Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 9

My position on whether we, or anyone else, should intervene in Syria couldn’t be clearer. I absolutely, utterly and definitively don’t know. I like to think I have been consistent in this. I didn’t know what I thought when the Syrian uprising started more than two years ago; didn’t know when the Syrian army stormed the city of Homs; didn’t know after reports of the Houla massacre reached us in May last year; didn’t know when brutal-faced Syrian generals denied all involvement in any massacre; didn’t know when I saw pictures of rebels bearing marked resemblance to clerics we are always trying to deport to Jordan, and don’t know now.

Justice is busy at the moment, if not as busy as some might think it should be, given the crimes committed by the hour in Syria and Egypt. Though there, where words are made to mean the opposite of what they do mean, where liberators murder and democrats steal freedoms, we have still to make our minds up whom to blame. But elsewhere the wheels turn, whether to our satisfaction or not.

So now, thanks to Jeremy Paxman, we know what pogonophobia means – a fear or hatred of beards. Once you start with pogonic from the Greek – of or pertaining to a beard – there’s no end to the lexicological merriment you can have. Suddenly the world becomes full of experts and activities you had never before imagined.

“And I have something to expiate: a pettiness.” So ends D H Lawrence’s poem “Snake”. The pettiness in question being the fear that drives him to throw a stick at a snake that has sidled into his garden on a hot, hot day in Sicily. “And so I missed my chance with one of the lords of life.” I loved that poem as a boy and years later made a pilgrimage to the garden in order to experience the heat, taste the fear, and think about the idea of expiating a pettiness. The phrase has a lovely sound, as though, in a reversal of the Eden story, it’s the snake hissing the judgement.

Men! I ask you! Be patient: this is neither an attack nor a defence. Of Twitter and Toasters I sing – the baffling nature of man (Wayne and Kevin, not homo sapiens) as evidenced by the latest revelations of their habits, customs, weaknesses and barbarities. Accusations of “sexism” have been bandied about with such flagrancy this week it has felt like the Sixties all over again.

We try to be above babies in this column. We don’t dislike them exactly. It’s hard to dislike a thing that hasn’t yet had time to form objectionable political opinions or the habit of reading thrillers. It’s more that we’re afraid of them. What are they thinking, what do they know about us, why that uncanny scrutiny? Or it could just be with babies as it is with children in general – if you never much enjoyed being one yourself, you aren’t going to care for any manifestation of them thereafter. And I was a self-hating baby.

I have a question to ask, but first I have a confession to make. On three separate occasions last week I made a fist and punched the air. So my question is: does this, by my own lights as someone who despises mass feeling, make me a fascist. In extenuation, allow me to say that I didn’t punch the air as an act of ecstatic connection with my fellow men. I did it at home, once with friends, twice solitarily. And while what you do solitarily has its dangers, it can’t, I think, constitute a Nuremberg Rally. On the other hand, I did briefly sway in unison with others last weekend, did share in communal excitement, did feel what a crowd felt at the moment of its feeling it – so what does that make me?

One of the more enigmatic statements on the British economy made by Mervyn King before he bowed out was that Jane Austen was waiting in the wings.

Today: two lessons in how to wear a hat. My exemplars are the painter L S Lowry and the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Dr Johnson said of the metaphysical poets that in them “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”. We don’t hold with violence in this column, nor do we mean to court the cheap controversy of heterogeneity. Lowry and Cohen might, on the face of it, make strange bedfellows, but both took London by storm last week – Cohen at the O2 Arena, Lowry at Tate Britain – and both define themselves by the way they wear a hat.

It’s a sure sign I’m getting old, according to a study the newspapers are carrying, that I fall asleep in front of the TV. I say “study”, but it’s no more than simple answers to simple questions collated by the insurance company Engage Mutual. So what am I doing reading stuff like this at my age? I’m waiting to see my doctor, that’s what. And when you’re waiting to see your doctor, you read whatever’s lying about. I can also tell you, for example, the cost of a six-bedroom, 25-acre property in Chipping Norton, and what Katie Price, or is it Katy Perry, or is it Katie Holmes, has for breakfast. Nothing. That’s what she has for breakfast, not the value of the six-bedroom property in Chipping Norton. Shaming to know such things. Why do we fritter away the hours we spend waiting to see a doctor – hours that could be our last on Earth – on flim-flam? Answer me that, Engage Mutual.