The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  Bastard

  We take the good times with the bad in this column. Life isn’t all Twitter and terror and porn. In proof whereof I am pleased to share with readers the news that I have been made an honorary Australian. In my heart I’ve been an honorary Australian a long time, but now it’s official.

  The title was conferred on me by the Australian High Commissioner, Alexander Downer, at a moving ceremony in London last week. I have a medal to prove it. The only downside is that the honour lasts a mere twelve months. This time next year, someone else will get it and I’ll just be any old Pommy bastard again.

  Between ourselves, reader, it was being called a Pommy bastard that made me fall for Australia in the first place. Written down, it doesn’t have much to recommend it, I grant you, but breathed into your face in situ – which might be a sophisticated cocktail lounge peopled by bankers and newspapermen in the middle of Sydney, or an outback bear pit with sawdust on the floor and twenty stockmen in Chelsea boots and ankle socks leering at you from the bar – the phrase ‘you Pommy bastard’ expresses a warmth, I’d even go so far as to say a sentimentality, it is near impossible to convey to anyone who has never been its recipient.

  I’d led a sheltered life before I went to Australia. Until that time no man had poured a flagon of red wine on my head, knocked me to the ground, sat on my chest, called me ‘Pommy bastard’, then wept into my neck. Time goes slowly while this is happening – slowly enough for you to decide you’re going to report the incident to the local constabulary, unless it’s the local constabulary that’s sitting on your chest, or for you to acknowledge that in some hitherto undiscovered recess of your maleness you’re enjoying it. The former denominates you as a ‘whingeing Pom’ – the worst sort of Pom there is – the latter frees you from ever being referred to as a Pom again. From now on you’re just plain ‘bastard’. In other words, you’re mates, and mateship in Australia can flower quickly into love.

  But it isn’t love as love is understood in this country. It skips all the usual courtship rituals and doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes. It isn’t, that’s to say, a prelude to another level of intimacy, hetero or otherwise. When, with a watery eye, you call a man a bastard, you aren’t looking to take the relationship to another level. This is where you want it to stay, with you calling the bastard a bastard and the bastard calling you a dag – a dag, for the uninitiated, being the dung-matted locks of wool that hang from a sheep’s behind. Only someone who knows why it’s a compliment to be likened to what’s sticking to a sheep’s arse will ever make it to be an honorary Australian.

  These reminiscences date me somewhat, I accept. Manners are smoother in Australia than they were when I spent time there in the 1960s and 70s. And while I do still have Australian friends I call mate when their wives are in the room and a dag when it’s just them and me and all the beer we can drink, I’m beginning to suspect from the half-hearted way they call me bastard in return that they are allowing me this for old times’ sake but otherwise indulge it with no one else. So before you go out there and call the first bloke in an Akubra you meet a dag, I’d check that the customs of the country remain as I’ve described them.

  But no matter how much Australia has changed, there remains a nostalgia for the old ways, as I discovered the other night when I publicly thanked the High Commissioner for the honour and riffed briefly along the lines of the previous paragraphs. No sooner did I finish speaking than two hundred Australians called me bastard, eager to reinvest the word with all its old wild gusto. One of those Australians, also there to receive an award, was Kylie Minogue. The moment I returned to my seat she flashed me one of her most dazzling smiles across the table, through the singed ferns and flickering candlelight. ‘You bastard!’ she said.

  Ah, reader, you should have been there.

  Australia – and this is why I love the place – is the only country in the world where the word bastard is an endearment. There are obvious reasons for this. Australians don’t define themselves by their legitimacy. The more dubious and rough-edged their origins, the prouder they are. A bastard, therefore, is one of them. There was a period when Australians tried to conceal their past in a suburban social primness of the sort Barry Humphries first parodied and subsequently apotheosised, making a Melbourne housewife a figure of the most anarchic mirth – but once that cat was out of the bag, and especially at the margins, in bohemia and in the bush, they rejoiced in whatever was outlandish in their lineage and welcomed every sign of outlandishness in others.

