For Crying Out Loud!

For Crying Out Loud!

Mother knows all the best games

Can we be honest for a moment. You didn’t have a good Christmas, did you? Your turkey was too dry, your kids spent all day glued to their internets, and you didn’t bother watching the Big Christmas Film because you’ve owned it for years on DVD.

What you should have had to liven things up was my mother. She arrived at my house with a steely resolve that the Christmas holidays would be exactly like the Christmas holidays she enjoyed when she was a child. Only without the diphtheria or the bombing raids.

My mother does not like American television shows because she ‘can’t understand what they’re on about’. She doesn’t like PlayStations either because they rot your brain. And she really doesn’t like internets because they never work.

What she likes are parlour games. And so, because you don’t argue with my mother, that’s what we played.

The kids, initially, were alarmed. They think anything that doesn’t run on electricity is sinister and a little bit frightening.

So the idea of standing up in front of the family and acting out a book or a film erred somewhere between pointlessness and witchcraft.

Strangely, however, they seemed to like it. Mind you, playing with a seven-year-old is hard, since everything she acted out had six words and involved a lot of scampering up and down the dining room, on all fours, barking. Usually, the answer was that famously dog-free movie with four words in the title, Pirates of the Caribbean.

My mother, on the other hand, could only act out books and films from the 1940s, but this didn’t seem to curb the kids’ massive enthusiasm. They even want to watch The Way to the Stars now, on the basis my mother made it sound like Vice City.

I loathe charades but even when I tried to bring a halt to proceedings by doing The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, they cheered me on with roars of encouragement. Other books I used to try to ruin the day were Versailles: the View from Sweden, which is nearly impossible to act out and even harder to guess. And when that failed, Frank McLynn’s completely uncharad-able 175g.

Eventually, with my mother still chuntering on about Trevor Howard’s impeccable and unAmerican diction, and the seven-year-old still under the table barking, and me trying to act out If, mercifully, we decided to play something else.

Not Monopoly. Dear God in heaven. Please spare me from that. I’m due in Norway on Thursday and if we break out the world’s most boring board game, I’d still be cruising down the Angel Islington in my ship. Happily, it turned out that in my mother’s world Monopoly is far too modern and that in her day you made your own entertainment.

So out came the pens and paper. I can’t be bothered to explain the rules of the game she chose, but in essence you have to think of countries, or girls’ names or things you find in space that begin with a certain letter. It sounds terrible compared with watching The Simpsons or shooting an LA prostitute in the face, but you know what, the kids loved this even more than charades.

The seven-year-old was so keen she developed a sudden and hitherto unnoticed ability to write. I’m not kidding. We pay £5 million a term to have someone teach her. She has a nanny. And we spend endless hours trying to get her nose out of Pirates of the Caribbean and into a book, but to no avail. She has never, once, written anything down that could pass for a word.

But that day she wrote until her pen ran dry, and wailed like a banshee when it was time for bed.

With the kids tucked up, I did what any sane man would do and reached for the television remote. But my mother had other plans. So we put a tablecloth over the jigsaw she’d been doing and played cards.

What a buzz. It was a blizzard of smoke, wine, trumps and tension. There’s no television show, no internet site and certainly no PlayStation game that provides you with the same thrill as sitting there, a bit drunk, in a room full of lies, with a fist full of rubbish. A game of cards, it seems to me, provides everything you could possibly want out of life. It’s as exciting as any drama and as convivial as any dinner party. It’s also fun, free, environmentally friendly and something you can do as a family.

What’s more, having discovered that my seven-year-old can write, I also discovered the next day during a game of Blob! that she can perform complicated mental arithmetic. She’s claimed for 12 straight months that she can’t count but she can sure as hell count cards. I swear to God that in the three days of Christmas she learnt more than in the last three years of school.

There’s more, too, because I also swear to God that we had more fun as a family than could have been possible if we’d powered up the Roboraptor and turned on our internets.

So, today, while you are stabbing away at buttons on your PlayStation, wondering why you keep being kicked to death, or watching a film that you’ve seen a million times before, only without advertisements, might I suggest you flip the trip switch on your fuse box, light a fire and break out the playing cards, the pens and the paper.

Just avoid the charades.

Because that’s just nature’s way of explaining why you never made it as an actor.

Sunday I January 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

On your marks for a village Olympics

While watching the absolutely breathtaking New Year’s Eve firework display in London I finally formed an opinion on the question of Britain hosting the Olympic Games.

I should explain at the outset that I don’t much like athletics. Running is fine when you are late for a train, or when you are nine, but the concept of running in a circle for nothing but glory seems a bit medieval if you ask me.

Speaking of which, the javelin. In the olden days when men ate bison and Mr Smith had not yet met Mr Wesson, I should imagine that a chap with an ability to chuck a spear over a great distance would end up with many wives. But now, I don’t really get off on watching a gigantic Pole lobbing a stick.

It’s the same with the hammer. When some enormous Uzbek hurls it into row G of the stadium’s upper circle, do we think he is the best hammer thrower in the world? Or the best hammer thrower among those who’ve dedicated the past four years of their lives to throwing hammers? With the best will in the world, that’s not a terribly big accolade.

