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And Another Thing

Sunday 1 August 2004

Blame your airport wait on dim Darren and Julie

I guess we’ve all been through an airport at some point in the past few weeks and I guess we all turned up, as requested, two hours before the scheduled departure time. Why? It used to be one hour, so why is it now two?

We’re told that airports need the extra time because, in the wake of September 11, stringent security checks have to be made. Ah, yes. September 11. The one-size-fits-all excuse for absolutely everything.

Sure, in America the twin towers thing has slowed down your rate of progress through an airport to the point where technically you are classified as a missing person.

This is because, before the attacks, Americans treated planes like we treat buses. Security was so slack – the airlines didn’t even have to match luggage to passengers, for instance – that I’m surprised Bin Laden’s suicide jockeys had to resort to Stanley knives. I’d have thought they could have boarded with a brace of AKs and a box of rockets.

Now, though, the pendulum has swung completely the other way. The Americans won’t let you on a plane until they’ve ruined your laptop, and half a dozen spaniels have had a good rummage round your shoes.

In the civilised world, however, where there are Red Brigades and Baader Meinhofs, we have known all about hijackings for 30 years, so airports have always been run like nuclear research facilities. We’ve always been barraged with silly questions while checking in. Bags have always had to be matched to passengers before a plane can take off. And the policemen have always dressed up like Vin Diesel.

In fact the only difference, so far as I can tell, between European air travel pre-September 11 and post-September 11 is that now you have to leave all your cutlery in a big bin before being allowed on board. So why the two-hour check-in rule?

It is a source of massive marital stress in this house. My wife insists on being there when asked, whereas I think 40 minutes is plenty.

I like to check in last, on the basis that the final bags to be loaded into the hold will be the first off at the other end, and I like to be greeted by a stewardess on the plane who tuts a lot and looks at her watch.

And here’s the killer. I’ve never missed a plane.

Deep down, I’ve always suspected that the two-hour rule is nothing more than airport authorities using the destruction of the World Trade Center as a means of getting us into their giant shopping malls for an extra hour so we can spend more on currency converters, oysters and inflatable pillows.

My wife, who as I write is packing for our Easter break, says I’m a cynic. So, OK then. If security remains the same and it has nothing to do with pre-flight retail therapy, why? Why does anybody think it takes two hours to walk from one side of a building to the other?

Does it perhaps have something to do with obesity? Are we all now so enormous that we move at the pace of an earth mover? But with all the moving walkways at airports, I hardly think this is it. So why? In two hours, they could unpack and rebuild all the electrical appliances in my suitcase, perform keyhole surgery on my abdomen, do deep searches on all my relations and there’d still be enough time left to buy 200 fags and a tin of horrid Harrods shortbread. In two hours, I could park at Gatwick and have time to catch a plane from Manchester.

I suspect the answer may well be found by examining the class system. If you fly first or business, they tell you the check-in takes 60 minutes. It’s only people in cattle class who are asked to get there two hours before the plane’s due to leave.

On the face of it, this seems silly. Club-class people still have to get a boarding pass. Their bags still have to get to the plane. And don’t say the single fast-track lane moves any faster than the 400 channels for ordinary people, because I assure you it doesn’t.

So why should a club-class passenger be capable of getting to the plane in an hour when people in the back need two? Are airport authorities suggesting that people at the back can’t read direction signs properly and get lost a lot? Are they saying people in thrifty cannot walk past a burger joint without being overwhelmed with a need to stuff their faces with chips? Are we to understand that the less well-off cannot tell the time?

Well, let’s think. It’s always the Darrens and the Julies who have to be paged over the airport PA. And it’s only mouth breathers in football shirts who queue for half an hour for the X-ray machine and then empty their pockets of scissors and daggers. And when was the last time you saw a businessman fumbling around for his passport after he got to the immigration desk?

I may be on to something here. They want you at the airport two hours early because in Brainless Britain everyone else is too thick to get to the plane any faster.

Perhaps a national IQ standard might be the answer. People from Mensa should be allowed to check in two minutes before the flight goes. Those with worryingly long arms must be there somewhat earlier.

Sunday 22 August 2004

Proper writing is like so overr8ed, innit kids

When asked how he felt about the chaos at Heathrow last week, an American student who had been delayed for 12 hours said: ‘I am so exhausted now, it’s like, “whatever”.’

This is interesting because I went on holiday this year with two 13-year-old girls. Actually no. Let’s be specific about this. I went on a holiday where two 13-year-old girls were present. And one, who had been bombarded with text messages from a would-be suitor, said to the other: ‘It’s like, “whatever”.’

In my daughter’s world almost everything is ‘like, whatever’.

The poor weather is like, whatever. The onset of a new school term is like, whatever. Paula Radcliffe’s 23-mile marathon is like, whatever. Mysteriously, though, Led Zeppelin are so like, cool.

I’m sure your children speak the same way; I’m equally sure they deliver longer sentences in a flat monotone with a scorpion tail of rising inflection at the end.

This unbelievably irritating syntax, I suspect, has been picked up from too many Australian television programmes.

Couple these speech patterns with the ‘like, whatever’ that has come from some exclusively blonde and pink valley in Los Angeles, and we’re left with an odd conclusion. A girl born in London and raised in Oxfordshire has developed an accent from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Yup, thanks to satellite television, my daughter now speaks Polynesian.

This is not the end of the world because eventually she will grow out of it in much the same way that you and I at some point stopped describing Emerson, Lake and Palmer as ‘far out’ and Goa as ‘groovy’.

What she may not grow out of, however, is her insistence that ‘today’ is spelt with a 2 and that ‘great’ somehow has an 8 in it. This new language has now spilt from the mobile phone into her thank-you letters and homework.

Those of a Daily Telegraph disposition believe that txt spk spells the end for proper English and are furious, but really it’s hard to see why.

Think. When pictograms and hieroglyphics were replaced with letters and numbers, did people paint angry drawings in green ink in the caves of Tunbridge Wells, declaring that this new ‘writing’ was the work of the devil? Imagine having to “write” to a newspaper wn you’ve hrd a swllw. How much easier it is to simply draw one.

Throughout history, great men have laboured over the written word, endlessly modifying the letters so they could be transcribed more quickly and read more easily. Nobody, for instance, complained when the Carolingian minuscule came along. They simply used it until they decided Gothic angularity was better. And then they used that.

The alphabet, too, has been endlessly altered to contemporary demands. Not until the invention of the settee and the dimmer switch and thus the introduction of Nancy Mitford’s guide to what’s in and what’s not was the letter U deemed necessary. It was not until the fifteenth century that we were given a J, and although the W came along in the tenth century, modern Germans still seem to manage perfectly well by using a V instead. Except when the German managing director of Aston Martin tries to say ‘vanquish’.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote ‘nostrils’ as ‘nosethirles’ and Shakespeare spelt his name differently on each of the five occasions he is known to have written it. Spelling was not an issue until the invention of school and the consequent need to fill the children’s day with something other than rotational farming methods.

Now our days are filled with distractions. You’ve got to locate a signal for your BlackBerry, download some garage on to your iPod and still find time to work, cook, clean the house and kick someone’s head in on the PlayStation. Speed writing is therefore a damn good idea.

At journalism college I was taught Teeline shorthand and although I wasn’t very good at it – I cheated in my final exam by using a tape recorder, long hair and an earpiece – I did recognise that it made a great deal more sense than the traditional phonetic alphabet.

Some people, even without the benefit of long hair and earpieces, were happily writing at 110 words a minute, more than twice what could be achieved if they were writing ‘properly’. So why, I figured, if this works so well, do we still persevere with ABC, the language of the quill?

We changed the way we wrote when steel-nibbed pens replaced feathers, so why not change now that silicon impulses have replaced the Biro? You can’t write shorthand on a conventional keyboard but you can write txt spk. And it is perfectly legible. ‘2day i wnt 2 c the dctr who sd my bld prssur ws gr8’. What part of that can you not understand? A language without vowels: it’s never done the Welsh any harm.

Adopting txt spk as the new alphabet would mean that I could say more each week in this tiny creased corner of your newspaper. And because I’m paid by the word it means that I’d be better off too. This would be ‘cool’. And the lovely thing is that the newspaper’s accountants would have to dismiss the pay rise by saying it’s ‘like, whatever’.

Sunday 29 August 2004

I have now discovered the highest form of life: wasps

There was much talk in the scientific community last week about the origins and meaning of an interstellar radio message picked up by a telescope in Puerto Rico.

To the untrained ear it sounds like a Clanger talking to the Soup Dragon, but to those who run Seti, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, it could well be ‘first contact’, the first real evidence that we are not alone in the universe.

The temptation is to reply, but how do we know the message was meant for us? What if it were directed at some other species on Earth? And how would the sender respond if he were to discover that his intergalactic email had been intercepted? I have a horrible feeling that the real recipient may be the wasp, which this year seems to be around in greater numbers than ever. Come on, you must have noticed that since the signal was picked up it has been impossible to go outside without being buzzed.

There’s plenty of evidence that wasps are not of this earth. Unlike any other animal, with the possible exception of the owl and the Australian, they serve no purpose. They’re not in the food chain, they can’t make honey and they’re not fluffy. Nature has a habit of extinguishing its more useless experiments. The dinosaur went west when it grew too big and the dodo when it mislaid its wings.

But the pointy yet strangely pointless wasp soldiers on. Why?

