On Tuesday we buried my great-uncle Gus. Most of the service was in Hebrew and I spent it, as I always do at these occasions, glancing at the prayerbooks of the men around me, trying to guess, from the shapes of the separate masses of indecipherable script in their hands, which page I was supposed to be on.

Fortunately, the bit about what a kind, successful and funny chap Gus was (which he absolutely was - he was a Coren, after all) was in English, and I was able to liven up and pay attention. And then the rabbi started talking about “Gus's father, Harry, who came here from central Poland as a teenager...”

I remember my great-grandpa Harry very well. The patriarch. The first Coren. I am the only son of the only son of his first son, and I have always considered that, in my solipsistic way, to be a very big deal.

I remember his 90th birthday party in 1975, sitting on his knee, kissing his face and feeling the coarse whiskers against my lips. I remember being pleased that he was exactly the same age as my favourite football team, QPR, which was founded in 1885.

Twenty-three years later, standing at the funeral of his last surviving son, the women on one side, men on the other, Gus in a box in front of us with a cloth over it bearing the Star of David, I thought how interesting it was, at a time when many of the current generation of Polish immigrants are said to be returning home because the construction work is drying up, that we were all still here - dozens of us descended from a single Pole who came in 1903 - more than 100 years later. Not one of us has gone back. Even to visit.

That is the difference between the two kinds of migration, you see. The economic and the humanitarian. We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it. Harry didn't leave in the hope of finding a better life. Just a life. The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore. My sympathy for the plight of the modern Polack is thus limited, and if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it.

When I got home from the funeral I read about the capture of Radovan Karadzic, and saw footage of some of the genocide that he himself instigated so recently, so near to Poland. Serbia has hunted him down, it is said, because it wants to join the EU. But the European Union is not so fussy as it once was. Virulently racist populist politicians hold significant power now in Central and Eastern Europe, and the modern, expand-at-all-costs EU is not bothered by that at all.

Only this week a Radio 4 programme revealed plans by the Lithuanian state prosecutor (with the full support of Lithuania's Deputy Foreign Minister, Jaroslavas Neverovicas) to charge former members of the Jewish resistance in Lithuania - escapees from the ghetto, who were fighting for their lives - with war crimes. As state-sponsored anti-Semitism, it makes Jörg Haider (remember him?), with his mild nostalgia for shiny leather boots and concentration camps, seem terribly innocuous.

Lithuania - which was part of the same state as Poland until 1795 and, like Poland, but unlike Germany, has never gone through any process of recrimination for, or even fully acknowledged, its role in the Holocaust - had an impressive war record, wiping out 95 per cent of its Jewish population, 200,000 people, with very little help from the invaders.

Since then it has shown no interest in prosecuting its own war criminals. And now it's decided that it was all the Jews' fault - again. Don't expect Poland not to follow suit.

Every year I have to write about this, and as nobody seems to be paying attention I guess I'm going to have to do it again. How stupid do the sports picture editors think we are? Every time the England team fall into disarray (which is quite frequently) they run a back-page photograph of the England captain, Michael Vaughan, appearing to rub his head in dismay and confusion.

But he isn't. He is mussing his hair out of vanity. He has been wearing a batting helmet for, well, in his case not very long, but long enough to have developed “hat hair”. He has been bowled out. He now has to walk back to the pavilion, tracked all the way by a steadycam, and, even in his adversity, he wants to spike up his hair and look nice on the telly. They all do it. And whenever a famous batsman who is having a run of bad form gets out cheaply the hair-mussing shot is dug out, and captioned “devastated” or “baffled”.

It's such an insult to our intelligence. It's like the shots of celebrities caught in the middle of a blink that are used to suggest that they are drunk. Except that, while drunk people do sometimes appear heavy-lidded, people who are baffled and confused and depressed DO NOT rub their heads! Any more than surprised people slap their foreheads. Or people lost in thought touch their chin with their finger.

Domino's Pizza gleefully reports an upsurge in custom as middle-class families cut back on eating in restaurants and take to dialling yucky fast food instead, and is claiming, rather boldly, that “staying in is the new going out”.

So, what, is obese the new healthy? Is heart disease the new cool? Is processed fatty rubbish in a box the new five portions a day? Is some spotty groik haring up and down your road at all hours of the night and morning on a screechy little scooter the new dawn chorus?

Have you noticed how women smoking outside office buildings all do it with the non-fag-holding forearm folded across their midriff and the ciggy-toting arm propped on it at the elbow, so that they only have to lever the forearm backwards and forwards to bring the hot little stub to their mouths?

Why do they do that? In winter I thought that maybe it was because they were cold and it was a way of keeping warm when they'd hustled out coatless in their rush to dilate those ventricles. But they're still doing it now in high summer. Is it modest protection of the bosom? Or are they so wheezy and degenerate from the years of self-abuse that they are too weak to hold a fag properly?

And why is it only women? Men seem to be able to smoke perfectly normally, chugging it down pinched between forefinger and thumb and then punching the butt out into the road for some poor immigrant to sweep up later. But girls all do this very defensive “don't-mind-me-I'm-just-snarfing-a-wee-fag” thing.

Are they hugging themselves as a consolation for the fact that, while they are outside, some ruddy-faced non-smoker who doesn't have to leave her desk every 20 minutes is being promoted above them? Or is it, perhaps, because they think it looks cute? Any ideas?

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