  The times we live in are too nice. Allow the wrong word to slip out and you have to grovel in apology. Let a joke get out of hand – and where’s the point of a joke if you don’t let it get out of hand? – and you’ll be terrorised out of ever making a joke again. And the word terrorist itself, remember, is now to be eschewed lest it offend. All of which pusillanimity I refer to only by way of praising the easy give-and-take of Australian manners. We all live better when we make a social virtue out of giving offence.

  But enough of this. In just six days, Noam Chomsky has accused me of missing the point – which means I haven’t – and Kylie Minogue has called me a bastard – which means I am. What a joyous week it’s been!

  Scrooge

  There should have been snow on the ground and the Salvation Army playing ‘Silent Night’ outside Waterstones. But you’ll have to use your imagination if you want all that. As it was, the evening was mild and the only distinct sound to be heard was that of pedestrians’ bones breaking under the wheels of cyclists running lights and riding pavements. I say the ‘only’ sound, but in fact I’d just learned Joe Cocker had died, so ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ was playing in my head. No singer ever sang a song better. Now it was his obituary. And I was just off to the doctor.

  We were of the same generation and roughly from the same neck of the woods, Joe Cocker and I, he a wild man from Sheffield, I a wild man from Manchester, though I suspect I read more Charlotte Brontë than he did. Every Saturday night I drove through Sheffield with my father on the way back from Worksop market, and in those days the flames still leapt with hellish allure from the city’s steelworks. What if I left school, got a job as a gas fitter, and followed the smell of sulphur? Didn’t happen. Jane Eyre won over Cocker. And the fires of Sheffield consumed me not.

  There I was, anyway, off to the doctor, packing death as Australians say, because my stomach wasn’t feeling right and my father was exactly the age I am now when his stomach did for him. Cocker’s going just made it worse. Me next – another feral Northerner who’d lived too hard. Cocker, I imagined, the victim of late nights, blues and cigarettes, and I overdosing on sourdough bread and vintage Cheddar.

  The astute reader will have spotted I am pleading extenuating circumstances. For what? Let’s say a failure to live up to the spirit of Christmas. But I had a doctor’s appointment and I was, by my own standards of liking to be running early, running late. So when this person tapped me on the shoulder outside Waterstones and said he hoped I didn’t mind him accosting me in the street, I had to do battle with impatience.

  But he had a nice face. Shy, behind a black beard, self-effacing, untried. I could hardly say: ‘Yes, I do mind.’ I smiled at him. It felt like a smile from my end anyway, and it must have been encouraging because he went on to say: ‘It’s just that I’m trying to find a Christmas present for my mother.’ And that’s when I heard myself reply: ‘I haven’t got time for this.’ In the moment of my brushing him off I saw he was pained. He blurted out an embarrassed apology for troubling me, but I was already down the road before I realised what he’d said, and by the time I began to feel I’d behaved badly he was gone.

  I ran in the direction I thought he’d taken but couldn’t find him. Unbidden, sounds of moaning issued from my throat. I had to lean against the window of Waterstones. I think I covered my face. One passer-by was good enough to ask me if I was all right. ‘I will never be all right again,’ I told her, ‘and there’s nothing you or a
nyone else can do about it. But thank you for asking.’

  So what had happened between me and the shy man in the black beard? Something like this. I hadn’t initially taken him for a con man or a beggar but the moment he mentioned his mother I saw a sob story coming. Like everyone, I get hoax emails from people purporting to be friends, saying their passport has been stolen in Vladivostok and they won’t be able to get home to visit their dying mother in Limerick unless I send ten thousand pounds immediately. I even fell for such a scam in person many years ago in a Rome railway station. Not for quite so preposterous a sum, it’s true, but I should still have figured out that the hustler – who said he was struggling to continue his studies as a nuclear physicist – was too young to have seven children, each in the terminal stage of every disease I’d ever heard of. Reader, what do these people take me for? Whatever else, I wasn’t going to fall for that one again. And believe me when I say I was late for my appointment with the gastroenterologist.