No matter. The Olympic Games are like Richard and Judy. Whether you like them or not, they exist and they are popular. The question that’s been vexing me these past few months is whether I should be pleased they’re coming to London.

I think Lord Sir Pope Archbishop Earl Duke King Seb Coe should be richly rewarded for having secured a British win. He was employed to beat the French and by wearing a beige suit and talking about multi-ethnicity he did just that. Good on him.

Now, though, the staging of the event will be handed over to those who built the dome, run the National Health Service, operate Britain’s asylum system, manage the roads, set up the Child Support Agency, invaded Iraq, guard Britain’s European Union rebate and protect the nation’s foxes.

So if we spool forward to the summer of 2012, to the opening ceremony of the London Games, what are we likely to find? A perfect ethnic blend of London schoolchildren prancing about in the nearly finished stadium wearing hard hats and protective goggles lest they are exposed in some way to the Olympic flame. But no swimming pool because health and safety thought it was a ‘drowning hazard’.

That’s then, though. What’s worrying me most of all are the next six years as we struggle under the global spotlight to get the infrastructure built.

To me, good design and cost are the only considerations. But I’m not in charge, health and safety will be. And they’re going to spend every waking moment fighting with those who want all the seating to face east, to keep the Muslims happy, those who have found a rare slug in Newham and would prefer the village to be built elsewhere and those who want all the electricity to come from the wind and the waves, because of global bloody warming.

All Olympic Games since Los Angeles in 1984 have either made a profit or broken even. But I bet Britain shatters that record. Because unlike the Americans and the Australians, and especially the Greeks, we’re obsessed with save the whale, feed the poor, green ideology. And we’ve got it into our heads that even on a construction site no one need ever be injured.

And if people are prepared to waste our money on hi-vi jackets and organic prayer mats, then think how much they’ll be prepared to waste quenching the greed of those who live and work on the proposed site.

Already I’ve heard businessmen say the compensation they’re being offered to move their hopeless company somewhere else is nowhere near enough. They can smell the money and know that all that stands between them and a retirement home in Spain is a bunch of woolly-headed liberals who couldn’t balance the books at a village tombola.

So, what’s to be done to avoid this cataclysmically expensive fiasco? Well, we could hand the whole job over to the French. Or the army. But since, on balance, I want the Olympics to come here, how’s this for a plan? We take the Olympics back to its roots and host the whole thing at my kids’ school. No, really, I was walking across the playing fields the other day and found myself wondering what more the Olympic bods might need.

At the annual school sports day they can simultaneously stage six sprint races, four games of hockey and several swimming events in the full-sized pool. There’s even a nearby river for Matthew Pinsent. Work needed to make this an Olympic venue would involve nothing more than an enlargement of the long-jump sandpits. And I know a local builder who could do that, with no danger to his workforce, and no impact on global warming, for about £250.

I’m not really kidding here. If you log onto Google Earth, you will find that despite the best efforts of John Prescott to build houses on every school sports pitch in the land, the south-east of England is still littered with a mass of sports facilities. There are enough swimming pools in Surrey alone to keep Mark Spitz going for 40 years.

This, then, is my vision: not to host the safest, least offensive, most globally cooling Games of all time. But the smallest. And then we could spend the savings we make – about £5 billion – on the most important part of the Olympic ceremony. The fireworks.

Sunday 8 January 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

We’re all going on a celebrity holiday

We learnt last weekend that the government in Sardinia is planning to impose punishing wealth taxes on billionaire visitors who come to the island in their enormous gin palaces or their onyx aeroplanes. I’m sure this went down well with those of a Guardian disposition.

In essence, those whose boats are more than a mile long will be hit where it hurts most, in the wallet. And second homes within 200 yards of the coast will attract a special council tax that will cause the owners to go cross-eyed.

And the excitement doesn’t stop there because, get this, the leader of the government, Robino Di Hood, says the money raised – and it could be £550 million a year – will be spent on baby foxes and mending the ozone layer.

Of course, delicious though the scheme might sound in eco-socialist circles, I doubt very much the super-rich will pay up. Sardinia is a pretty little place for sure, but there are many other pretty little places they can go to instead. So they will. And losing them will kill Sardinia off as a tourist destination more quickly than news of some poorly chickens.

Let me explain. A friend of mine returned recently from a break in Jamaica. ‘So how was it?’ I asked, expecting to hear about the food, the hotel, the beach and how many times he’d had his arms cut off by crack-fuelled Yardies. But no. Instead he told me he’d seen Helen Fielding, Laura Bush and the entire Eastwood family – with the disappointing exception of grandaddy Clint.

This is now how we judge holiday locations. Not on what we see, but on who we see.

And on that basis, Reykjavik knocks Jamaica into a cocked hat because last year, on a family holiday in the land of fire and ice, I trumped Helen Fielding and Laura Bush with Dame Kiri Tiki NikiWara and then trumped the Eastwood family by seeing Clint himself, checking in while I was checking out.

News of this enthused another friend so much that he went to Iceland for a winter holiday and returned to say that yes, the nightlife was very jolly and the volcanoes very active, but that the highlight had been sharing a ride in the hotel’s lift with Quentin Tarantino.

