The actual moment of her passing I missed. Couldn’t take it. But I held myself together tolerably well for the funeral. A humanist affair, mourners in T-shirts, overseen by a secular officiant with a plain manner, much like someone selling you a mortgage, though with less gravitas. Ken, of course, delivered the address, and Audrey read the nation’s best-loved poem, the one exhorting us not to stand at the dead man’s grave and weep because he isn’t there and doesn’t sleep, but has become the thousand winds that blow and something or other on the snow.
In fact, since Alma was cremated, there was no grave to stand and weep at anyway. It’s time someone did an ashes version.
I can’t say I care for humanist funerals. Or for cremations, come to that. The two often go together, presumably because it’s not so easy to be irreligiously matter-of-fact with the earth’s forgetful jaw yawning black and empty at your feet. No discreet curtain. No electronic organ music. Just the disgrace of dirt and decay.
The last humanist cremation I attended in the flesh was my aunt’s, a woman I had been close to and loved dearly as a boy but had not seen for many years. The not seeing was probably my fault, so you can add a pinch of guilt to whatever I say next. But what grieved me most about her funeral was how little provision it made for grief. We wept individually, of course, but the service itself, if you could call it a service, was sorrowless. Tasteful, that was the word for it; the extracts from humanist works well chosen, the music sweet, the demeanour of all participants impeccable. But it was hard to believe that anything much of animal moment was happening. Maybe it wasn’t. Just one more dead person. Yes, she was someone to me and to her sister and to her husband, but who were any of us in the great scheme of things?
I know what I want from a funeral. I want desolation. Howl, howl. If it truly doesn’t matter whom we burn or bury next – for we are but a mote in Creation’s eye – then that is all the more terrible for the dead and all the more desolating for those of us left standing. The end of a life, if we believe a life has meaning, is a dreadful event. The end of a life, if we believe a life has no meaning, is a more dreadful event still. Twist it how you like, death is neither decorous nor rational nor humane.
Then, after the desolation, should come that something else we feel for in the dark. Not comfort, not consolation, not even the peace that passeth all understanding. Something more like grandeur. At last, if we have been allowed to feel the enormity of a single lost life, there may follow a conviction of the grandeur of all lives. But nothing follows if we don’t first find words for the magnitude of our despair.
And for this you need the psalms and liturgies of the great religions. Never mind what you think of religion the rest of the time – to hell with consistency – if you’re going to die big, you have to die rocked in a religious vocabulary. I don’t want ‘Ode to a Skylark’ read over me, together with a snatch from Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet and Humphrey Bogart saying play it again, Sam. I don’t want to be lowered into the ground like a reluctant guest on Desert Island Discs, with my favourite book (other than Shakespeare) coming down after me. Leave me and my tastes out of it, I want the words of God.
There’s a wonderful description, in Dickens’s Hard Times, of the death of one who in life had barely been alive. ‘The light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out; and even Mrs Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs.’
Faultless, that invocation of the King James Bible. For the language of the Authorised Version – before we ironed what was epic out of it to make it ‘relevant’ to a cloth-eared age – aggrandises every life at the moment of its extinction.
And now I remember what my objection to soap operas is. They shrink the space around us in life, deny us our dread solemnity in death, and send us to eternity in the arms of Perry Como.
Some of his Best Friends
Are some of your best friends Jewish? Tam Dalyell’s are. He told us so last week. Defending himself against the ‘preposterous’ charge of anti-Semitism, he also informed us that he and his children had worked on a kibbutz, that he had holidayed in Israel – but then so had Asif Mohammed Hanif of Hounslow, albeit with explosives in his belt – and that on occasions he writes affectionate obituaries of Jews, though whether the Jews are dead before he writes them he doesn’t tell us. Thus the Father of the House, knight of the mournful countenance, and champion of causes so lost they do not even know they are causes until he rides in to champion them – the man whom history not so much forgot as never noticed.