There’s more, too. Wasps can smell a bowl of sugar from five miles away. How? Sugar does not smell. What’s more, they can organise flight paths from their nests to known sources of food. Again, how, unless they have been trained in the complexities of air traffic control?

Here’s another nugget. Wasps are vindictive. Pretty well every creature will attack when it’s hungry or threatened whereas a wasp will attack if you’ve annoyed it in some way. Local councils, which tend to be staffed by animal-loving eco-mentalists, are forever producing leaflets portraying the wasp as a benign part of the British summer – a sort of airborne nettle – forgetting perhaps that each year wasps kill more people than sharks, alligators, lightning, scorpions, jellyfish and spiders combined.

And try this for size. A wasp can lay its eggs inside a caterpillar, knowing that when they hatch the baby wasps will be able to eat the creature from the inside out. And here’s the really clever bit. Normally, the host’s immune system would destroy the eggs before they had a chance to hatch; so, to get round this they are coated with a virus that genetically modifies the caterpillar to ignore the invasion. In other words, a wasp can alter the very being of another creature.

Biologists have examined this virus and found that it exists nowhere else on Earth. They’ve also worked out that it’s been around for more than 100 million years… which is when that strange radio message from the stars was sent.

You may be interested to learn that wasps eat garden furniture. They chew the wood, mixing it with saliva to make paper for their nests. And we think dolphins are intelligent. Furthermore, wasps are pretty much indestructible. I now have an electric tennis racket that turns the art of insect control into a sport. Instead of catgut, the strings are made from metal strips connected to a powerful battery. One touch will kill anything up to and including a large dog, but wasps? They sit there, jiggling around, until you take your finger off the power button, whereupon they simply fly away.

Only the other day, after what I have to say was a damn good shot, I cut a German Yellowjacket in half with a carving knife. Such a devastating blow would have killed Flipper instantly, but the wasp? Its head remained alive, its antennae wiggling, perhaps sending messages to outer space, pinpointing my position.

We need at this point to examine the mating characteristics of the wasp, which are, to say the least, odd. As summer draws to an end the males produce a huge semen duvet in which the queen will hibernate. When she wakes for the spring, she uses the sperm to fertilise her eggs and the cycle is repeated.

This process poses a few questions. How, for instance, does a wasp produce semen? This would involve masturbation, and that’s a concept which is difficult to visualise: 10,000 wasps in a nest all taking Captain Picard to warp speed. We know they are making paper for their nests, but what else are they using it for? To print some copies of Asian Babe Wasps? ‘Ooh, Adolf. After you with that picture of the Norwegian queen.’

It sounds unlikely. It sounds even more unlikely when you discover that having spent the summer collecting proteins for their young, adult male wasps are free, as autumn approaches, to gorge themselves on rotting apples. This renders them fat, lazy and drunk.

Perhaps this is why the radio message has been received. Perhaps the alien beings that put the wasp on Earth are calling to find out why world domination has not yet been achieved. I doubt they’ll be pleased when they find that their army has been defeated by Granny Smith.

Sunday 5 September 2004

The doctors are out to get me

Yesterday I spent the afternoon pretty much naked, in a darkened room, while an attractive blonde applied lashings of warm lubricating jelly to most of my soft underbelly. Sounds like fun. But unfortunately this was an ultrasound test, part of my fourth medical so far this year.

I have been sucked dry, pumped up, bent double and asked a range of questions so impertinent that even Paxman would blanch. I’ve been probed, hit, tickled, smeared and X-rayed, and I’ve forgotten what it’s like to pee in a lavatory. These days, I only ever relieve myself into small plastic vials.

The problem is that insurance companies like to be absolutely sure you’re not at death’s door before providing cover. Which, surely, is a bit like asking to see the dealer’s cards before making a bet.

To make matters worse, insurance is far from the only reason why you need a medical. You need one for an HGV licence, or a mortgage, or a job. And every single organisation insists that you undergo its bespoke check-up.

Things are so stupid that my local practice employs someone who spends half her working week dealing with nothing but people who want to borrow five grand for a kitchen extension. And she can’t even do that properly, thanks to me. Because I have so many contracts with so many people, and because I’m forever climbing into jet fighters, I have become The World’s Most Checked Man. As such, I am a leading expert on medicals.

When I went away to school, the doctor held my testicles and asked me to cough. He could have established my reflexes were fine by tapping my knees gently with a small rounders bat, but hey, this was a public school, so into the pants he plunged.

Would that it were that simple these days. Today, the first question you’re always asked is, ‘Have you got Aids?’ Well unless you can catch it from slobbing in front of the television, or going to Cotswolds dinner parties, I very much doubt it.

The second question you’re asked is whether you’re partial to a bit of same-sex heroin. Can we just get one thing clear. I know there are no Conservative voters in the media, but there are several heterosexuals and I’m one of them. And no, I’ve never slept with an East African prostitute, and the only hypodermic needle I’ve seen all week is the one you’re about to plunge into my arm to check I’m not lying.

The fact that I smoke 60 cigarettes a day and drive like a maniac for a living doesn’t seem to bother them. Not until you get to page 442 on the form.

When they’re absolutely convinced that you’re not a Glaswegian smacked-up rent boy with a girlfriend in Nairobi, they move on to check your blood pressure. Mine is 100/60, same as it was last week, when the Norwich Union asked the same damn thing.

Then you pee in another jar, and then you sit back as the nurse hunts around for the tiny bit of blood you have left after the Scottish Widows had their fill the previous month. After all the blood tests this year, I couldn’t even be a donor for an injured field mouse. Small wonder the pressure’s so low: I’m empty.

After my fluids have been checked, the doctor normally sticks his whole head in my bottom. Well, that’s what it feels like. ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh,’ I normally say, until he comes out again to explain that it was only his finger.

Soon, you will be led to the scales which, in doctors’ surgeries, are always set to over-read. I am 15 stone, minus a few pounds for all the blood and urine that’s been extracted. But in a doctor’s surgery, I weigh about the same as the Flying Scotsman. This, to an insurance company, is a good thing. Whoever heard of a fat heroin-user? And what’s more, fat people are ipso facto unattractive, which means they’re less likely to be having much in the way of man-on-man action.

At the end of the session, by which time everyone in the waiting room has died from whatever it was that brought them there in the first place, you will be asked for the medical history of your entire family, back to the middle of the eighteenth century.

Why? Even after the doctor has hit you in the elbow with his hammer and asked you to read his wall, he will still not know if there are tumours the size of conkers dangling from your brain, but the form will be completed anyway.

And you’ll be on your way to a new conservatory.

It’s all a complete waste of time, and I haven’t finished yet because at some point in the procedure, the GP is bound to uncover something that warrants further investigation. This will mean a trip to the hospital where you will get lost.

I did, and that’s how I came to be lying in a darkened room, with a pretty blonde smearing me with KY Jelly. She then ran her ultrasound detector all over my belly, before turning on the light and giving me the good news. I’m not pregnant.

Sunday 12 September 2004

Let’s brand our man’s army

A new type of training shoe was introduced this week. It is grey, made in Vietnam and costs £39.50. Or £79 if you want one for the other foot as well.

In a world of Nike Motion Control Air Sprung Hi-Loaders, you might expect this rather dour and expensive new product to be a commercial flop. But, because the shoe was tested by someone’s mate in the forces, it’s being sold with an army insignia on the box. That makes it a ‘British Army’ training shoe, and that gives it an appeal Nike can only dream about.

Branding has now reached the point where the product doesn’t matter; only the logo. Already you can avail yourself of a JCB cardigan and pop down to the off-licence for a litre of Kalashnikov vodka – guaranteed to blow your head clean off. And how long will it be before Cadbury gets into romantic fiction, and Louis Vuitton into cars?

Even the dullest and most useless products are enlivened by the right name. A hotel, for instance, can raise its prices if it provides Gilchrist & Soames shampoo in its bathrooms. Who are Gilchrist & Soames? God knows, but the handle has a nanny-knows-best ring to it. There’s a sense that it’ll bring a well-scrubbed gleam to your secret gentlemen’s places.

I have no problem with this. If I’m in a shop, faced with a choice of two cardigans that seem similar, I’ll go for the JCB option because there’s a subliminal assumption that Anthony Bamford has personally inspected the sheep from which the wool came and his wife, Carole, has done the knitting. For sure there’s a suggestion that the company wouldn’t waste 50 years of hard graft by sticking its badge on rubbish.

A prestigious badge gives clueless shoppers a sense of well-being, a sense that their money is not being wasted on tat.

The perfect life, then: suit by Knight, Frank & Rutley, mobile phone by Boeing, car by Bausch & Lomb, furniture by Holland & Holland, kitchen utensils by Mercedes-Benz, children by Uma Thurman, armpit hair by the mysterious Gilchrist & Soames and, best of all, shoes by the British Army.

This is the first time the service has endorsed a commercial product and there’s no doubt it’s entering a minefield. Colonel Robert Clifford, head of the Queen’s Own Light Sponsorship Brigade, said this week: ‘We need to be exceptionally careful about what we link ourselves to.’ Too right, matey.

You could probably get away with a ‘British Army’-branded Land Rover or some green ‘British Army’ binoculars – the Swiss Army has sponsored penknives for years. I think ‘British Army’ lager might be worth a go, too.

But I don’t think ‘army’ meat pies or ‘army’ haircuts would go down well. Also, I probably wouldn’t want to spend time on an ‘army’ holiday. It might have worked 100 years ago when they were in Ceylon and half the Caribbean, but today they only go to Belfast, Belize or Basra.

