The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  Beyond bikes, Boris is famous for his classical education. Would he therefore consider my proposal to close London every weekend for a year so that actors dressed as Trojan triathletes might wander at liberty through our roads and parks reading aloud and without a pause The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid? To show respect for which all cyclists must dismount and all runners stand still.

  Strictly turn-off

  This week – the untold story of my life in dance. Clear your mind of Billy Elliot. Or, if you must, think Billy Elliot in reverse – a boy who infuriated his father by refusing to dance and wanting to have boxing lessons instead. Of the dances my father urged on me, I most dreaded the conga, the Russian kazatzka, and the last waltz with whichever great-great-grandmother was still standing. I was too shy to try any of them. Girls might see. Or worse, join me.

  But it wasn’t just girls I was afraid to dance with, it was the older women in my family as well. To do something as intimate as conga behind a woman I didn’t know was bad enough, but to conga behind a woman I did know was worse. In despair with me, my father suggested I forget the conga and just smooch. It was my mother who intervened at this point, saying that she thought smooching with my aunties would be inappropriate. I agreed with her. There’s a kind of young man who cannot smooch with a woman without feeling he has to ask her to marry him. And for all my inexperience, I knew you didn’t do that with your aunties.

  I went through the era of Bill Haley and early Elvis in an agony of incompetence. The kazatzka had been challenging enough, but the jive could kill. I’d accompany my tall friend Malcolm to the Plaza Ballroom, where he would kick his legs so high in the air that everybody had to get off the floor, he thought to watch and admire him, but in truth to avoid injury. Here, hiding in a corner, I would invent stories to explain why I couldn’t leave my seat: a slipped disc, ripped ligaments, a bruised heart, torn trousers. One night I saw one of my aunties there, smooching with a man who wasn’t my uncle. Had I needed confirmation that dancing was the devil’s work, this was it.

  And then something wonderful happened. The twist. Whether it was because the twist obviated the need for close contact, or because the corkscrew action suited the configuration of my pelvis, I cannot say, but I took to it at once. Not only could I do it; I taught others to do it. This got me through my first year at university where almost everybody was as wary of moving their bodies as I had been and only I could twist. Undergraduates of both sexes queued outside my college room for lessons. Even the Master wondered if I’d show his wife a few steps. ‘There are no steps, Master,’ I told him. By the end of Michaelmas term 1961 the twist had swept through the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge. Whatever historians of popular culture in academia say, this was my doing.

  From here on my attitude to dancing in general changed. I don’t say I ever looked happy or comfortable doing it, and I of course refused to perform any routine whose genesis was the package holiday on the Costa Brava, but at least I never again had to feign angina or torn trousers. All this I mention to explain my vexed attitude to Strictly Come Dancing, or ‘Strictly’ as enthusiasts call it, much as luvvies speak of the ‘Dream’. We watch it in our house, anyway, ritualistically, with friends and a grand spread of cheese straws, pizza and red wine. This, I’m told, is called relaxing and is good for me. And as far as the company, the cheese straws, the pizza and the red wine are concerned, I agree.

  Nothing beats a merry gathering. It’s what we have gathered to watch that’s the problem. ‘Couldn’t we watch it with the television off?’ I wonder. But the suggestion has no takers. This is light entertainment, and we all need to be lightly entertained. Demur to that truism and you ruin everybody’s night. That was what my father used to take me to task for – ruining everybody’s night. I don’t doubt that Matthew Arnold’s father used to say the same to him. But at least I broke out and learned to twist, which I bet Matthew Arnold never did. Isn’t that enough?

  And yes, as long as Strictly Come Dancing was about people discovering a gift for dancing they never knew they had – an unexpected grace, a fluidity of body and soul previously locked away inside them (think the human corkscrew which the twist told me I could become) – then it was engaging and at times even touching. But little by little the curse of light entertainment descended on the original conception, lightness begetting lightness as surely as ignorance begets ignorance. I say nothing of the lameness of Bruce Forsyth’s jokes, which were apparently part of his charm – a subtlety lost on me – but which promise to continue anyway now he’s gone. And nothing, either, of how celebrity has become so debased a concept as to mean somebody of whom no one has heard.