So why take umbrage? Why break a butterfly on a wheel? Well, a) because I feel like it, and b) because there is no folly so particular that it doesn’t shed light on folly in general. Besides, by parading his prejudices as unwittingly as he has, by expressing such genuine surprise that anyone should find his words exceptionable, Tam Dalyell exposes the unexamined assumptions of his time and place.
What he has been saying, for those of you with your minds elsewhere, is that Jews punch politically above their weight, exercise an undue and disproportionate influence. As an off-the-cuff remark, dropped from the lips of a foolish fond old man, we would probably let it pass, but Mr Dalyell has been trying this on for size, to whoever will listen, for some time now. Last year, for example, in an address to the Zayed Centre, an organisation ‘established in fulfilment of the vision of his highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’ – that vision having included one symposium denying the Holocaust and another validating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – Dalyell told the assembled Arab delegates pretty much everything they wanted to hear about the criminality of Ariel Sharon, which is standard practice if you’re going to accept that sort of an invitation, but didn’t scruple either to let them into his pet theory on Jews and their overinfluence. Whether or not the following were his exact words it is hard to tell, but he undoubtedly allowed the assembly to deduce from what he did say that ‘there were 400,000 Jews in Britain who enjoyed a very strong and stunning influence’.
As I wasn’t there in person, but have only the Zayed Centre’s own report to go on, I am not sure whether that was ‘stunning’ in the sense of Marilyn Monroe, or ‘stunning’ as in what you do to a mullet. But I guess the latter.
Moving on from that, as in his recent interview with Vanity Fair, Tam Dalyell identifies a ‘cabal’ of Jews, both in this country and in America, which is exercising undue influence over our Prime Minister. In the context of Jews and the power they are said to exert, we have, I think, wherever Mr Daylell holidays, to take the word ‘cabal’ as incendiary. It means to bring to mind a tradition of Jewish mysticism mistrusted by those who have always feared the hermetics of the Jews, at the same time evoking a suspiciousness of Jewish intrigue rooted in medieval ignorance and hatred. The Jew in cahoots with the devil to secure world domination blah blah. Now showing on Egyptian television.
I don’t much care whether any of this makes Tam Dalyell an anti-Semite. There are already too many charges of racism flying about between the peoples of the world. Let’s just agree the man has a problem with Jews.
Why else would advisers who happen to be Jewish (or look Jewish, or sound Jewish, or simply make Tam Dalyell ‘think’ Jewish) become, in his imagination, a ‘cabal’? Why else would their influence, supposing it to exist, be a matter of such grave concern to him? And why else is he so watchful of the stain of Jewishness that he can detect its spread in ministers and advisers who, to the naked eye as it were, are barely Jewish at all? Peter Mandelson, for example, who lacks a Jewish mother and therefore cannot marry in an Orthodox synagogue, supposing he should want to; Jack Straw whose single Jewish grandparent makes him but a quadroon. Such genealogical curiosity has its antecedents in Nazi Germany, though I wouldn’t dream of labelling Mr Dalyell, who holidays by the Dead Sea and writes obituaries of Jews, a Nazi. But the question has to be asked, why Jewish bloodlines compel his interest the way they do.
And why he thinks that a distant Jewish relative leads ineluctably not only to undue influence, but undue influence in a sinister cause.
Enough Jews are prominent in their opposition to the policies of the present Israeli administration, let alone to the manner of their implementation, for Mr Dalyell to rest assured that wherever two or more of them are gathered there will not be an identity of pro-Israeli interest. They protest, they march, they offer themselves, some of them, as human shields against the Israeli army. But even were this not the case, even if it could be shown that every Jew in Creation backed Israel to the hilt, where would be the wrong? Must a Jew empty his pockets of all traces of his Jewishness before the influence police deem him to be clean?