This leaves us with a problem.

The small income that could be generated from Land Rovers, binoculars and lager would in no way compensate for the inevitable outcry that such a scheme would provoke.

However, what if the deal were to work the other way around? Instead of the army sponsoring commercial products, why not get the makers of those products to sponsor the army?

Everyone looks up when an Apache gunship heaves into view, so why not sell advertising space along its flanks? Obviously, in times of war you’d have to cover up the Pepsi logos because they’re a bit bright, but in peacetime, why not?

All the forces could join in. We could have easy-Destroyers and Lastminute.com transport planes. Marlboro, I’m sure, would cough up for the already Red Arrows, and local firms could get in on the act, too, sponsoring individual soldiers. Sergeant Brian Griffiths is brought to you by Cartwright & Jones – family butchers since 1897.

It’s all very well saying this is a ludicrous plan, but what would you rather have? HMS Persil or no warship at all? Because soon that might very well be the choice we face. And let’s not trot out the tired old argument that sponsorship would undermine the dignity of the most successful armed forces in the whole of human history.

Where’s the dignity in being allowed to fire only 10 live rounds a year? Where’s the dignity in not being able to afford to take the ships out to sea? And running them on one engine when they do? Where’s the dignity in flying a fighter that has no gun because the MoD can’t afford one? We keep being told that soldiers in Iraq use their own mobile phones because the army’s radio equipment can’t even pick up Terry Wogan, and I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound very dignified either.

I’m not suggesting that a soldier should be made to wade into battle looking like a Formula One racing driver, but there is a happy medium. I’m thinking, as a guide, of the discreet but effective logos allowed at Wimbledon; a little patch on the epaulette that lets the watching TV cameras know that the wearer drives an Audi.

Sunday 19 September 2004

Go to school, see the world

Every morning, it seems, I open the papers to be confronted with a photograph of yet another bronzed gap-year student ‘with the world at her feet’ who’s been murdered while trekking through some fleapit on the wrong side of the equator.

If I were the parent of teenage children today, I’d advise them to stay home in their year off and experiment with heroin instead. It’s a lot safer.

Happily, my children are far too young to be stabbed in the Australian outback and, even more happily, by the time they are old enough they will have been on so many exotic school trips that the world’s wildernesses are unlikely to hold much appeal. ‘Oh, not the Kalahari again. I did that in Year 2.’

The trips run by my school, back in the 1970s, weren’t remotely exotic. Once we were taken to Matlock Bath with a Penguin biscuit, but this was an exception.

Mostly, they’d load us on to the school minibus, which would then be driven by a certifiable lunatic to the Peak District, where we’d be made to walk five miles through a peat bog to look at a millstone grit outcrop.

‘In geology,’ the psychopath would bark, ‘this is a series of sandstones, grits and conglomerates, resting directly on the carboniferous limestone…’

‘Hmm,’ we’d all think, ‘but is it big enough to hide behind while we have a fag?’

Then you had the Combined Cadet Force, which was public school code for genocide.

Large numbers of boys were bussed in eighth-hand army lorries to the Yorkshire Dales, where we were told to leap to our deaths from cliffs, or walk around with millstone grit outcrops on our backs until we collapsed from heat exhaustion.

Anyone who did actually die was given detention.

Today, things seem rather different. My kids are only at prep school, and already they’re talking about whether they want to go bear-baiting in Alaska or skiing in the Urals. Or maybe both. ‘Oh please, Dad. Aramoctavethia and Phoebocia are going, so why can’t I?’

Well, one of the reasons is that parents budget for the school fees without realising that, in fact, we’ll need half as much again for Icelandic windcheaters, horse rental in Argentina and a Unimog for the South Pole. Seriously, by the time my eldest leaves for ‘big school’ she’s likely to have more Air Miles than Henry Kissinger.

And big school, of course, is much, much worse. School magazines in the olden days – i.e. the 1980s – used to show photographs of well-scrubbed boys and girls at their desks, learning algebra. Now, school magazines look like brochures for Kuoni.

They’re full of boys and girls building box girder bridges in South Africa and sensitive radio telescopes in the jungles of Costa Rica. I’m not sure this is a good idea, because if a child has tackled the Zambezi, rescued 14 Colombian tribes from McDonald’s and colonised Mars by the time they’re 18, what’s left?

Mostly, when I was young, we went on holiday to Cornwall, although, once, I seem to remember spending a fortnight in the shadow of a gasworks just outside Jedburgh.

So when I reached adulthood I went berserk. The stamps in my passport became so prolific that I needed another, and because that was always away having visas stapled in place, I had to get a third. In the space of 10 years, I visited more than 80 countries and spent at least one night in each of the US States. I made Hemingway look like an agoraphobic and Alan Whicker like a slugabed.

As soon as the door to China was just slightly ajar I was bounding through the Forbidden City with my Nikon, and it was the same story in Vietnam, and Cuba. I went to Norway once, simply because it was the only European country I hadn’t visited, and I vacuumed up the Mediterranean islands like a dog vacuums up the crumbs from a five-year-old’s birthday party.

Eventually, though, the ants in my pants settled down and I realised that, while the world can offer many beautiful and wondrous experiences, home is where your friends are. And no experience is ever quite as rewarding as being in the gooey, firelit bosom of your family.

As a result I now sigh and mooch around with shoulders like a bent coathanger if I even have to go to Oxford; but that’s fine. I’m 44 and that’s a sensible age to pack away the pith helmet and pick up the secateurs for a spot of light gardening.

But 18?

I have a horrible feeling that my kids are going to leave school not prepared for the world but sick of it.

Obviously they will be far too tired for any further education, which doesn’t matter because by then universities will be allowed to take only working-class children. That means there will be no gap year either, and that means they won’t be stabbed in Sudan.

Instead, they’ll come home from their A-levels having done much too much, much too young. This will mean they’ll spend the next 10 years of their lives eating crisps and drinking beer while shooting aliens on the PlayStation.

Sunday 26 September 2004

Space virgins need chutes

If someone were to build a passenger-carrying rocket for joyrides into space, would you go? Of course you would, unless you’re a farmyard animal or A. A. Timid Trousers Gill.

So let me put it another way. If Richard Branson were to build a passenger-carrying rocket for joyrides into space, would you go? Hmm.

In the ’90s, barely a week went by when we weren’t treated to the unedifying spectacle of Branson’s rat-like little face being winched, at our expense, from some vast expanse of ocean. His speedboats kept running into lumps of wood, and his balloons were always too heavy for sustained flight. ‘Shave off the face fungus, Beardy. That’d lighten things up,’ I used to shout as his capsule plummeted into the oggin yet again.

Secretly, though, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for His Richardness.

Despite his Virgin Cola, which is an affront to the sensibilities of any twenty-first-century being, I like the way he’s made it in business without a pinstripe suit or an obvious predilection for golf and freemasonry. And despite the often disastrous attempts to go across the Pacific on a small horse, or up Everest in a washing machine, I do like the way he kept on trying.

There are those who say he’s a publicity-hungry monster but, you know, there are easier ways of getting your phizog in the papers than hurtling across the Atlantic at 50 knots. He could have chosen to sit in a jungle while two goblins from up north pour maggots into his ears, for instance. So let’s give the poor bloke a break and look more carefully at this space programme of his.

He says that within three years he’ll be in a position to offer seats on a spaceship at something like £150,000 a pop. Apparently it’ll be no more risky than early commercial jet flight, which, if you remember the Comet, means it’ll be extremely dangerous and very many rich people will be killed.

But once we’ve buried what’s left of Elton John and Bill Gates, the economies of scale will kick in, and soon poor people will be able to die in the freezing radioactive wasteland of space, too. The idea of putting ordinary punters into space was kick-started by the $10 million Ansari X prize for the first private venture that could put a passenger-carrying craft 62 miles above the Earth, twice, within two weeks.

Because we’ve all grown up with Nasa absorbing more money than the Third World, the notion of any individual doing space travel on the cheap seemed as preposterous as DIY brain surgery. But back in June, a machine called SpaceShipOne, funded in part by one of Microsoft’s founders, managed to break the 100-kilometre boundary.

It was an elegant solution. A conventional plane took off with the spaceship on its back. And then, at 47,000 feet, where the air is already thin and the fuel-consuming part of a journey is already done, the spaceship lifted off and was blasted by a rocket motor out of the atmosphere. It then glided back to Earth, ready to go up again.

It didn’t, because the pilot reported several anomalies, chief among which was a huge bang midway through the flight. Finding out what it was, and fixing it – which they did by painting one of the panels white to reflect heat – meant the second flight was delayed to this week. Early reports suggest that this went flawlessly, apart from the mother ship going into a perilous spin after separation.

So now we have Branson stepping into the breach, saying that by 2007 Virgin Galactic will be using larger versions of SpaceShipOne to transport paying passengers. I do have some concerns about this, none of which has anything to do with perilous spins, loud bangs or Branson’s previous failures. No, my main worry is that the passengers will conform to Branson’s relaxed style and be allowed to fly in jumpers and corduroys.

If I went, and I would, I’d want the full Michelin Man suit, with an aqualung and a parachute. And I’m not being silly.

Back in August 1960 an American pilot called Joe Kittinger climbed into the open gondola beneath a balloon called Excelsior III and floated up to 102,800 feet. At this point, 20 miles above the Earth in what is technically space, he jumped.

