Low life
Sour grapes
Jeffrey Bernard
I write to you today under the unbearable weight of a vast quantity of sour grapes. No, I was never on Now! magazine, neither have I a staff job nor any hope of aold g en handshake, and I think it only fair to warn Bernard Levin that it can get pretty chillY sitting in El Vino when you're down to your last glass of Bollinger. Not only does MY heart bleed for the redundant staff of NOW and Mr Levin — who, by the way, reminds Me a bit of Captain Oates — but for the entire staff of the Daily Mirror whom I saw in their pub, The Stab, yesterday slogging their guts out for a pittance, pension and pathetic expenses. These deplorable feelings of bitterness and envy were precipitated by a rare visit to Fleet Street where I went to see a man about an article. Then I popped into El Vino for the one. What a dreadful place. If you can accept the management's theory that having to wear a tie keeps out the riff-raff, or support the ridiculous notion that hacks and lawyers aren't riff-raff, then I suppose you may like the place. Admittedly the prices are reasonable but it isn't just the drink that goes to the heads of the denizens.
They really do exude a self-importance quite out of keeping with their jobs when they should be thanking their lucky stars for the fact that they're on poker-playing or drinking terms with their editors.
Mind you, I can appreciate the fact that in Spite of the money for old rope and the ever present threat of a gigantic redundancy payment, there are a great many drawbacks to being a staff hack. For one thing staff men, the ones I know anyway, are tied down to a desk for most of the day, only managing to get out for a noggin between 11 a.m. and closing time. Added to that, when can a writer be reasonably expected to write when he or she has 15 personal telephone calls to make plus two visits a day to the accounts department to collect ex's? Then, of course, you can't choose who you work With or next to. (I once found myself in the same room as Derek Jameson for three minutes before he sacked me, and that was Pretty unpleasant I can tell you. Not the sack I mean.) On yet another magazine which folded some time ago I worked next to an extraordinary hack — far too genteel for the job — who could only write and talk about Noel Coward, Ivor Novell() or E.M.
Forster. The times that man drove me out of that office upstairs to accounts and thence to Wheelers or Bentleys only to end the day, skint in a betting shop was legion.
There are moments and occasions, however, that can uplift the staff man and make him feel the job's well worth doing. One other now folded journal used to let me use the desk next to one of its star scribes. Fond of the occasional cocktail, he was sick into his typewriter one 'afternoon after a working lunch. The fire department were called and they obligingly hosed down his machine. He also once, in a manic mood, announced that he was about to write the greatest article of all time. He raised both hands high above his head and then plunged them into the typewriter. So hard did he hit it that he couldn't extricate his fingers. Again the fire brigade were summoned and they kindly freed the incredible digits. These events are only too rare, though, in the life of a staff man who, as I say, leads a humdrum enough existence and earns every Penny of his £15,000 a year which has just gone up to £17,000 as I write. A case in point was the amazing hack who took one of the office girls to a hotel one night with sexual intercourse in mind. Sadly they were both too drunk to find a hotel and somehow wandered into a food factory. In an attempt to commit thelfoulideed'the hack actually fell into a gigantic vat of chutney and damn nigh perished. On second thoughts I think the freelance game may be better in spite of the chill wind that blows between Fleet Street and Barclays Bank.
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