DEEP IN DOMESTICITY

Jeffrey Bernard

I can't for the life of me understand why some people are so hell-bent on stopping others from doing what they want to do. If I choose to close up my arteries with nicotine and then open them up again with vodka that is my business and I will. But apart from ASH there is now an organisation called Action on Alcohol Abuse which is worried about the fact that 25,000 people die from drinking every year. What else should they die from? Eating? I really would like to be left alone by organisations. AAA also says that 50 per cent of domestic murders are committed by people when they are drunk. Well, of course they are. The other 50 per cent are probably committed by supporters of AAA. You don't have to be drunk to behave like a pig.

And I know about domestic murder. I lived with a girl once who tried to murder me. She used to burn the toast, insist on following me to the races and she was very much into sighing. You know, deep heavy sighs that make you wonder just what the hell you've done. The Guilt Machine, I used to call her. She once even came to the Coach and Horses and stood in the doorway looking reproachfully at me. She didn't come inside, she just stood there and dabbed an eye with a handkerchief. She had another sort of sigh as well, much shorter and harder. That was the aggressive sigh and a nasty noise it was too. Such a terrible waste of a lovely body. Whoever it is who is responsible for putting the right brains into the right bodies really screws up sometimes. She was a dancer and I've noticed that dancers tend to be a little daft. I mean it's a funny thing to do, isn't it? I don't think it's natural. If you were with someone and they suddenly got up on their points, flung their arms in the air and then began to tiptoe through the tulips1 you'd send for a doctor or throw a bucket of cold water over them, wouldn't you? But this girl used to do her barre exercises at the ironing board. "Just iron the bloody shirt," I'd say and she would with a tremendous sigh. Well, she had to go and she did. She got a job dancing in Beirut.

Another attempt was made on my life by a girl who would keep telling me how very wonderful her ex-boyfriend was. Such romancing. She made him sound like St George gone to work for an advertising agency. And yet there is no or­ganisation bent on saving us from being bored to death. It so happens that neither of those two women would have been so boring if they had taken the odd swig from the ubiquitous bottle. I sometimes wonder, now that I'm an ex, if she tells her current chap how wonderful I was. Probably not. I threw her too many wintry smiles to make her drop her gaze. It's surprising how nasty you can make a smile if you want to. I got so good at it eventually that I could look her in the eye and make her look at the floor in five seconds. So I don't think she is referring to me as Mister Wonderful at the moment.

Which reminds me. Something rather odd; I got chatting with a bloke in a pub the other day and I'd never met him before. One thing led to another and he started telling me about his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend. After a minute or two it dawned on me that he was talking about me. It sounded really awful, from smoking in bed first thing in the morning to disappearing to Newmarket for a week with all the house­keeping money. Of course I was fascinated and I led this bloke on getting more and more information about me. Apparently, apart from smoking, racing and drinking, I have an ungovernable temper, fall asleep in restaurants or eat Indian takeaways in bed, snore and wear the same polo-neck jersey for days on end. Well, it's news to me although I must admit I did once wake up one morning to find some curry in one of my shoes. Anyway I left this man none the wiser. But who needs an agent or PR with ex-girlfriends like that. All I can say to AAA is that the majority of attempted domestic murders are committed by people addicted to instant coffee. That is the evil we must fight.

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