Moments later he became the first man to go through the sound barrier without the benefit of a plane. It was, and still is, the highest parachute jump ever, and it proved you can ‘abandon ship’ even when you’re in space.

I met Kittinger a couple of years ago and he’s adamant that if the crew of the Challenger had been equipped with chutes, some might well be alive today.

Branson ought to bear this in mind. It’s all very well promoting a relaxed service; but passengers are going to look pretty silly if they’re stuck in space wearing nothing but a nice V-neck and a pair of slacks.

What’s more, a 62-mile parachute jump through the furnace of re-entry would certainly add pizzazz to what otherwise might be a once-in-a-lifetime op…

Sunday 3 October 2004

Call that a list of best films?

Another day. Another chart listing the best British films ever made.

The last time I looked, the British Film Institute was busy claiming that something called The Third Man was at number one, though I couldn’t for the life of me work out why, since it was about a man who went to see a friend who was dead.

In second place it was Brief Encounter in which a man meets a woman in a railway station, and in third we had David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, which was about a homosexual who rides a camel round the desert. And then crashes his motorbike and dies.

I can’t be doing with David Lean. First of all, his ears were far too big, and secondly all his films feature lots of locals in loincloths and too much dust.

And as for The Bridge on the River Kwai. God almighty. Jesus took less time to die than Alec Guinness.

Last week, however, Total Film magazine said that the best British film ever is Get Carter, in which Michael Caine wears a mac and goes up north.

Other notables in the top 20 are The Wicker Man, in which we saw someone pretending to be Britt Ekland banging on a wall, A Clockwork Orange, which was mad, and If, which I always thought was a scientific experiment to see if you can actually die of boredom.

The only Bond film to make the grade was From Russia With Love, which came in at number nine. Why? With the possible exception of Moonraker, this early Sean Connery flick was one of the worst 007 adventures.

Of course I know these surveys are supposed to prompt debate down at the pub. I know that listing the top 10 coolest windmills and the top 10 zaniest animals are all meant to be the start of an argument, not the end.

But when it comes to British films there is no debate because the best one ever made, without a doubt, is The Long Good Friday. A movie that Total Film doesn’t even put in the top 25.

They credit Michael Caine with genius in Get Carter, but for real simmering violence you just can’t beat Bob Hoskins and the immortal ‘I put money in all your pockets’. As a general rule, I like to watch this film at least once a month.

The second-best British movie was Local Hero, starring no one you’ve ever heard of, apart from Burt Lancaster, who was brilliant, and set right up at the top of Scotland.

There have been (a very few) funnier films, but none has been quite so touching.

When I first saw it I left the cinema, turned round and went straight back inside to watch it again.

In third place it’s The Killing Fields, which was about… well, just about everything actually. Hate, war, friendship, hope, desperation, evil, incompetence, genocide, journalism and platonic man-love, all crammed into 141 spellbinding minutes.

It took David Lean 141 minutes just to get Peter O’Toole’s camel from one side of a sand dune to the other. And it took even longer for Alec Guinness to fall on that plunger.

Like many British films, The Killing Fields was gently peppered with actors from the small screen. We had Bill Paterson from Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Patrick Malahide, who was Detective-Sergeant Chisholm in Minder. This would normally be something of a credibility hurdle, but I was so wrapped up in the story I wouldn’t have minded if Amos from Emmerdale Farm had wandered into shot.

In fact I could make a fairly watertight case that The Killing Fields, along with Local Hero and The Long Good Friday, are not just the best British films of all time but the best from anywhere in the world.

Obviously there have been many wondrous cinematic events from America but, generally speaking, Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

As a result, US films tend to be rather too full of explosions and everyone’s teeth are too white.

Then you have French cinema, in which a man meets a woman. They spend about two hours looking at one another, in black and white, over a cup of coffee. And then the man goes off with another man to have some graphic sex.

I would never argue that all British films are better than all foreign films. As often as not, our directors and screenwriters got their funding from FilmFour, handed in their notice at the Guardian and went off to make what looked like a social services training video.

Of course it always got rave reviews from the frizzy-haired critics and the compilers of best-film-ever surveys, but in America the audiences were usually not that interested in the fortunes of a Manchester drug addict. They would have preferred it if Manchester had simply exploded, and as a result the film almost always flopped.

Trainspotting was only rescued because the writer remembered to include a plot.

Trainspotting, by the way, was the fourth best British film. And you can work out the rest over a pint at lunchtime.

Sunday 10 October 2004

Two fingers to the pension

Life used to be so easy. At the age of 65 you retired with a nice carriage clock and went home to spend your pension on potting plants and pipe tobacco. Then, 10 years later, you died.

Now things are very different. You retire at 63 and go home to spend your pension on kickboxing classes and cocaine. You have no plans to die at all.

This, as I’m sure you read last week, is having a dramatic effect on pensions. The country can afford to keep its senior citizens in old shag for 10 years but not coke for 30. Not when the number of retired people exceeds the number working.

As a result, the young people of today have been told to expect some harsh changes. They will have to save 30 per cent of what they earn and hand over 70 per cent to the government. They will be expected to work down the mines until the age of 127 and even then they will be expected to die, in poverty, in a puddle of vomit.

Stern-faced men are saying the country must find an extra £57 billion a year for pensions by 2050 if old people are to enjoy the same standard of living that they have today.

It all sounds very gloomy, but £57 billion is nothing. We learnt last week that the government has spent £30 billion on a computer system for the NHS.

In the past few months I’ve watched Oxford Council spend what must have been £57 billion inserting bollards to make life harder for motorists, then taking them away, then building them again.

Thanks to changes made by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, we’re going to fall short of the pensions bill by only 5 per cent. In France they’ll miss it by 105 per cent. In Germany it’ll be 110 per cent. Then there’s the United States.

I read a book by Niall Ferguson while on holiday this year. It’s called Colossus, it’s about the American empire and it argues that already the gap between what America has and what it needs to keep its old people in burgers is $45 trillion.

Now, I don’t know what a trillion is, but I do know that $45 trillion is roughly 10 times more than the total combined wealth of Germany, France, Italy and Britain.

It seems there are three ways this vast deficit can be covered: they can either increase taxes, immediately, by 69 per cent or cut medicare benefits by more than a half, or stop all federal purchases for ever.

I haven’t seen either John Kerry or George W. Bush suggest they’ll be doing any of these things. And that’s bad news, because the situation is becoming more critical.

If nothing has happened by 2008, taxes will have to go up by 74 per cent.

No president, of course, will ever impose any such increase, which means that with the certainty of Titanic’s fate once it had hit the iceberg, America will go spectacularly bankrupt. It is, according to the author, an inescapable fact.

Long before that happens, however, the US will renege on all its foreign debt, which will bankrupt the entire world, causing famine and maybe even some kind of holocaust. So you’ll look a bit of a Charlie if you’ve spent the previous 40 years squirrelling away £30 a week for your old age.

This is the fundamental problem with pensions. You are saving for a future you don’t yet know. You’re taking care of something that might never happen – your old age. You could live a life of thrift and then, the day before your pension matures, you could be trampled to death by a horse. Or win £17 million on the lottery. Or watch America go bust, taking the International Monetary Fund and your pension fund with it.

What’s more, how do you know that the people you entrust with your savings will look after them wisely? How do you know they won’t raid the fund, spend it on a boat and then jump off?

Every night commercial television is littered with multi-million-pound advertisements for pension companies. That’s your money – your nest egg – they are spending, trying to attract more suckers so they can build a taller, shinier office block. From which they can plan more adverts.

The government’s no better. If ministers take our money, saying we can have it back when we’re old, how do we know they won’t give it all to Oxford Council so it can knock over bollards to make way for new ones?

Believing that the chancellor will have a special ring-fenced fund to be spent only on pensions is as silly as thinking your road tax is spent on the roads. It isn’t. It’s spent on new NHS computers and, of course, on the civil service, which I see now employs more people than live in the city of Sheffield.

Of course they’ll be fine. They are on the I’m All Right Jack Civil Service Pension Fund. But what about you? Well, I suggest you buy something stupid like a plasma television and sit in front of it with a big Twix and a packet of killer fags.

Because, do you want to end up poor in a bankrupt world, full of civil servants? Thought not.

Sunday 17 October 2004

This is how the world ends…

Crikey. Out of absolutely nowhere the Danes have announced that they own the North Pole, and just in case anyone gets any fancy ideas that they don’t, they’re embarking on a series of surveys which will prove it.

Over the next few years they will spend £13 million demonstrating that the top of the world is connected by a vast underwater mountain range to Greenland, which is one of Denmark’s dependencies along with, er… the Faroe Islands and, um…

Iceland. Oh no, hang on a minute. They lost that.

So why, you may be wondering, after two centuries of sitting in a sauna have the Danes suddenly decided to get themselves an empire?

Well, they reckon that, thanks to global warming, the ice cap will soon melt, allowing man to access a subterranean lake full of black gold. Brilliant. Denmark becomes Europe’s Saudi Arabia and everyone in Copenhagen will have a big Cadillac.

Unless, of course, it turns out that there is no oil up there. And I foresee some other problems, too, chief among which is the notion that states can claim parts of the world just because they’re connected by some kind of underwater geology. I mean, on that basis Ireland could claim ownership of Tunisia.

