Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 8

I’m out of the country for three weeks and already there’s talk of lowering the age of consent. This can’t be coincidence. I must assume that knowing my views on the subject and hoping I’d be gone for even longer, Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, quickly ups and proposes to David Cameron that we allow 15-year-olds to have sex. Not much of a concession given that most 15-year-olds have already had too much, but these things are symbolic, which is why, no matter what is actually going on out there, I’d move in the opposite direction to Professor Ashton and raise the age of consent to 35. Let the 15-year-olds in question know what we think, no matter that they’ll ignore it.

The disquiet caused by Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman’s encounter on Newsnight lingers on – in my memory anyway – like the queasy half-recollection of a bad dream. Given the millions still watching it on YouTube, I must suppose that other people are unwilling to dispel all remembrance of it as well – or, if they never saw the original, feel they need to be up to speed on it – though the trash-can of telly trivia is where it belongs. Unless it doesn’t. That’s what nags away about the interview, if it can be called an interview: you can’t decide if it was something or nothing.

Wanna know how to be hip? After five nights in the hippest of hip hotels in New York’s hip Lower East Side, I’m the man to tell you. Never mind why I was there. That’s stuff for another conversation. Let’s just allow that I was hanging out, doing my shit, being hip.

I don’t have to remind readers of this column, well versed in Tacitus’s Annals, of Boadicea’s inspiring speech as she climbed into her chariot alongside her ravished daughters. But it never does any harm to hear it again. “It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters. If you weigh well the strength of the armies, and the causes of the war, you will see that in this battle you must conquer or die. This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.”

This mad pursuit of health is killing me. Or at least statins are killing me and I wouldn’t be taking those were I not in mad pursuit of health. It began with a blood test. Doesn’t it always? I’m in two minds about blood tests because half the people I know who have died only discovered they were dying after they’d taken a blood test. Would they have lived had they kept the secrets of their blood to themselves? Anyone’s guess.

What is this thing we call “form”? How come that one day we score a goal with every ball we kick, and the next we keep giving it to John Terry? Where does Wayne Rooney’s form disappear to for half the year, and what explains its coming back?

According to Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland, what the militant group al-Shabaab, was “really attacking” when it went on the rampage in Westgate shopping mall, was “the very idea of capitalism”. A four-year-old boy from Britain, whose mother had already been wounded in the attack, had a different moral take on the massacre. “You’re a very bad man,” he told one of the gunmen. Sometimes you get nearer to the truth if you keep it simple.

And today’s morning story is “The Selfishness of the Long Distance Cyclist”. You know the plot. Innocent weekend motorist fancies a pootle through central London to feel the wind through his hair, pick up a pizza, show his kids Buckingham Palace, visit a sick relative – there is no end to the pleasant tasks a motorist might set himself on a blowy, autumnal Saturday – in pursuance of any or all of which he puts on his motoring gloves and goggles, adjusts his satnav, and sets off. Only to discover that there is nowhere he can go, that no street is open to him, that diverted buses are causing havoc in every direction, including the shortest way home again, and all because the Tour of Britain, the country’s largest professional cycle race  – not to be confused with all the lesser, amateur cycle races that close the city every other weekend of the year  – is finishing in London with a “dramatic dash along Whitehall”, though how its organisers know that in advance is anybody’s guess, unless they have learnt of my intention to run out from Horse Guards Parade this afternoon and throw myself, Emily Davison-like, under the wheels of the leaders.

Two weeks ago I wrote in praise of not knowing what to think. Today I write in praise of knowing what to think and not acting on it, which is different. I write in praise of President Obama, in other words, or at least in dispraise of those who believe an opinion must be mother to a deed – the interventionists, the isolationists, the screaming chorus of the convinced whose contrary but equally belligerent voices might have driven a lesser man than Obama crazy.

Let’s get the envy question out of the way. Yes, I would like it to have been me the 15,000 madrilenos, or better still madrilenas, turned up at the Bernabéu Stadium to welcome to their club. Ever since I attended a bull fight on a school trip to Barcelona I have smelt blood in the sand, tasted churros from a sugared paper bag, and heard the crowd chanting my name. ’Oward! ’Oward! Never mind that I am not fleet of foot or brave of heart – am I not a matador, a galactico, in my soul?