Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 14

The great god Pan is dead! I was weeping soppily in celebration of another Olympic gold for Team GB when I learnt of the death of that formidable intellectual force, the art critic Robert Hughes, and remembered what tears are really for. I can't claim him as a personal friend, though we met occasionally when he came along to editorial meetings of that once fine journal Modern Painters, breathing fire, heaping scorn, laughing like Jove, and reminding us by his very presence that there are few higher callings than talking well about art. Some men of stature shrink those they come in contact with; Hughes made everyone around him feel like a god. Olympic sport is all very well, but when Robert Hughes addressed you as "Mate", it was as a welcome to Mount Olympus itself.

This is the way the world will end – not with a bang but McCartney. I've nothing against McCartney. He has added to the world's stock of innocent pleasures. But life isn't an idle interval between Beatles songs. Or the songs of anyone else, come to that. Popular music is merely one pleasure among many. Ditto dancing. So I ask – are we capable, as a nation, of doing anything that doesn't begin with singing and dancing, isn't crowned by singing and dancing, indeed doesn't have singing and dancing at its core?

Among the acts of consideration I have to thank my parents for, circumcision ranks very high. I mean no disrespect to the uncircumcised, but who the hell would want to look like that? I take the point that beauty doesn't trump all other considerations – a German court recently ruled that circumcision was criminal bodily harm – but when did anyone look at a foreskin and say, "Now that's what I call a thing of beauty"? And when did anybody who didn't have that unsightly otiosity wish he did? I know there are some out there in crazy.com who rage against what was done to them, but that's zealotry talking – parent hatred, Jew and Muslim hatred, sentimentality about the rights of boy babies and their putzes – not aesthetics.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a blow job." Ah, the classics! I am alluding, of course, to Clandestine Classics – the new wink-wink imprint for those who don't want to abandon Jane Austen and the Brontës in favour of ebook mumsy-porn altogether, but nonetheless would like them, as it were, made more conformable with contemporary sexual mores. Something along these lines, if I may continue with my own version …

Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels to "vex the world". Pope's target was "babbling blockheads". Those were the days. Though constitutionally more modest, less certain of our genius and more sceptical as to our effect – for the times we live in bruise easily – we share those great satirists' ambitions. If a writer can't vex the world a little every day, why would he bother to get up in the morning?

What with one thing and another – the euro, the Jubilee, the weather – the country has had a fidgety year of it. But this weekend we have been a bag of nerves. The moment Murray made it through the semis you could feel the national temperature rise. Seats for the final were said to be changing hands for sums approaching a junior banker's bonus. People were catching trains from all over Britain, ticket or no ticket, happy just to camp out in the vicinity of Wimbledon. Whether to witness history or heartbreak, everyone wanted to be there.

So, when it came to the Queasy Belfast Handshake, who felt the sicker – former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, or the Queen? They both managed convincing smiles for the camera, McGuinness's if anything the more tentative, just as his handshake appeared the more limp (allowing it to be taken rather than taking, acceding to a grip rather than initiating one), but then the Queen has smilingly shaken more hands – with what degree of indifference or insincerity or even loathing we will never know for sure – than McGuinness has.

In France the other week, ostensibly for the translation of one of my novels, but actually in pursuit of the recollection of a taste.

The poetry we commit to memory when we are young stays with us as a solace and an inspiration – an emotional no less than an intellectual resource – long after we have forgotten the mere accidents of our lives. So there must be universal assent to Michael Gove's plans to reintroduce the learning of poetry into schools. Or so you'd think. But that's to reckon without the trahison des clercs. The clerc in this instance being the poet Simon Armitage.

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water. Only a shame I didn't get to see it. It wasn't for want of trying. I'm not a pageant man myself, but my wife's imagination had been fired by Antony and Cleopatra when she was young, and I accepted that the spectacle of a queen on a river – whether or not there would be pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, fanning her in the rain – was not one she could bear to miss.