  More seriously objectionable is the way the judges, who once demonstrated knowledgeable criticism in action – this is what you’re doing wrong, this is how you could do it better, these are the lines and shapes we want to see – have succumbed to the lure of celebrity and declined to pantomimic versions of themselves, gurning, preening, feigning lust, exchanging leers of suggestiveness and innuendo.

  In the same collusive spirit we are asked to wonder, when teacher and learner are paired off, whether shenanigans are to be anticipated, whether the spouse seen smiling weakly in the audience as a dancer wraps her legs around the husband’s waist, or the wife collapses in a panting heap into her partner’s arms, is soon to be made a fool of.

  And so, ironically, it falls to me to speak up for dancing as an activity too intrinsically elegant to be demeaned, as movement whose subtle disciplines are worthy of serious respect, and as an art sufficiently sensual in itself not to be in need of lowbrow sexing up.

  We accept today that Disney’s cartoons of animals in tutus degraded them. Reader, humans can be degraded too.

  Who dunnit? The one who dunnit last time

  Out of the country for ten days, looking at desert, showering in the open air and not watching television. Bliss. Not watching television has much to recommend it anywhere, but when warm winds are winnowing the hairs on your chest and making little floral pinwheels of those between your thighs – let’s not be prudish, that’s what happens when you walk out of an open-air shower into desert – not watching television feels like a reason to be alive.

  It’s falling out of the collective passivity that’s so good. The not knowing what people are talking about when they use words like ‘Apprentice’. But in no time at all, the collective reclaims you on your return, and before you know it, you are eager to know how something or other ended. Bloody Broadchurch. Or how something or other began. Bloody Mad Men.

  My point is general and only happens to be called Broadchurch. Prior to going away, I’d watched all but the last episode, mainly for the pleasure of Olivia Colman – with whom I suspect it would be fun to take an outdoor shower – occasionally thinking it was good, occasionally thinking it was poor, but mainly thinking it was above averagely just about all right. It was clear, of course, by episode three who’d done it.

  It’s always the person who’s sufficiently present in the plot for you to know vaguely who he is but is never filmed staring longer than is natural into the middle distance just before a commercial break. And other characters were starting to ask how it is possible not to know what the person you’re married to is really like, and it was becomingly glaringly obvious that Olivia Colman didn’t know what the person she was married to was really like. Too busy being a detective. Aren’t they always? Too busy detecting to detect what’s happening in their own lives. Come up with a domestically attentive detective and you’ve killed the genre. Besides, you don’t employ Olivia Colman in the first place unless there’s going to be a reason for her to stand sobbing on the sand when all’s revealed. There’s no point paying for the best tears in the business and then not getting her to shed them. So Olivia Colman’s half-anonymous husband it had to be. This is going to be a problem from now on for any whodunnit starring Olivia Colman. The villain is always going to turn out to be the person she shares her home with.


  So let’s have no more whodunnits. The reason they are never satisfactory is that the resolution doesn’t justify the waiting; the answer doesn’t live up to the question; the actual reason he dunnit is no match for the millions of reasons someone else might have. Even if you haven’t guessed right, it’s entirely without human significance that you guessed wrong. There is more drama in not being able to finish the Independent cryptic crossword.

  The other problem with contemporary whodunnits is that the villains, however would-be complex, are all guilty of versions of the same crime: taking an unhealthy interest in children. Perhaps these things are cyclical, or maybe they reflect something that is happening in the real world, or at least what we fear is happening in the real world, but denouements have suddenly been taken over by paedophiles. The suspicious look like paedophiles but aren’t, whereas the guilty don’t look like paedophiles but are.