There’s another issue, too. According to a new(ish) book called Doomsday Just Ahead, the North Pole has not always been where it is now. And at some point in the next 30 years it’ll be on the move again. According to its author Ian Niall Rankin the last Ice Age was caused by what he calls a polar shift, and now apparently another shift is on the way, because the Earth’s magnetic field is dying.

Fearing that he may be a loony, I’ve checked and, sure enough, in the past 35 years the field has lost 235 billion megajoules of energy.

I don’t know what a megajoule is, but I bet you could run a kettle on it. And nor do I know how many megajoules the magnetic field had, to start with. But having spent an hour in the local library I’ve found that between 1835 and 1965 the magnetic field lost 8 per cent of its strength. So maybe Rankin is right. Maybe we don’t have much time left.

Then what? Well, as I understand it, the molten middle bit of the world stops spinning and won’t start again until the world quite literally falls over. Somehow – and I really cannot be bothered to find out how – this restores the magnetic field again and all is well… except for one tiny detail.

Nobody can predict where the top of the world will be. The new North Pole could be in Cardiff or it could – please God – be in Washington, DC. Scotland could be on the equator, along with Argentina, in which case the South Pole would be about 200 miles west of Hawaii.

Or it could be in the middle of downtown Baghdad. Imagine the joy of that. Bush has his nasty little war to secure all the oil, which is promptly buried under two miles of ice.

It would be prompt, too. There’d be no gradual shift to the new climate. If you woke up tomorrow to find Nuneaton was at the new North Pole you can be assured that your car wouldn’t start. It would immediately be 120° below and it would stay that way for the next eight or so thousand years.

If this has happened before – and, according to Rankin, it has – then it would explain what Titchmarsh has been on about these past few weeks. In his series British Isles he’s been stomping about in the nation’s pretty bits, telling us how, before the drizzle came, Britain was jungle-hot and full of hippos, and then freezing cold and full of polar bears.

It didn’t make much sense to my children. They learnt, long before they could multiply two by two, that man in general and General Motors in particular have been solely responsible for climate change. And yet here was Northern Alan telling them that the world has been heating up and cooling down for millions of years, all by itself. It was like learning that the answer to two times two is Paris.

I’ve loved it, because this was Alan Titchmarsh, of all people, doing more damage to Kyoto than a whole herd of coal-fired power stations. In fact I’ve been watching the show with the engine of my car turned on. Just for fun.

Sadly, he didn’t explain why Britain’s climate has been so topsy-turvy recently, but I must say Rankin’s theory about polar shift does look plausible.

It would be good news for the Danes because if they do prove they own the seabed at what is now the North Pole, they may not have to wait for global warming to melt the ice. When the Earth falls over, they could well end up drilling in the tropics.

The bad news is that when the Earth tilts, the sea, and I mean all of it, will wash over all of the land, killing every single living thing instantly. Unless you’re at the top of Everest, or in a mine.

This means that it may take a while for Denmark to recoup its initial investment. More disturbingly, it also means that the world will have to be repopulated by Arthur Scargill and Chris Bonington. This concept is as ugly as it is unlikely.

Sunday 24 October 2004

Fight terror and look good, too

So the Houses of Parliament are to be ringed with steel in an attempt to keep out terrorists – and burglars after those juicy expenses.

All of the proposals seem jolly high-tech, but I assure you they won’t work. The boom that’s to be anchored in the Thames may well stop baddies from crashing a barge loaded with explosives into the outdoor tea room. But not if it’s a particularly large barge. And certainly not if it’s a hovercraft, which will simply ride over the obstacle and right up John Prescott’s trouser leg before exploding.

Then you have the proposals for CCTV cameras throughout the Palace of Westminster.

Why? So that security experts will be able to work out what the suicide bomber looked like before he became a thin veneer on the walls.

Outside, the entire building will be ringed with an electric fence, but you can bet your children’s eyesight that the Health and Safety Executive will ensure it does not carry a death-dealing 4 million volts.

Sure, a lower, less lethal voltage may deter Greenpeace beardies and Otis Ferry from breaking in and making their point, but I doubt a ‘slight tingle’ would be much of an obstacle for someone who’s spent the past three years in a cave dodging daisycutters and A-10 tankbusters.

The intelligence services are said to be worried about someone driving a car bomb into the clock tower, which could then fall over, landing 13.7 tons of Big Ben on Tony Blair. But then our spies were worried about Iraq having nuclear weapons, so we can take these concerns with a pinch of salt. And anyway, if His Tonyness has to spend the next few years trapped inside a gigantic brass bell, it wouldn’t really be the end of the world.

Anyway, I’ve looked, and if you had it in mind to bring down Big Ben you’d be better off with an aircraft. And this is not the World Trade Center. A Piper Cherokee would do the trick.

The fact is that all the new security arrangements may well stop 100 terrorist attacks. But if they fail to stop the 101st, they will all have been a waste of time and money.

The BBC, for instance, is supremely well guarded. The security personnel are programmed to allow nobody in, at all, ever. And if you do make it to the electric revolving doors, they will respond only if presented with a computerised photo ID.

To get round all this, I simply enter the building every day through the post room.

And I feel certain it’s the same story at Heathrow. Yes, it would be very hard to smuggle a pound of Semtex through the terminal, but I bet you could get access to the runways, and therefore the planes, by waiting till nightfall and strolling through the Terminal 5 building site.

They can take as many precautions as they like at Westminster but they won’t think of everything, and one day someone out there will. More worrying, however, is what all these security arrangements will look like.

Have you, for instance, seen the American embassy in Grosvenor Square recently? It’s been surrounded by hideous crowd-control barriers and by concrete blocks that, I know from personal and painful experience, can be barged out of the way by a small Peugeot so are unlikely to stop a large articulated lorry.

Anyone wishing to gain entry to the building itself has to pass through the sort of prefab hut you might normally expect to find on a Nuneaton building site.

I suppose there’s something to be said for making the security measures look temporary, otherwise people could get it into their heads – heaven forbid – that this Middle East business might drag on for years; but does everything have to be so ugly?

The Palace of Westminster is one of the most famous and photographed buildings in the world, a position it may well lose if Britain’s notoriously low-rent civil service is allowed to decorate it with anti-aircraft guns, mines and concrete mantraps.

Now I know money is tight. I know that artists are having to give their pictures to the Tate and that the £400,000 an hour being handed over to the Treasury by BP is being spent on MPs’ seventh homes; but is this not an occasion when some spare cash could be found?

Could Richard Rogers not be employed to design fencing which blends the traditional lines of Sir Charles Barry’s building with the modern world of counter-terrorism? And instead of a boom trailing out into the middle of the Thames, why not build an elaborate sandbank, such as they’ve done in the sea off Dubai?

Then there’s the question of the serjeant-at-arms’s tights. We’re told this is inappropriate combat gear and that they’ll have to be replaced with Vin Diesel’s body armour. Why? Can Paul Smith not design an eighteenth-century-style frock coat with a built-in machine-pistol holster?

It’d be a worthless gesture, but at least we could lose our battle with the terrorists in style. Not from behind a chunk of nasty pre-stressed concrete.

Sunday 31 October 2004

The Cheshire charity rip-off

Is the money going to charity or to the people who cooked the horrible food?

I read recently that the noble people of Cheshire give more to charity than anyone else in Britain. But knowing Cheshire as I do, I worry a little about what it is they’re actually giving.

I suspect that if such a thing as Cheshire Aid were to exist, it would not try to bring grain or farming equipment to the under-privileged of the world. The organisation’s lavish video would paint a different picture. ‘This small homestead in the Sudan had no water. But after all our hard work, look, we have built them a swimming pool, with a Jacuzzi in the shape of a Cadillac.’

In a recent edition of Cheshire Life magazine the publishers ran a competition where readers could win ‘another fridge full of champagne’, and I fear this kind of thing could have an effect on where those readers might place the poverty line. ‘This poor African village had nothing. But thanks to the efforts of our fund-raisers in Wilmslow and Alderley Edge, it now has electric gates. Better still, the people who live there were all brown. Now, as you can see, they’re bright orange.’

Still, 400 packs of Dale Winton face cream and half a million gallons of chlorinated swimming-pool water are better than nothing. Which is what I reckon normally gets raised at a charity event.

I guess we’ve all been to the sort of evening where you’re expected to buy raffle tickets at £20 a pop and then, throughout dinner, girls in charity T-shirts arrive just before every one of your punchlines inviting you to place more £20 notes in one of their buckets. And then, with the auction, they start on your credit card.

All these auctions are pretty much the same. Someone makes a heartfelt, tear-jerking appeal on behalf of the charity, and then up pops some sweaty, half-cut, minor-league celebrity who’s a mate of someone on the committee. That’d be me, usually.

The first item for sale, which is normally a weekend for two at some godforsaken golfing hotel and country club, goes for £60,000, as someone desperately tries to impress everyone on his table with how much money he’s got, and how fervently he wants an MBE for giving it all away.

I once sold a year’s use of a Jaguar at one of these do’s for more than the car was worth, simply because two blokes in the room were each determined to prove that they were considerably richer than the other.

Better still, I once sold a weekend on a boat in Monte Carlo for £250,000, and the chap was so keen to impress, he handed over the cheque and said he couldn’t be bothered to go. I auctioned it again and got another £200,000.

Of course, as you sit there with your slimmed-down wallet, full of spindly canapés, you begin to feel so poor and hungry that you wonder if you shouldn’t be on the receiving end of some aid. But you forgive the vulgarity because, of course, the money’s going to help some blind teenager in Rwanda whose entire family was butchered by an Aids-ridden terrorist.

