There's only one word these people understand. And that word is towgets

He was standing at the stop where you catch the Art Bus from Tate Britain to Tate Modern via the National Gallery. Wearing a white linen suit over a black shirt - never a good sign, though I blush to admit I favoured it myself in earlier times - and a floppy cricketer's hat (a floppy cricketer's hat I have never favoured). He was laughing and talking to himself, knitting words to nobody with his teeth, and he saw me before I saw him. Don't ask me to explain how you know that someone's seen you before you've seen see them if you haven't seen them to ascertain as much, it's just one of those animal things - your pelt prickles and you know that you've been observed.

He was standing at the stop where you catch the Art Bus from Tate Britain to Tate Modern via the National Gallery. Wearing a white linen suit over a black shirt - never a good sign, though I blush to admit I favoured it myself in earlier times - and a floppy cricketer's hat (a floppy cricketer's hat I have never favoured). He was laughing and talking to himself, knitting words to nobody with his teeth, and he saw me before I saw him. Don't ask me to explain how you know that someone's seen you before you've seen see them if you haven't seen them to ascertain as much, it's just one of those animal things - your pelt prickles and you know that you've been observed.

I didn't recognise him as an individual. But I knew the species. What the Americans call a nudje or a nudnik, but what we in Manchester, having more feeling for the expressiveness of Yiddish, call a nudzhjee. Putting up his market stall, or sotto voce, while knocking out pre-rusted canteens of cutlery, my father would suddenly sing a warning - "Nudzhjee! Nudzhjee!" - meaning: "Look busy, there's a nuisance coming this way."

Like so many Yiddish pejoratives, the word carries an implication of no-hoperness. But also something manic: a nudzhjee does not just bore you, he brings to boredom a sort of genius for tedious irrelevance and a tirelessness that can be truly terrifying. A nishtikeit is merely a nobody, and a nochshlepper no more than a hanger-on - neither is much of a bother. You might even cultivate your own nochshlepper the way that the ancients kept fools, to entertain your friends and demonstrate your superiority. Schoolgirls who discover they are beautiful often encourage a fat nochshlepper with bad skin to tail around after them. Artists and writers do the same with pet critics. But a nudzhjee nobody encourages. A nudzhjee drains life of meaning.

Perhaps because he was proof against all forms of nihilism and was possessed of the gift of finding nothing uninteresting, my father had a soft spot for nudzhjees. His warning call - "Nudzhjee! Nudzhjee!" - had affection and sometimes even a degree of keen anticipation in it. He liked to play with nudzhjees. Not cruelly. He wouldn't tease or otherwise lead them on (supposing it is possible to lead on a nudzhjee), but he would let them ramble interminably, putting his head to one side and rolling his eyes, stopping them only to deliver an exclamation of indulgent disbelief which I believe was entirely his invention - "Towg!" And then, when he'd finally had enough, "Towgets!", "towgets" being, according to my father's unique system of grammar, the superlative form of "towg".

I can't explain why, but there were more nudzhjees in those days. Perhaps my father attracted them. Or perhaps the modern ones stay in, watching Big Brother and wishing they could be on it. We had several in our street, the most notorious being Harries, who was troubled by an over-production of tartar. Not the sauce, not the silk, not the descendant of Ghengis Khan, but the concretion of calcium phosphate manufactured by saliva.

What made Harries the über-nudzhjee he was, a nudzhjee with a reputation that extended to the whole of Prestwich and Heaton Park, was the amount of tartar he produced, the amount of saliva that produced it and the interest he had in getting you to look at the problem for yourself. Only my father was prepared to allow Harries to open his mouth and show him. "What's it like in there?" we asked. "Bet it's like a pot-hole in a glacier. Bet it's like one of those caves where bats have been defecating for centuries. Bet it's like a lime pit. Bet it's..."

"Towgets," my father said.

On the day of my father's funeral, every road to the cemetery was jammed. I come from a big family and my father had many friends. Nothing unusual in that. What made the difference were the nudzhjees, travelling in from all over Manchester, wanting to pay their respects to the only man who'd ever given them a hearing. Dignified they were, too. And utterly silent. Though whether that's because one nudzhjee cancels out another, or because they know there's no buttonholing death, I cannot say. My preferred explanation is that they now believed there was nobody left alive worth nudzhjeeing.

"So why's someone of your wealth waiting for the Art Bus?" the nudzhjee in the floppy cricketer's hat asked me with a limping laugh.

The usual problem: do you turn away and say nothing, thereby looking a prat and swallowing the imputation, or do you engage.

"You have the wrong person," I engaged. "And I am waiting for the 77A not the Art Bus."

"Great column in The Observer!" he continued.

"Wrong person."

" Hello! magazine?"

"Wrong person."

"No you're not, you're Howard Jacobson. My favourite writer after Proust." He removed a battered volume of Proust from his jacket pocket and slapped it. "Great writer. The best. But I'll tell you - he didn't have to do what you have to do, he didn't have to come up with something new every week. And that's the real test of a writer, I think. Not a continuous, undisturbed narrative, but a new start every week. Am I right?'

I took a deep breath. "Towgets," I said.

"Yeah, sure, sure, he's good too. I love Notes of a Dirty Old Man."

"That's Bukowski."

"Of course! You're right. So who's Towgets?"

A great weariness descended on me. Suddenly I wanted my daddy.