Low life
Thrill-
Jeffrey Bernard
Yet another idiot student approached me yesterday and among other things said how exciting it must be to be a hack. Well, of course it is. Take this morning. I woke up with an excruciating pain in my back to discover I'd been sleeping on a Langan's Brasserie cocktail stick all night, then discovered that the milk had gone off and then opened the post to discover a royalty cheque from Punch for £5. I then found a note from the cleaning lady which said, 'We need Flash, bathroom cleaner, Harpic and furniture polish.' Now I'm pretty sure that a man like D'Artagnan didn't start his day like that and I am certain that the life Reilly led in no way resembled that, but this young man would have it that I am somewhere half-way between the two of them. If he only knew it, that note from the cleaning lady is the nearest I've been to a love letter in five years. What these people don't realise is that it is they who are to be envied what with their punting beautiful girls up the river and getting grants to read books. (What they substitute for punting in red-brick universities I wonder about.) But the young man would be saved a lot of aggravation if only he could be the fly on my wall and behold the cobwebs on my typewriter. Even my house plants have got lung cancer. The skin of an old melon has been lying on my desk for three days and I'm too depressed to move it. It awaits the return of the cleaning lady. I never see her. She has her own set of keys and descends on these shambles every Wednesday and I wonder just what the hell she makes of it. Sherlock Holmes would see at a glance that he was in the flat of a man who has surrendered. The young student though would probably think the overflowing ash- trays, dirty glasses and dirty-tissue-filled wastepaper basket to be fearfully exciting.
The builder Mike Molloy told me about got it right though. This man was laying tiles on the kitchen floor of a woman colleague's house. There he was on his hands and knees and half covered in cem- ent when he asked our friend, 'What do you do for a living?' She said, 'I'm a news- paper columnist.' He looked up at her and said, 'God, how boring.' What an incredi- bly happy and foolish man he must be.
And how foolish of the student to come out with that silly old chestnut of how exciting it must be for us to be able to meet famous people. Oh yeah? I was with a famous person the other day without realising it. She who would have me barred from the Groucho Club for my bad lan- guage turns out to be none other than Dale Spender the Australian militant feminist and, I quote from a book blurb, 'a writer from choice and necessity, a feminist who has set herself the task of drawing attention to the sexist nature of our language' de dah, de dah, and so on. Well, the club lent me two of her books and so full of hate are they that it burnt my fingers to turn the pages. The antipodean feminist must be the most fearsome and tortured animal on earth. I shall return the books to the club today as gingerly as if I were disposing of nuclear waste. Far from exploiting women I don't even notice them any more. So sucks, boo, yah, if you'll forgive the language. Yesterday, when I went into the club I felt so nervous of seeing Ms Spender that it was as though I'd had a large dose of amphetamine. Oh yes, young man, my life as a hack is full of excitement. I mean once you've had tea with Raquel Welch and Princess Margaret, a cocktail with Anthony Burgess and a row with Norman Mailer what else is there left? Not a lot. Later, after I go out to plunder the supermarkets of Flash, bathroom cleaner, Harpic and furniture polish I shall go to the pub for some exciting conversation and, of course, a pain-killing drink. Gordon will tell me how he failed by a short head yesterday to win a fortune. The barman will tell me of a football result that I have not the slightest interest in hearing about. Norman will tell me that he is about to get a cold and that the telephone is out of order. His mother will tell me that it rained in Hendon last night. Any one of half a dozen women will give me a reproachful look for nothing I can remember doing or not doing. Graham will ask me, 'What did I do last night?' Terrific stuff. Really exciting, isn't it?
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