Low life
Night thoughts
Jeffrey Bernard
mind create what the Notting Hill Gate branch of Lyons way back in 1949 rather strangely had on their menu billed as Chicken a la Poulet. (They also had Mushrooms sur Toast.) But what about Mike Tyson's neck? Nineteen and three-quarter inches! I don't trust people who use exclamation marks but that man has to have them. He is a very workmanlike fighter, don't you think? Thank God he wasn't in the Greek Street betting shop last Saturday week. My head has healed from that one-punch fracas but the crack the pavement gave it seems to have exacerbated the two cysts, one behind each ear, that I have had for a while. They are now the size of plums. They embarrass me, make me feel self-conscious and to some extent they alarm me. Either they are there because the wretched pancreas can't break down fat any more or Norman is poisoning me.
By the way, he took his virago to see Aida and when I asked him what he thought of it he simply said, 'I couldn't understand a f—ing word of it,' and returned his attention to the till. The Eton boating song he can grasp. The virago herself, being Italian, explained it to him though and told him that it wasn't being sung in Egyptian.
Anyway, yesterday in the Coach and Horses I was sipping a drink and thinking with an affection that has strangely in- creased over the years of Mrs Bernard III when I was tapped on a cyst and turned round and who should it be but she, who had blown in from Spain. Shortly after that our daughter blew in. It was all — how shall I put it — very nice? But then, shortly before Mike Tyson put that neck of his through the ropes in Atlantic City, I wondered if cysts, wasting, diabetes and all the other awful indications of decay might not be the rottenness of 20 years ago coming out like pus from a lanced boil. I can't help pondering such things at 2.30 a.m. I should have been better to them and Michael Spinks should have distanced him- self from Tyson with a bit of use of the left jab. What should have been is a heavy load and a nuisance thing to think about.
Oh well, today is going to be splendid. I shall go out soon, have a cocktail and listen to some really ridiculous remarks about the big fight from people who have absolutely no idea or conception of what it is like to be in a boxing ring with someone who is being paid to hurt you, and then go and have a nap in the blueberry pie in the Groucho Club before getting what may be the last supper together. That may not sound a lot of fun to you and you're right. It isn't to me either. I had intended to get out of this dreadful part the agent in the sky got me and go to Spain for a few days to drown in the sun, but trouble with air traffic controllers put paid to that one.
News of all that I heard on LBC Radio and why, I would like to know, do nearly all the women who read and announce news on the radio speak with what must be called Tesco accents? Only the stunning Jill Pyrer can speak as though she is not at the end of a queue. It could be that Tesco talk is the result of the heady climb from suburbia to media. To desert the telephone for the microphone is a giant step in any woman's life. Years ago, Margaret Thatch- er probably had quite a nice voice.
And now it is six hours since the big fight and my daymares in the night and I have suddenly got a pain in the region of my spleen. Poor Michael Spinks must have a pain in the head and please don't tell me that there is always someone worse off than yourself.
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