that time, that long ago, it must have been a unique and shat- tering experience. Well, of course I couldn't stop asking James to describe it to me, but for once in his life words failed him, and then, as usual after a Christmas feast of a kind, we all fell asleep, before later waking up with splitting headaches and some embarrassment to pick away at left-overs and drain the dregs of my oh-so- precious whisky.
I asked a fellow patient in the Middlesex Hospital last week — it's the only conversa- tion you can get at the moment — what he had for Christmas dinner last year, and he told me welsh rarebit. Why not? It seems a little ridiculous for a person by him- or her- self to go to much more trouble than that, although much to my surprise I find myself becoming more conservative in my attitude towards Christmas as I get older.
I have in mind to get a small Christmas tree and I might even stick a sprig of holly into what will substitute for a goose, but to be realistic Lcan't see much point in hang- ing up a branch of mistletoe, not with this face and 14 floors to get to it. The thing that used to bring sentimental tears to my eyes was to open the door to a small group of children singing carols. Today, if you heard the sweet and dulcet sound of warm- ly clad and rosy-cheeked children outside your door singing 'Once In Royal David's City' you would know that, if you opened the door, they would kick the shit out of You and rob you of every penny you had, and now I am thinking, and I have done every year since I was last divorced, that I will go and spend two or three days in a hotel. The only thing that stops me is that I feel incredibly mean about spending about £300 or so on doing that. Anyway, I've always thought all hotels are too expensive since they're not giving you much apart from a pair of clean sheets and some rather snooty glances.
I don't know why they close down the dialysis unit on Christmas Day, but God knows it's the one day of the year that a man could do with a couple of working kid- neys.
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