Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 7

You’ve read about the sack of Rome, the siege of Carthage, the looting of Persepolis – well, the b*stards are it again. This time they’re plundering Soho. Sidle down Walker’s Court, that suppurating alleyway of sexual half-promises that connects Peter Street and Brewer Street, and you sense the despondency. Sex shops have closed; sex clubs are semi-shuttered; sex itself seems to have given up the ghost and gone home to play on its computer.

I fear it must attest to the essential morbidity of this column that almost the only time I refer to Coronation Street is when someone dies on it. Last time it was the fragile Alma, who departed in a becomingly confused state listening to Perry Como. We should all shuffle off as peacefully, though I’ve chosen Richard Tauber singing “Goodnight Vienna”. If I make it through that I want the same singer singing “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” to Marlene Dietrich, and if I’m still alive then, it’s obviously going to be a long night and I’ll need the St Matthew Passion. In this instance, the death on the Street hasn’t happened yet but, barring divine intervention, will have before you are able, reader, to send flowers.

I fear it must attest to the essential morbidity of this column that almost the only time I refer to Coronation Street is when someone dies on it. Last time it was the fragile Alma, who departed in a becomingly confused state listening to Perry Como. We should all shuffle off as peacefully, though I’ve chosen Richard Tauber singing “Goodnight Vienna”. If I make it through that I want the same singer singing “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” to Marlene Dietrich, and if I’m still alive then, it’s obviously going to be a long night and I’ll need the St Matthew Passion. In this instance, the death on the Street hasn’t happened yet but, barring divine intervention, will have before you are able, reader, to send flowers.

Où sont les neiges d’antan? Pardon my French, reader, but nostalgia always takes a French form with me. Particularly nostalgia for old-style anti-Semitism. Where are they now, the charming European Jew-haters of yesteryear, with their arm bands, forged Protocols, Dreyfusphobia and theories of racial purity? Candid, open, no pretending that they were something other, no complaining that they’d been smeared when you called them what they were. And now look! You can’t find a Jew-hater to meet your eye.

I can’t speak for you, reader, but for me no new year can be said to have begun until I’ve shed a tear. The only question is whether I shed it on the last day of the old or the first day of the new, and what in particular precipitates it. This time, I made it through the champagne, fireworks and kisses of the last night of 2013 only to be set off the following morning by the New Years’ Day concert televised live from Vienna.

So who do you reckon won the great TV head-to-head of Christmas? Not Downton Abbey vs EastEnders, or Doctor Who vs Coronation Street, but the Queen vs Edward Snowden – Edward Snowden being the ex-CIA employee turned whistleblower currently residing in Russia, and the Queen being the Queen, currently relaxing in Sandringham. Snowden was Channel 4’s choice to give its traditional bad-taste “up-yours” Alternative Christmas Message – from which we might deduce that Ratko Mladic, Miley Cyrus and Mrs Brown and Her Boys were either unavailable or too expensive. In the event, it was no contest, the referee stepping in and stopping it in favour of the Queen after 15 seconds. Cruel, I thought, to have let it go on that long.

By the time we speak next, Santa will have been and gone, leaving the usual trail of devastation and disappointment behind him. There are, of course, two kinds of disappointment: the first consists of not getting what you want, the second in getting everything you want. I am of the generation for whom disappointment assumed the former shape.

There was something of Zelig – Woody Allen’s nobody who turns up at every event in recent history – about the deaf sign-language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, who, in the view of experts and amateurs alike, talked “gibberish” with his hands. I didn’t watch the service on television, having had enough of all the easily bought, hushed-tone reverence – which is not the same as having had enough of Mandela – but it was plain enough on YouTube, from his frozen eyes and inexpressive jazz hands, that he wasn’t doing the business. He has since blamed it on schizophrenia. Which could have been Zelig’s defence as well.

You’ve got to hand it to Jesus. He didn’t settle for the easy part of being a rabbi, turning up to charity fund raisers or telling folksy parables about the wise man of Minsk to bored barmitzvah boys. He went out, in Matthew’s words, “to cities”, or wandered by the sea shore where “great multitudes were gathered unto him”. I have started to do the same. “Lecturing,” I call it. Addressing people in the streets on matters of practical morality, dress sense, litter – that sort of thing.

Today I write on “Sledging Considered As One of the Fine Arts”. Sledging, for those not familiar with the term, is the practice of on-field verbal intimidation much favoured by Australian cricketers though by no means confined to them. Every cricket team sledges, though some do it with more aplomb than others.