The Dog's Last Walk by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

What’s Hecuba to you?

Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan. Not the fan in the Lady Windermere sense. I mean the fan who is an abbreviation of fanatic, that self-abasing follower of a person or a thing whose ardour could in fact do with some of what fans of the other sort provide.

The queue and the fan are of course closely related, in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion. There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month – I’ve no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when – fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order – well, in order, I presume – to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning. Why don’t they just pop into Hamleys? Or walk?

The same occurs outside trainer stores (where they sell gym shoes – that really is the only way to describe them – that neither you nor I would want to wear), hotels (where someone you and I have never heard of is staying), bookshops (for books neither you nor I would want to read), clubs, theatres, and suddenly, even, town halls and similar buildings suitable for revivalist meetings in Labour constituencies. There is no let-up of excitement either, I am assured, outside the Barbican where Benedict Cumberbatch is being Hamlet, a person (Hamlet, not Cumberbatch) who wanted for nothing, was a fan of nobody, and therefore, we can fairly deduce, never queued in his life. Find all the uses of this world weary, flat, stale and unprofitable, and there is no designer skateboard you would hang around all night to buy, and no celebrity of either sex you are going to sit on wet pavements for two days to get a glimpse of. There’s a lot to be said for misanthropy.

I am stern in the matter of being a fan in the fanatic sense, and blame the parents. A proper dose of comic scepticism administered at the right age could stop all that. Listen to your parents shrieking ‘Him!’ or ‘Her!’ or, better still, ‘That!’ with sufficient derision each time you announce the worthless fame-phantom you’ve grown enamoured of – ‘What’s Hecuba to you, or you to Hecuba – I’m speaking figuratively – that you should skip school to gawp at her? Fortinbras, you say? That speck of nothing? That stain of hyena’s vomit? That bowl of undiluted cat’s piss? A dog wouldn’t stop to rub his nose in that piece of shit’ – and there’s just a chance you will start to question your judgement, your self-worth, and your sense of smell. I say just a chance, but just a chance is better than no chance.

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