This is what always made Sardinia such a tempting destination. Forget the emerald waters or sandy beaches. It was the chance you might catch a glimpse of Princess Caroline and Roman Abramovich raving it up in one of the Aga Khan’s bars.

That’s why Sardinia has always been better than Corsica. Yes, the French island is more visually stunning than its Italian neighbour, and historically way more interesting as well. But it has always been let down by the quality of the celebs.

On numerous holidays there, the only people I’ve ever clocked are Zoe Ball, Mick Hucknall and Jeremy Paxman.

Mind you, that’s better than Dubai. On my last visit I found myself sharing a hotel with Chris Tarrant, Grant Bovey and Anthea Turner. It was like being stuck in a warm and fuzzy ITVdaytime chat show. All I needed to complete the saccharine picture of harmlessness and syrup was television’s Richard Hammond.

Barbados is a fine case study here. It’s one of the most populated countries on earth, the terrain is fairly non-mountainous and many people with tattoos holiday in the south. So why go? Well, obviously, there are direct flights and many fine restaurants, but it’s who you see in those restaurants that empties Cheshire so comprehensively.

At somewhere like the Cliff, it’s possible to spot Gary Lineker, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Ulrika Jonsson on the same night. That’s a triumvirate to make anyone’s holiday complete. Think about it: confirmation that your taste in food and islands coincides perfectly with the doyens of football, home improvement and er, being Swedish.

And I’m not being snobbish either. I know plenty of cool and trendy media people who go on holiday to Tuscany every year in the desperate hope that while they’re shopping in San Gimignano for some fair-trade, organic pesto-flavoured, nuclear-free South African peace crisps, they might bump into John Mortimer.

The celeb syndrome now affects pretty well everyone and pretty well every lifestyle choice we make.

I mean, are you going to spend £1,100 on the egg-yellow alligator-skin diary featured in last week’s Style supplement? Not likely. Unless of course Gwyneth Paltrow is papped with one while out shopping. Then you’ll happily trade your children’s health to get one.

It’s why people will wait 200 years for a table in the Ivy. It’s why people are salivating at the prospect of sending their children to Marlborough. A fine school, of course, made so much finer these days by the attendance of Eugenie York.

It’s why the village of Barnsley in Gloucestershire has become so expensive. Yes, it sounds a bit whippetish for sure, but having Kirsty Young, the Five newsreader, as a regular in the local pub makes you out to be a player.

If, however, you find all this too ghastly and you’d rather eat your own nose than share a holiday hotel with Jade Goody and Nick Knowles, then don’t despair.

Try Sardinia. Because, if this tax plan comes to fruition, it’ll be full of no one at all.

Sunday 15 January 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

The worst word in the language

Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can’t really use these words any more and yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those in the travel and hotel industries to pepper their conversation with the word beverage.

There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. And the biblically awful ‘gift’. I also have a biological aversion to the use of ‘home’ instead of ‘house’. So if you were to ask me round to ‘your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta’ I would almost certainly be sick on you.

But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hung-over, is ‘beverage’.

Apparently, they used to have ‘bever’ days at Eton when extra beer was brought in for the boys. And this almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Boris Johnson would understand.

Therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hotels have got it into their heads that the word beverage, with its Eton and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing a customer.

Now look. The customer in question is almost certainly a businessman, and the sort of businessmen who take scheduled planes around Europe and stay in business hotels are fairly low down the pecking order. You think they turn their phones on the instant the plane has landed because the Tokyo stock exchange is struggling to manage without them. No. The reason they turn them on so damn fast is to find out if they’ve been sacked.

Honestly, you don’t need to treat them like you’re on the set of Upstairs Downstairs. They do not spend their afternoons cutting the crusts off cucumber sandwiches. And they do not say grace before dinner. They’re called Steve and Dave and you know what they’re doing on their laptops in the departure lounge? Organising a backward hedge merger with GEC? ‘Fraid not. They’re looking at some Hooters Swimsuit pictures from the internet.

For crying out loud, I’m middle class. I went to a school most people would call posh. But if I came home and said to my wife that I wanted a beverage, or asked her to pass the condiments, she’d punch me.

When I travel, I don’t need to be treated like Hyacinth Bucket. I want you to understand I speak like you do and that I’ll understand perfectly if you say there’s a kettle in my room. You don’t have to say there are ‘tea and coffee making facilities’.

And please, can you stop saying ‘at all’ after every question. Can I take your coat at all? Would you care for lunch at all? Or, this week, on a flight back from Scandinavia, ‘Another beverage for yourself at all, sir?’ What’s the matter with saying ‘Another drink?’ And what’s with all the reflexive pronoun abuse?

I’ve written about this before but it’s getting worse. Reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and the object of a sentence are the same person or thing. Like ‘I dress myself. You cannot therefore say ‘please contact myself. Because it makes you look like an imbecile.

If you send a letter to a client saying ‘my team and me look forward to meeting with yourself next Wednesday’, be prepared for some disappointment. Because if I were the client I’d come to your office all right. Then I’d stand on your desk and relieve myself.

I’m not a grammar freak – I can eat, shoot and then take it or leave it – but when someone says ‘myself instead of ‘me’ I find it more offensive than if they’d said ‘spastic wog’.