Is it, though? Or is the money going to the waiters, and the people who cooked the horrible food, and the people who printed the invitations, and the florist and the band, and the owners of the nasty country house hotel where the event is being staged?

Time and again I’ve asked the charity representatives at these events how much money they hope to raise and time and again I’ve been told that they don’t expect to get a penny. Just a mention in the local glossy magazine or, if they’re really lucky and some people from Holby City have turned up, maybe even half a page in Hello!

What good’s that? How can a small photograph of some P-list celeb like me, with his arm round a bosomy, half-dressed soap actress, be of any possible benefit to the blind and cancerous orphans in Rwanda?

And the problem’s getting worse, because there are now so many charity evenings – I have invitations to 23 on my mantelpiece – that the competition among organisers to be more and more lavish is fierce. Some are even employing PR firms, who regularly ring me offering big money – thousands – if I’ll turn up for the night and drink their Krug. This means the auction prizes have to be elaborate just to cover the costs.

Soon you will be invited to buy a weekend for two on a nuclear submarine, simply to meet the expenses of the Brazilian fire-eaters who’ve just abseiled into the marquee from a helicopter gunship.

I suppose I had better say at this point that some events do raise money. My wife, for instance, would certainly like it to be known that the cost of staging her annual do is entirely underwritten by Honda or Ford or Audi, and that every penny raised does go to the local children’s hospice.

And this, I think, gives us an inkling of the way forward. When you’re faced with the choice of what events to attend, don’t ask which footballers are going and what sort of peacock will be used to garnish the roast swan. Ask only how much of the proceeds will actually be going to charity.

And if you’re in Cheshire, what those proceeds will buy.

Sunday 7 November 2004

Now I’m an artificial hipster

I know that in recent days we’ve lost Howard Keel, Yasser Arafat and Emlyn Hughes.

I also know that the Americans are having a hard time in Falluja and that someone from HolbyEnders has been caught with her nose in the devil’s dandruff. But all of this pales into insignificance alongside the news that I am beginning to disintegrate.

After a lifetime of man-sized hypochondria, where every cold is ebola and every light bruise a shattered limb, I was informed last week that I have finally got a proper, grown-up disease.

About a year ago, my left hip started to ache, so, knowing it was bone cancer, I decided to do nothing. It’s better, I figured, to wake up dead one morning than go to a doctor and be told when that morning might be.

Eventually, though, it became difficult to get in and out of my car, which is tricky when you’re the host of a television programme that mostly involves getting into and out of cars. So with a heavy heart I went to see the doctor.

‘I’ve caught cancer,’ I said Eeyoreishly. But he wasn’t convinced and, after a bit of poking around, said he thought it was more likely to be osteoarthritis, arguing that my hip joints may have simply worn out.

This seemed unlikely. My hips have never done anything. I am not a Ceroc dancer or a downhill skier, and the only exercise I ever take is chewing food and typing.

But the X-ray pictures he took are now back from Boots – and blow me down, he was right. I do have osteoarthritis in my hips, and as a result I shall need some plastic replacements.

Apparently this is funny. On learning the news, one friend said I should avoid leaning on any radiators when I have them fitted in case they melt. Another pointed out that they’re hollow and could be used as a sort of time capsule. ‘You could fill them up with newspaper cuttings and Robbie Williams CDs,’ he said, helpfully.

My wife simply phoned our lawyer, saying she really didn’t want to be married to a cripple and could he organise a divorce.

More worryingly, I cancelled my health insurance recently because, so far as I can see, they take your money every month and refuse to give it back. So I can either go private, which will cost £25 million, or use the NHS. This would mean waiting until the end of time, and then being given two joints that the 14-year-old doctor, on the advice of his line managers, had bought on the way to work from a plumbers’ merchants.

With a view to getting round this, I had a look on eBay and guess what? You can buy second-hand sex toys(!), some naval anaesthetic and even a Vulcan bomber. But nobody is flogging off their dead mum’s joints.

That’s stupid. Why burn the old dear when you could whip out her hip joints and auction them on the internet? And what’s more, with no hips you could bend her legs double and not have to buy such a big coffin. I’d pay up to £30, providing the joints had been washed thoroughly. But there weren’t any, so that’s that.

The producer of Top Gear suggested I contact one of the Formula One teams to see if it could run me up a pair in carbon fibre. Sounds great, but I’m not sure I want to spend the next 40 years hobbling around with a pair of McLaren suspension units in my legs.

And anyway, here’s the clincher. Apparently I can’t have the operation for another 15 years because plastic wears out even faster than bone, and it’s not like changing the battery in a torch. The doctors therefore want to make sure that the replacements I’m given will last until I really do catch ebola.

So that’s it. For the next 15 years I have to hobble around with disfigured hips, in huge pain, being laughed at.

This sounds gloomy, but actually, given that all middle-aged people are bound to start going wrong, arthritis really isn’t such a bad lucky dip prize. It knocks the socks off cancer, for instance, and it’s a damn sight better than the osteoporosis that crippled my dad.

First, it won’t kill you or make you run around town in a bee suit blowing raspberries and, better still, it only hurts when you move. Which means you can get a doctor’s note saying that you mustn’t.

This in turn means you will never again be allowed to bring in coal or carry suitcases. And you will be excused from those stupid bracing walks that your wife is forever suggesting after a hearty Sunday lunch.

I’m not sure, but I’d like to bet that I am now entitled to one of those handy orange stickers that let me treat all pavements as parking spaces.

The only trouble is that to park a car you must first of all get into it, and that really does hurt like hell. I tried to film a road test for Top Gear yesterday, and it was like being pulled in half by two tractors. What I’m going to do about that, I really don’t know.

Sunday 14 November 2004

Bullies were the making of me

As I understand it, the latest state initiative will force school bullies to wear blue plastic wristbands so the weak and fat can see them coming and have time to take evasive action.

Already I can see some problems with this. For instance, what happens if the cunning and wily school bully decides to get round the problem by simply leaving his wristband at home? Then you wouldn’t know he was a bully until you found a large dog egg in your satchel and an unusual stain in your maths exercise book.

Perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, though. Perhaps you wear the blue plastic wristband to show you’re against bullying, in the same way that people wear little ribbons on their lapel to show they’re against Aids or breast cancer or cruelty to moss.

Again, though, I can see some problems. In the same way that a small CND badge would not have protected the wearer from a nuclear fireball, I feel fairly sure that, if you turn up to school with a blue plastic wristband, it’s not really going to prevent the bully from pushing your head down the lavatory.

My biggest problem with the scheme, however, is that I have nothing to wear to show that I’m cautiously in favour of bullying. I, for instance, would love to put some sand in Piers Morgan’s lunchbox. And nothing would give me more pleasure than spending an hour or so flicking Tony Blair’s ears.

Sure, it has its bad sides, of course – nobody likes to think that someone will draw a huge penis on their children’s homework – but there are upsides as well. Like if you’ve spent all day with your head in a lavatory you don’t need to wash your hair that night. And you will be a better, sharper, cleverer person.

This, I fear, is what the schools minister Stephen Twigg absolutely will not understand. He’ll have listened to a bunch of idealistic town council do-gooders with all sorts of nonsensical degrees in child welfare, and he’ll have decided that it was time to break out the blue plastic wristbands. So now all the loony welfare workers will have carte blanche to stamp out bullying, in all its forms.

You know where this is going. They started the war on speed by going after lunatics who drove around at 130 mph, and ended up nailing little old ladies for doing 31. They go after people who hunt foxes, and soon your dog will be prosecuted if it kills a mouse. They put health warnings on cigarettes, and now they want to stop you from lighting up in a pub. For the social worker there is no spirit of the law – only the letter.

This means we can wave goodbye to the socially important pursuit of teasing. I tease people for being too short. I tease people for reading the Guardian. And in return people tease me for looking like a human toffee apple and liking Supertramp. I’m 44, for heaven’s sake, and I still find another man’s new haircut funny. So I’ll spend the day ribbing him about it.

Teasing is a good thing. It sharpens the mind and punctures the ego. Teasing, at its best, is faster than Chinese ping-pong and funnier than a really good skiing crash. Teasing is what separates us from the beasts. You never, for instance, see wildebeest laughing their heads off when one of their number falls in the river or gets eaten by a lion.

But of course the stupid do-gooders will see it as a sort of cannabis, a seemingly harmless first rung on the ladder, and try to stamp it out before the teaser takes up some heroin-style bullying.

Well, I was bullied at school, mercilessly and endlessly, for nearly two years. I forgot what it was like to wake up normally rather than as a result of someone letting a fire extinguisher off in my face. And I was thrown on a daily basis into the school’s unheated plunge pool.

I remember one night being dragged out of bed at 3 a.m. and told that, because the school would be a better place without me, I would have to be killed.

There was a very good reason for all this. I was a very annoying, very spoilt 13-year-old prig. I had the capacity to irritate before I’d even said anything, and I was the owner of a biblically idiotic haircut.

Eventually the bullying became so awful that I confided in my mother, who said that if everyone was picking on me then I must be doing something wrong. So I grew my hair very long, took up smoking and tried my hardest to make everyone laugh.

It’s not easy when you’ve got a mouth full of dog dirt, but eventually I succeeded, and the bullying stopped.

I really, genuinely believe that were it not for the bullies, I would now be a humourless estate agent in some godforsaken provincial town. Bullying, in other words, saved my life.

