A vodka marked the spot as a low-life hero passed into legend

All it came down to in the end was a modest button-backed leather pew in the Coach and Horses, a table in front of it and a vodka and soda.

Yesterday people stood and looked at the site of Jeffrey Bernard's tiny kingdom and marvelled to think that, from this utterly commonplace corner of a commonplace pub, a legend was born.

Bernard, who died last Thursday at 65, was a man world-famous for being his disreputable self. He was, in a sense, the first "lifestyle" writer.

Year after sodden year, his "Low Life" column in the Spectator kept the magazine's thoughtful, right-wing, readership up to speed with what lesser mortals were doing - drinking, smoking, gambling and forgetting who they had had sex with the previous night.

His funeral yesterday brought the louche, the sleazy, the grog-blossomed, the ashen-faced, the wrecked, the sullen and the unarguably glamorous to the West London Crematorium at Kensal Green, immortalised in Chesterton's poem The Rolling English Road, as the place we shall all wind up, en route to paradise.

The poem was read by Peter O'Toole, his eyes alarmingly bright, his tie red, his shirt white, his suit blue, like a walking deconstructed Union Flag.

Around him, writers, wits, drinkers, stay-up-all-night philosophers and brazen former squeezers listened to this triumphant vindication of this rolling English drunkard.

Alice Thomas Ellis, a tragic vision in monochrome maquillage, looked as though she had walked off the set of Medea.

Beryl Bainbridge looked girlish, Jonathan Meades looked unusually genial, Paul Raymond (of Revuebar fame) was unrecognisable.

Present and past editors of the Spectator tacked to and fro.

Alexander Chancellor made a speech which included the line: "Well, the paparazzi are definitely not responsible for this".

"I was talking to Charles Moore the other day," said Frank Johnson, "and told him, you know I think I was the only Spectator editor he genuinely liked. Charles said `yes I nursed that illusion for a while myself'."

Here were Lin Cook and Anthony MacIntosh, owner of the Groucho club, and Sue Gluck, last of Bernard's four wives, his daughter Isobel, his brothers Bruce, the art critic, and Oliver - who read movingly a plea for tolerance from one of Jeff's columns, and startled the gathering by doing it in Jeff's voice.

It was a family bereavement but it was the nation's ... but no, there was little chance of grandiose sentiment, with such a concentration of cynics around.

"Jeff always said it would be just his luck to go on the same day as The Queen Mother" said Keith Waterhouse. "But to die just in between Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, with George Solti as a kind of runner up - well it's ridiculous.

And did you see the guy who was cremated before him? Alf Fletcher ,a bookie. There was a floral picture of a horse and rider, winning a race. It was perfect - Jeff Bernard pipped at the post again."

As everyone lit up Marlboro Lights (the crematorium lobby, hammered by a sudden thunderstorm, became a grimly determined smokers convention), a controversy blew up.

The family had decided to hold the post-funeral wake at the Groucho. But a hard-line faction insisted only the Coach and Horses, Bernard's old watering hole, would do.

At the pub, the landlord, Norman Balon, hunched like a vulture, a man for the word "hangdog" is far too ebullient, admitted his disappointment.

"I was wounded" he said. "Jeff's been coming in here for 30 or 40 years. Day after day he was the first customer. He was there at 11am when the doors opened. He had his stool and he'd complain if anyone else sat on it. He'd say, `I've been sitting there for thirty fucking years'."

"He tried to be disliked," said Alexander Chancellor in his speech, "but it never seemed to work."

At the Coach and Horses, O'Toole is drinking pints and Michael Elphick, currently starring in Pygmalion, is persuading photographers to buy him a drink.

Norman prowls about, violet-shirted and growly. Bruce Bernard arrives to shepherd stragglers to the Groucho wake. A bleak tray of salami and mortadella sits wanly on the bar. A drooping red-head orders another large Bell's. O'Toole, drinking pints, widens his blue eyes in amazement at what someone has said.

Soho in September. Jeff's patch. We could be here all afternoon.