Before embarking on a sentence, work out first of all what’s the shortest way of saying it, not the longest. There seems to be a general sense that using more words than is strictly necessary is somehow polite. That’s almost certainly why, on another flight the other day, I was offered some ‘bread items’.

We see this most conspicuously in the catering industry, where I am regularly offered a ‘choice of both Cheddar and Brie’. No, wait. I’ve forgotten the pointless adjectives. I should have said a ‘choice of both flavoursome Cheddar and creamy Brie’.

‘Are you ready to order at all, yourself, sir?’ ‘Yes, I’ll have the hearty winter-warming soup and the nourishing bowl of pasta, topped with the delicious dew-picked tomatoes, thanks. And to follow, if yourself can manage it, a plate of gag-inducing, nostril-assaulting, bacteria-laced Stilton.’

It’s all rubbish. Why is a bowl of pasta more appealing than a plate of pasta? And why not simply say pasta? Because don’t worry, I’ll presume it’ll come on some form of crockery, in the same way that I’ll presume, if you put a kettle in my room, that you might have put some coffee granules in there as well.

I’ll leave you with the best example I know of this nonsense. It was a rack of papers in a hotel foyer over which there was a sign: ‘Newspapers for your reading pleasure’.

All they had left was the Guardian. So it wasn’t even technically correct.

Sunday 22 January 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

McEton, a clever English franchise

Following Tony Blair’s attempts to rebrand the entire nation, we’re now told that London is no longer home to the Queen, some beefeaters and 10,000 chatty cabbies who know where they’re going. It is instead a vibrant multicultural city where you can hear 600 different languages on even the shortest trip to the shops.

Talk like this, we’re told, is what won Britain the Olympics but, that aside, I find myself wondering what it will do for the country’s balance of payments.

Tourists do not come here for our weather, or the quality of our provincial cooking. Nor are they attracted by the exceptional value of our hotels, or our beaches, or Birmingham. I’ve never met an American or a Japanese person who has said: ‘I want to come to Britain so I can buy an Arabic newspaper from a Bengali store where the cashier speaks Polish.’

What most foreigners like about Britain is not multi-culturalism or tolerance or any of that new Labour nonsense. No, what they like is our history. Shakespeare. Blenheim Palace. Soldiers in preposterous hats who don’t move. Yes, they may go and see some dead dogs in a modern art gallery but that’s only because they’ve spent the morning on the top of a sightseeing bus and they’re freezing.

Do they, for instance, go back home with baseball caps worn by modern British policemen? Or a plastic incarnation of the traditional Dixon of Dock Green helmet? Which gets more visitors: Anne Hathaway’s cottage or Benjamin Zephaniah’s birthplace?

Then there’s British Airways. When the staff wore blazers and the planes were finished in grey and royal blue, captains were beating foreigners off the ramp with big sticks. When they went all ethnic with those jazzy tailfins, the whole thing went tits up.

Any British business is well advised to use pomp, tradition, tea and history in all global marketing campaigns. So we arrive neatly at the doors of a British institution that is steeped in nothing but history and tradition. Our public schools.

There are those, of an Islington persuasion, who think they are nothing more than a hotbed of outdated values, cruelty, inequality, drugs, bullying and buggery. Not so. When I was at Repton in the 1970s we did not wear tails and we hardly ever set fire to anyone. In fact, my house looked a bit like London today. There were kids from Iran, Japan, Trinidad and even Ethiopia.

Sent by parents who wanted them to have a traditional British education, most had only a rudimentary grasp of English. And yet there they were, going through the complications of puberty, thousands of miles from home, unable to communicate with teachers, matrons or even the woman in the village shop.

I felt rather sorry for them – not so sorry that I didn’t steal all their biscuits, obviously – but I did feel that the downside of being sent so far away for an education far outweighed the perceived upside, that is, that you could go back to Ethiopia knowing the Latin for ‘What ho’.

Now, though, Repton has come up with a brilliant idea. They’ve moved the mountain to Muhammad. They’re keeping the old place in Derbyshire to cater for the children of Cheshire businessmen, and they’re opening a sister school in Dubai.

As a money-spinning venture this is up there with the iPod. I mean, Dubai is full of Indians who will understand cricket, and Arabs who have the funds to make the desert green. It’s also full of expats who’ll thank God they don’t have to pay the fees and 12 airfares every year. A big-name British public school in the Middle East. It’s a stroke of genius. And not just for local parents but also for Britain’s trade deficit.

Imagine how well Eton would go down in Los Angeles, or Harrow in Tokyo. Imagine the earning potential these schools would have; offer to put little American kids in bowlers, boaters and busbies and parents would be queueing round the block to have little Hank thrown by a mortar-boarded master into a chilly swimming pool.

Of course, in America you’d have to change the word for fagging, and in Japan I can see some complications with the traditional Remembrance Day service.

In fact, to make it really work you’d have to study the history of Harry Ramsden’s. A traditional fish and chip shop, near Leeds, it was bought and then floated on the stock exchange by a former boss at KFC who wanted to make it a national dining experience. And all he needed for that was the brand. So the beef dripping in which the chips were cooked was replaced with blended vegetable oil, and the harbour-fresh fish with frozen fillets.

