Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 6

Somewhere out there, wherever things went before there was an internet, a mere mote in the eye of scandal, smaller even than the baby moon that’s just been discovered running rings around Saturn, perhaps at the back of someone’s drawer or pasted into an ancient journal of the heart, creased, faded, but I fear still identifiable, is a photograph of me without a shirt. I am wearing a pair of those prickly bathing trunks that men and boys were forced into in the early 1950s, made of elasticated Brillo pad, and I have my fists up like Joey Maxim, light heavyweight champion of the world. After his retirement Joey Maxim became a stand-up comedian, as I might become after mine. But I knew nothing of that at the time I posed bare-chested, trying to look menacing. I just wanted to be light heavyweight champion of the world.

Though never much given to heroising I did, when I was 16, heroise a Regency dandy who killed himself because he could no longer be bothered doing up his buttons. I would act likewise when the time came, I thought. Wasn’t I half bored to death already? I saw myself writing the suicide note and then being too bored to finish it. “Goodb...,” I’d write. I imagined with satisfaction my friends and family puzzling over what I was trying to tell them.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. If I eat five 80g portions of fruit and vegetables a day, I’ll live longer. But if I eat seven 80g portions of fruit and vegetables a day, I’ll live longer still. I forget how much longer I was going to live when I was on five 80g portions – that’s history now, anyway – but under this new regimen of seven 80g portions of fruit and vegetables a day, I’ll reduce my risk of dying of heart disease by 31 per cent and my risk of dying of cancer by 25 per cent which ought to mean I’ve increased my chance of living longer by a total of 56 per cent. But that’s 56 per cent of what? Don’t I need to know at what age I was going to die when I wasn’t eating any 80g portions of fruit and vegetables before I can reliably calculate the age I am likely to live to now that I am eating seven?

Just back from a few days’ holiday in the sun, the intended calming effects of which were vitiated more than a little a) by the fact of there being more sun back home and b) by the hotel’s piping music in all its public places – niggling tunes that snagged the ear and sank the heart. Imagine “The Girl from Ipanema” synthesised through the nostrils of a depressed camel from 8am until midnight and you have still not approached the torment of it. One particular melancholy repetition of sounds – I suspect Bedouin in origin, for no other reason than that it suggested long uneventful nights in the desert and the disappointments of another insufficiently spiced tagine – entered my brain on the first morning of my stay and remains with me a week later. The word for a tune that lodges in this way is an earworm, said to be borrowed from the German Ohrwurm, but it could just as easily be a corruption of earthworm, for that is exactly how it feels – as though an earthworm has invaded your head and is slowly and with a circular motion burrowing through your occipital lobes looking for whatever it is that earthworms eat, all the while humming to itself.

Sounds like the title of a play by Simon Gray, “The Alien Middle Class”, but it’s just a phrase thrown out the other day by a senior government adviser. If working-class children are to get into the best universities and land the best jobs, then they are going to have to learn to fit in with the “alien middle class” – so says Peter Brant, head of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

The place could be any crowded city where the one-sided war between cyclists and pedestrians rages. You – the innocent party – are walking along the pavement minding your own business when you see the enemy coming towards you. Is he riding his bicycle at full pelt, or just doing semi-wheelies while in conversation with a friend? Not sure it matters. He and his bike just shouldn’t be here. You have already nearly been knocked down 15 times this morning by cyclists jumping red lights, weaving through traffic, haring in the wrong direction down one-way streets, showing you the finger, mounting the kerb rather than slowing down or stopping – for cyclists are on the devil’s errand and have no time to stop – and so you are not well disposed to them.

OK, so what great novel begins: Alpha Lima Lima Hotel Alpha Papa Papa Yankee Foxtrot Alpha Mike India Lima India Echo Sierra Alpha Romeo Echo Alpha Lima India Kilo Echo – and continues, assuming you are keeping up – Bravo Uniform Tango Alpha November Uniform November Hotel Alpha Papa Papa Yankee Foxtrot Alpha Mike India Lima Yankee India Sierra Uniform November Hotel Alpha Papa Papa Yankee Alpha Foxtrot Tango Echo Romeo India Tango Sierra Oscar Whisky November Foxtrot Alpha Sierra Hotel India Oscar November?

Not a subject ideally suited to a weekend consecrated to lovers, but it has been raised and I must address it. Murder, I’m talking about. The amount of it there is about. The sheer volume of bodies. Not in actuality – though God knows there are enough bodies there (“I had not thought death had undone so many”) – but in books and on the stage, particularly in film and on television, and more particularly still in that genre known as “the thriller”, though I speak as one who has never felt the thrill of thrillers. But live and let live is my motto. If murder is your bag, bag it. Me – I go to art only to wonder whether Elizabeth Bennet will eventually get to lie with Mr Darcy, and when Gregor Samsa will come down from the ceiling.

You finally really did it. You maniacs. You blew him out! God damn you all to hell! The sacking of Kevin Pietersen, I’m talking about. The only English batsman currently worth getting out of bed to watch. And his crime? Insouciance. Egoism. Inconsideration of the feeling of others. So who would you rather have coming in to bat at number four? Mother Teresa?

You finally really did it. You maniacs. You blew him out! God damn you all to hell! The sacking of Kevin Pietersen, I’m talking about. The only English batsman currently worth getting out of bed to watch. And his crime? Insouciance. Egoism. Inconsideration of the feeling of others. So who would you rather have coming in to bat at number four? Mother Teresa?