THE lovely wife (TLW) has been threatening to stage an intervention of late, and that can’t be good news. It’s not the betting, thankfully, and I’ve not yet taken to hiding empty gin bottles in the toilet cistern, but every now and again she’ll come through the front door and ask, in agitated tones: “Is that ANOTHER box of crap from Temu on the doorstep?”
“It’s not crap.”
[Hard stare].
“Well, it’s not ALL crap.”
I do have a soft spot for the Chinese Warehouse monster Temu, but she who must be obeyed (SWMBO) has a point that there is a limit, and I may have taken things too far when buying aftershave called “Quorum”, purely on the basis that it shares a name with the sire of Grand National legend Red Rum.
I’ve even contemplated the possibility of a range of aftershaves based on my favourite National Hunt horses of yesteryear, but it’s not quite as inspiring as I first envisaged.
Some positives
There are some positives with the idea, and I could cope with Entanglement (Bird’s Nest) and Gala Performance (Monksfield) as fragrance names with an air of mystery. Milesian (Lanzarote) has roots in Irish mythology so gets a tentative thumbs up, while Grey Mirage (Desert Orchid) is on point for the ageing lothario; Falcon (Night Nurse) has a certain macho edge, which might appeal, but Deep Run (Dawn Run) doesn’t really cut it, sadly, which is a shame.
SWMBO points out that I already have plenty of aftershaves and those don’t get much use, while I rarely buy her anything of that ilk. The purchasing of perfume is a dangerous business, of course, but doubly dangerous if hers must be named after the dams of great horses. Fair Sabrina (Bird’s Nest) is grand for someone called Sabrina, but merely suggests I’ve got a thing for Melissa Joan Hart, which she already suspects.
Flower Child (Desert Orchid) is a winner, as is Around The Roses (Sea Pigeon), particularly as TLW is an accomplished florist. Florence Nightingale (Night Nurse) and Twilight Slave (Dawn Run) are romantic gambles that could go either way and, while I’m non-committal on Regina (Monksfield), I’m pretty certain that a bottle of Slag (Lanzarote) would not make a welcome Valentine’s gift.
On reflection, and taking all of the above into account, I should probably stay out of the perfume business.
ON an unrelated subject, I’ve recently started re-reading The Spectator columns of Jeffrey Bernard, and can happily report that the pleasure is not diminished by repetition. Bernard, I used to think, was a man I wished I’d met when I was first looking to make my way in the world, but I’ve changed my mind on that subject. In the mid-1990s, I started a temporary job at the civil service in Holborn, initially as a post-boy, and that was at a time when the culture was to go to the pub either at lunchtime and/or after work for a pint.
I quickly got to know most of the staff and, as the regular post-boy never smiled, my youthful enthusiasm quickly made me friends and got me invited to the local, which was in Fleet Street. This was some time after the newspaper industry had abandoned Fleet Street for Wapping, but I enjoyed being part of that work/social culture all the same. Bernard worked for the Sporting Life in those hard-drinking days, but was infamously sacked having been very, very unwell at a point-to-point dinner where he was meant to be the guest speaker.
I often wondered how things would have turned out if I’d arrived at the Sporting Life in Fleet Street a decade before I did, or indeed wandered into Bernard’s local, the Coach and Horses in Soho. I flattered myself that I would have taken to the scene like a duck to water, but when I allow myself to imagine exactly how things would play out (let’s face it - the irascible Bernard would not have found the 19-year-old me disarmingly enthusiastic, but just downright annoying), I imagine myself either disillusioned or dead. Or both, and that’s twice as bad.
Lust for living
But aside from being sad (sic), bad and dangerous to know, Bernard managed to bring a remarkable lust for living to his writing, even if the main focus of that writing was often the very precariousness of life. Bernard was a racing obsessive and the sport punctuates his work, with his funniest anecdotes often about his interactions with racing personalities, such as the time he was due to drive from Newmarket to Lambourn, where he then lived, only for Lester Piggott to offer him a seat in his helicopter, which was taking the great man to Newbury. The warm feeling he took from this unsolicited offer evaporated a week later when Jeff received an invoice for the journey.
Even death itself was never off limits, and the demise of the great racecourse character Ras Prince Monolulu (right, real name, Peter Carl Mackay) is one in which Bernard’s role is related with a darkly delightful mixture of regret and mischief. Bernard was dispatched to the Middlesex Hospital on Valentine’s Day 1965 to get an interview with the ailing Mackay, and decided to bring along a box of chocolates to cheer the patient up.
Sadly, this act of kindness backfired as Prince Monolulu choked to death on what Bernard assures us was a strawberry cream he had proffered the supine tipster. You can’t believe everything you read in The Spectator, but the idea that Jeffrey Bernard accidentally killed Prince Monolulu with Black Magic is strangely compelling.
I suspect the warmth of my feeling towards Jeffrey Bernard is coloured by my imagining him as portrayed by the wonderful Peter O’Toole in Keith Waterhouse’s play “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell”.
If you’re feeling down during the dark days of winter, and can find a recording of the play when O’Toole made it his own, I can guarantee that it will put a spring in your step. Failing that, it’s easy to lay your hands on a paperback copy of Low Life, a collection of Bernard’s Spectator columns. Unlike most of your ante-post portfolio, it’s something you won’t regret.