The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  Some Egyptians, having democratically elected a man who was quick to take on the lineaments of absolutism, now look longingly back to the dictator they already had. Better the despot you know is the thinking of the Russians in relation to Syria. And Russians have some previous when it comes to alternating despots. Maybe we should listen to them from time to time. Since we are all wrong about everything, the more variously wrong voices we attend to the more comprehensively informed about our ignorance we are likely to be.

  Having done dictators, let’s deal with democracy. We think we are for it. Let the people choose. That was what Egyptians recently believed. But they forgot that ‘the people’ often choose badly. So when does a free vote that turns out to be a bad vote turn out to be undemocratic? When the side that you are on says it is. Enter the army. We, who know what we think, call any army interference in civil politics ‘a coup’. Egyptians in favour of ‘the coup’, and who don’t therefore see it as ‘a coup’, call it democracy in action.

  If I knew what I thought I’d say that was a fair description. Using the army to remove, in the name of democracy, a democratically elected leader who thought he’d been elected to be a dictator, thereby rendering illegal the legality of his election, makes a sort of sense if only in that it makes nonsense of the idea that there can be sense.

  What’s happening in Egypt isn’t funny, but no absurdist playwright could have left the language of ideology – the weasel words in which we wrap our beliefs and offer to know what we think – in more disarray.

  Yesterday, upon the stair,

  I met a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today

  I wish, I wish he’d go away.

  But now he’s gone – Mr Certainty – now Parliament has decided against intervention, I can’t help thinking it’s made the wrong choice. Gas for God’s sake! No but yes but.

  Dumb also degrades

  Somewhere out there, wherever things went before there was an Internet, a mere mote in the eye of scandal, smaller even than the baby moon that’s just been discovered running rings around Saturn, perhaps at the back of someone’s drawer or pasted into an ancient journal of the heart, creased, faded, but I fear still identifiable, is a photograph of me without a shirt. I am wearing a pair of those prickly bathing trunks that men and boys were forced into in the early 1950s, made of elasticated Brillo pad, and I have my fists up like Joey Maxim, light heavyweight champion of the world. After his retirement Joey Maxim became a stand-up comedian, as I might become after mine. But I knew nothing of that at the time I posed bare-chested, trying to look menacing. I just wanted to be light heavyweight champion of the world.

  Believe that and you’ll believe anything. In fact, I wanted to be a novelist and literary critic, as would be obvious from the photograph, were you to see it, which I hope to God you never do. I was ten when it was taken, at a holiday camp near Morecambe, and had been forced to adopt the pose by my father who I reckoned could have been light heavyweight champion of the world had his heart been stronger. Why he couldn’t see that I had no such ambition, that I felt humiliated to be photographed without a shirt, I have never understood. He was not without his own prudishness in such matters as swearing, but he couldn’t sympathise with mine in the matter of exposing my chest. But I still believe today what I believed then: clothes maketh the man.

  This reminiscence of delicate feeling is prompted by a story concerning Zac Efron, someone of whom I don’t expect my readers to have heard. Me neither, but research tell me he stars in films made for schoolgirls, goes to the gym, and has just had his shirt ripped off at the MTV Movie Awards.

  Given that Efron was at the awards to receive a prize for Best Shirtless Performance, you would expect him to have come prepared to lose his shirt again. A little powdering and plucking, or whatever you do to look like that, must surely have gone on. He did, though, tweet a thank-you afterwards to the person who unbuttoned him, a young woman called Rita Ora, of whom we also haven’t heard, saying he didn’t know whether he could have done it on his own, by which – since we must assume he has no difficulty unbuttoning his own shirt – he could only have meant brazenly baring what was underneath it. A confession that suggests he is not without a consciousness of modesty at least.

