Jeffrey Bernard

Jeffrey Bernard
As a way of giving their reporters time off during the holiday season, or perhaps out of pure laziness, the Spectator has resorted to the time honoured routine of a trip to the archives. So they reprint an article written by Jeffrey Bernard called 'Eastern Promise', dated 17 December 1988. Oh what a different world it was those twenty years and more ago! Bernard worked for the Spectator for over twenty years though to describe him as either a reporter or a journalist (if there's a difference?) misses the point. For he was an alcoholic, the term 'heavy drinker was wasted on the man, too mimsy and part-time. Bernard gave not just his heart and soul to drink but a leg too, amputated late in life when his body was falling apart; although the purveyors of strong drink cannot take all the credit here as Bernard took his drink with a steady supply of cigarettes. He wrote in between drinking himself into a stupor, he was basically honest as he wrote about what he knew, hence his work for the Spectator was published under the tile 'Low Life'.

The facts, if you have a thirst for them, can be found propping up the bar in Wikipedia under the heading of his name. What we learn is that he was determined from an early age to live this way.