The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  The absurdity of giving principle precedence over the humanity which principle exists to serve – because where there is no life there is no call to distinguish between right and wrong – was demonstrated last week by the Court of Appeal’s insistence that the possible risk Abu Qatada poses to national security has no relevance to the law on whether sending him home would infringe his human rights. Since the logic of this entails weighing the consequences to Qatada, it breaks down in the matter of not weighing the consequences to us. The key word is ‘relevance’. If risk is irrelevant to the letter of a specific law, then there’s something wrong with that specific law. For the letter killeth.

  As for human rights, we have been round the houses on the subject. Even liberals lacking Johnsonian robustness look uncomfortable when human rights are invoked in the case of Qatada. But a principle is a principle. And there’s the problem. Sometimes one overriding principle makes a dog’s dinner of another. Human rights is not the first concept to have originated in the highest and most disinterested motives, that compels every civilised person’s allegiance, but falls foul of the contradiction at its heart. ‘What about my human rights?’ is a banal, dog-in-a-manger plea, but it asserts a fundamental truth – rule on behalf of one person’s rights and you violate someone else’s. In this instance, those to whom, by the court’s admission, Qatada might very well pose a risk.

  Geoffrey Robertson QC argued eloquently on Newsnight for the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, and we agree with him. Something must be set above our private interests, the fury of our passions, the common reasoning of the marketplace and the will of Theresa May. In the end, the cacophony must be silenced. Left or right, bloodthirsty or forgiving, we must all submit to the judgement of those we appoint to reason dispassionately in cases where we, forever ‘heated by injury’, cannot.

  But it isn’t only injury, or apprehension of injury, we have to quiet; it’s also our sense of the preposterous. And to be told we must protect an advocate of violence and hatred from the risk of torture in the country of his birth outrages both. Principle is a fine thing, but so is common sense. Boswell was a lawyer. The distinction he makes between acting from the motive of private passion and the motive of public good is the law’s. And that’s the distinction Johnson refutes. ‘Nay, Sir, when I shoot the highwayman I act from both.’

  Sometimes we just have to shoot the highwayman.

  But what if don’t want to connect to you?

  When I first received a message from LinkedIn, telling me a person I’d never heard of wanted to connect to me, how would I like to respond, I resisted all the obvious ways and swatted the request into trash. That, I thought, would be that. But then came the reminders. So-and-so was still waiting to hear.

  I won’t pretend I felt guilty, but behind the silhouette of the petitioner I recognised the pain. The idea of someone hanging on, anxiously eyeing the mail every morning, wondering if you received the original request, wondering if you’ve responded yet, wondering if you ever will, is bound to bring back memories of all the rebuffs and repudiations one’s suffered – in my case a half a century of unrequitedness. I still recall squatting by the letter box, like a dog waiting for the newspaper to be delivered, knowing in my soul that yet again the reply I craved would not arrive, on that day or indeed on any other, because it never had been, and never would be, written.

  But still you wait. Still you beg your parents to get off the phone because you’re expecting an urgent message which, again, you know will never come. Still you linger at the end of the lane, wondering if it’s the wrong lane, the wrong end, the wrong hour, the wrong day, the wrong life. Rejection is the one constant of human experience. So it wasn’t without compunction that I again swatted the request from LinkedIn into trash.

  What was LinkedIn anyway? Never having heard it spoken, and possessing no instinct for cyber semiotics, I couldn’t make out the word the letters added up to. Link-a-din was how I read it. Like a little bell ringing. Ting-a-ling, Link-a-din. Or maybe it was a Finnish translation of the name of a princess from One Thousand and One Nights. ‘Then know,’ said the Princess Link-a-din, ‘that though I run like a gazelle and have the spirit of a mountain lion, when I do see thee my heart beats like a lamb.’

  So some sort of party invitation, was it? Whatever their protestations to the contrary, it’s in the nature of such sites to hint at impropriety. I’m guessing now, but I assume that things can get pretty personal in the chat rooms that keep the young awake all night, wondering, wishing, regretting. Did the person who craved my recognition, and was hanging on unto desperation for me to take up Link-a-din’s invitation to connect, want to talk dirty to me?

  That such was not the case became obvious when those with whom Link-a-din was offering to link me increased in number and eventually became people I already knew. But since I knew them, why the need for the intercession of a third party? Anything they wanted they could simply have asked me for the next time we met. ‘Lend me a fiver: how would you like to respond?’ Besides which, all my friends were fastidious in the matter of prepositions. That which wasn’t euphonious they wouldn’t say. And we had perfectly good words already for what we did, none of them requiring prepositions. We met. We conversed. We exchanged ideas. We had never yet ‘connected to’.

  ‘Only connect’ was E. M. Forster’s epigraph to Howards End. Not ‘Only connect to’.

