Low life
Tough chicken
Jeffrey Bernard
Somebody gave me a packet of three condoms the other day, so I took them into a Soho delicatessen and swapped them for three packets of saffron. You know it makes sense. We'll be having paella this weekend. What the man in the delicatessen will be having is an Italian waitress badly in need of a shave. But I suppose even cockroaches know of ecstasy. Incidentally, I don't intend to waffle on about condoms but isn't it a ghastly word? When I was a lad they were called French letters just as gays were queers. There is something vaguely obscene about various words used by the medical profession. They use awful phrases too. I have never in my life opened my bowels since I am not into DIY surgery. But I did, pass water recently walking by the Serpentine.
That was a good deal, though, with the saffron. They say it needs about an acre of crocuses to make half a dozen packets of the stuff. I don't know of a single place in England where you can get a decent paella. Even in Spain they are few and far between and in the cheapest of Spanish restaurants they turn them out with the rice being the same consistency as porridge. Anyway, apropos the paella business I must warn you about the chickens they sell in Chinatown. God alone knows how they cook them in those Gerrard Street res- taurants. I bought one last week — they leave the head on — roasted it for 90 minutes and couldn't stick a knife into it. So I started to casserole it at midnight. I sat there in the kitchen until 5 a.m. It was like baby-sitting. I got through ten oranges with my electric juice-maker in that time so that must have involved a fair bit of vodka. Then at 6 a.m. I woke up with a ladle in my lap. Of course, as usual, I threw the coq au water away. I must have thrown hundreds of gallons of chicken stock away over the years, forgetting or being too lazy to go out and buy some leeks and potatoes or whatever. It looks so awful when it's cold. Very ill people sometimes have faces like vichyssoise.
Talking of which I am getting very worried about my own face. It looks really awful. So awful that in a strange way I am slightly irritated by the fact that I haven't got Aids. I mean, if you are going to look as dreadful as I do you might as well have a better reason for it than occasional lapses of memory about insulin. And, apart from Chinese chickens reared in Gerrard Street basements, the weight loss may be caused by excessive quantities of orange juice. Ever since She who would iron 14 shirts at one standing bought me the electric juice- maker, I have consumed about ten oranges a day. Too acid. The lotus eaters were probably midgets. But there is good news for those readers who would like me to disappear, never mind lose weight. This week I embarked on a brand new nervous breakdown and I am going away to either Greece or Corfu. In either place, with self-catering facilities, you can live well for one day for the price of a round of drinks in a London pub. The manifestations of a nervous breakdown are various and not unknown. Apart from the obvious things like covering the telephone with cushions, crying in the dark and checking in the mirror to see that one really exists, I am lumbered with a type- writer that can't think for itself. And then people extract the urine out of me by giving me condoms.
What decided me to go mad though and was the last straw was coming out with a good line the other day which fell flat. I thought it was quite a good line anyway. There was an attractive woman in the Coach and Hearses this week and I said to her, 'I thought impotence was a blessing in disguise until I met you.' It died like a dog. She told me I was an old fool. How very true. A psychiatrist would have charged me £200 for that information.
Previous page
