The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  In my case, this was partly to prove a point. I believed my legs were longer than he knew them to be. ‘Best try them on,’ he’d say. And even then I felt I owed it to the dignity of my person and stature to quibble with him over half an inch. ‘All right,’ he’d concede, changing the chalk mark, but I suspect that when it came to doing the job he trusted his estimate over mine and took the half-inch back off again.

  He was an appraiser of appearances, would let you know if he thought something you’d asked him to do would ill become you. Politely – because he had the manners of a gentleman of another time as well as of another place – he would quickly run his eyes over you and give his opinion with the faintest inclination of his head. He had fine, aquiline features and at such a moment you felt you were being looked at by a hawk.

  He was interviewed by a national newspaper when Fabio Capello took over as manager of the English football team. Since the Football Association’s offices were in Soho Square, the journalist thought it would be a good idea to ask some of Soho’s Italian residents what they thought of him. About Capello’s managerial skills, Raffaele had little to say. But he liked the suits. ‘I have seen Mr Capello on the TV,’ he said, ‘and I am quite impressed with how he dresses. But then most Italians know how to dress. Without meaning any offence, the same cannot be said of a lot of young English people.’

  A critical father, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn. Presumably all fathers from Naples are. And perhaps a critical husband as well. Only a couple of weeks ago, in the course of a conversation about the desirable length of a woman’s skirts – and no, we weren’t being dirty old men, we were simply discussing a dress my wife had brought in for him to lengthen – and no, not at my prim behest – he talked about his own wife’s instinctive modesty. He even drew an imaginary line high on his chest, to show her preferred height of neckline.

  I stepped away from that conversation out of embarrassment and respect. His wife died a few years ago, and I was inclined to think that there was a sadness about him thereafter. Often I would see him on his own in Soho after work, always elegant and handsome, but a little lost, I thought. But I am a conjugal sentimentalist and am upset by the sight of a once-married man out on his own. No wife to go out with or go home to is no life to speak of. I might, therefore, have invented him forlornly wandering Soho, as some say I invent him, out of the same idealised sorrow, sitting forever cross-legged on his table.

  Soho is the poorer, as is everyone who knew and respected and, yes, loved him, whatever the truth of where he sat or what he felt. Another social comfort dropped away. Another good man gone. And with him something irreplaceable – not just industry and skill, but a rare sort of honour.

  Rejoice!

  So what did Mrs Thatcher ever do for us? Gather round, you readers too young to remember, and let me tell you what it was like in those far, dark days before her Coming. Of rubbish gathering uncollected in the streets I sing, of the dead rotting where they fell, of inflation running at such a rate that the only people with money were those who had none, and of the rich taxed so punitively that they would have left the country in droves had there been any reliable means of transport for them to leave by. So why did no one tweet a revolution? Ah, how far away it must all seem. No Twitter, no Facebook, no mobile phones, no iPads. So how did we communicate? Reader, we didn’t.

  I was teaching at a polytechnic when She became prime minister. Think of it – a polytechnic! If there is one word that sums up the depressed spirit of the 1970s – provincial, grim, strike-bound, maimed, undernourished, unpoetical – it’s ‘polytechnic’. You can smell the engine oil in the word, as you could smell the engine oil in the country, only none of the engines were running.

  I taught – that’s when we managed to recruit students – in a bus station adjoining the poly, and I was considered fortunate to be teaching there. ‘Fares, please!’ other lecturers would twit me, but I took it in my stride. It was better than being punched in the face, which, before 1979, was the prevailing mode of academic discourse in a tertiary institution.

  Some of our courses were taught on a traffic island in the middle of the ring road. Given the rubbish, the rats, the piles of unwanted coal and the dead lying in the corridors of the polytechnic, a traffic island wasn’t all bad. True, there were no teaching facilities. Not even a blackboard, unless you carried your own. But then we’d sold all the chalk to flying pickets to make ends meet, and few of the students could read anyway. Occasionally a car with no brakes – no cars had brakes before Mrs Thatcher – careered into the class, which would have put pressure on the local hospital had there been one. But so long as no one was seriously injured, accidents were regarded by staff and students alike as a welcome break from the rigours of Humanities 1: The Wit of Arthur Scargill, or Humanities 2: The Wisdom of Arthur Scargill.