  If I now introduce the name of Cyril Smith it is not to encourage readers to imagine him without his shirt. But there is no escaping the issue of sexual abuse at the moment, whether it’s some public figure being charged, or some other public figure exonerated, and innocent or guilty, accused or accuser, it would seem that we are all being called to account in the matter of sexism and the abuse of power, what we mean by such terms, how much responsibility we bear for the seedy atmosphere of contemporary life.

  Called in by Newsnight last week to address the hair-raising claim made by a UN investigator that sexism in the UK is worse than in other places, three highly intelligent women calmly discussed the sexualisation of women, from exploitation, to denigration, to harassment, to bullying, to rape, agreeing that while some of the UN investigator’s findings were more pertinent than others, it was right nonetheless to talk about a continuum that linked small infractions of common decency to significant manifestations of contempt, denials of opportunity and acts of violence. It is easy to deride the continuum argument. Matters of apparent insignificance at the one end – things we think we should laugh off if we are good sports – and murderousness at the other. A woman playfully ripping off a man’s shirt here, and Cyril Smith brutalising children there. Come on!

  Something, however, is seriously amiss, and we don’t get far discussing what it is, how it has come about, or how to intervene, if we refuse to accept that causes accrete, that the tone of society determines our actions within it, that the lives we allow to be held cheap in the name of a bit of fun one day are lives we might be prepared to hold cheap in far more serious circumstances the next. Maybe monsters like Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith create themselves. But are we certain we know why they thrive when they do? And what subtle signals of allowance and even encouragement we might be sending them?

  To be clear: I am not using the sexualisation of Zac Efron’s body to discredit those who complain about the sexualisation of women’s. On the contrary, I consider the one to be the mirror image of the other. The Page 3 girl pinned on a workshop door degrades all parties to its being there: the inanely objectified girl and those who inanely ogle her. And we should not discount the coarsening effects of inanity itself. To trivialise is also to dishonour. Dumb also degrades. Similarly degraded and inane, anyway, are the girls who shout ‘phwoar’ the minute a boy, a man, a Chippendale, a birthday stripper, undoes a button. I know the argument. It’s irony: women enjoying being the ones who do the gawping for a change. ‘How do you like it when you’re at the receiving end, boys?’ But we’ve had years of that now. If the reversal of roles was intended to liberate and empower women, then where’s the evidence it has?

  Someone might have a better idea – and that won’t include any of the forms of purdah favoured by male societies still frozen in Neolithic terror of women – but until I hear it here’s my recommendation. Let’s all keep our shirts on for a bit.

  The dying bug

  We are not health religionists in this column. We don’t warn against excessive consumption of all the good things in life – such as Giuseppe Rinaldi 2010 Brunate Nebbiolo, or Ribena – because we know that life itself, to be pleasurable, must be excessively consumed.

  And we don’t celebrate austere athletic prowess, as when another pared-down British cyclist in a Lycra onesie pedals to a victory that will lead only to more aggressive, foul-mouthed bikers running red lights and mounting pavements. (I don’t, notice, say that all cyclists fit that description; only that those who do – and they are recognisable by how much higher in their saddles they ride – are more to be feared whenever a Wiggins or a Froome notches up a win.)

  Notwithstanding our principled bodily scepticism, however, we have just emp
loyed the part-time services of a personal trainer, David. I say ‘we’ because there are others in my house he is employed to service. And I say ‘trainer’, though when he gets to me he is not so much a personal trainer as a personal stretcher. You don’t have to be in pursuit of a body beautiful to wish yourself to be the flexuously willowy creature you once were or, failing that, just to be able to pick up something you have dropped.

  Seeing me stoop to retrieve a pound coin on a bus the other day, three people got up to offer me their seats. Two of them were women. The third was a good decade older than me and had a wooden leg. And please don’t tell me he didn’t. I know he didn’t. But now that I have a personal stretcher I might as well let absurdity have its way with me entirely.

  I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me £2,000 a year to amble on a treadmill for half an hour a week and sit and read Grazia in the cooling-off area. So this is not the first time I have been struck by the irony of paying good money to do something I don’t want to do, and moved heaven and earth to be saved from doing when I was a schoolboy.

