The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  I accept it’s none of my business. And, for all I know, the silent couple might be wondering why I am so careless of how I look as to be glugging Bandol as though it’s the last bottle on the planet and ripping at French bread as though I love making it cry. I grant them their right. But grant me mine. It saddens me, that’s all. As the poet said, ‘Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.’

  Yet to be, not been.

  Fisherman’s friend

  In the hold this gear must go,

  Rattling winches, O!

  For mister mate has told me so,

  Rattling winches, O!

  It’s a while since we discussed seafarers and the songs they sing in this column. I’ll need to conduct a thorough search of my files but I suspect that while I’ve touched occasionally on the grog and my noggy, noggy boots, this is the first time I’ve invoked the rattling winch, O! Clearly, I’ve been away from the sea too long.

  And the reason for this sudden burst of maritime nostalgia? An item in the news about the Fisherman’s Friends, a group of Cornish fishermen, lifeboatmen and coastguards who have just landed – ‘landed’ or, if you like, ‘netted’: I want you to see I’m still conversant with the idiom – a million-pound recording contract from Universal. Good to hear of anyone who isn’t a banker making money at the moment, though no doubt they’ll be singing shanties in the City now they know there’s a buck in it.

  In the hedge this fund must go

  Rattling rolldowns, O!

  For Warren Buffett’s told me so,

  Rattling rolldowns, O!

  Port Isaac is where you can hear the Fisherman’s Friends perform their repertoire, including ‘Rattling Winches’, which I initially misheard as Rattling Wenches. (Wishful thinking, I suppose. You think of little else when you’re out rattling on a whaling boat on a wild wild sea.) Port Isaac is on the north Cornish coast, just a few miles of blind and winding lane from Boscastle, where I got my grounding in sea shanties twenty years ago and more. There was a fair bit of rivalry between Boscastle and Port Isaac in those days, as I suspect there still is, in the matter of which village is the more ruggedly beautiful, which has the greater history of independence, which smuggled more successfully, which has the better darts and pool teams, and of course which sings the more authentic shanties. So there’ll be some sour faces in Boscastle today, is my guess. If I weren’t busy proofreading a novel – not a seafaring yarn this time – I’d be down there to give them moral support. It’s no joke losing out to a neighbouring village, as I know, having been on the Wellington Hotel pool team and the Cobweb Inn darts team in the days when Port Isaac was devilishly strong in both sports.

  They were always slicker in Port Isaac than they were in Boscastle. It was a population thing, partly. While we in Boscastle weighed in with a mere eight hundred inhabitants, a figure widely thought to include family pets, and most of those (pets included) morose, Port Isaac was a seething metropolis of a thousand ebullient faux-Cornish socialites. But it also had to do with our relative places in the popular imagination. Television always preferred to film period dramas in Port Isaac, on account of its looking more conventionally like a smugglers’ cove. Poldark and all that. And now Doc Martin. To probe Boscastle’s subtler mysteries you need to get up onto the cliffs, or walk the Valency Valley, a deep, shaded tunnel of ancient vegetation and rivulet where Thomas Hardy courted his first wife. We had the literature and the savagery. Port Isaac was merely picturesque. But you know the public.

  So it’s all in the saga of their rivalry that in these superficial times the shallower village should have the more successful shanties. Whether ours were more genuine, that’s to say more native to the area, is another matter. Most of Cornwall is tainted with Birmingham and Walthamstow now – garage owners and window cleaners who sold their houses in the boom time and migrated west to make crab sandwiches and serve cream teas and chips; and even when you find true Cornish Cornish it’s hard to avoid the impression that they’re playing at it. When a voluptuous Cornishwoman by the name of Trixie nestles up to you in the snug and calls you ‘me ’andsome’, is she recalling a Celtic courting ritual hundreds of years old, or is she taking the piss? I divided my time between Wolverhampton and Boscastle for about a decade and never discovered the answer to that. But this I can say: not once did anyone call me ‘me ’andsome’ in Wolverhampton.

