Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Anyone Speak English?

Did I recently read, or did I just dream, of a surgeon halting an operation on the grounds that the theatre nurses lacked adequate English to understand his instructions? A fine thing, multiculturalism in action; necessary, too, when you have hospitals to staff and all your nationals are immobilised by dreams of being on Big Brother; but a scalpel is still a scalpel and not a box of matches. Did I also read that the surgeon in question was reprimanded for his action? No surprise there. Language is the last taboo. By decree of right thinking we have brought down the Tower of Babel, come to understand one another perfectly – and anybody who says otherwise is an alarm clock.

Xenophobic of me, I admit, to assume that the nurses in question must have come from foreign parts. And unpatriotic at the same time. Are we not capable of producing our own unintelligibility?

That I am not able to understand half the things that are said to me, particularly when I am on the phone to a helpline, or getting software assistance from somewhere in the Orkneys, or being handed from ‘agent’ to ‘agent’ at a call centre in Romsey, I have now come to accept as normal. It’s my fault, I tell myself, for asking questions and then not bothering to listen to the answers. I am grown incurious. I am losing my hearing. It’s my age. But recently the malfunction has started to kick in the other way as well; increasingly, people are not understanding a word I say to them.

Seasickness, for example. Is that too difficult? Seasickness pills. The chemist’s assistant looks at me as I though I am a madman. She leans towards me, making a hearing trumpet of her face. Not a syllable does she speak. Maybe she guesses, correctly, that if she did form a word I’d be none the wiser. I make a little boat of my hand and send it bobbing on the ocean waves. ‘Seasickness pills.’

‘Ah, pill,’ she says at last. Not in an entirely confident spirit. This might be a pharmacy but only a pedant would take that to mean that they sell pharmaceuticals.

‘Yes,’ I say, encouraging her. I was a teacher once and know how to leap on the back of dawning intelligence and make it gallop. ‘Pill, yes, good, but specifically pill for seasickness.’

She’s in trouble again, looking around for help. Soon shops are going to have to employ translators to mediate between people born after 1980 and people born before it. ‘Scenic pill?’ she tries. And for a moment I wonder whether there are such things and whether I should be buying them. A pill for improving your appreciation of scenery, would that be, or a pill for calming you down after you’ve been too moved by scenery – a sort of Stendhal syndrome prophylactic? Which reminds me that pills can be for or against and that all this might be my fault for not being sufficiently precise in the matter of which I want.

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