  When I’d finished teaching I’d go home to a cold-water flat, buying a cabbage for supper on the way. If there were no cabbages I boiled the Guardian. Soup’s soup. I shared a lavatory with a dozen others, most of them out of work, so it fell to me to replace the bath towel every six months. A rota ensured that no more than three people of the same sex (otherwise no more than two) used the toilet at the same time, and I suppose if I miss anything from those years it’s the camaraderie that built up in the course of urinating together.

  I had been engaged for about seventeen years but I didn’t have the money for a ring. It was our intention to marry before we were seventy but we held out no hope of ever living together. A council flat of our own was a dream it would never have occurred to us to entertain. Few people dreamed before Mrs Thatcher came to power. And no one entertained. Words like ‘hospitality’, ‘lobster bisque’, ‘lasagne’, ‘sparkling mineral water’, ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’ and, of course, ‘champagne’ were unheard of in the early 1970s. My fiancée, Penny – she couldn’t afford a second name – would have been pretty had she had teeth. Or hair. But dentists and wigmakers were beyond our means, as were physiotherapists, personal trainers, life coaches, Lacanian psychoanalysts and cleaners. Then lo! – in a shaft of light – She descended, and Penny was illuminated. New teeth, hair that cascaded down her back when she jogged, she no longer walked into buildings now that she had bought her own spectacles instead of waiting to get them on the National Health, and she told me she was leaving me. ‘It isn’t you,’ she explained. ‘It’s me. I want more for myself.’ This, too, we owed to Margaret Thatcher – this ‘It isn’t you it’s me’, this ‘I want more for myself’.

  It’s said of Mrs Thatcher that she atomised society, but the truth is she brought us together. If we appeared nicer before, it was only the niceness of deprivation. She showed us how to be companioned in avidity. This was classlessness in action – the rich man at the helm of privatised industry and the poor man with shares in it.

  She privatised envy, too, giving everyone a stake. Hitherto, envy had been the closed shop of the poor. Ah, how we envied! What we didn’t have we wanted. What others had we wanted. What we didn’t have and others didn’t have either we wanted even more. This didn’t change but it made us feel better to see that envy didn’t stop higher up; suddenly those who had everything began to experience covetousness, though they couldn’t have said what exactly they coveted. Finally, Thatcherite economics gave it a name. A bigger bonus.

  Until Mrs Thatcher unchained the City, industrial blackmail was the prerogative of the unions. In order to get the pay and conditions their members demanded they held the country to ransom. Hence the dead rotting in the streets. Today it’s the banker to whom we must capitulate, on pain of his taking his talents somewhere else. Scargill, by this token, would have made an excellent banker.

  So, whatever Mrs Thatcher said about society, a big happy society is what we are, joined in universal heartlessness. ‘Rejoice!’ she famously told us, and that’s what the children succoured in her creed are now doing – over her death.

  Fanatics only ever read one book

  So how fare our
investigations into what makes someone want to kill cartoonists? (I’m assuming we know why they want to kill Jews.) Maybe, before pondering the education of a jihadist, we should ask a prior question: what makes a fanatic?

  We were given some insight into this on Newsnight earlier this week when Evan Davis, growing nicely into his job, interviewed the lawyer, journalist and associate of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald – a man strikingly deficient in the musculature necessary to essay a smile. The subject was surveillance and David Cameron’s call for more of it. There are, I accept, differing views on this. I, for example, am for having every member of the human family watched day and night by every possible means because the human family is currently dysfunctional and can’t be trusted. But I understand why others don’t think as I do. This puts me in a different category of person from Greenwald, who allows no beliefs that conflict with his and attributes those that do to a cowardly subservience to authority.