  Boscastle needed three pubs to refresh its eight hundred morose souls – Port Isaac, as I recall, had only two – and there was singing in every one of them, though the best singing happened at the bar of the Cobweb. It could break out at any time, depending who was there, but Friday night was when it really happened. Sometimes there’d be recitations or shaggy-dog stories, none of which I much cared for – if I wanted prose I could write my own – and then there’d be the odd Tom Jones favourite, such as ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, a song highly inapplicable to Boscastle, which did grandeur, not hospitality, invariably followed by Roger Whittaker’s ‘The Last Farewell’, which is a bit too catchy to be a shanty proper, but we bellowed it like broken-hearted mariners anyway. Then the ‘real’ locals would turn up, still wet with sea spray (and a little aftershave), still bespattered from the fields, and some still tanned from the oil rigs of the Middle East, at which point mere northern interlopers like me would buy a round of drinks and withdraw from the bar, in the manner of acolytes attending a secret ceremony, and the singing would begin in earnest.

  I say they were shanties but many were simply coastal folk songs of uncertain provenance – mainly Irish, I suspected – that suited the mocking melancholy of the Cornish. The one I remember most vividly, perhaps because it was the one above all others that made me feel a stranger under threat, was ‘A Bunch of Thyme’, an aching, wickedly lilting story of sexual theft, the singer lamenting the bonny bunch of thyme a ‘saucy fiddler’ had stolen from him. ‘For thyme,’ we would all join in, ‘it is a precious thing…’

  I always felt they were siding with the fiddler. They were after my wife, of course. ‘You got a song, ’Oward?’ they asked me once. The bastards! What did they expect – ‘Hava Nagila’? So I gave it to them from the back of my throat – all I’d experienced of the cruel hardships of the sea.

  ’Twas on the good ship Venus,

  By God you should’ve seen us…

  I know other verses if Universal’s interested.

  Ignorance is Bravo Lima India Sierra Sierra

  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?

  Don’t bother deciphering it painstakingly. Just let the whole thing wash over you. What famous opening sentence does the above look and sound like? I’ll give you a clue: the novel ends badly, or at least it does if you’re more than a little bit in love with the heroine’s fur hats and don’t particularly like trains.

  If you bear in mind that the physicality of words, even when they’re in the nature of a code, often take on not just the appearance but the moral atmosphere of the thing they’re coding, it should help to notice the suggestiveness of that concentration of Papas. What do you think of when you see Papas? That’s right – families. As for the chance concatenation of Uniform, November, Hotel – there you have the narrative in a nutshell. Must I spell it out? Russian soldier. Snow. Clandestine adulterous assignations in a Moscow bed and breakfast.

  Whoever hasn’t by now guessed Count Vronsky is a dunce. The novel, of course, is Anna Karenina – ‘All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.’ Now you can check, if you’ve nothing more pressing to do, whether or not I’ve applied the gobbl
edegook alphabet correctly.

  As for the truth of what Tolstoy says about families, that’s another matter. I have always thought that what determines unhappiness in a family is pretty much the same the world over: too many Whiskys in November, too many Tango Foxtrots with Juliet or Oscar.

  But this Charlie Oscar Lima Uniform Mike November is not about Anna Karenina. It’s about the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet and other comparable linguistic devices for avoiding confusion and making oneself understood. My position being that they do neither.

  Three days ago – worn out with telling the Internet who I am, where I live and what my password, as opposed to my username, is – I made an airline booking by phone. Having a person to talk to turned out tolerably well. I recommend it. Allowing reasonable health, a person doesn’t suddenly crash on you, leaving you to do it all again, which as like as not results in your making the same booking twice, a mistake for which there is no known remedy (as I discovered the time I booked the same seat to Wolverhampton seventeen times) outside of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which incidentally had no record of such a place as Wolverhampton. But I can’t pretend that having a person to talk to doesn’t come with difficulties of its own. The chief of these, in this instance, being his insistence on reading my booking reference back to me phonetically. ‘Quebec, X-Ray, Zulu …’

  ‘I’ll have to stop you there,’ I said.