  Well, it would seem we do have reason to be anxious, with half the Catholic Church, any number of well-loved TV personalities – when I say well-loved, I don’t mean by you or me, reader – and an inexplicable number of classical music teachers under suspicion of paedophiliac offence. Who’d have thought there was so much of it about?

  Why child abuse is so prevalent, or was so prevalent a generation ago, since a lot of this is justice playing catch-up; what part authority and celebrity play not only in making children available and susceptible, but in making adults lose their reason; just what the pleasure can be in sex with people below the age of consent and discernment, sex without true reciprocity, sex without adult conversation – now here are questions to build a drama around. But it wouldn’t be a whodunnit. It would be a whydunnit or a howdunnit and those are a different kettle of fish. Not a revelation of a secret, or the unmasking of a single sick individual, after which society gets back to normal – i.e. to fornicating with people who are not their spouses but are at least their own age – but a revelation of our natures, after which there is no normal.

  Enough with the detection. It’s not the uncovering of any predilection that’s interesting. It’s the predilection itself. Look at Mad Men, which threatens to lose itself again in the labyrinth of tracking down Don Draper’s secret past. The early episodes of this sometimes superb series were marred by existential hokum, flashbacks to an earlier self, if that was himself – for who’s to say where self resides? – name changes, identity crises, lonely half-forgotten infidelities – for who was there to be faithful to? – all filmed in that slightly odd, old-fashioned, halting way that tells you psychology is afoot.

  And with the new season we are back on the trail of Don’s hunger to make love to women to whom he isn’t married – as though that’s a weakness that needs explaining – through faded shots of prostitutes in lingerie of another age, and a boy with a weird haircut peering through peepholes in a brothel – the biggest psycho-cliché of them all.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like a Freudian explanation – but only when Freud’s doing the explaining. Otherwise, I want character revealed in action, not exposition, the feel and taste of us – all deranged in some way or another – the here and quite sufficiently mysterious now.

  Smiley face

  Odd that in principle we care so much about the sanctity of private space, yet have so little regard for it in practice. In Pret A Manger modern Britain, where everyone who sells you a sandwich is your best pal, the concept of distance has gone the way of honorifics.

  I have an agreement with Boots the Chemist that they collect my prescription from my doctor and text me when they’ve dispensed it. I am not ungrateful. The system is efficient and convenient. But I find it intrusive – akin to having a stranger peering into my bedroom window – to be texted by someone I don’t know. And the notification isn’t businesslike. No ‘Dear Mr Jacobson, this is to inform you that your pills are ready for collection. We await your visit with eager apprehension and guarantee you our kind attention at all times. Yours faithfully, The Management.’ Instead, they call me Howard. Not even ‘Howard, if we may be so bold’, just plain, next-door-neighbourish Howard. If I didn’t delete so quickly I’d probably discover a yellow smiley face wishing me a great weekend.

  Complaining is out of the question. They won’t understand the offence. And I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Besides, I’m not sure it’s wise to mess with a dispenser of poisons. They could put anything in those pills the next time. ‘Take 20 of these, 10 times a day on an empty stomach and a bottle of whisky. Sweet dreams, Howard.’ Accompanied by an emoticon of a dead man.

  I wasn’t born into a world in which people made free with Christian names. My friends and I, all of whom aspired to be novelists, addressed one another as cher maître. At school I was ’Obson, and I doubted that anyone at Cambridge knew that Jews had Christian names. My bedmaker called me Sir (and just occasionally Naughty Boy); the college porters did the same, albeit with a snigger. F. R. Leavis called me Jacobson; my moral tutor called me Fagin; the Master called us men and the only girlfriend I ever had at Cambridge called me a name I cannot repeat here. Thus do the educated understand the importance of respecting distance.

