Low life
Too many pretty girls
Jeffrey Bernard
Ithink I may stop watching the television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Those endless balls are beginning to get on my tits and I feel as though I am watching a think- ing man's Come Dancing. You can under- stand Mr Darcy sitting or standing most of them out, and having a family like the Ben- nets as neighbours would drive me straight back to London. I know this goes against all canons of accepted thought but I am a literary lout and the man who thinks that Proust is a bore.
But what about these men who female writers have dreamed up? Heathcliffe is just a bit of rough trade who would be a Leeds United supporter were he with us today and Jane Eyre would be a Guardian reader, or possibly writing for it between visits to Mr Rochester residing in a mental hospital. Pride and Prejudice on television is full of pretty pictures but it comes down to a pastel coloured, soft-focused dream world of bullshit. Even through these, often blurred, eyes life is black and white and very sharp. More yobs than nobs.
After watching the last episode I came back to earth with a bump when I went miles out to Park Royal to address about 30 medical students at a teaching branch of the Medical School of the Middlesex Hospital. It was arranged by a woman dia- betic consultant who thought that it might be a good idea for the students to be told what it is like to be a patient.
In theory it was a good idea but I doubt that I carried it off particularly well. But it allowed me to air some grievances about the medical profession, particularly its meanness and slowness in giving patients relief from pain, and the stupid and exag- gerated idea and fear of making people morphine addicts. Those in real pain do not become addicted, and anyway what does it matter if a man or woman with only weeks to live does become an addict? Neither do I like the way doctors encourage their less intelligent patients to kowtow to their play- ing God by tugging at their forelocks to them and calling them Sir. Then there is, by the very enclosed and restricted nature of their six years' training in a hospital, an enormous ignorance of life beyond the hos- pital walls so they cannot understand depression, alcoholism and utter despair. They should avoid the patronising sing- song voice that comes partly from literally talking down to the supine and vulnerable. They are there to cure physical ills and not to be judgmental about the man inside the body. To my surprise they didn't resent my saying any of that and there was a moment of applause when I said that nurses are peo- ple and not angels created by the likes of Mills and Boon. My God, those students were young though, and those of us halt and lame would do well to remember how fright- ening it will be for them to be wrong about anything when they do become doctors.
After all that, the kind consultant dropped me off at the Coach and Horses, it being too nice a day to go home and stare at the walls, and we had a drink together. I introduced her to Norman who excelled himself by using the F-word no less than three times in his first sentence to her. She must be quite used to it having been with people in agony, delirious or semi-comatose, but that is not the point. An even worse patient than I am, he is a terrible moaner and a bit of a baby when in a little pain.
I told the lady that I was simply written up as 'difficult patient' in my records in hospitals, and she said they had no right to write such stuff and that I was just a body. Would it were so. Just a body like a clock and how do you stop it? I suppose you just let it wind down. It is even money it will end on tick and not tock.
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