High society by Ben Elton Page A

CLUB, SOHO
    F or some members of the Groucho the great bore about the gentlemen’s toilet is the number of other members who insist on using it for the purpose of urination.
    Milton perched his large backside on the edge of the basin. ‘You know what they should have done? Instead of putting in a bloody snooker room and that crappy little upstairs bar they should have put in an extra bog just for coke-sniffing. I mean it’s bloody outrageous, isn’t it? We have to sneak into a toilet to get our jollies like we’re bloody criminals. What’s more we come in here to sniff. I mean, under normal circumstances you wouldn’t walk into a bloody toilet with the specific intention of taking a series of ruddy great sniffs, would you? But that’s what we’re forced to do. The one bloody activity that cannot be indulged in without deep inhalation and it has to take place in the bloody bog! It’s disgusting and bloody unhygienic. Particularly this bog, which is heated and ventilated like the black hole of Calcutta and full of pissed-up, over-fed, fat, flabby-arsed flatulents like me. It’s a bloody disgrace. Everybody knows that a percentage of the members of this club who use the toilet use it to snort coke. We pay our fees, don’t we? We should have our own bog! They wouldn’t even have to plumb it in, better not to, in fact, so that the farters wouldn’t use it…’
    Milton’s companion, a showbiz manager who specialized in providing quite famous comedians to appear on blokey game shows, had chopped out a line of cocaine on the cistern. Milton lowered his big red nose towards it, and the folds of his sweaty neck bulged over his collar as he did so. He inhaled greedily.
    ‘There we go…beautiful…aaaaaaaahhhh. Ooh! Yes! Oh yes. Very nice indeed. Brings tears to your eyes. Very, very nice indeed, thank you. Bloody should be, the price we’re paying for it. Still, got to have the best tonight, I think. I’m onto something. Got a tip-off on the news desk, anonymous unfortunately, but I think it’s genuine. Well, we shall see, shan’t we? Peter Paget’s daughter has been taking ecstasy. Yes, of course Paget the drug nutter, the bloke who wants to legalize everything. Not surprised he wants to legalize everything if his own daughter’s a bloody space cadet, eh? Unbelievable. The double standards of these politicians is just gobsmacking! Remember the Home Secretary’s son! Not to mention Prince sodding Harry. Mind you, at least HRH looked suitably horrified. This Paget bloke’s just a hypocrite. Talk about corrupt. Trying to change the law of the bloody land just to keep his kid out of trouble. I mean, if that isn’t an abuse of his position as an MP I don’t know what is. Well, that’s how we’ll spin it, anyway. We’ll show these poxy politicians and their stuck-up little celebrity kids that nobody is above the law in this country and the British press will hound down any overprivileged little shit who thinks otherwise. I’m going to set one of my Rottweilers onto that Paget girl, you see if I don’t. Aaaaahhhhh! Very nice. Very, very nice indeed. Chop us out another, will you? I’m going to have a slash.’

ST HILDA’S CHURCH HALL, SOHO
    T ommy had paused briefly to get another cup of tea. Some of his audience seized the opportunity to make calls on their mobiles to inform colleagues that they would be late for work.
    ‘Well, after they’d got the unconscious A and R man out of my dressing room (saying he’d slipped over while helping me with me yoga), I shagged his bird anyway, and it was top. She was as coked up as me and mad for it, so I gave her an E (not her first of the night, I reckon, by the way she were stroking all the furniture and everything) and gave her a right seeing-to. I do love a dirty girl with ideas of her own. It was the first time I’ve touched a dressing room fruit basket in years. The fruit in those things is always shite, like in hotels. It looks great and tastes of fook all.