  For the whole time I was at grammar school I carried around in my back pocket an assortment of notes from my mother requesting that I be excused from PE, cross-country running, football, cricket and swimming on the grounds that I was bilious, hypersensitive, agoraphobic, vertiginous, allergic to the natural hemp from which gym ropes were manufactured, easily nauseated and afraid of water. ‘All these are just excuses for being a pansy,’ the PE teacher told me. ‘They’re not excuses, sir. They’re a description,’ I corrected him – for which he made me hang upside down from the wall bars for an hour. Thereafter, my mother added constitutionally pusillanimous to the list. ‘That means being a pansy, sir,’ I explained to the PE teacher, who hung me from the wall bars again, despite the biblical injunction against the brain ever being positioned lower than the feet.

  Looking back, I realise it wasn’t only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn’t knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn’t they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them? I wasn’t a rebel. I just found it impossible to listen when I was trying to think, and craved sovereignty over my imagination. You would have thought, in that case, that PE was just the ticket; I could hang upside down from the wall bars and think my own thoughts till the hour was up. The trouble was, the only thoughts I had were about killing the PE teacher.

  On top of which, the gym was a locus of the unambiguous. It was regimented and militaristic. It aspired, necessarily, to the unequivocal. You cannot exercise and be amused about it. You cannot integrate the dying bug into your core workout and hold to the position that you are a spiritual being. In this way the body and the mind are each other’s opposite unto death, which is why you have to choose which of them you are going to follow. The great Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima had a passion for bodybuilding as well as literature and even posed for publicity photographs in a ceremonial fundoshi. But in the end, unable to reconcile the irreconcilable, he put a sword through the bodily part of himself.

  Confined to a racetrack or velodrome, the single-minded athlete is a curse only to himself. In these cathedrals of mirthlessness, he can conjoin with his co-religionists in celebration of the body ugly with no detriment to the rest of us. It’s on our roads and pavements that he spreads confusion and violence, and to our parks that he brings disharmony.

  A city park is a wonderful place to practise the ironic life. At once metropolis and country, neither wholly natural nor wholly artificial, home to the sedate swan and the preposterous pelican, a place of new growth that speaks urgently of death, a city park enables us to rejoice in those contrarieties that prevent us turning fanatical or tedious. But none is safe from such events as the Prudential Bike Ride, which this weekend will make a hell of central London with its ‘bike-based entertainment and festival zones’, for which read roads you can’t cross, officious men in yellow bibs, slavishly applauding groupies, unironic X Factor ballads piped through giant speakers, and parks you can’t enjoy. (Yes, yes, and incidental charitable intentions, but I don’t deny that good can sometimes come from evil.)

  Otherwise it’s runners, numbered and logo’d, pounding the paths, fracturing the ambiguous quiet of city nature and frightening the already existentially bemused ducks with the ticking of their Fitbits and the zombie zedding of their headphones. Fortunately, David, my personal stretcher, is not closed to comedy. I might not be laughing when I do the dying bug, but he is. So while he will never make an athlete of me, there is a chance I will make a philosopher of him.

  Weeping in the new year

  I can’t speak for you, reader, but for me no new year can be said to have begun until I’ve shed a tear. The only question is whether I shed it on the last day of the old or the first day of the new, and what in particular precipitates it. This time, I made it through the champagne, fireworks and kisses of the last night of 2013 only to be set off the following morning by the New Year’s Day concert televised live from Vienna.

  Daniel Barenboim, looking as though he were sucking a lemon, leading the Vienna Philharmonic through the stirring slush of Strauss. Other considerations apart, the Vienna Philharmonic is enough to make a grown man cry. Such a zest for life in their playing. Then there’s the nostalgic ritual of the concert itself, dating from 1939, a year already drenched in tears, somehow brave in its continuance, given all that’s gone before, and braver still in the fleeting assertion, shown in the faces of the orchestra and the audience alike, that there isn’t, and never was, a finer place in the whole wide world to be on New Year’s Day than Vienna. As if.

