Low life
Blood, sweat and vodka
Jeffrey Bernard
This flat of mine is slowly turning into an afternoon drinking club. God knows I love visitors and company now that I can't get out much any more but they arrive and dive head first into my vodka and they have been drinking me out of house and home.
Perhaps I should put a notice on my front door saying Members Only and sit just inside it on a bar-stool like Muriel Belcher did years ago in the Colony Room and abuse people as they arrive. At least nobody has yet put out cigarettes or dropped chewing gum on my carpet and there was a time in the Colony Room when the carpet resembled tarmac.
But it isn't only vodka that I give away. Last week my doctor came up and took some of my blood away with her. She says that she thinks I may be anaemic, some- thing is wrong with my blood anyway, and that is why I couldn't even get up to write to you last week. Blood I can spare but the vodka drinkers are a strain on my feeble resources.
This morning my physiotherapist is com- ing up to take me out for my first trip out- side in my wheelchair. I dread it. Last week Isabel and her mother came along to do a marvellous job of clearing the flat up and sorting out the laundry and my clothes. They only got through two bottles of red wine. It was quite like old times. Isabel's mother started bullying me and asked me why I didn't pull myself together, shave every day and go out more often. I tried to explain that I have come to like sitting here and staring at the walls or looking out of the window and gazing at the sky, the Park Lane Hilton and Battersea power station in the distance, but she wouldn't have it. I haven't been ticked off like it for years. I am not sure I dare go out to visit her in Spain later this month. She has an obses- sion about wanting to bath me and I don't know why since I don't exactly stink. Per- haps we have both arrived at our second childhoods.
So I wonder who is going to turn up today. I had hoped that with my disability this place might turn into something of a salon but it is becoming a dive in the sky. I suppose someone will ask me to put a dart board up soon. One drunken visitor last week even started singing but luckily another member told him he was being a bore and he left. I wonder, do I need a bouncer? I certainly couldn't bounce pussy at the moment.
I have been knocked sideways yet again by a demand from the Inland Revenue for nearly £10,000. These people are fantasists. Their assessments are lunatic and if they think that Peter O'Toole is still playing in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell to packed houses then they are three years out of date. Those were the days. What they should be doing is giving me tax relief on the amount of vodka I am dispensing to my visitors. I sip, they quaff. I am quite surprised in a way that we haven't had any fights in here yet. Dancing is not allowed, neither is Isabel allowed to listen to pop music, but she does have the distasteful habit of watching East Enders. When she does, I go to my bedroom. No one would have ever driven Muriel Belcher to bed without hav- ing a very large sum of money. And Isabel's growing addiction to lager is beginning to worry me. What next? Don't answer that. I've been there. Some sing of from major to minor but I hum of from bitter to whisky. It is just as well that I like sad songs.
And now I must go and lie down again and let some of my anaemic blood get to my head before the members begin to trickle into the club. I shall be closed tomorrow for the fifth Test Match at Edg-
baston. Club members will have to watch that in the Coach and Horses. I wonder how they are cashing their cheques what with Norman being on holiday in the south of France? Come to that, I wonder what Norman is doing there? Putting his foot in it or poking his nose into things I suppose. Thank God I am trapped here.
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