Now there are 170 Harry Ramsden’s and I don’t see why there shouldn’t be 170 Etons. And before you wonder where they’re going to find enough quality British staff to run a global business this big, may I point you in the direction of the Excalibur hotel in Las Vegas. Billed as a medieval hotel with turrets and legend it is, of course, just a big plastic skyscraper full of American bellboys in Little Lord Fauntleroy shorts. Horrid? Absolutely, but the place is always packed.

Repton has shown the way. But if Eton were to pick up on the idea and open a chain of, say, Eton Harry Potter Experiences, it would earn Britain more than Lloyd’s of London and Mrs Queen put together.

Sunday 29 January 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Rock school sees off drone school

William Shakespeare has probably done more to damage the cultural worth of Britain than anyone else in the whole of human history. After endlessly having to study his plays on the school curriculum, generations of children have ventured into adulthood convinced that all literature is coma-inducingly dreary. I don’t blame them. Portia’s speech about the ‘gentle rain’ is in no way as stimulating as 10 minutes on Grand Theft Auto.

I believe that Shakespeare, along with Milton, Donne and Chaucer, has a place in modern Britain. And that place is deep in the bowels of the British Library, where he can be studied by hardcore language students.

Right now, my n-year-old daughter has a voracious appetite for books. She devours Jacqueline Wilson and reads The No. l Ladies’ Detective Agency endlessly. But I can guarantee this craving will be snuffed out the moment she’s introduced to Twelfth Night.

There’s a lot of political posturing about the future of education right now, all of which seems to miss the point: that at school, children should be encouraged to study books that make reading fun.

And it’s the same story with religion. Because I was forced into chapel every Sunday, and made to read the Bible, which is even more excruciating than Paradise Lost, I emerged from the chrysalis of puberty filled with a sometimes overwhelming desire to set fire to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

But music is my biggest bugbear. You see, I have no regrets about being a literary dunderhead and an atheist, but I have huge sadness that I can play the piano, but only in the same way that a dog can tie shoelaces.

There’s a photographer I know. He’s Welsh and drunk most of the time, but once, in the foyer of the Hotel Nacional in Havana, he sat down and played, with both hands and all the twiddly bits, some Billy Joel songs.

I couldn’t believe it. This miserable Welshman had a hitherto unseen ability to bring hope and happiness to that bleak and hopeless place; he had the skill to bring them the sounds of America, the sounds of freedom. And he’d chosen to assault them with Billy bloody Joel. The bastardo.

But the women loved it. In fact, there’s nothing more a woman likes than a man who can play a musical instrument. If you can bash out a double-handed rendition of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ you are virtually indistinguishable in the eyes of womankind to Jon Bon Jovi. As a result, my Welsh friend spent most of that night being ridden round his bedroom by a Cuban teenager in a cowboy hat.

But at school they never say, ‘Listen, boy, if you can master Air on a G String, you’ll spend your entire adult life removing Angelina Jolie’s.’ And even if they did, you’d still struggle because the ditties they make you learn are so turgid.

The acoustic equivalent of a Shakespearean sonnet. Musical Chaucer.

So why are children not given that week’s chart hits to learn? This is music they can identify with more readily than ‘The Happy Farmer’ or something written by a precocious Russian when he was five, 200 years ago.

If you give a child an Airfix model of a kitchen table, he won’t enjoy the finished result. If, on the other hand, you give him a model of HMS Hood, he will.

And then he’ll want to move on to bigger and better things.

When I was 10, I was made to learn songs that sounded awful on the first pass and even worse when I’d mastered them. And I can’t help wondering how much more fun it would all have been if I’d spent my music lessons making siren noises while playing ‘Blockbuster’ by Sweet.

Had this happened, I would have progressed through T Rex, through Genesis and on to Billy Joel. And then it would have been me being ridden round the hotel in Cuba.

Of course, a lot of modern songs are riddled with sharps and flats, which make them hard for a child to grasp, but mostly it would take even the most half-witted music teacher only five minutes to convert them so you only need hit the white notes.

Take ‘Ode to Joy’ as an example. In my music book there’s an F sharp which, from memory, means it’s in G major. But in my daughter’s music book, it’s in C major so there are no sharps or flats at all. It’s therefore easier to learn, easier to play and sounds exactly the same.

Except, of course, she has no interest in Beethoven. She wants to play ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay and ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ by the Who. She wants to end up with HMS Hood, not a kitchen table.

And without wishing to be selfish, as a parent, so do I. Trying to force our children to do their piano practice is like trying to force a gorilla into a dinner jacket. They have no stomach for it, and frankly neither do I, because in even a fairly large house there’s no hiding place from the cacophony when they begin.

The insistence of a road drill when you’re hung-over is a bad sound, but it’s preferable to the noise of a nine-year-old learning a song that wouldn’t be any good even if it were played properly.

I therefore have an idea. Can someone, please, bring out a song book called Tunes Your Dad Likes in C Major? And can Ruth Kelly stop worrying about grammar schools and put it on the curriculum?

