KEY POINTS:
There are many reasons to love English journalist Jeffrey Bernard. His distaste for employment, unstinting commitment to achieving monumental drunkenness and energetic disdain for those people he saw as being at ideological odds with him are but three of his sterling attributes.
He's an acquired taste, however, is
Jeffrey. I accept it might be hard to love a man who believed the end of civilisation would be precipitated by young girls wearing sunglasses on top of their heads. But I defy anyone not to adore the fluent savagery with which he dispatches so many of the sacred cows of modern society.
When asked, for example, how he felt about the ennobling properties of employment, he had this to say: "There's no virtue in work for its own sake. It's a myth that was invented by people like D.H. Lawrence - back to the earth. As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... If there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own f*****g garden, wouldn't he?"
As well as being a world class sot, Bernard was also a first class writer, albeit one whose tone and subject matter tended resolutely toward the darker aspects of life. The column he wrote throughout the 1970s, first for the New Statesman, and then for the Spectator, was described by one of his contemporaries as "a suicide note in weekly instalments".
This weekly chronicle of wastedness was also a love letter to Soho and Fitzrovia, whose seedy glamour seduced JB early on in life. He shared the watering holes of Soho with equally picturesque contemporaries - Frances Bacon, Nina Hamnett and "that boring drunk, Dylan Thomas". Drink was his first love however, and superseded all else.
The column was a frequent casualty of his devotion to oblivion; many were the weeks when the bald announcement "Jeffrey Bernard is unwell" appeared in place of any copy.
When Oscar Wilde declared work the curse of the drinking classes, he was referring to the likes of Bernard, surveying the world through jaundiced eyes from his perch on a barstool in his beloved Coach and Horses, hoovering up vodkas, day in, day out.
Anti-establishment bohemians are the easiest to romanticise, especially ones as eloquent and funny as Bernard. How can you not fall in love with a man who titles his memoirs Reach for the Ground?
Telling anecdotes about Jeffrey Bernard, you can't help but wish they were your own. He inspired artists, most notably playwright Keith Waterhouse, whose Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell became a film starring that other hellraiser, Peter O'Toole, and is continuing to pack out houses as a London stage play.
And yet, for all the inspiration and laughter Bernard continues to provide, his story ended tragically.
He ended life alone, enduring a painful, inevitable death from cirrhosis, looking at life with the same clear-eyed bitterness up until the end.
What is the point of it all? was the question he continued to address. Beyond the accounts of low-life carousing and late-night interludes, it was the only question which really concerned him, and why his columns remain important and worthwhile for more than just their gallows humour.
Jeffrey Bernard frolicked in the gutter, steadfastly refusing to look at the stars, and remained at all times deeply concerned with, and committed to the exploration of our human condition. What better concern for a columnist? For that I salute him, even if he did come to the dispiriting conclusion that there isn't really a point to it all, and barkeep should pour another double instead.
