The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  It is plainly the case, anyway, that even those who are routinely voluble on either side of Clarkson are growing bored. This could be because there have been too many instances of the just Jeremys of the world being just Jeremy, or it could be because there have been too many instances of offended of Primrose Hill being offended of Primrose Hill. Call it mutual fatigue.

  But there is a third possibility and that is that we are simply not convinced in our hearts that racially dubious language is sufficient in itself to make the speaker of it a racist. In matters such as this we can use up our vocabulary of disapprobation too quickly. If we are going to call Clarkson a racist, what word does that leave to describe, say, the ideology of Boko Haram? Clarkson appears to want to play around at the edges of offence – baiting the sanctimonious for the fun of it – but if such play amounts to the committing of a hate crime, what do you call the Nairobi mall massacre of infidels?

  There is, I know, the continuum theory to contend with. We start by sneaking back an odious designation here, a needling joke there, and soon we are shooting our way through shopping malls. This is the argument of the eternally vigilant, and their wakefulness is to be applauded. But the continuum theory works against them as well. First of all they outlaw words that bear a history of ugly association, and further down the line they are sending round the thought police.

  So what are the gradations of racism? Are we racists by virtue of having occasional malodorous thoughts about foreigners? If that’s the case, then who shall ’scape whipping? It is fair to say that we should do with such thoughts what we do with comparable invasions from the blackest parts of our souls, and suppress them. But are we not then hypocrites if we accuse others of feeling what we have sometimes felt ourselves? Or does the racism lie not in the thought but the speaking it, or not even then, but in putting the utterance into action? It would take the wisdom of Solomon to decide at which point in that slow sequence – a sequence that might see as much turning back as going forward – the thing we call racism enters.

  Should we not do with racism, then, what the wisest of us do with jealousy, envy, pertinacious desire and the like, and accept we are not above any of it, however much we’d wish to be? Not acquiesce in its consequences, but not go hunting it down in others as evidence of their inextinguishable nastiness. Thus, we could say to the latest verbal offender, it is not because we’ve glimpsed the hem of your bigotries that we are incensed by you – indeed we possess identical undergarments – but because you think we love it when you tease us with the prospect of your showing more. It’s not that you’re a bit of a racist so much as that you’re a bit of a whore.

  As for Clarkson, it has always seemed to me that his real crime is to be interested in cars. Not just interested in cars in the way he is, as though they are a definitive badge of masculinity, as though the idea of a man unexcited by cars is inconceivable, as though the din and roar of them must be of universal male appeal, as though driving a car up a slope – sorry, up a hill – represents the ne plus ultra of human achievement, but just interested in cars full stop.

  This might come as a surprise to cyclists who can’t understand why I don’t want to be mown down by them at traffic lights, but I detest the car as much as they do. It’s just that I detest the bicycle as well. Not the object in itself, which is neutral, but the uses to which it’s put. As a general rule, I hold the world to be an even more dangerous and fatuous place than it needs to be so long as there are people in it who idealise a means of transport.

  Just get on it and go where you’re going. Don’t dress for it. Don’t smooch with it. Don’t see it as an extension of you, or you as an extension of it. A man who doesn’t know where he ends and his machine begins is by definition a fool. And a fool on a main road is a menace. As witness what cyclists do when they see a red light – but there I go again.

  And a motorist is a cyclist but more so. I say ‘motorist’ as opposed to driver. A driver employs his vehicle functionally. A motorist has an ideological relationship with his car. In a sane society you’d get eight years for that. But then in a sane society we’d have sent Max Clifford down for lowering the national tone long before we knew what other sins he was committing. And by the same logic, if you must get Clarkson, get him for Top Gear.

  ‘Get out of my face!’

  So how loud does your voice have to be before someone thinks you’re shouting? How sharp your reprimand before it will be described as threatening? And how close do you have to be to someone before you can be accused of being in his face? These and similar questions will be addressed below. But I can tell you the answer to all of them now. And it’s the same in every case. Not very.

  Anyway, I was curious about this mobile phone I’d been reading about. The BlackBerry Passport. A giant of a phone that would be ideal, I thought, for a man with fading vision, stubby fingers and no interest in selfies. It’s possible you can take a selfie with a BlackBerry Passport but it’s so heavy you won’t be able to hold it up to your face long enough to strike a becoming pose. I should say it ‘looks’ so heavy because so far I haven’t been able to lay hold of one. Indeed, it was in the hope of being able to do just that that I breezed, all innocence, into a Vodafone shop in the vicinity of Covent Garden. I won’t be any more specific than that. It’s not my intention to encourage copycat visits.

