Notebook
First things first in a memorable week for Ole. At the beginning of last week I got married again. She for the first time, me for the last. Now, you might think that the hoots, gales of laughter and giggles that greeted the event had something to do with the fact that, in the words of a friend, I've already served two sentences of seven years Without remission and they ran consecutively, but I don't really think it was that. Listening to the chat that went on in front of the background music of popping Champagne corks I got the very definite iMpression that most people are stark terrified of marriage. Just what it is that men think they're losing by getting married I'm not quite sure. Most of them refer to it as freedom', but if freedom means pottering about alone in a flat at 7 a.m. while avoiding accusing glances from the typewriter and While Miss Right is incommunicado at five Miles distant, then I want to be captured. Even a few women feel the same way, though, unsurprisingly, far fewer than men. One woman whom I've never met and who, I hasten to add, knows nothing about me, was told the news by a mutual friend and said to my wife, 'Oh, you poor thing.' Well, I don't think my wife is that daft and I don't think that I'm as brave and reckless as most of my men friends think. Time will tell. Lots of it I hope. • Last Tuesday, Margaret Thatcher and Joyce McKinney appeared side by side on the front page of the Daily Mirror. Was it, I wondered, a new interpretation of the Phrase 'true blue'? On the front page of the Sun Miss McKinney appeared above Tommy Docherty who was advertising his Piece on page nine about how he left his Wife, and next to her a child refugee from Zaire sucked a lollipop. Wonderful stuff. Fleet Street must survive. On further reflection the whole tatty business eventually sank in and I felt angry. You realise, I suppose, the waste of justice and money that is being squandered on this very boring Woman. While court cases last, while extradition squabbles continue, and while injunctions are hurled back and forth from Paper to magazine I presume the countless cases that are in desperate need to be heard are put back. At the same time I reckon it is Safe to assume that God knows how many People linger in prison on remand who shouldn't be there in the first place. Is the law an ass, or are its administrators? Perhaps it is all the same. All! know is that a girl who is now famous for a liking for flagellation, oral sex or whatever is costing a ,_I°t of money. Why not let the Americans Keep her? Talking of Americans, I notice that the tourist season is upon us again. They are over here pinching our tables in restaurants and our places at the bar, but it doesn't matter. They are really awfully nice even if they do overtip and point out Westminster Abbey to you as though they found it before you. No, everyone or nearly everyone likes Americans, but what do we think of the Germans? Fleet Street utterances on the subject of the Queen's visit to West Germany strike me as being immensely hypocritical. It is, after all, a public relations exercise, and an industrial one in particular, but ask a few people in the street who were conscious during the last war whether all is forgiven and forgotten and I think you would be surprised at the answer. Doing just that in London yesterday I got a corker from a Chelsea Pensioner: 'I killed my first German on 27 March 1915,' he told me, 'and I would kill one for you now for fifty pence.' Not nice, you say, but the memory does linger on. It will all be all right in ten or so years' time, I suppose, but meanwhile they are heavy, humourless and nasty to most of the English. I hope that when the English dislike of the Germans does fade away, the dreadful sentimentalising of them by so many ex-servicemen as great enemies fades with it. 'We'd like you to give the film an Ingmar Bergman, atmosphere.' At another meeting to discuss a soft drink commercial the production company were asked to make it as like Elvira Madigan as possible. My only first hand experience of the business Was a few years back when I sat in on a production to write about it for the Daily Mirror Magazine. The company took a buxom blonde, two children and a full crew to Spain for a week to open a tin of peaches. We had to go to Spain because that was the only place, the agency said, 'where you'll find a meaningful sunset.'
It's village cricket time again. Our man. aging editor at the Spectator is getting together a side to play against Charles The Scout' Benson next month and we're already — deviously and craftily — trying to enlist secret weapons. At Newbury races last Saturday I managed to recruit two very fit-looking young men, one of whom opened the bowling for Eton recently and the other did the same service for Ampleforth. Nearly everyone feels 'windy' about facing speed. I wonder just what Mr Benson is up to? I know he's got the actor Julian Holloway playing for him who is certainly a very aggressive bowler, but we
don't know what else he has got up his sleeve. What I am fairly sure about is the fact that good bowlers and very different tactics to those used on the professional field win the fun matches. In my days as a Suffolk village captain I met with a fair amount of success by putting the best field ers at deep mid-wicket and deep square leg. This is where the sloggers hit the rubbish and there's nothing quite so daft as seeing the slips position packed with geriatric, gin-swilling, once-a-year cricketers who couldn't catch a football if it was lobbed at them.
My pancreas, as those doctors would say in silly newspaper columns, keeps sending messages to my brain begging me not to abuse it. Ignoring them yet again I wound up in hospital recently, for five days of agony relieved only by the most naïve question I've ever been asked by a doctor —13o you have any difficulty in swallowing?' — plus a couple of shots of pethedine. It's high time the medical profession changed its attitude toward the dishing out of analgesics, even to those suffering self-inflicted pain. The idea that more than three or four shots of the likes of pethedine can cause addiction is a tremendous exaggeration uttered by a vast majority who have never experienced the sort of pain that makes you want to scratch the paper off the walls. But, lo and behold, the Royal Free does carry a young angel of mercy on the staff. She said, 'I'm going to give you a pain-killer as a prophylactic now while you're all right. Pain is bad kir you.' Older doctors please note and play less at being God.
Jeffrey Bernard
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