High life | 15 August 2019

If it hadn’t arrived I’d be dead, but it was hardly welcome: another birthday — 38 years old on 11 August, but for any pedant among you, reverse the numerals and you’ll get it right. Thirty-eight came to me as I was sparring with a young whippersnapper from Norway recently. I was out of breath and told him that, at 38, I was having trouble keeping up. ‘You’re doing fine for 38,’ he said, and then attacked as if there was no tomorrow, the brute.

What’s that old cliché about being as old as you feel? I’ve never felt younger, but I have to stop giving advice to people. La Rochefoucauld warned about that: old men give advice because they can no longer set a bad example. Ouch! I try to be bad at all times but others do not want to be bad with me. Well, not always, but most of the time. Oy veh!

I have just finished a book about the Left Bank of Paris and the writers and artists who worked and played there, and noticed that, on my birthday following the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the great Albert Camus was the only one to express revulsion and publish an editorial against the savagery of the act. What double standards we hold. We only speak about Nazi crimes but fail to mention the incineration of innocents by us, or the three million German women raped by the Soviets.

Never mind. We have other problems now, but the hypocrisy persists. And it gives the lie to the nostalgic fantasy of American goodness. Uncle Sam is the only one to have vaporised innocents after literally having forced Japan to go to war with the embargo he had imposed.