  Two assistants were talking to each other at the counter. They didn’t look up or ask if they could help me. I found a BlackBerry Passport the size of War and Peace glued to a display table and enquired if they had one I could pick up. One of them shook his head. I wondered, in that case, how I could discover how heavy it was and what it felt like in my hand. The other shrugged and said I couldn’t. How then, I wondered, did people discover if the phone was suitable to their needs. ‘They buy it,’ the first assistant said.

  I thought I ought to be sure I’d heard what I’d heard. ‘So you’re telling me,’ I said, ‘that in order to know whether you want to buy the phone you have to buy it?’ ‘Yeah,’ one of them said. ‘But we haven’t got any anyway,’ the other added.

  There’s a tide in the affairs of men, and all that. Swept on by that tide I approached the desk and expressed surprise at their way of doing business. I was a Vodafone customer and felt I had a right to expect a certain level of politeness, not to say helpfulness, from Vodafone staff. Were they here to sell phones or weren’t they?

  It was at this point that a third person, wearing some sort of anorak and sitting at a little table near the counter, told me not to shout. I told him I hadn’t at any point raised my voice. I had expressed exasperation, which was not the same thing. ‘Don’t shout at my staff,’ he repeated, though the only person shouting was him.

  Since he had in this way declared himself to be a manager – a sub-manager as it turned out – but hadn’t stood to address me, I sat to address him. ‘If you’d heard the tone in which your staff answered my enquiry,’ I said – letting the idea of professional derogation hang in the air between us – ‘you would understand why I spoke to them as I did. They were rude; I let them know I didn’t like it. I didn’t shout.’

  ‘Get out of my face,’ he said, getting into mine.

  What happened next, how this led to that, how the two original men took turns to say, ‘If you know what’s good for you you’ll get out of this shop,’ how the third man threatened to call the police, how I told him to call who he liked, how after no policeman arrived I decided life was too short for this and rose to go – still ignorant as to the configuration of the BlackBerry Passport – all this I will not trouble you with. But as a parting shot, because I felt the event needed a finale, I called the sub-manager a clown. Whether he’d trained to be a clown and failed, or whether his wife had run off with a clown, I had no way of ascertaining, but if he’d been in my face before, he was out the other end of it now. He reared up from the chair in which he’d all along been sitting. ‘Come back at six o’clock when I’m not wearing my uniform and say that,’ he said. />
  So there you have it: in the space of ten minutes I’d gone from making a modest enquiry about a phone to being threatened with having my lights punched out. And the cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker tells us that violence in civil society has declined.

  I wrote to Vodafone’s chief executive, thinking he’d like to know. I was contacted with a number to ring, but it was just customer services – the place you go to complain about your bill. They offered me £30 for my inconvenience. Just think, reader: if I’d gone back to the store at six o’clock and been knocked senseless by the sub-manager, they might have offered me £50.

  Whether the person who made the offer believed me when I told him money wasn’t the issue, and whether I should have believed him when he told me the case was being investigated, I don’t know. But I am not living in suspense.

  There are several conclusions to be drawn from this, the more obvious – regarding the part faceless multinational companies play in raising social tension – I leave readers to draw for themselves. But we have reached a pretty pass when the surly, the disobliging and the downright rude believe they have a human right never to be admonished. Of course, no one should be abused, but a rebuke is not abuse. First we couldn’t slap a child, then we couldn’t tell him off. Now we cannot tell off anybody.

  Politeness is a two-way street. We’ll be sorry when the public, tired of being treated with contempt and held in queues when it complains, decides to pull the whole lot down.

  Raising the age of consent

  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 fifteen-year-olds to have sex. Not much of a concession, given that most fifteen-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 thirty-five. Let the fifteen-year-olds in question know what we think, no matter that they’ll ignore it.

  I am a believer in making unrealistic demands of the young. It’s important they confront a challenge. I recall envying school friends whose parents let them sleep with their girlfriends in the spare room – though not as much as I envied them for having girlfriends in the first place – but later noted that these were the boys who went to ruin soonest. No moral compass. No exemplary prohibition.

  You might think you want your parents to be your pals, your partners in sexual mischief, but you don’t. You want them to be forbidding Noboddadies, silent and invisible, fathers and mothers of jealousy and inhibition, whose commandments you will of course break, but in the breaking of which you come to understand the first pleasure of sex which isn’t penetration but disobedience. Here is what we lose when we remove the concept of wrong from sex: secrecy, connivance, terror and, above all, argument. There is more than one attitude to take to sex – and you’re a goner as a moral being if you aren’t taught that early.

  I detect demurrals from the Health & Efficiency brigade. Let sex flower naturally, they say. But whoever thinks sex is natural and therefore to be unambiguously encouraged has never seen it, never done it, never thought about it, and never seriously weighed its consequences. I’m not proposing that we din Shakespeare’s testy description of lust in action as an ‘expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ into our children the moment the subject’s raised. But I’m grateful to my parents for warning me that I was likely to experience as much disappointment as delight, for cautioning me against impatience, for suggesting there were other things I might do – table tennis was one of them – and for not letting the girlfriends I didn’t have sleep with me in the spare room we didn’t have either.

