Why London has the jump on New York

It’s not just that we get out of bed earlier, but it is that simple. You’re allowed to fail in London. In fact, you can even be lauded for it, if you fail in sufficiently grand a fashion.

Jeffrey Bernard - unwell

I’ve written before about one of the most entertaining nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre, watching Peter O’Toole essay the role of a dipsomaniac British journalist in the eponymous play ‘Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell’. Taken from a byline that would appear in The Spectator when the great man was too hungover to file his column, the play celebrates a life spent ‘reaching for the ground’. He looks back fondly on arriving in Soho, and from that moment on, ‘never looking forward’, in an era when you could end up, (I’m paraphrasing) ‘drunk, miserable and alone on less than a fiver’.

These days it’ll cost you a bit more than a fiver to attain that condition, and you’ll have to smoke your Woodbines outside in the freezing cold, but something of the old Soho still remains. And long may it do so.

Of course, whenever he could find a magazine to stump for the fares and digs, Bernard loved going to New York. Well really, I mean who doesn’t? But I wonder if Bernard had stayed in the Big Apple, (as a few of us old timers still call it), would he have ever been so beloved by a reading public for his foibles, immortalised in the same way? And wouldn’t the stage play have had to have some redemptive moment, where the drunk writer finally swears off the grog and finds Jesus, who has been waiting for him all along, hidden away in a rolled up copy of the Racing Post? I doubt it: the bitch goddess success has no time for heroic drinkers who leave behind ‘two unfinished novels’: another line from the play.

Incidentally, at the end of the play, penned by the late (and similarly bibulous) Keith Waterhouse, Bernard staggers off with just a suitcase, looking for a place to lay his weary head. The Jet-Set Hobo will find himself in that same predicament in a few days. So, if you have a room to spare, especially in your Knightsbridge mansion – though a Brixton squat will do almost as well – do drop me a line, now won’t you?