Low life
Wish you were here...
Jeffrey Bernard
ingapore, the stop-off on the way to Sydney, was a disappointment. The great Japanese-financed consumer society thousands of shops overflowing with elec- tronic toys and gadgets, a police state and a high-rise city of architectural monotony is just about saved by a few good res- taurants and the odd colonial house that the Japs missed in the war. I was not sorry to leave the place and I wish I had had the physical fortitude to have gone right on to Sydney in one go. That was another seven hours on and I collapsed on arrival. Not jet lag but something I must have picked up in Singapore. (That's why I didn't get through to you last week.) It took two clays to come back to life and look at Sydney. I like the place and I like the people. I was extremely lucky to be put up in a luxury hotel for the first four days so that bed, room service and a view of the Opera House from the 28th floor gave me time to recover. Of course the place was far too expensive to drink in and I went across the road to a bar called Jackson's which caters for lesser mortals. The first morning I sat there a frail old man joined me at my table on the pavement, sat down with a thump and buried his face in his hands. After a while he looked up at me and said, 'Christ almighty, I haven't been home for five days.' I assumed the poor fellow lived in Melbourne or somewhere in the bush and I asked him where he lived. He raised a weak and trembling hand, leant over to me and pointing to the-corner of the block said, 'In that house over there.' I then asked him about his wife. Wouldn't she be worried or angry? No, she would be sitting at home as usual and 'she frightened the dog off his chain last week'. Apparently that meant that she was hideous, not intimidating.
Shortly after that I fell in with a good man, Robert Haupt, from the Sydney Morning Herald. His colleagues too are very much okay. He drove me out to Bondi Beach where we had lunch overlooking the whole scene, the Tasman Sea and the beach itself, sitting on a sun-soaked bal- cony. The beach surprised me, being much smaller than I thought it would be and backed by a built-up area of suburb. There must have been a thousand topless ladies sunbathing and, as has been said, to walk along that beach is like picking your way very carefully through a field of poached eggs. The Morning Herald people are very much into playing cards as far as I can tell and trumps last week seemed to be Amer- ican Express.
On my fifth day here I moved into a hotel called the Palisade. It is a splendid house built in 1915 and the Harbour Bridge is just beyond my balcony where I sit late into the night sipping cocktails to allay the itches inflicted by mosquitoes. It is a well furnished balcony so I sit there and eat takeaway suppers and watch the ships go by as dusk falls. There is another strange hotel around the corner. Strange in so far as the bar opens at 6.30 a.m. and because when I went in there the other evening for a drink the boss said, 'I'm sorry we're late with the fight.' Was there a big fight on television, I asked. No, it was the nightly punch-up they have in the bar. God alone knows how much these fights cost in terms of damages, but they must cost a few bob, the men here being mostly extremelY muscular.
I met up with the daughter yesterday and I must say I am a little worried about her. She is happy enough but not working. MY own awful upbringing makes me wonder whether she needs a cold shower, a three- mile run and a good thrashing. I certainly didn't get where I am today in SydneY eating oysters and bream and swilling booze by lying in the sun all day. She can have two more lunches and one more hand-out before I leave today and then I shall rinse my hands of her. And now it is off to the Sydney Morning Herald pub for a final game of Barclay Visa cards. By the way, the newsmen here have christened their landlord Norman. y11 ,,,,„0 can't escape them. Even from 15,unu miles.
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