  We do those we are charged with bringing up no service by pretending to be no older or wiser than they are. To do so only deprives them of precept and example. And don’t be fooled by their apparent scorn for such things. They might not know what the words mean but they miss what they denote when it’s not on offer. And part of that is a sympathetic but well-reasoned rebuttal of pornography. We can’t stop them looking. We used to look ourselves. Many of us are no doubt looking still. How could it be otherwise?

  Pornography became inevitable for Homo sapiens the moment he turned sapiens. We ate of the tree of knowledge and immediately wanted to take dirty photographs. But you can look and know you shouldn’t. You can look and gauge the damage that looking does. D. H. Lawrence’s denunciations of pornography and ‘the masturbation self-enclosure’ helped me when I was young – not to give it up but at least to be in a debate with myself about the subject. And that’s the parental role: to be the other side of the argument, to make the case for harm in an age where the very idea of harm in the matter of sexuality (a word that is itself part of the problem) has grown dangerously unfashionable.

  Thirty-five, then, kids, is when we think you are ready to start. This will come as a shock to you because you believe thirty-five is when you’re meant to finish. ‘Gross!’ you call the thought of people that age perspiring naked in one another’s arms. ‘Ugh!’ you cry, putting your bitten fingers down your baby throats. But all that proves is that you, too, are moralists who lack the words you need to moralise with. Allow anything about sex to disgust or dismay you and you are admitting that the procreative impulse is susceptible to judgement.

  We have let you get away with judging us for too long. Time now for the rightful order to be restored. We teach you. And the single thing you can teach us in return is that teaching is what you hunger for: the gift of our experience. Tell your parents that. Tell them you’ve got plenty of friends, thank you all the same – remind them that you perform fellatio or similar on most of them – but what you’re short of is intelligent authority.

  And thirty-five is not as arbitrary as you think. This might surprise you, but in the main people get better at sex as time goes by, not worse. Sure, you lose a little in the way of athleticism, but what you forgo in elasticity of body you gain in flexibility of mind. You notice more. You discover that the slow accrual of mutual fondness adds savour to sensuality. And with luck you will by that time have evolved a sense of the ridiculous, which can be a nuisance during sex but is wonderfully consoling after it.

  In the meantime, accept that most of what you think and do you shouldn’t. If you don’t know that sex is trouble, a pleasure and a plague, no sooner done than regretted, and no sooner regretted than missed – in short, perplexing and unfathomable – you aren’t ready for it.

  Arrivederci Raffaele

  The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don’t have Italian tailors we can spare here. Each day the London district loses a little more of its essential self – to developers, gentrifiers, scaffolders, diggers of trenches for cables we don’t need, cleaners-up and dumbers-down.

  There’s a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest. Given such depredations, it’s cruel of death to want its share as well.

  Raffaele Candilio was the alterations tailor my wife and I went to no matter how large or small the job. He would remodel a suit or just sew on a button. You would go up the rickety stairs to his workroom above a Chinese importer of waving cats, and find him sitting cross-legged on his work table, sewing. Sometimes Pavarotti would be singing. Not in person, but it was almost as good as. Other people I have spoken to in the days since he died contest my description of him. He was never sitting cross-legged on his work table when they went to see him. Well, we all have our memories. That’s how I see him, anyway: a slight, delic
ately made man, light of bone and temperament, easy and weightless in the world, but precise and sharp – a tailor of genius who floated above the clumsy inattentiveness of the mundane world.

  I loved his workroom and would sometimes take along a garment that didn’t need altering just so I could visit him, listen to Pavarotti and look at postcards of his native Naples, Rocky Marciano and some football team I didn’t recognise pinned to his walls. Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men’s nostalgia. So, I think, was he, because while he often had Italian friends visiting him, the small staff he employed appeared to be of every nationality. Whether that meant that songs about returning to Sorrento got to them as well, I can’t say. Though you could smell the grief of exile in there, I never saw them cry. At least not until last week.

  There, in my mind’s eye, he sits on his table, and when I enter with an armload of trousers he makes a quick gesture with his hand, which means that I am to climb over the cardboard boxes in the backroom, draw a simple curtain to cover my modesty and change into whatever I want altering. None of this is necessary. He knows what needs doing, how many inches on or off, just by looking. ‘Just estimate it, Mr Candilio,’ I say. ‘I trust you.’ He lets his head fall to one side fatalistically. Yes, I trust him. And yes, he trusts himself. But things go wrong. And customers complain. So just change into your trousers.