  I mistrust togetherness tears, precisely because I’m susceptible to them. The band plays, emotions surge, the oceanic sensation of limitlessness beguiles you into the arms of humanity, and the next minute you’re giving a Nazi salute. That’s something else that gets the tear ducts working – Vienna, with its beautiful and treacherous associations; Vienna, with its power to inspire longing and loathing. ‘Wonderful city where I belong’ – I used to love listening to Richard Tauber sing about Vienna, but he’d had to flee it at about the time Das Neujahrskonzert was inaugurated, wonderful or not. Behind the tears, the questions. Ought I to be feeling what I’m feeling? Ought I to be watching at all?

  In a sense, every new year is a reminder of the ones before. Small wonder they’re upsetting. They mark the passage of time even more fatefully than birthdays do. The bells toll and the world is grown a little older. And without doubt, part of what’s upsetting me as I watch the Vienna Philharmonic playing in 2014 is the memory of a New Year’s Eve I spent in Vienna twenty years ago, waltzing with my wife of that time on Graben Street, hearing Tauber in my head, loving the snow, the glamour, the swirl of years and dresses, the fantasy of being transported back to the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which would not, in truth, have been that great for me.

  But then it’s all fantasy, every bit of it. Yes, we’d waltzed in the snow – or at least I’d made as though to waltz – but we’d been brawling all day, with friends, with each other, with a waiter who’d brought us what we hadn’t ordered at a coffee house that wasn’t as good as the coffee houses we’d read about, even arguing with our friends’ dog who froze fast to the icy ground the minute he set a paw outside the hotel and so expected us to take turns carrying him. A magical New Year’s Eve? Only if I scissor out the dog, our arguments, the truth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and picture us waltzing forever in an empty landscape like figures on a music box.

  New year tears work either way: remembering what was or what wasn’t. And I now realise I’d been preparing them, in anticipation either of sorrow or a too-transient happiness, from the very first New Year’s Eve of which I could be said to be conscious, when I sat in the kitchen watching Jimmy Shand on television, wondering why everyone I knew was at a party and I wasn’t – everyone, that is, except my grandfather, who sat on a chair next to me, coughing up bile and clipping his yellow
toenails with the scissors I employed to cut balsa wood.

  It has to be better than this, I thought; I don’t have to be the saddest boy on the planet; it doesn’t just have to be me and Jimmy Shand and an old man with rotting toenails. But it was many years before it did get any better than that, and even then the exquisitely romantic New Year’s Eve I longed for – waltzing in the streets of Vienna, for example, or dancing cheek to cheek with Ava Gardner in a bar in Manhattan while Yanks who looked like Fred Astaire went mad in Times Square – refused to materialise.

  From the age of twelve to sixteen, I played brag on New Year’s Eve with school friends, cursing the celibacy of the occasion, cursing the cards I was dealt, cursing the fact that I’d been born poor, though I couldn’t have said how riches would have helped, and yet knowing that on some future New Year’s Eve I would look back on these evenings with an aching fondness, missing our once-carefree celibacy, the jokes we shared, the excitement of cards, our vanished youth.

  Enter girls at last, and all that happened to my New Year’s Eves was that they became sadder still. You have to have reached a mature age before the girl you take to a New Year’s Eve party is the girl you want to leave it with. If they were always wrong for me, I was certainly always wrong for them. My dissatisfaction with the year that had been, matched only by my dissatisfaction already with the year to come, made me a horrible companion.

  For men like me, the future is simply too close to the past on New Year’s Eve. We should try separating them, first by banning the countdown to midnight, then by outlawing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and finally by interposing a dead or fallow year between New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Worth it for a dry eye once in a while.