  Leading Greenwald with expert gentleness into the gated hell that is his mind, Davis put the case for differing viewpoints. Nothing could have been more instructive than Greenwald’s dead expression – his mouth fixed in the rigor mortis of absolute conviction, his eyes unanimated by the pleasure of conversation or the excitement of controversy. Doubt honours a man, but this was the face of someone whom no ghost of a second thought dares visit. No consciousness of absurdity either. As for the humanity whose civil rights he champions with such icy rigidity, for that he had nothing but contempt. We are merely, if we don’t think what he thinks, the playthings of the powerful. This is the terrifying paradox of zealotry: no one hates humanity more than those who believe they know what’s best for it.

  I don’t, I must say, see Greenwald launching rockets any time soon. The ideologue is still a long way from being the terrorist. These, though, are the first steps. Expelling doubt. Refusing contrariety. Hating play. Making oneself the human equivalent of a weapon, implacable, well aimed, reduced to a single function.

  Another way of putting this is to say that the fanatic is someone who has only ever read one book. It is right, therefore, to ask not only what the appeal of the story he goes on reading is, but where he heard it, who read it to him first, and where and why it goes on being told. Religions, like cultures, understand themselves through narrative. How we came into the world, what we were created for, what are our triumphs and our losses. These narratives enjoy a fearful pertinacity. They have the capacity to console but also to inflame. There are still people fighting over territory declared holy by their national stories a millennium ago.

  So it was heartening to see the French – offenders and offendees, or at least some of them – putting aside their individual stories for an hour. But the anti-immigration demonstrations in Germany were reminders that masses on the move are frightening as well as stirring. A group that has only ever read one book is a fanatic group.

  For all the day-long defiance of terror, fear continues to stalk the conversation. Fear for Muslims, for example, and fear of them. May I make a plea, in the name of varied reading – because it’s better to read even two books than one – for the right to hold both positions? I don’t want to see anti-Muslim demonstrations on the streets. I no more want to see Muslims homogenised and traduced than Jews. But must that mean I cannot ask where the single story beloved of the fanatic is engendered, and if it should turn out that the most moderate Muslim unthinkingly propounds a narrative that fuels the fanatic mind – an anti-Western, anti-Semitic, victim-driven narrative – can I not plead with him to shade it a little, to remember that the best stories liberate us from our pains and grievances into understanding other people’s?

  We rightly shy from holding communities to immediate and unambiguous account for what their most errant children do, but is it wise, is it honest – reader, does it make the world a better place for any of us – to raise the charge of Islamophobia the moment someone questions the communal atmosphere such errancy might have breathed? At the heart of every narrative of belief is a weak spot of exclusivism and dogma waiting to be exploited by its wilder adherents. Monotheism is a grand conceit, but can we really say that it is innocent of the millions of killings in its name? Danger lurks in the tales we all tell. And whoever goes on telling a tarnished tale is party to its effects.

  ‘Nothing – absolutely zilch – happens without a past,’ Robert Fisk wrote recently. But the past is not forever fixed; it too is a story, endlessly spun and woven, told and retold, now this way, now that. A Paris jihadist spoke of turning to terror after seeing Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners on television. It is not to defend such barbarities to say they were but one side of a savage conflict. They too had a past. They did not express the immutable will or character of the American people. A half-truth is a half-lie. The invasion of Iraq, however botched, had a past we falsify if we see it only as a story of Western skulduggery. It is a false tale, falsely told, that Israelis wantonly butcher children in Gaza. It is a false tale, falsely told, that the West is waging war against Islam. Whoever lusts after coherence lusts after lies.

  The fanatic craves a single, simple story. Communities of whatever persuasion who provide the pen and paper, ink and plot, should search their hearts. But who are we to talk? We too, in our lurid self-censoriousness, tell madmen tales they love to hear.