Sunday 5 February 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Flogging absolute rubbish is a gift

I didn’t have much to do last Thursday so I went on a day trip to St Nazaire to look at the Second World War U-boat pens.

Ooh they’re big. And clever. Above the roof there’s a corrugated concrete awning designed to break up bombs before they hit the structure itself, and channel the blast horizontally away from the precious submarines.

This system could even repel the blast from an RAF Tallboy. When dropped from 20,000 feet these supersonic 5-ton bombs could displace a million cubic feet of earth, creating a crater 80 feet deep and 100 feet across.

And yet when one hit the roof of the St Nazaire sub pens all anyone inside heard was no louder than the discreet cough of an embarrassed butler.

Later the Americans peppered the roof with battleship shells dropped from B-17s.

But that didn’t work either. In fact, at the end of the war the only thing left standing in St Nazaire was the target.

They’re still there today and you’d expect, as I did, that inside Madame Tussauds would have run amok, with lots of waxwork Germans toiling over wooden torpedoes and millions of schoolchildren on guided tours of a real U-boat. But no. All I found was lots of graffiti and, in one pen, half a dozen upended shopping trolleys.

Still, in another there was a gift shop which I assumed would be full of Airfix U-boat kits, copies of Das Boot, an underwater oven glove perhaps, or maybe the very Enigma decoding machine captured by Jon Bon Jovi.

But no. All they had in the window was several trolls in traditional Breton costume – which was in no way relevant, since St Nazaire is not actually in Brittany – while inside there were plates made into clocks, lighthouses made into table lamps, place mats featuring scenes of France I wasn’t in, and most incongruously of all a rack of T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Leprechaun’s Corner’, which is a pub in Dublin.

It’s almost as though the owners had deliberately stocked the shop with anything they could lay their hands on just so long as it had nothing to do with the war.

Which seems a bit daft since I’m willing to bet that no one has ever said, ‘I fancy a Breton troll for my mantelpiece so I’ll go to those U-boat pens in St Nazaire to see if there’s a gift shop there which can help.’

This would be like going to Windsor Castle to buy a holographic keyring of the Grand Canyon. But that said, I’m constantly amazed at the inability of gift shop proprietors in the world’s tourist hot spots to sell anything that anyone might remotely want to buy.

There’s always a glass dolphin, perfectly crafted, with the name of the place you’re in stencilled onto the base. Now if there was just one on the shelves and if it was a bit rough and ready, then yes, you might be fooled into thinking it had been made, by hand, in a cave, by a local man in traditional national costume.

But since you’re in an airport terminal and there are 2,000 of them in there, and they’re all the same, and they say ‘Made in China’ on the bottom, and you saw exactly the same thing in San Francisco last year, only with ‘California’ etched onto the base, then you’re not going to be fooled.

Scandinavian gift shops are big on selling smoked salmon so you can go home with a taste of the north. But they are sold pre-sliced in hermetically sealed bags, and you just know that no wizened old trawlerman has access to the sort of packaging machine which can do this. If you want industrialised smoked salmon in a plastic bag, you’ll wait till you get home and call Jethro Tull.

Another gift shop favourite is the intricate 4-foot galleon, complete with real canvas sails, half a mile of cotton rigging and cocktail-stick delicate masts.

Great. But how are you supposed to get something like that home?

If you’re setting up a gift shop for tourists here’s a hint. Sell stuff that airport baggage handlers can’t break. And more importantly, ensure that your stock reflects your surroundings in some way. Accept that visitors to a World War Two submarine pen are not necessarily going to want an Eiffel Tower snow shaker.

Well, I did, but that’s because at home I have what I call the ‘Cupboard of Shit’.

It’s a glass-front Georgian cabinet in which I keep all of the useless rubbish I’ve found in gift shops over the years. Pride of place goes to a foot-long alabaster model of the Last Supper in which all the disciples are wearing different-coloured glitter capes.

But then I’m also proud of my Chinese-made plastic New York fireman figurine, complete with a moustache and a wounded mate on his shoulder. Movingly, this exquisite piece is called ‘Red Hats of Courage’.

I understand, of course, that the townspeople of St Nazaire might not want to cash in on the horrors of the U-boat war, or the British commando raid that wrecked the port in 1942, or the American landings there in 1917, or the loss in the Loire estuary of the troopship Lancastria and 4,000 souls in 1940.

I suppose we should respect them for that. But something relevant would have been nice. A model, perhaps, of a crowd of people in stripy jumpers with their hands held high, eating cheese.

Sunday 12 February 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

My kingdom for a horse hitman

If a newspaper columnist wants to live an easy life, then it’s sensible to steer clear of certain issues. Laying into Jesus is right out. And it’s probably not a good idea to say the poor should have their shoes confiscated. But the greatest taboo – the biggest landmine of the lot – is the touchy subject of horses.

I once wrote a column suggesting that nobody should be allowed to keep a pet unless their garden is big enough to exercise it. Under no circumstances, I argued, should you be allowed to put your animal in a lorry and drive it on the public road at 4 mph.

This went down badly. It turned out that there are three million horsists in Britain and each one of them wrote to me, hoping that I would die soon. So I made a mental note to skirt round equine issues in future.

