Low life
Not a drop to drink
Jeffrey Bernard
The case of the woman who won £15,000 damages from her employers because of the suffering she endured at work from passive smoking has sickened me somewhat. You only had to see pictures of her in newspapers or watch her on tele- vision to see that what she is really suffer- ing from is the most awful obesity. Even my own doctor, a non-smoker herself, thought it 'quite disgusting'. It is no wonder that the victim of office smoke has difficulty in breathing. Every time she takes a breath she must have to raise about 50 lbs of mammary gland and I would wager that most of her £15,000 windfall or smokefall will be spent on custard cream biscuits, Mars bars, treacle tarts and chocolate cakes.
The case is the thin end of a very sinister wedge and I speak, of course, of passive drinking. That will be the next target on the list of liberties we shall be robbed of. My last wife, dear thing, divorced me because of the suffering she had to endure through passive drinking and she was quite entitled to do so, but I am not married to this lousy Government. And thank God for that, for my dinner would never be in the oven and my cigarettes and corkscrew would be con- fiscated.
When I mentioned the passive smoking woman to my doctor, she, the doctor, had called on me to check me over. She has the good sense not to tick me off and tell me to give up my two remaining comforts but she did smilingly remark, 'You know you're destroying yourself, don't you?' She then took my blood pressure and said, `Extraor- dinary. Your blood pressure would be the envy of a 20-year-old.' Swings and round- abouts. Last week I didn't appear here because of an entirely new complaint. I think my intestines might have taken early retirement.
And here's a funny thing. Last week a magazine asked me to test several vodkas for them and nine bottles of different vod- kas were duly delivered. I haven't been able to do it yet and I have been staring at my review bottles on the shelf feeling a lit- tle sick. It is a form of passive drinking. If I don't get better soon I might have to farm the job out and get it written by a ghost. And there are several of those around here sitting on the pavements, poor sods. One day recently such a man called out to me from the other side of the street asking me for the price of a drink. I beckoned him to come over for it and he waved me away. That has to be the Everest of laziness. I am not going trotting after winos with my bust hip. In fact yesterday I even had to get a taxi to the Coach and Horses which is a mere four blocks away. The doctor offered to get me a wheelchair when she called but that would be an awful surrender. Anyway, who would push the wretched thing?
So here I am staring at those nine bottles of vodka wondering more than ever what it can all mean. It is drizzling and the London Electricity people are coming to cut the stuff off because I forgot to pay. They don't know about amnesia and why should they? They don't sit about in bars for most of the day trying to blot out pub talk with pure grain spirit. So there might be blackout in this flat tomorrow. They wrote also to say that if they do cut it off there is a reconnec- tion fee. What they don't seem to under- stand is that if they don't cut it off in the first place then the fools wouldn't have to reconnect it. Well, that seems quite logical to me anyway.
Previous page