  You can check that, if you have a mind to, by going online. But don’t be surprised if you have to scroll through innumerable entries regarding the TV quiz show, presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell, before you get to the novel from whose ashen epigraph it takes its title. This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up Steppenwolf and you’ll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ and you’ll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you’ll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network.

  Anyway, now I understand what it’s for, I remain astonished sane people sign up for it. Sometimes it’s best to speak from ignorance: that way you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees. You won’t get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won’t get a reasoned account of the joys of being ‘linked’ from somebody who’s already ‘in’. Attend, therefore, to my uninformed impartiality. Don’t go there. Eschew the lot. You announce the poverty of your personal life by signing up to any networking service and you have nothing to gain professionally by linking in with people as unlinked-in as I am. Show some self-respect, for God’s sake.

  What needs are such services answering? Lawyers – to take a LinkedIn type at random – have never been short of work or behindhand in making useful contacts. Observe lawyers hugger-mugger outside a court and you become aware of the matrix of common aim and influence – class, dress, vocabulary, clubs, eating holes, remunerative ambition – that has served them well since the first man or woman sought to have a wrong redressed.

  If you crave more interconnectedness still, it is only because you fear your colleagues might steal a march on you. So get together – outside a court, say – and unanimously agree to quit. There will be withdrawal symptoms, but hang in there. Eventually you’ll thank me. That which none of you do, none of you will miss. And untweet yourselves while you are at it. Every hour we hear tweeters remonstrating with the very site they habituate. It’s so brutal, they wail. You might as well climb into a boxing ring and complain you’ve been punched.

  ‘Only de-connect.’ Out in the free, uncompromised world of the unlinked no hell-troll can hound the mildest Corbyn sceptic, no sex pest ruin lives with lavish compliment. But if you must stay where you are, confusing work with pleasure, and then getting shirty when someone confuses pleasure with you, expect no pity from the rest of us. Today, let us declare every social and professional networking site a no-cry zone.

  Nostril hair and the university

  So how did you spend the extra time last week – that leap second inserted into our clocks to keep them in sync wi
th the fickle Earth’s rotation? I spent my second wondering how many more it would take to slow down the ageing process. How many leaps before the Earth juddered on its axis and time reversed, as it did for Superman, and I would be able to recall the names of friends again, get out of a chair without groaning, read the number of a bus in time to hail it before it drove past me? How many before the lines of sad experience vanished from my face and the hairs retracted into my nostrils? Which brings me neatly to my theme: nostril hair.

  There are two ways we can speak about nostril hair, allowing that some people might not want to speak about it at all. We can speak literally and we can speak figuratively. Allow me to speak literally first.

  For my own poor part I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly. I own a mirror for looking upwards, several pairs of scissors with differently curved and blunted points, and a battery-operated razor (the batteries are optional: vanity alone can power it) the shape of a small spaceship. We shouldn’t be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. The day I don’t attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of his appearance, someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal. I will have retreated into myself, to that place where eccentricity and maybe even madness reside. Science, perhaps.

  The astute reader will by now have worked out that in truth nostril hair is only my sub-theme, and that my real subject is Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who recently made a joking reference to the lachrymosity (were there such a word) of women, in punishment for which University College London expeditiously removed him from the honorary post he held there.

  If I say that Tim Hunt is to be numbered among those who don’t fanatically barber their nostrils twice a day, I intend no disrespect. I am now addressing nostril hair culturally. Tim Hunt has the air of a man who doesn’t put his appearance first, a man who, whether calculatedly or otherwise, inhabits that sphere of extraterrestrial idiosyncrasy whose uniform is a cream linen jacket bought from one of those shops in Piccadilly where they come pre-battered, a fisherman’s smock (probably picked up in Cornwall), stained owlish spectacles, a cord that goes around the neck to hang them from (else they’d fall into a laboratory bath) and, yes, figurative tufts of nostril hair.

  Among the reasons universities exist is that such men should have a habitat. They are a dying species. When I went to university, there was almost no other way for a don to look. A few military men and dandies were the exception, but even their moustaches and cravats were mildewed and wouldn’t have passed muster anywhere but in the Fens. Otherwise, the Scarecrow look from The Wizard of Oz prevailed. Bicycle clips, one trouser leg still in the sock, ties unevenly knotted, hair growing out of their ears and from their noses, sometimes in odd fringes above their shirt collars, occasionally in tussocks on their cheeks.

  This was the higher carelessness of the academic life. To have turned up to give a lecture any less neglected would have been to put show before sagacity. Nostril hair wasn’t simply an inadvertent consequence of collegiate life; it was the very badge of it.

  That they held opinions abominable to those of us who tirelessly invigilate the political niceties goes without saying. Here were odd men and women, but mainly men, to all intents still living the monastic life of the thirteenth century. Some were even tonsured like monks and taught in tiny cells where, when they thought no one was listening, they played upon medieval instruments. To them the mundane demands of modernity were a torture.