Sadly, though, there are now three million and one horsists in Britain because my wife has just bought a brace of the damn things. I don’t know how much they cost but since they were imported from Iceland, I’m guessing it was quite a lot.

Not as much, however, as they’re now costing the National Health Service. The first to fall off was my nine-year-old son. He’d seen his sister trotting round the paddock and, being a boy, figured he could do it too.

Sadly, I wasn’t around to stop him so I’ve only heard from the ambulancemen what happened exactly.

The next casualty was our nanny, who disproved the theory that when you fall off a horse you should get straight back on again. Because having done that she promptly fell off a second time. We had to mash her food for a while but she’s better now.

So what about my wife? Well, as I write she’s skiing in Davos.

Except she’s not because 24 hours before she was due to go she came off the nag, spraining her wrist and turning one of her legs into something the size, shape and texture of a baobab tree. So actually she’s in Davos, drinking.

Apparently, the accident was quite spectacular. On a quiet road, just outside David Cameron’s house incidentally, she took the tumble with such force that she was incapable of moving. And had to ring the nanny who, as a result of her fall, could only limp to the scene of the accident.

Needless to say, the horse, with its walnut-sized brain, had been spooked by the incident and had run off. Neither of the girls was in a fit state to catch it, which meant a ton of (very expensive) muscle was gallivanting around the road network, as deadly and as unpredictable as a leather-backed Scud missile.

After it was returned by a sympathetic neighbour, I offered to get a gun and put the bloody thing out of my misery. But no. The accident was not the horse’s fault, apparently. And nor will my wife take the blame, because she’s been riding since she was an embryo and hunting since foetus-hood.

What happened was that the horse skidded on the tarmac. I see. An Icelandic horse, capable of maintaining significant speed over lava fields and sheet ice, couldn’t stay upright on asphalt. Of course. Stands to reason.

So now all the female members of the Clarkson household are busy joining internet campaigns to get every road in the land resurfaced with special horse-grip tarmac.

This, it seems to me, is the problem with horse ownership. You can’t have one half-heartedly. Every morning you must go and clear its crap from the stables, and then you must spend the afternoon combing it and plaiting its tail and feeding it tasty apples. And then each night, as you get into bed, each bruise and aching joint serves as a painful reminder of that day’s accident. Horses take over your life as completely as paralysis. You can think of nothing else.

And this gives the horse fraternity a sense that the whole world revolves around their pets too. That’s why the hunting crowd are so vociferous.

Because for them it’s not a pastime. It’s an all-consuming life. And it’s why my wife wants all roads resurfaced.

More than that, she comes back every day white with apoplexy with something a ‘motorist’ has just done. Not slowing down. Not moving over enough. Not coming by. Not turning the radio down. This from a woman who refuses to drive any car with less than 350 brake horsepower.

Of course, we’re told often and loudly that roads were originally intended for horses, and that’s true.

In the same way that the royal family was originally intended to govern. But times move on. The horse was replaced by the car and became a toy. And now it should be allowed on the roads, in the same way that the Queen is allowed into parliament. Briefly, and by invitation only.

I’ve always said that if a boy comes to take my daughters out on a motorbike I shall drop a match in the petrol tank. And that if he buys another I shall do it again. But in the past month I’ve learnt that four legs are infinitely more dangerous than two wheels. So if he turns up on a horse I shall shoot him, and it.

In the meantime I have to content myself with the behaviour of my donkeys. All they do, all day, is run up to their new, bigger field-mates and kick them.

Sunday 19 February 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Where all the TV viewers went

You probably haven’t seen Davina McCall’s new chat show, which airs at prime time on BBCi. And that’s a pity because I think it’s rather good.

Throughout television history most chat-show hosts have been men. And this is a problem because men feel duty-bound to compete.

If the guest fires a .22 joke into the ether, a chap has to come back with something heavier and better. Male conversation is gladiatorial, argumentative, spiky and designed most of all to be funny.

I asked the editor of GQ magazine last weekend if he liked my new jacket. ‘No,’ he replied in a frenzied high-pitched squeak. ‘It makes you look like a ∗∗∗∗.’ Can you imagine a woman saying that?

As a result, modern, zingy chat shows hosted by men tend to be all about the host.

It’s their duty to compensate for the dull guests and spar with the good ones. The only man who doesn’t do this is Michael Parkinson. Which is probably why he’s been around since 1912.

Davina doesn’t compete either. And because she doesn’t play the big ‘I am’ we learnt a lot about her guest last week: Martin Shaw. And what we learnt most of all is that he’s rather dull. Some of his answers were so boring, in fact, that my children, with a great deal of harrumphing, got up and left the room. And this brings me to the point of my column this morning.

When I was a child I did my homework and then watched television until it was time for bed. You may say, ‘Aha, but television was so much better back then’, but trust me on this, it wasn’t. It was grainy, lumpen, dull, black, white, infantile and all anyone could ever win was a pencil.

Even so, when I first started to appear on television in the early 1990s, people were still watching in huge numbers. I once made a rather porridgy show for BBC2 that attracted 7 million viewers. Nowadays you could only do that if you screened Angelina Jolie having lesbian sex with that new weathergirl on ITV.