And it can work for fat kids, too. You can ban them from watching crisp advertisements on television, and put health warnings on their cheese, but there’s nothing more guaranteed to make them lose weight than having their hair set on fire from time to time.

Sunday 28 November 2004

100 things not to do before you die

I’ve done a power slide in an airboat on the Florida Everglades. I’ve seen the sun set over the Perfume River in Vietnam. I’ve flown an F-15E fighter bomber, and I’ve ingested pretty well everything there is to be ingested. While doing 180 mph. In a Ferrari.

In other words, when I read those silly magazine features listing all the things you’re supposed to do before you die, I’m left feeling hollow and empty. I’m only 44 and I’ve already seen Etna explode. I’ve swum with the bloody dolphins in Tahiti and I’ve tried my hand at bobsleighing.

I’ve even done the odd eightsome reel, which is as close as anyone should get to folk dancing. So now, what are you saying? That I should go off into a corner and commit suicide?

Apparently not. Because last week we were presented with a new list of 100 things to do before we die. Only this time around, the authors are not drunken magazine hacks back from a long lunch; they’re all eminent scientists, boffins and inventors.

The idea behind the scheme is simple. James Dyson, who designs purple vacuum cleaners, says he wants to make schoolchildren think of science and engineering – and vacuum cleaners, presumably – as cool. I thoroughly approve of that, but I must say that most of the suggestions he and his colleagues make are either difficult, revolting or impossible.

Let’s start with something simple, like extracting our own DNA. All you have to do, apparently, is gargle with salt water and then spit it into a glass of washing-up liquid. You then dribble ice-cold gin down the side of the glass and watch as spindly white clumps form in the mixture. This is the essence of you.

Of course, coughing up phlegm is not quite as glamorous as driving a hovercraft over the glaciers of Tibet, but think what you could do with a thimbleful of your own DNA. You could nurture it, and keep it in a warm place and then, who knows, one day it may grow into a perfect replica of you. Or, if you smoke as much as I do, a perfect replica of a Marlboro Light.

Well, it gets worse, because one of the other things the boffins suggest is that you turn yourself into a priceless jewel. Apparently there’s a company in Chicago that exposes cremated human remains to heat and pressure for 18 weeks, after which they have turned into a brilliant one-carat diamond.

Can you see a drawback with this? Yes, that’s right. And frankly I’m surprised to find that some of Britain’s biggest brains failed to notice that this was supposed to be a list of things to do before you die.

Here’s a worrying one. You can link your computer to that huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico, then spend your spare time listening for signs of extraterrestrial life. This, I imagine, would require quite a lot of patience. So much, in fact, that on balance I think I’d rather be a diamond.

Certainly I’d much rather go to Tennessee, where the donated corpses of murder victims are available for would-be forensic scientists. Anyone can have a go, apparently.

You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, given the brainpower of the team behind this list that they could have come up with something a bit better than poking around in a dead American’s liver to see what killed him. Or slowly turning into a diamond as you while away the hours listening out for something that’s too far away to be audible.

Permit me then to suggest something better than they’ve managed, something more exciting than anything you’ve ever done. Or even heard about.

Find a group of friends, preferably people you don’t like much, and catch the next flight to Los Angeles. Once there, hunt down the company that organises dog fights for paying customers, whether those customers have any flight experience or not.

You will each be strapped into a Marchetti trainer and taken by your co-pilot to 3,000 feet where he will open the throttles as wide as they’ll go and ask you to hunt down your friends.

Each plane has a laser on the nose and is coated in the same material you find in those laser-quest games. So, you get another chap in your sights, pull the trigger and, unless he can manoeuvre out of the way, which will involve pulling more Gs than you, he’s toast. His co-pilot releases smoke to show he’s hit.

And, as a side effect, you’ll come back more interested in the science of flight and the theory of aerodynamics than you ever thought possible.

Sunday 5 December 2004

Let’s break all Tony’s laws

I see that pretty soon parish councillor henchmen will be prowling round our villages at night, handing out £50,000 fixed-penalty notices to those whose lights are keeping people from getting to sleep.

Well, now; I live opposite a football pitch that, each evening, is illuminated by several starburst gigawatt lamps. They’re an eyesore, for sure, but since I understand that it’s jolly hard to play football in the dark, I have not complained. Instead, I’ve simply hung two pieces of material in front of the window. I like to call them ‘the curtains’.

I have tried, really I’ve tried, to understand why legislation is needed to prevent people from using lights at night, but then I’ve tried hard to understand why dogs aren’t allowed to kill foxes any more. And I don’t get that, either. Or why I can’t use my mobile phone when I’m stuck in a traffic jam.

Every single day there is a small piece in the papers that announces the introduction of a law banning something which you thought was harmless. And here’s the thing. You raise your eyebrows momentarily, and then you turn the page.

It’s only when you add up the number of new laws that have come along since His Tonyness grinned his way into No. 10 that you realise just how much of our freedom he’s tried to erode in the past seven years.

Last week Boris Johnson told us that you may not legally fix a broken windowpane in your own home unless you are a qualified broken-window mender, and that when the work is done you must get it inspected by a broken-window inspector from the local council. Furthermore, it is against the law to change or tamper with the electrical sockets in your own kitchen.

There’s so much more to come as well. Greyhound tracks will soon need new super-licences, you will not be allowed to tread on a stag beetle, you will not be able to have unprotected sex or a few drinks with your friends after work. Cheese will have to be marked with a government health warning and you will be prevented from telling jokes about homosexual men, lesbians, Muslims, Catholics, the Irish and foxes.

Gary Lineker will be allowed on television only after the watershed, in case children are enticed into his dangerous salt-and-vinegar world; you will not be allowed to get your dog to kill a rat – because it’s a wild animal – and you will be banned from giving your mum a headstone when she dies in case it falls over.

Naturally you will also be banned from smoking in public, owning a Bible, sending Christmas cards that feature the nativity, and smacking your children. Happily, you will be allowed to drive a car, but not at more than 20 mph, not if you’ve had a piece of sherry trifle, and certainly not if it has four-wheel drive.

All of the above will be covered by legislation; but, where this is not possible, Tony uses the Hoxton Thought Police instead. As a result I was told last week that I am now ‘not allowed’ to talk about Siamese twins and must in future refer to them as ‘conjoined’.

Why? Down’s babies used to be called mongoloid because it was felt some of their facial characteristics made them look as if they were from Mongolia. And I can see why that might be upsetting. For both Mongolians and those with Down’s.

But the expression ‘Siamese twins’ is used because the first pair ever to reach the world’s consciousness – called Chang and Eng – happened to be from Siam. So who’s going to be upset? Siam doesn’t even exist any more. Are these idiots now saying I can’t refer to Dutch courage? And if so, who will stand up for the right of measles if I call them German?

To be honest, however, none of this interference is going to make any difference to my life. That’s why I’m not whingeing, because I shall continue to call people while driving, and tell them stories that Cherie Blair would find offensive.

Furthermore, I’ll carry on calling two people who share body parts Siamese twins.

I will eat as much cheese as I like and I will still give my dog a whole packet of prawn-cocktail-flavoured crisps whenever she rips a rat to pieces.

This evening I’m thinking of smacking the children. For fun. And then, when I go to bed tonight, after I’ve altered all the wiring in my kitchen and drunk two bottles of wine, I’ll leave the outside lights on. And dream about the glimpse of G-string I saw in the office last week.

In other words, in a single day I will break 14 laws and seven social taboos that simply didn’t exist before Tony came along. And I shall do so with impunity because there’s no way in hell he can possibly enforce all his Big Ideas.

Sunday 12 December 2004

Sharks, you’re dead meat

Last Thursday an 18-year-old Australian surfer boy was eaten by two great white sharks which, according to onlookers, tore his body in half and then spent a few minutes arguing over who’d get which bit.

As usual, various wildlife experts were interviewed, and they all said the sharks in question should be let off with a caution, partly because they’re protected and partly because such attacks are extremely rare.

But they’re not. In fact, not even a week had passed since another surfer had been eaten on exactly the same piece of coastline. Meanwhile, in California the surfing community has reported that shark attacks have tripled in recent years and it’s a similar story in South Africa.

So what’s going on? Well, some say the great white has developed a taste for humans because we’ve eaten all their usual prey – tuna and so on. Others argue that it’s because boards look like seals from underneath. Or it could be these shark attacks are simply God’s way of telling surfers to get a job.

But I think I’ve worked out exactly who’s to blame… and it’s the soppy sentimentality of the National Geographic Channel with its Disney-style ethos of ‘no animals were harmed in the making of this programme’.

When David Attenborough does a wildlife show on the television, we see nature in the raw. We see the little thing’s big dewy eyes and its wobbly legs when it’s born. We see it finding a mate, and relaxing in the sun after a hearty meal. And then we see it being eaten by a lion.

Who can forget the horror of that poor little penguin in The Blue Planet? He’d gone off to find food for his wife and been attacked, in gory, close-up detail, by a leopard seal. Terribly wounded, he tried his hardest to make it home, but the journey was too long and the slope too steep. So he died, pitching, beak first, into the ice.

Now, had this been made by the Americans, Mr Penguin would have found lots of food, all of it organic, successfully swum past the waiting leopard seals and made it back to the rookery where he and Mrs Penguin would have opened a fair trade shop and lived happily ever after.