  But what if this hadn’t been a con? I replayed the young man’s words. I saw his hurt expression. And I recalled the good impression he’d originally made on me. I even thought I’d noticed he was carrying a roll of wrapping paper. What if he was genuinely looking for a present for his mother and either thought I was of an age to know what mothers liked receiving or – and here was the agonising part – he knew my work and wanted me to accompany him into Waterstones to sign a book for her. You could read this last concern cynically. I didn’t want a reader of mine to have a bad opinion of me. True, I didn’t. But more than that, I couldn’t forgive the rudeness of my rebuff to what I now decided was a perfectly innocent overture: ‘Hello, would you be so kind as to sign a book for my mother?’ ‘Fuck off.’

  Fuck off, I might be dying, might have sounded a little better. But it was the season of goodwill, for God’s sake. I might just as well have said: ‘Fuck off, it’s Christmas.’

  Then again, since it was Christmas, would it have been so terrible to have given him the little help he wanted whether or not he was pulling a fast one?

  Beggars have mothers too. And what did it matter if he didn’t? Whoever he was – reader or rascal – I had wronged him. Consumed with shame and sorrow, I stumbled into the consulting rooms. The doctor felt my stomach and talked to me at length, but I couldn’t listen. For all I know, I’m dead already.

  Is that all there is?

  I reckon I was about eighteen when I discovered despondent hedonism. It was listening to Peggy Lee singing ‘Is That All There Is?’ that did it. If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s bring out the booze and keep dancing.

  As a philosophy of life it has much to recommend it. If nothing else it solves the problem, at the heart of monotheism, of what to do next. God created us, now what? Are we just to go on saying thank you? If that’s all there is to religion …

  The Peggy Lee song came back to me, sacrilegiously you might think, during a performance of Haydn’s Creation in the Great Hall of University College School, London, this week. It was a half-amateur, half-professional affair, though it was the amateur half – the UCS Centenary Choir – that attracted me. It’s one of the great joys of Christmas in this country that there’s a mass or oratorio being performed somewhere just about every day. And precisely because the choirs are amateur they can be relied on to perform with a marvellous verve. The UCS Haydn was no exception. But were they too thinking, as the concert finished, that they’d glimpsed sublimity and now what?

  Haydn’s Creation begins wonderfully. Darkness broods upon the deep. For a moment we want the universe to stay that way, without form or clatter, undisturbed, uncreated. It is described as chaos, but this is less boisterous than chaos. The spirit of God suddenly moving on the face of the waters is thus unwelcome – an ominous intrusion of divine vandalism – until the orchestra responds explosively to His call for light and we realise that it is better to be alive, even if it’s noisy, than to be unborn.

  Everything is now thrilling as God busies Himself dividing light from darkness, dispelling spirits whose malignancy hadn’t bothered us previously, filling the heavens and inundating those parts of earth destined to be seas. Rain falls, hail, ‘the light and flaky snow’, and in an exquisite aria the angel Raphael hymns the ‘softly purling rivers’ and the ‘limpid brook’.

  Reader, whatever you do or don’t believe, these first days of creation are lovely, no matter that no poet has yet been created to describe them. Sometimes undescription is good too. But try telling God that. No sooner has He formed the beasts – the nimble stag, the sinuous worm, the flexible tiger – than He begins to ask Himself if this is all there is. What He’s missing is praise. A being who will ‘God’s power admire’. Enter Homo sapiens.

  Knowing what we know now, we should have said no then. But the offer was too good to resist: a life of ‘incessant bliss’ partnered, if you’re the man, by a woman of ‘softly smiling virgin looks’ or, if you’re the woman – O lucky virgin, you! – by a man who’ll be your guide at ‘every step’. But disillusion sets in at once. With nothing to do but extol God’s virtues in language that evokes Chief Sitting Bull’s – ‘Him celebrate, Him magnify!’ – Adam and Eve fall to asking if that’s all there is.

  This is where I come unstuck whenever I visit a synagogue or a church. The Him celebrating. Is that all there is to faith? Saying thanks until you start to choke on the word? The advantage I enjoy over Adam and Eve is that I can walk out and find some booze. They, bored to within an inch of their lives, have to get themselves expelled.