  He apologised, assuming he was going too fast for me. I had already given him my age, so he had reason to suppose I lacked most of the organs of cognition. ‘That’s Qu-e-bec!’ he shouted.

  I had to stop him again. ‘Deafness isn’t the problem,’ I assured him in a loud and confident voice. ‘I’m a writer and a word for me is a plastic entity with distracting associations. So I don’t only have the tail of the Q dancing before my eyes, I see the Saint Lawrence River freezing, think of the Algonquin people who gave Quebec its name, hear the clash of languages and cultures, and recall being taken as a boy to see a pageant in Belle Vue commemorating General Wolfe’s scaling of the heights of Quebec, where – I mean Belle Vue, not Quebec – I ate a poisoned choc ice and was ill for a fortnight. So you can see why it would have been easier all round if you’d just said Q.’

  He wondered whether I experienced similar difficulties X-raying Zulus. A jest he found more amusing than I did.

  The truth is, telephony alphabets send me into a panic. All those unfamiliar words in strange conjunction – reminiscent of Dr Johnson’s description of metaphysical poetry: ‘the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together’ – rattled off at such speed that by the time you’ve worked out the letter denoted by the first, you’ve missed the following five. That it is intended sadistically on the part of the nerds and pedants who employ it – dreaming of being a pilot bringing down an Airbus A380 in a hurricane or single-handedly preventing or starting World War III – I have not the slightest doubt. The point of a secret language is to exclude those who don’t speak it, sometimes to misinform and mislead them, often to flummox them into hasty acquiescence, but always to make them feel inferior.

  The God of the Old Testament confounded the language of men, that they might not understand one another’s speech. If everyone spoke the same language, He reasoned, there was no knowing what they might get up to. The Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, like French and Spanish, was among the weapons He deployed. Twitter was another, and more subtle than all of them on account of its fooling users into thinking they are having a conversation.

  You don’t argue with God if you know what’s good for you. Therefore, I try to live in calm acceptance of the fact that I don’t know what anybody’s talking about.

  Ignorance, as they say, is Bravo Lima India Sierra Sierra.

  In the country of the deaf the man with subtitles is king

  A friend of mine went to the doctor recently, terrified by the sudden appearance of luminescent white spots, like toxic sequins, on his scrotum. After innumerable tests, the doctor wrote to say he had white spots on his scrotum. My friend wondered if the condition had a name. White spots on the scrotum, the doctor told him.

  I was reminded of this last week when reading about viewers complaining to the BBC that they couldn’t hear a word of what the actors in the new period drama Jamaica Inn were saying. After lowering herself deep into the whys and wherefores of what had gone wrong, Philippa Lowthorpe, the director of Jamaica Inn, came back up with an explanation that left nothing further to be explained: there was, she said, ‘a sound issue’. So ‘that’s all good then’, to borrow a phrase from Ian Fletcher, head of human values in that Beebspeak spoof, W1A.

  I didn’t watch Jamaica Inn. I’ve read the book, seen the movie, caught an earlier TV adaptation and once lived close to Jamaica Inn itself. I’d say that was enough. And if you are going to do wrecking in Cornwall you should have the courage to do its contemporary version. No more standing on the cliff with candles luring ships onto the rocks and then murdering the survivors. I am not being censorious: a lifestyle’s a lifestyle, and until Rick Stein opened his seafood restaurant in Padstow, and the Cornish began to export pasties, they had no other way of making an honest living. But things have changed. Not only does the county now enjoy Minority Status, it wrecks differently.