  Boris and the bikes

  And today’s morning story is ‘The Selfishness of the Long- Distance Cyclist’. You know the plot. Innocent weekend motorist fancies a pootle through central London to feel the wind through his hair, pick up a pizza, show his kids Buckingham Palace, visit a sick relative – there is no end to the pleasant tasks a motorist might set himself on a blowy, autumnal Saturday – in pursuance of any or all of which he puts on his motoring gloves and goggles, adjusts his satnav, and sets off. Only to discover that there is nowhere he can go, that no street is open to him, that diverted buses are causing havoc in every direction, including the shortest way home again, and all because the Tour of Britain, the country’s largest professional cycle race – not to be confused with all the lesser, amateur cycle races that close the city every other weekend of the year – is finishing in London with a ‘dramatic dash along Whitehall’, though how its organisers know that in advance is anybody’s guess, unless they have learned of my intention to run out from Horse Guards Parade this afternoon and throw myself, Emily Davison-like, under the wheels of the leaders.

  I don’t say that unhindered access to the amenities of one’s city at the weekends – not just London but any city where runners and cyclists maraud – is of the same historic order of importance as women getting the vote. But now that they have got the vote, now that slavery has been abolished and no child can be bound apprentice before the age of eight or sent up a chimney before the age of twenty-one, now that a man may marry a man and a Jew may join a golf club, we are free to turn our attention to less dramatic but no less far-reaching infringements of our freedoms. And I don’t just mean the freedom of city motorists to motor, I mean the freedom of city amblers to amble without being warned off, shooed away, made to wait, held back and hectored by race officials keeping roads and parks and even lakes clear, as they did for days on end last week for no better reason than that a triathlon was in progress. A triathlon, reader! The thrice-cursed triathlon, than which there is no sillier sight in sport, not even counting beach volleyball, synchronised swimming and trampolining, from which you can at least shrink away with your head lowered when you have lost, instead of having to leap from the indecorousness of one into the indignity of the next, in a single unbroken sequentiality of shame.

  In Australia they call it the Iron Man. I happen to know this only because I was once strolling along a beach in Broome, thinking my thoughts, when thirty orange men in tiny pea-green bikini bottoms and Esther Williams bathing hats came charging out of the water in my direction, shouting ‘Out of the way, dickhead!’, which prompted me to ask who they thought they were to be calling me a dickhead, the dickheads, whereupon a race o
fficial screamed, ‘They’re the Iron Men, you galah! Move.’ And the next thing I knew they were riding bikes over me on the sand. But one thing I will say for them: at least they didn’t close the beach.

  Thanks to last week’s triathletes, however, I was forced to sit steaming for two hours in a taxi on the way to the London Art Fair, my intention to look at paintings, encourage painters and maybe even add to their meagre earnings, thwarted by the psycho-cycle swimmers’ desire to wear hideous clothes and chase after one another to no intelligible end. Don’t get me wrong. I am no opponent of sport. Football, cricket, tennis, darts – all these are aired affectionately in these columns. But then no darts tournament has ever necessitated the closure of the city in which I try to live in peace. Darts players know their place. At the oche, in Alexandra Palace or Blackpool Tower. As cricketers know their place is Lord’s. If we want to see them that is where we go, if we don’t we don’t. I don’t insist on a poetry reading at Old Trafford while Manchester United are playing, and they don’t close Regent’s Park to kick a ball around. Thus do we accommodate one another.

  But first the marathon runner and now the cyclist have commandeered our space. In this they have support at the highest level. ‘The Tour of Britain,’ says London’s Transport Commissioner, ‘is a superb event, further showcasing’ (never trust a man who turns showcase into a verb) ‘London’s reputation as a city for cycling’ – an assertion as fatuously self-proving as ‘The knifing of young men in deprived areas further showcases London’s reputation as a city for knifing’.

  Behind the Commissioner for Transport’s transports we can of course detect the will of Boris, London’s Mayor for Bikes. Because he cycles, he has decreed that we must cycle; because he believes that cycling is good for him, he has decreed that it shall be good for us, not only to do ourselves but to tolerate at any cost in others – a piece of nannying we would not expect from one who in all other matters opposes the Nanny State.