  So what right did we have to expect modern attitudes from them? Of course they were sexists, racists, pederasts, colonialists, anti-Semites. Of course they made jokes which not another living soul found funny. Bigotry was expected and even required of them. There have to be places where people let nostril hair run wild, think differently from the rest of us, implicitly call into question and even deride everything we have made up our minds about, find wisdom through unconventionality, and say a lot of foolish things along the way. Universities are such places. Correction: universities should be such places.

  Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn’t a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

  Reaffirming the college’s pusillanimous decision to show Tim Hunt the door, the Provost of University College London said: ‘Our commitment to gender equality and our support for women in science was and is the ultimate concern.’ Wrong, Mr Provost. The right of women to enjoy equal opportunities, receive equal pay and enjoy equal respect to men in science, or anywhere else come to that, is without doubt a matter of high importance. But it is not as high, if we are to talk of ‘ultimate concerns’, as the freedom to think freely and independently – a freedom which matters as much to women as to men, and without which equality must lose its savour.

  Who wants to be equal in an institution which is frightened of the very differences it exists to foster? What shall it profit a man or a woman, if they shall gain the whole world and lose their own soul?

  How to be hip

  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.

  The first rule of hip is that you don’t ring a hip Lower East Side hotel from London and ask if they have tea-making facilities in the room. Of course they don’t have tea-making facilities in the room; they don’t have any facilities in the room. Bar a bar, that is – in this instance one that’s better stocked than Salvatore’s. You might not think you want a highball glass of Knob Creek bourbon and a bag of Doritos the minute you wake up, but you do if you’re hip. Tea and coffee, if you must, you get in the breakfast room where servers (it’s not hip to call them waiters) wear trainers and black tracksuits and look at you with deep suspicion when you request a breakfast menu. What is it you’re really seeking? Just ask. They’ll have it. ‘English breakfast tea,’ I say, enunciating my way out of any misunderstanding. English breakfast tea, not to be confused with crack cocaine. They are clean out of teapots so I get a cup with a diaphanous sac of something brown floating in it. I think about shoving it up my nose. As for the bacon bagel I fancy, that they can’t do. ‘But you serve bagels,’ I say. My server nods. ‘And you serve bacon.’ He nods again. I make a question mark of my body. The hip equivalent of light – let’s call it darkness – breaks somewhere in his brain. ‘I can give you a bagel and a side of bacon,’ he finally says. I settle for that.

  From the corner of my eye I catch him watching me putting the bagel around the bacon. He’ll be telling the guys he hangs around with about this. It could even catch on. If you are in the Lower East Side in the next few months and find all the dudes putting bacon between two halves of a bagel, while watching out for the cops, you’ll know how it originated.

  Back in the room, I resume my search for a cupboard or a drawer. A wardrobe I have. But shelf have I none. Such things are getting hard to find wherever you stay these days. The hotels my father used to take me to when I was a small boy and he was driving a lorry between Manchester and London were marvellously furnished with spaces to put things. I still recall a chest of drawers with separate compartments for cufflinks, collar studs and tiepins. Since then exiguousness has come to be the fashion in the matter of hotel storage. But there’s usually somewhere to cram in a sock and maybe a change of undergarment – even if it means removing the Gideon Bible. In hipsville, though, there’s absolutely nothing – just the floor of the wardrobe where you’ll never be able to find anything because of the exiguousness of the light.

  The more hip the hotel, the less light you get. Don’t ask me to explain this. It could be that it�
��s not hip ever to see yourself. It could be that you don’t mind losing shit if you’re hip because possessions don’t matter. It could be that the truly hip can see in the dark. I’d ring reception to ask if there’s some hidden switch but the phone is more complex than the cockpit of a spaceship and it isn’t hip to put instructions in the room. I’d try Skyping on my laptop but that means lying on the floor, because there’s no desk or table and no chair that allows me to make a lap to rest my laptop on. If you think this is a cheap hotel you’re missing the essence of hip exclusivity. We’re in art-world territory here, where less is more, and none is everything. They have to do only one thing to this hotel to make it not just hip but super-hip and that’s move the bed out.

  Out on the hip streets of Off Soho that get less hip the closer I get to On Soho I see an artisanal juice bar and cake shop that is advertising for ‘talented baristas’ and happens to have a free seat in the sun. Somebody’s Daughter, it’s called. I don’t recognise the name of the father but the smell’s good. I ask the talented barista for a skinny cappuccino – having no fat in my milk accords well with having no light in my room – and a cinnamon pastry. He isn’t sure about the cinnamon. He’ll have to go check. Ten minutes later word is delivered that if they have a cinnamon pastry they can’t find it. That’s hip – a cake shop that can’t find the cakes. But hipper still is the time it takes to get me my cappuccino.