  Sin is the natural response to not knowing what to do next, a confession that the grandeur you were promised hasn’t eventuated. Smart religions build sin in, so that you will feel your dereliction is in fact another form of faith. I read Graham Greene avidly as a boy, fascinated by the idea that the worse you behaved the holier you were. Now I realise that this is one of religion’s solutions to the problem of its inherent tedium.

  Another is terrorism. Rather than capitulate to despondent hedonism, let’s blow somebody’s brains out. The great advantage such extremism enjoys over the soul-searching Western liberalism to which we haltingly subscribe is the promise it holds out to its would-be adherents that they won’t ever be left asking what next.

  We, the children of Creation, remain locked in the paradigm of enticement and disappointment. Bathos is in our bones. We know no ‘softly smiling virgin’ awaits us in Paradise when we have killed our hostages. Yet somehow that knowledge leaves us weak instead of strong.

  Is it because we fear we cannot offer the young anything like as good a time as ISIS can? Are we secretly envious of those who aren’t wondering if that is all there is? Is that why, in our descriptions of ourselves, we act as their recruiting agents?

  The gunman who held up the Lindt cafe in Sydney has been described as a ‘lone wolf’. Reader, there is no such thing. A man may act alone but no one thinks alone. In the melange of ideologies he expressed before he killed was much he would have found simply by reading the papers we write. If you oppose the West, we will induct you into the hows and whys of hating us, because no one hates the West more than the West hates itself. If you want to make a bomb to blow us up, we will show you how to do it online.

  Careless talk costs lives, but we welcome its dissemination on the Internet as the very emblem of our liberty. Though we know we are a lethal species, we forbid invigilation of our menace. To the exhausted liberal who believes in nothing, this at least remains an article of faith: the freedom to say what you like, when you like, where you like. And whoever warns of danger is a fearmonger.

  Soon, this faith too will pall and we will ask if that is all there is. Only by then there won’t even be a ‘that’.

  Flyting, sledging, and where to stick your asterisks

  Today I write on ‘Sledging Considered As One of the Fine Arts’. Sledging, for those not familiar with the term, is the practice of on-field verbal intimidation much favoured by Australian cricketers though by no means
confined to them. Every cricket team sledges, though some do it with more aplomb than others.

  As with all aspects of sport, national character is the first determinant of success. The more refined and well mannered the culture, the less accomplished its sledgers. I don’t say the corollary follows – I am too fond of Australia to put its love of vilification down to something primitive in the country’s psyche – but you only have to read Australia’s national poem, ‘The Bastard from the Bush’ (‘Fuck me dead, I’m Foreskin Fred, the Bastard from the Bush’), to see an essential connection between verbal violence and a remote colonial lifestyle.

  That said, it’s important to place sledging in a tradition of insult-flinging to which even the most sophisticated literature owes a debt. Drama, we are told, originates in the sacrificial, propitiatory rituals of ancient communities. We put on a show for the gods and hope they applaud. Poetry originates in the impulse to exchange insults with fellow mortals. ‘Get back to where you come from, that’s somewhere in the bush’ is how the Captain of the Push responds to the challenge to his authority thrown down by Foreskin Fred. ‘May the itching piles torment you, may corns grow on your feet, / May crabs as big as spiders attack your balls a treat. / Then, when you’re down and out, and a hopeless bloody wreck, / May you slip back through your arsehole, and break your bloody neck.’

  Indistinguishable from the satisfaction of getting your own back, hurling abuse and imagining someone else’s suffering is the joy of deploying rhyme and rhythm. We never curse better than we curse in verse. Primary-school playgrounds resound with the scurrilous ditties small children make up about one another. My best friend Martin Cartwright couldn’t leave the classroom without hearing ‘Farty Marty / Spoils the party’. For years I had to put up with ‘Howardy Cowardy Custard / Thinks his pants have rusted’. And a poor religious boy called Manny was yoked with such tireless invention and horrid ingenuity to fanny that his parents had finally to remove him from the school.