Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 17

May I take this opportunity to wish readers a happy "moral and aesthetic nightmare".

It is to the credit of our versatility and resilience as a people that at a time of national calamity – our economy in ruins, half the population in negative equity and the other half on Facebook, feral dogs roaming our parks, a Prime Minister who would be feral but is capable only of savaging the Leader of the Opposition (a case for intervention by the League Against Cruel Sports), our young lying drunk in gutters, our old wishing they could find somewhere as salubrious as a gutter to die in, the French with their tails up – it is to the credit of our national spirit, I say, that at such a time we can find the energy to complain that television footage of a polar bear breastfeeding her cubs (not being a naturalist, I cannot vouch for "breastfeeding" being the correct term) was shot in a Dutch zoo and not the Arctic.

Now that the more articulate of the summer rioters have told us they can't wait to be sticking it to the Feds again some time soon, more sober minds must be considering how to stop them.

"Anything else?" How many more otiosities am I to be subjected to? Only yesterday I was in an airport queueing to buy a newspaper. All that was necessary was for me to hand over the money.

Let's leave the criminality to the police.

Last week the cricket writer Peter Roebuck died.

'I too once danced in a ring." The line isn't mine, though I have often felt it belongs to me.

In Zurich briefly to give a reading, I look out of my hotel window towards the Lindenhof and see what appears to be a fairground or gypsy encampment. I hear music and smell roasting meat.

Surfing the net recently, on one of those feverish Sunday afternoons when you pretend to be relaxed, enjoying doing nothing, I came upon a diverting piece in which Elaine May purports to interview Woody Allen and Ethan Coen.

And so, with a dignified nod to anyone who cares to notice, I straighten my bow tie, wipe away a tear, put on my bravest face and leave the stage.