  When we did not otherwise want to be addressed or disturbed we shut the double doors to our rooms. This was called sporting one’s oak. And no one of any breeding knocked on a sported oak. You could be burning in your bed but still no fireman dared transgress against that code. A Cambridge man had the right to perish in inviolate privacy behind his oak. Whether this tradition still persists I have no idea, but I fear for it given that a friend who has a son at Trinity tells me his boy steals Do-not-disturb signs from boutique hotels to hang on his college door. Not the old-fashioned signs politely requesting a little quiet, but the ones that say UP YOURS or GO FUCK YOURSELF, I’M JERKING OFF.

  How long before there’ll be no need to nick them from the latest bordello B&B because you’ll be able to pick them up, three for the price of two, at Boots? ‘Dear Howard, this is to let you know that SHOVE IT and SIT ON THIS are now in stock. You’ll find them in Alternative Therapies. Have a great weekend. Smiley face.’

  How it is that hotels have become sites of gross sexual collusion between hoteliers and guests is a question I leave to sociologists of the hospitality business. But no longer does one need to sign in on a false name and rinse the sheets the morning one leaves. Now, if there’s been no congress, you have to fake the signs of it for fear of disappointing the chambermaid. Why else the reproduction of a lascivious Fragonard on the bedhead? Why the fridgeful of energy-boosting drinks? Why the bath oils and body washes whose uses baffle the imaginations of travellers with only business matters on their minds? Why the machine selling fruit-flavoured condoms in the reception area? Why the bar of soap that says Gettin’ jiggy wit’ da figgy and tells innocent users ‘we can tell from that grin you’ve been committing the fifth deadly sin’? What business is it of theirs, and since when was the fifth deadly sin a grinning matter, anyway?

  We aren’t prudes in this column. We are pleased hotels are more accommodating to the needs of their guests. It’s not the obscenity but the familiarity we object to, the assumption that we are all one happy family in facetiousness. Call it the democratisation of the private. This is what you get when the necessary divisions in society are broken down: an end to deference, difference, manners and, above all, gravitas.

  A Virgin train I regularly catch to Manchester to see my mother – Mrs Jacobson, to you – has the message ‘Hey, good-looking’ on the mirror of the toilet. The impertinence aside, what makes Virgin think it falls within its brief to entertain us? You want us to arrive at our destination in a good mood? That’s simple: get us there punctually; don’t check our tickets at both ends as well as on the train; don’t keep asking to see my senior railcard – of course I’ve got a senior railcard: I am a walking senior railcard – make better sandwiches, and don’t run out of them before the train’s left Euston.

  But that’s not all. Over the lavatory bowl is a list of things they would rat
her we didn’t flush – ‘nappies, sanitary towels, old mobile phones, unpaid bills, your ex’s jumper, hopes, dreams or goldfish’. I’m surprised they lost their nerve and didn’t add Richard Branson. For it is he, of course – he and the thousand other Branson clones – we have to blame for our nation’s descent into indignity. ‘I love,’ he says on his Virgin blog, ‘when signs and announcements show a little sense of humour.’

  Shame, in that case, you don’t have one, Dickie.

  PS: ‘Love when’ isn’t English usage. You must be spending too much time in your balloon. Have a lovely weekend. Smiley face.

  There was a rabbi of Kiev

  Now that another Yom Kippur has been and gone without my being struck down for my sins – the biggest of them, in some eyes, being my failure to honour the Day of Atonement in the way a Jew is supposed to – I will unfold to you a tale. Call it an expiation for not adequately expiating.

  There was a rabbi … Jewish parables always begin that way, and as often as not situate the rabbi in Kiev. So: there was a rabbi of Kiev, only he was not a rabbi in the conventional sense, he was rabbi of Radical Scepticism employed by the City Duma’s Department of Rationalism to keep an eye out for irrationalism of a specifically Jewish variety. Though known to his friends as Viktor, he always jumped when someone shouted: ‘Abram!’ This was because Abram was the name his parents had given him. Whenever this happened, Viktor – who had bestowed that name upon himself – fell into a fit of guilt about his parents and prayed for forgiveness from the God in whom they had believed but he did not. Immediately he had finished praying he castigated himself for showing such disrespect to his own non-belief.