Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 15

Hello, my name is Howard and I am a wino. I didn't know I was a wino until I read that a small glass of wine – whatever a small glass of wine is – contains 1.3 units which, according to the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at Oxford University (who sadistically chose the eve of the Queen's Jubilee celebrations to publish its findings), is twice the amount of wine I should be drinking if I want to stay alive long enough to see another jubilee. The previous advice was that I wouldn't live to see even this jubilee if I didn't drink at least six times that amount a day. But now these high-minded, interfering shufflers warn I must reduce my daily intake to whatever half of 1.3 units is – as though any of us measure our drinking in units – and if I don't, if I tell them to stick their decimal points and go ahead and polish the whole glass off, I am officially to be described as bingeing. One small glass of wine a night – bingeing! So what's an orgy? A glass and a half and a packet of crisps?

Pornography again. When we last discussed pornography, we noted how having nothing better to do explains, in part, the hours expended on it. "The devil finds work for idle hands" – never were wiser words spoken. If it's true that past the age of fervent procreation we rub the itch of sex as much out of tedium as desire, then how much more is pornography – in particular, internet pornography – the servant of ennui. One bored click of the mouse while we're waiting for our emails and we're in hell.

If I say the words Oslo Court, the chances are you'll conjure up an icy courtroom in the Norwegian capital where Anders Breivik, the ideologue who read too many conspiracy theories on the internet, is on trial for mass murder. But there's another Oslo Court, a restaurant of wonderfully indeterminate nationality – Ruritanian is how I'd describe it; "like stumbling into Narnia", is how Matthew Norman does – discreetly positioned on the ground floor of an apartment block in St John's Wood, a hop and a skip from Regents Park (not that you'll be hopping and skipping anywhere after their Wiener Holstein).

Last week, we began with Mozart, this week we begin with Queen. Can anybody find me somebody to love? Except love's not our problem, moving pictures are. Oh Lord/Something – something/Can anybody find me something to watch?

To hell with all our troubles, let's start the day off with a song. "In Italia seicento e quaranta;/In Almagna duecento e trentuna." You know the rest: after 640 in Italy and 231 in Germany, there's 100 in France, 91 in Turkey (Turkey!) and 1,003 and still counting in Spain. No mention, notice, of the United Kingdom, where either the women were too chaste or Don Giovanni couldn't face hanging around for between 50 minutes and three hours at border control – depending on whose figures you believe – waiting for his passport to be stamped. Not someone you think of as a queuer, Don Giovanni.

Man is a physiognomist. We tell ourselves we shouldn't judge a book by its cover – though, speaking as an author, I must tell you that my covers have caused me many sleepless nights – that appearances are deceptive, that "there's no art to find the mind's construction in the face", that the best of us have "that within that passeth show", but the truth is, show wins it every time.

So at what age should you start salting money away for carers? You hope, of course, that all those on whom you've showered love will gather round at the last to shower it back, but what if you haven't showered all that much, or what if you would much rather, anyway, have strangers deal with the gibbering, dribbling satire on yourself you've been reduced to?

What a wonderful thing is Wisden, that lovely, lozengy, yellow-jacketed, Bible-shaped and Bible-weighted cricketers' almanack, 1,500 pages deep, in which the averages of batsmen and bowlers and wicketkeepers, English and not-English, male and female, living and dead, are collated with a mystic punctiliousness that proves beyond argument the existence of God. You want to see the Divine Watchmaker at work on the mathematics of life? Then read Wisden.

All hail the Bradford Spring! Well you hail it if you want to. Some lessons the left will never learn. Behold it falling once again into the trap of thinking its enemy's enemy must be its friend. One should no more overestimate George Galloway than one should underestimate him. He is no Stalin or Mao Zedong whose tyrannies the left will blink away until they can no longer be denied. A formidable prize-fighter he might be, but he is unlikely to make the planet tremble.

Cruddas – Cruddas, for God's sake! Could Dickens himself have come up with a better name for a Hackney-born self-made billionaire braggart bagman? "You knows my wicious ways," said Charlie Cruddas, tapping his nose with a finger that bore the marks of being in every pie in Brownnose Alley. "Now all you needs to know is my price. 'Igh, Mr Buzzard, wery 'igh indeed. 'Cos I 'as influence, I 'as."