Interesting how seamlessly Dalyell moves between Israel and the Jews. It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel, we are forever being told. Nor is it. Nor should it be. But if the two are not identical, why is Tam Dalyell so quick to make them so? To what end of peace and understanding did he, in the same breath, and to an Arab audience, conflate the wrongs of Ariel Sharon and the 400,000 ‘stunningly influential’ Jews of Britain? Does he see Jew whenever he sees Israel? Does he see Israel whenever he sees Jew? More to the point, does he see criminality and then see Jew, or does he see a Jew and then see a criminality?
The Grave Question of the Bicycle
Ever had your thunder stolen? An interesting expression, whether you have or not. I have always taken it to be an allusion to some event in Norse mythology, Thor furious with Loki for purloining his elemental powers. But the authorities say not, tracing it back to a remark made by the unsuccessful eighteenth-century dramatist John Dennis. Dennis, apparently, had invented a new way of simulating the sound of thunder for his latest unsuccessful play, Appius and Virginia, though what was wrong with the traditional sheet of aluminium I can’t imagine. Soon after Appius and Virginia was taken off – the usual: bad reviews, no Americans in town, everybody only wanting to go to musicals – Dennis was watching a performance of Macbeth when he heard his thunder machine in operation. ‘That is my thunder, by God,’ he cried to whoever was sitting next to him. ‘The villains will play my thunder, but not my play.’
‘Shush!’ said a person – probably Alexander Pope – in the row behind.
Believe that if you like. Myself, I’m always suspicious of anecdotes which rely on eighteenth-century writers saying ‘By God’. And since they were all wits in those days, isn’t it likely that the whole point of Dennis’s explosion of displeasure was its witty, mock-heroic allusion to Loki’s having purloined Thor’s powers?
Anyway, all this by way of preface to the villains having stolen my thunder, by God, in the matter of cyclists. Everywhere you looked last week, commentators and critics fulminating against bicycles, the people who ride them, the odious expressions of self-righteousness on their faces, the even more odious clothes they wear to mow down the innocent, and their all-round humanitarian and aesthetical offence. The justification for this explosion of bile was the publication, or the leaked publication, of a European Commission document arguing that motorists were ipso facto responsible for whatever befell the cyclist. You ride a bike, you go up to a motorist, you punch him on the nose, he pays you damages. That’s the gist of it. So it’s not altogether surprising that every crypto-cyclophobe in the country should suddenly come roaring out of the closet. But some of us, regardless of any EU document, have been steadily and tirelessly arguing against the bicycle for years, with little expectation of agreement or reward. Is not a cyclist responsible for the barrel-load of grief in my novel Who’s Sorry Now? And will I not still be here, gentle reader, a foot soldier in an unfashionable cause, quietly pushing for the death penalty for cyclists, when all these sensationalist johnny-come-latelys – or should that be johnnies-come-lately? – have moved on to excoriating mothers with pushchairs or toddlers on three-wheelers?
Whatever comes of the EU document – and much of the speculation is no doubt fantastical (higher insurance premiums, the death of the car, the closure of our highways, civil war, etc., etc.) – it only enunciates a principle which is already tacitly accepted by the high-minded everywhere, to wit the blamelessness, whatever the circumstances, of whichever person is currently perceived by liberal society to be the underdog. ‘Whoever is responsible,’ the document says, ‘cyclists usually suffer more.’
Here, in a nutshell, the ethos of our times – the more shocking for the flagrancy with which it owns up to itself. ‘Whoever is responsible . . .’ Like a rocker switch of blame, or worse, a shrug of jurisprudential incuriosity. He who suffers more is the innocent party by simple virtue of his suffering. Slight is right. As for any causal connections between the sufferer’s sufferings and his actions, forget them. The question of responsibility is now off the table.
It is by this logic that a person who fills his face with hamburgers feels entitled to sue the hamburger. Just as it is through fear of this logic that the playing of conkers in school playgrounds is now under threat, unless all parties sign a legal disclaimer before any conkering gets under way, indemnifying the headmaster, the school, the local education authority and the horse-chestnut tree.
