Low life
Halfway there
Jeffrey Bernard
Legal complications are preventing me from moving into the new flat in Soho. I am staying in what could be called the Hotel Limbo. I don't quite know why I called them legal 'complications' for it all seems terribly simple to me — a matter of signing an agreement — but lawyers don't work that way. Witness how long it takes for an injured party to get damages. Thirty years ago I was knocked down by a car travelling on the wrong side of the road. I had to wait two years to collect a lousy £100. Anyway, I am near the end of my ever-shortening tether but at least I am no longer waking up in ghastly West Hamp- stead and phoning for a mini-cab to come and drive me away from it.
What I fear now is that the management of the Limbo will get sick of the sight of me and ask me to find another halfway house. All I have with me at the moment is the hideous portable Monica, two shirts which drive me back and forth to the laundry every day, half a bottle of vodka and a packet of razors. A chambermaid brings me tea every morning at 7.30 and then if I don't have to assault Monica I go and sit outside the Bar Italia and drink coffee, watch the world go by and listen to Rigolet- to until the sun is over my adjustable yard- arm. The boss of the Bar Italia, Tony, has a video of Rigoletto and he plays it most mornings. How good it is to find somebody addicted to Verdi and not the produce of Colombia.
A strange collection of people passes through Frith Street in the course of a morning. There is Jo-Jo, a Maltese odd- jobman who was once seen climbing a steep staircase with an enormous refrigera- tor on his back. He has been here for don- key's years but, like most of the Cypriots here, can barely speak English. Then we have Ali from somewhere fractionally east of India who drinks whisky all day out of miniatures. He once aimed a righthander at me in the betting shop but was off target. I think he's on the far side of bonkers. Then one day last week I met a man called Attie who must be the only man in Soho to know about and talk sense about racing.
And sitting at my table outside the Bar Italia yesterday I was approached by a teenager who asked me for a penny. I said, `What the hell do you want a penny for? You can't buy anything with it.' He said, 'I am saving up for a motorbike,' and I told him, 'If you don't ask people for more than a penny, it will take you a hundred years to get one.' I gave him the wretched coin and he then said, 'You see, I like to do things the hard way,' and he walked away whistling. The hard way? Extraordinary.
So after about three large coffees it is cocktail time and I stagger to the Coach and Horses (I still haven't bought that walking stick) and hope to bump into Roxy Beaujolais, who manages the Soho Brasserie, on the way. A delightful and attractive Australian woman — I keep meaning to ask her why and how she came to invent such a marvellous name. It smacks to me of the name of a sexy torch singer in a 1940s Hollywood movie. Any- way, she is aces.
And then it is Norman's. I wonder when they will come to take him away. First it was the book, then it was going on the Terry Wogan show and now, last Sunday, he officially opened the Soho Fair. Will fame go to his head, I hear you ask? It has, it has. He stands or struts behind the bar now like Captain Bligh eyeing a mutinous rabble. Paranoia has set in and he talks to his staff in a way reminiscent of Hitler addressing a Nuremberg rally. And he has achieved it all on Coca-Cola. There's a les- son there somewhere.
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