  Today, and for all I know this is true of other remote areas of the country, it’s not ships that locals target but relationships – marriages, ideally, but courtships and engagements will do as well. First you lure the couple to your village with innocent-looking brochures promising clean air, high seas, beetling cliffs and cream teas, then you beguile them at the bar with tales of mystery and black magic, then you promise to take them out mackerel fishing, but there’s room for only one of them on your little boat, and while you’re pointing out the bobbing heads of seals to the city wife (‘Over yon, maid’), and wooing her with reminiscences of your last great pilchard haul, your own spouse is working over the city husband, calling him ‘me ’andsome’ and getting him to roll with her in the blackthorn. Within a week one of them will have gone back to Primrose Hill and the other will have found a little cottage to rent overlooking the harbour.

  This isn’t, it should be said, without its risk of wreckage for the locals themselves. They, too, fall in love, mainly with their own romancing, but otherwise with either of the pair from the metropolis, sometimes even with them both. I’ve known Cornish men leave the house one morning, without a word, and not be seen again until they return, years later, with a baffled, faraway look in their eyes, like the forsaken merman, incapable of settling back into village life for evermore. Cornishwomen, too, to whom a reputation for emmet-stealing has stuck, who go on walking the cliffs at night, siren-like, in full make-up and high heels, and who at last are spoken of as witches.

  Otherwise wreckers’ yarns are old hat, whether they have ‘sound issues’ or they don’t. You can overdo the past, not because it’s another country but because it’s the wrong country. The BBC should try making a series about the way we live now, but without a detective in it, without a mysterious lake, and without a paedophile who has paid his dues to society and deserves to be left alone.

  As for making it audible, I am past caring what they do. Because most of what I watch I can’t hear, I have taken to making up my own stories to the pictures. Mainly they’re stories adapted from late Henry James novels, which are the sort of stories I like – articulate adulteries in English cathedral towns and the lengths to which the betrayed parties go not to show they know. It isn’t always easy to match such narratives to shots of midwives wheeling babies in period prams, but if I close my eyes as well I sometimes enjoy success.

  The other way is to own up to the problem and get medical advice, though after my friend’s experience with his scrotum I’m reluctant to go near a doctor. He’ll just tell me I have a sound issue. And I won’t hear him. Failing that, he’ll send me to have a hearing aid fitted and then, as all people my age know, you’re on the slippery slope. Firs
t you have a gadget to help you with your sound issue, then a gadget to help you with your water issue, then a gadget to help you with your mobility issue, and the next thing you’re in a care home having issues with your carers.

  All along the fault lies with the programme makers who either have no interest in words – the picture being everything – or think dialogue is authentic only when it’s imperceptible to the naked ear. I can accept that when it’s drug takers who are talking, which is why I consented to not understanding a syllable of The Wire, and I half go along with it in the case of troubled cops from Louisiana, which is why I was happy to understand only half of what was happening in True Detective. It’s a truism of detective thrillers anyway: given the banality of most plots, the only real excitement lies in separating one indistinguishable bit of muttering from another.

  Otherwise it’s subtitles or nothing. Secretly, of course, the entire country is watching everything with subtitles. The success of Scandinavian television is to be attributed to its coming to us with subtitles already attached. May I propose that the BBC should now do that with all its programmes? That way we will eventually be able to do without sound altogether. Which will cut costs and help make up the shortfall when the licence fee goes.

  Phoney racists

  Of the wars we only pretend to fight, the phoniest is the one against celebrities caught off guard evincing racism. That’s if they really are caught, and if they really are off guard, and if they really are celebrities.

  Between those appalled by the latest of Jeremy Clarkson’s affronts to people of another colour, gender or persuasion, and those who find his slips and sniggers endearing, silly, just Jeremy being Jeremy, or even Jeremy being invigoratingly if bumblingly transgressive – which is clearly how he would like to see himself: a sort of cross between Mel Gibson, Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown and Don Quixote – lies a yawning chasm of indifference. Do I mean by that that I would wish there to be a yawning chasm of indifference, or do I know of its existence, and even its dimensions, for a fact? Reader, I leave that to you to decide. But I was brought up to believe that if you wished hard enough for something, you would get it.