To more deadly effect, it is by this logic that we read half the conflicts in our world, exonerating the suffering however much the suffering are at fault, thereby fetishising victimhood and contributing to its murderous cult.
But, to return to the graver question of bicycles, if it is the case that suffering outweighs responsibility, and that the weaker form of transport can never be deemed to be a danger to the stronger, must that not put the pedestrian, to mix the metaphor, in the box seat? Cyclist punches motorist, motorist to blame. Ergo, pedestrian punches cyclist, cyclist to blame. Do you not see what possibilities have thus opened up for us, the strollers, the loiterers, the idlers, we children of Baudelaire, lovers of city clouds and crowds, wallowers in the universal ecstasy of everything except cyclists? Nothing now to stop us striking back. Here he comes, in his colours of hateful complacency, shouting ‘Ding, ding!’ as he shoots the lights, or ‘Out of my way!’, or more often something far more foul. So now here we come, too, with our umbrella handles out or our mugs of piping coffee or our Uzi semi-automatic mini sub-machine guns at the ready, and if we are lucky enough to unseat the brute, can we not plead our deeper level of suffering, ‘whoever was responsible’?
Such violence of emotion may surprise cyclists who think their only enemy is the motorist. But just as they feel threatened by the car, so do we feel hectored by the bike. See the car as venomously racist and the cyclist as sanctimoniously anti-racist, if that will help. One doesn’t want to die under the wheels of either if one can avoid it. But for most people, living in unexceptional circumstances, the sanctimonious present the greater nuisance. Get hit by a car and you probably won’t live to tell the tale. Get hit by a bike and there’s a fair chance you’ll make it to your feet. The trouble is, it’s the bike which keeps stealing the motor car’s thunder.
Blunkett in Love
The burning question is why it takes a year or a cheque to get a visa when you are not lucky enough to know someone who knows someone who knows a Home Secretary. Why doesn’t it take nineteen days, whoever you are? Why must everything that proceeds from the dark heart of officialdom demoralise us? Are we not of the same human family? There’s a backlog, they say. Try that on with your tax or VAT return. ‘Sorry, no can do for a year, I have a backlog.’
Myself, I won’t give a monkey’s if it does turn out that Blunkett assisted his lover’s nanny. Indeed, I’ll be disappointed in him if it turns out that he didn’t. Isn’t this what we are supposed to do if we can – lend a hand? Isn’t it something the great religions of the world enjoin upon us? Help a friend in need? It would be better if he helped us all, gave the birch and then the boot to every spitefully slumberous official at the Home Office, I agree, but a start’s a start. In the meantime, of those preparing to take a stand on principle, is there one who’s never done a favour for a chum,
never dropped a word into an ear, never shared a chauffeur for an hour, never put a lover on a spouse’s ticket? God help him, in that case.
They occur in Shakespeare from time to time, the whited ones, the Angelos for whom the letter of the law is sacrosanct, and they are always revealed to be morally despicable at the last. We like a man who has a little give in him ethically. In fact we more than like him, we know that his is the only true path to virtue.
But these, anyway, are trifles light as air in a drama which grows more tragic by the day. Love is love. I know the expectation: men in high office are meant to keep their heads, however much in love they are; but as in principle so in passion, it’s flexibility that makes a man fit to govern, whether what he’s governing is his country or himself. Flexibility, not laxity. Blunkett in Love would be a good title for a light comedy of indiscretion, but what’s been striking about this amour as the details of it have unfolded, and in so far as we are possessed (and entitled to be possessed) of the truth, is how little of lightness or laxity there has been in it. Forget that romping boy Boris who is cursed with looking like someone out of the Beano even though, for all we know to the contrary, his heart is breaking. Blunkett weighs in much heavier. For good and ill, he has always been a forbidding and astringent politician, strict in his pronouncements, rugged and even rough in battle. Not a man you would tangle with lightly. And clearly not a man you would fall in love with lightly either.
Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Page 17