Body Talk

Barry Glendenning is unwell. He’s not at death’s door or anything, but he does have one of those horrible colds that begins as a mild dose of the sniffles, then quickly intensifies into the kind of feverish malaise that makes him wish he was dead. You know the type: you’re hot, then you’re cold, then hot again, then aching all over while shivering under a duvet on the sofa, weltering in a fug of self pity, hot, sweet tea, pisspoor daytime television programmes and discarded, rolled-up wads of snot-soaked tissues. The Flu, I think it’s called – unless you’re a woman in which case it’s just a cold.

Of course when some magazine columnists are unwell, it means they get away without actually having to write anything. Take Jeffrey Bernard, for example. Gambler, journalist, raving alcoholic, diabetic and chain-smoker, for decades he wrote the wonderfully confessional Low Life column for The Spectator magazine, in which he chronicled life in London’s Soho from his stool at the bar of the locale’s legendary Coach and Horses pub, where he was a permanent fixture.
On the regular occasions that he failed to submit his copy, the magazine would state simply: “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell”, a euphemism which generally meant Jeffrey Bernard was so totally incapacitated by drink that he was unable or unwilling to write his column this week. Good man Jeffrey.
Indeed, such was the frequency with which this one-liner appeared in The Spectator, that it eventually became the title of a hugely successful Keith Waterhouse play, in which Bernard was played by Peter O’Toole.
Upon waking from a drunken slumber in the toilets of the Coach & Horses, our hero finds himself alone and in the dark. Unable to contact the landlord, he is resigned to spending the rest of the night with a bottle of vodka and an endless chain of cigarettes, narrating a story of hilarious and witty reminiscences that, as one critic who knows more about this kind of stuff than I do said, “leads us gradually towards a contemplation of mortality, decay and the crucial recognition that, for a toper on this scale, another marriage is impossible.”
Of course Jeffrey Bernard is no longer unwell… he’s dead and has been for some time now. The column which his biographer Graham Lord described as “the longest suicide note in history” appears in The Spectator no longer, while its author is fondly remembered by those who didn’t know him as a charmingly eccentric English wit, and by those who did, as a cranky, boorish and wildly irresponsible misanthropic one-legged bastard.
But enough about Jeffrey Bernard, my original intention this week, before being struck down by life-threatening pneumonia, was to write about body language, the subject of a documentary I saw recently presented by an eminent psychologist whose name I can’t remember, but who – as you might expect from an expert in this particular field – managed to convey the impression that he knew what he was talking about.
What he was talking about, in fact, was sex and, more pertinently, how you can tell if someone you are talking to, or indeed not talking to, is attracted to you. Like many other men of my acquaintance, I was sitting in front of the television with pen poised.
Speaking from a heterosexual man’s point of view, you could be forgiven for assuming that the physical “tells” which indicate whether or not a woman wants you to ride her sideways are easy to spot. For example, if a girl you fancy in a bar approaches you, goes down on her knees and start fellating you vigorously, it’s probably safe to assume that, yes, she’s interested. Alternatively, if she takes one look at you and runs away screaming, she probably isn’t.
Thankfully, given the rarity of the former scenario (not to mention the frequency of the latter), it seems there are several more subtle nuances which can be used as indicators of suggestion and availability. Coquettish gestures, hair-flicks, eye-pops, emphatic grimaces, head-swivels, lick-lipping and exaggerated looks of incredulity were all cited as signs that a girl has taken a shine to a bloke she is talking to.
It should of course go without saying that if all these licks, flicks and ticks are occurring simultaneously, you’d probably be better off moving your attention elsewhere, as chances are you’ve wandered onto the set of The Exorcist and are about to be submerged in a torrent of green projectile vomit.
Of course, if you’re already in a relationship, careful study of your partner’s body language can also be used to confirm that she’s not working late every night, but is in fact shagging all around her behind your back. Typical physical “tells” in this scenario include a loss of attentiveness on your girlfriend’s part, less synchronisation of body language due to disinterest on her part and a lack of desire for sex on her part, because she’s getting more rampant, hot, steamy, animalistic, up-against-the-wall, no-holds-barred nookie than you could ever hope to provide, elsewhere.
But if it’s any consolation, at least you know she’s not getting it down the Coach and Horses from Jeffrey Bernard, because Jeffrey Bernard is dead. Despite his myriad shortcomings when he was alive, old Jeffrey was renowned as some man to pull the ladies all the same. As his biographer Graham Lord famously put it: “He had an awful lot of wives, four of them his own.” Classy bloke.