I watched a wildlife show the other night which had been infected completely with the American Way. It was all about the Andes, and guess what? None of the animals had any sex and none of them ever died. Not even the fish. The gannets dived into the water and came out again.

Pumas chased llamas pointlessly. And the foxes just hung around, looking cute.

This is why we now have a hunting ban: because we’re living in a world where foxes have vegetarian cubs that frolic around in the woods, playing non-competitive tag.

Certainly, I have never seen any footage, ever, of a fox breaking into a chicken run and killing the lot. And it’s why the world is full of surfer boys who scour the planet for decent waves, oblivious to the peril that lurks beneath the surface.

Today, great white sharks are always called ‘magnificent’, and now we have Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, saying he wished he’d never written the book because it gave everyone a sense that the great white was ‘a bad guy’ when really it was ‘fragile’. One can only guess, of course, but I bet the 18-year-old who was pulled in half by sharks this week didn’t think, as those teeth sank into his thighs, that the shark was magnificent or fragile.

It’s the same story with the mosquito. But because it’s never been the subject of a soppy, tree-hugging, natural history show, even the biggest veg-head weird-beard is at liberty to run around his bedroom at night with a rolled-up newspaper and a can of bug zap, shouting: ‘I’ll get you, you little bastard.’

A great white is no different. It’s a dangerous, ugly, killing machine that takes a chunk out of you and lets you bleed to death before coming back and deciding that actually it doesn’t like human very much. It’s a 23-foot aquatic mozzie, an underwater monster with razor-wire teeth, and it should be treated as such.

We should therefore turn the tables round. Instead of letting the damn things cruise around eating us, we should start eating them. Of course, this would mean hunting them to extinction, which would cause all sorts of loonies to wave their arms around, saying that we were changing the world. To which we could reply: ‘Absolutely. We’re making it better. And then we shall start on the tigers.’

Sunday 19 December 2004

The ghost of wife’s present

Obviously I know you should never buy your wife anything that needs a plug, but this has always presented a problem. Because I’ve always had some understanding of stuff that needed electricity to function, and had no clue about stuff that didn’t.

Scent, for example. Have you actually been into the perfume department of a shop recently? Not only do you have the traditional choice of about 10,000 from the well-known names such as Chanel and er… Charlie, all of which, to a smoker at least, are exactly the same, but now you have celebrity-endorsed products as well.

Does your wife want to smell like Beyoncé or Celine Dion?

Or would she like to spend the year strutting around with a whiff of Cliff Richard behind her ears?

Horrified that you might trip over the great smell of Kilroy – or Cuprinol, as it’s known in hardware stores – you make a beeline for the clothes department; but this is an even bigger mistake, because you’ll Buy the Wrong Thing. And, to make matters worse, you will Buy the Wrong Thing in the Wrong Size.

So, jewellery then. Well, no, because for reasons I’ve never fully understood jewellery shops never advertise their prices. Which means you need a basic grasp of the Stanislavski technique as you try to pretend the reason you don’t want the necklace is because of the clasp, not because it costs £16,000.

Personalised luggage or stationery is fine, but this needs to be ordered in March.

And it’s much the same story with furniture. Plus, it’s hard to carry a tallboy home on the train.

Of course, the shop can deliver, but this involves filling out a form, and then another. And then some more. And then the information has to be typed on to a computer, and by the time that’s been done the daffodils are out. Why can’t they just write your address down on a scrap of paper and give it to the van driver?

At round about this point the modern gentleman will start to think about getting some candles. We all know that girls like to spend hours having baths in the semidarkness, and we cannot imagine what they might be doing in there. Well, we can, actually, which is why I always say no to candles.

I’m afraid I’m similarly selfish when it comes to music. My wife is forever buying CDs by bands I’ve never heard of and I know she wants the new Killers album, but if I were to buy it for her, she’d play it, and then I’d have to listen to it as well.

Books? Oh, come on. It seems a bit mean to spend only £7.99, especially as the sort of books my wife likes don’t even come with a plot.

This is why I didn’t even bother window-shopping for my wife this year. I just headed straight for the electrical department in Selfridges, where I knew I would feel safe and warm and comfortable.

Unfortunately, I must have blinked and missed some kind of technological burp, because it was full of various brushed aluminium boxes that didn’t seem to do anything even remotely worthwhile.

In essence, there are three things you can do with all this modern technology. Listen to music. Take pictures. And communicate with other people while you’re out and about. But the combination of these three things has driven the world’s techno-nerds into a complete frenzy.

Take the much-talked-about iPod as a prime example. Even if my wife had 5,000 songs in her mysterious CD collection, and even if she had the time to copy them all on to the chip, what would be the point exactly? Why copy something you already have?

So we move on to the new breed of three-chip digital video cameras. Yes, the quality is vastly improved, but answer me a straight question. Have you ever watched anything you’ve ever shot on your Handycam? Thought not. So who cares if you can now zoom in on your husband’s nose hairs from six miles away?

And why would you want a phone that can download clips of movies from the internet? When have you ever been in a position that you’re on a moor and suddenly feel the need to watch three seconds of Tom Cruise dangling upside down?

I suppose it might be quite fun to video your genitals and send them to your lover. But if I did that to my wife, she’d think I’d gone mad.

Disappointed, I came out of the electrical department fearing that, while I wasn’t looking, the world had moved on. And that it was still moving on, towards Christmas, and that I needed to get something. So I ended up buying my wife a dead rabbit.

Doubtless when the shops open on Wednesday she’ll quietly take it back and exchange it for ‘Saigon’, the great new smell of Henry Kissinger.

Sunday 26 December 2004

Who’s afraid of the nice wolf?

With devastating but quiet savagery, the countryside is being destroyed by a million-strong herd of marauding deer. Surveys have shown their numbers are spiralling out of control and that they’re now tearing through crops and woodland like a pack of horned locusts.

Worse still, deer were responsible last year for 15,000 road accidents in Scotland alone. Ten people died, pinned to their headrests by those antlers after the animal came through the windscreen. Not a nice way to go.

A similar number were killed in East Anglia, and on one stretch of road through Cannock Chase in Staffordshire a deer is apparently hit once every three days. He must be getting awfully fed up with it by now.

Anyway, the government has decided to act. Amid howls of protest from gamekeepers, ministers have decided that a well-orchestrated nationwide cull is needed. But this being New Labour, they’ve got themselves into a right old lather about it.

If it were a bacterium, or a Conservative, that was eating all the trees and killing 50 people a year, they’d act instantly to wipe it out. But deer have big, brown, soulful eyes. And that gives the luvvies a problem.

I mean, this is a government that has publicly declared undying love for foxy-woxy, so even though the deer is engaged in wholesale slaughter of mankind, you can’t really visualise Tony Blair running around the Highlands in a pair of stout wellies, hosing down Bambi’s mum with a hail of machine-gun fire.

As a result, ministers are going to great lengths to point out that the deer is a fine animal and must not be viewed as a pest or a nuisance. But that hundreds of thousands must, nevertheless, be shot in the face.

They’re even talking about allowing carefully selected and heavily licensed deer killers to roam the Highlands in the close season, shooting expectant mums. Quite something for a government whose local councils all over the country employ ‘deer liaison officers’.

Quite what a deer liaison officer does, I’m not sure. Personally, I’d rather spend his wages helping victims of the Asian earthquake, but there you go.

My favourite part of the government initiative is watching them agonise over what should be done with the mountain of carcasses. Because, of course, they’re all vegetablists, and as a result it simply hasn’t occurred to them that they could be garnished with onions and eaten.

You can even eat the muntjac, which looks like a big rat and barks like a dog. But, like crocodile and snake, it tastes of chicken.

This would be an ideal solution. Fat, poor people who spend their limited resources on crisps and lard could be encouraged to roam around the woods at night, killing deer. This way they’d get some exercise and a free meal.

But I fear that it won’t catch on, so I’m drawn to an idea that was first mooted two years ago by a wealthy Scottish landowner called Paul van Vlissingen. He spent £300,000 of his own money looking into the deer problem, and has decided that the best way of keeping their numbers in check is by reintroducing wolves.

There’s no doubt that a pack of wolves gallivanting around the Highlands would keep deer numbers down, and this would save the trees and crops. But I can’t help wondering what else Mr Wolf might eat.

Obviously Johnny Fox would be a tasty target, which is fine, now that man isn’t allowed to hunt him any more. But what about the sheep? In the Alpine region of France, a pack of just 30 wolves does its level best to keep lamb off the menu in most local restaurants; and we see a similar problem in Sweden, where wolves, tired of eating deer, are helping themselves to pretty well anything that moves.

This brings me neatly to the wolf’s favourite amusebouche – us. Van Vlissingen says humans have nothing to worry about, because in the last hundred years there hasn’t been a single recorded case of a person, or even a part of a person, anywhere in Europe, being eaten by a wolf.

He also argues that in Alaska and Canada humans and wolves live happily together.

True, but that’s because in Alaska and Canada most people pack some kind of heat in the parka. Here, however, we’re not allowed to walk around with a blue-steel .44, so I suspect the reintroduction of wolves would mean the odd rambler would go west.

This means everyone wins. The government keeps deer numbers down without turning its deer liaison officers into murderers. We will be able to drive faster in greater safety on the roads; the countryside gets an interesting new animal; and the rambling queen, Janet Street-Porter, gets eaten.

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And Another Thing

Sunday 1 August 2004

And Another Thing: The World According to Clarkson Volume Two