Television viewing figures are in freefall. Morecambe and Wise used to pull in 25 million viewers. Now a show is judged to be a ratings success if it gets five or six. And it’s not that people are watching stuff from way down the satellite listings. The figures show they’re not watching at all. So what are they doing instead?

Well, we know a lot of women are in chat rooms starting affairs with old schoolfriends, and a lot of men are on MSN pretending to be 12-year-old schoolgirls.

I also know a lot are on eBay because I recently dumped a load of household waste into the online auction house and there was a global frenzy to snap up the lot. Next week I’m selling one of my bogeys and I bet I get a quid for it.

Then you have podcasts. Just last week I read about an anonymous woman called Faceless who makes a daily broadcast over the internet, telling her fans via a voice scrambler what she’s been up to. I’ve listened and, in a nutshell, it’s nothing.

She gets up, tries not to eat too much, has boyfriend problems, and says ‘like’ a lot. And people are downloading this rubbish. There are others who go out on the streets to make their own shows using the cameras on their mobile phones. Mostly, this involves punching anyone they come across and pushing complete strangers off their bicycles.

One of the issues that my children have with normal terrestrial television is that they can’t watch what they want, when they want to watch it. ‘What do you mean Doctor Who is on Saturday at seven? I want to watch it now.’

So off they toddle to bid for bogeys and make happy-slapping movies with each other on my phone. My youngest said the other day she ‘hates’ the BBC. Because so far as she’s concerned, it’s just ‘people talking’.

I know this frightens the living daylights out of television people. They worry that they are playing gramophone records in a digital world, that they’re wearing a Jane Austen-style bonnet to a club. And they’re scared stiff that all their fancy graphics and micro-soundbites can only delay their inevitable demise. But I’m not so sure.

It’s said that soon we’ll be able to watch shows on our mobile phones, but why would you want to do that? Why watch something that’s cheaply made for a small audience on a i-inch screen when you have David Attenborough on a 42-inch plasma at home? There’s only one reason why you would.

Because you can.

Certainly, eBay is interesting only because it’s new. When it’s been around for a while, people will realise that they didn’t buy Bill Oddie’s used underpants because that’s what they wanted. They bought them only because they could.

I can prove this. Last year, Top Gear was Britain’s most downloaded television show. Which means there are thousands of people out there who’d rather fiddle about with their newfangled broadband connections than sit down and watch the damn thing on television. Or record it on Sky Plus.

That would suggest we’re a nation of idiots. But since we’re not, I think we’re just going through a phase where pushing someone off a bicycle is more fun than watching television. It won’t last. Davina will.

Sunday 26 February 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

It takes immense skill to waste time

A report last week found that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is now the number one bedtime story for Britain’s children. But the findings also revealed that one in three parents do not read anything at all to their kids at night.

Experts say this is because grown-ups are now far too busy earning money for their metered water and their speeding fines to have much left over for the cultural needs of their young.

I’m not so sure, because last week I sat next to a thirtysome-thing chap at the barber’s who’d come inside, not for a haircut, but to have his hands manicured. He didn’t appear to be homosexual.

In fact, because he talked at some length about his forthcoming family skiing holiday, we can presume he has young kids.

So what’s his excuse for not reading them a bedtime story? ‘Sorry, Octavia, there’s no Hungry Caterpillar for you tonight because Daddy spent half the day having his fingernails oiled.’

How un-busy do you have to be to think, ‘It’s four in the afternoon on a Thursday, so I know: I’ll pop to the hairdresser’s and spend an hour or so having exotic creams rubbed into my thumbs’?

And it gets worse because on the barber’s shelves there were a million badger-hair shaving brushes. Who buys them? How empty does your life need to be before you think, ‘No, I won’t use a disposable razor and some foam from a can. If I use a brush, and whip up some lather of my own, I can make this shaving malarkey last for hours’?

Later, in Jermyn Street, which for those of you in Arbroath is a street in London where you can buy tailored shirts and shoes made from the soft underbelly of a grey seal, I saw a prosperous-looking man in a baker’s shop agonising over what sort of plumped-up, crusty, almond-infused loaf he should buy. Plainly, he wasn’t on a tight schedule.

Then we have a friend of mine who flew all the way to Siena to buy a selection of silk contrada flags that were then used as a lining in his next bespoke suit.

Everywhere you look these days you see people paying a fortune to waste time. It’s almost as though our lives are now so wealthy and so healthy that to inject a bit of worry and angst we trouble ourselves with the scent of the soap in the guest bedroom, or the breed of sheep from which our clothes are made.

There’s a shop near my flat in London that sells nothing but hand-knitted super-soft golfing jumpers. What moron gave the owner a loan for that?

What did it say in the business plan, for heaven’s sake? ‘Yes. The rent is expensive in Notting Hill, but I believe there are enough people who will drive right across town, park, come into my shop, buy a £200 jumper and then go all the way home again.’

I would have told her to get lost. But someone didn’t and because the shop is still there after six months I can only presume she was right. There are enough people out there who are prepared to devote an entire afternoon to buying a jumper.

It’s not just London either. While perusing the Google Earth website the other day – it was more fun than reading the kids a bedtime story – I zoomed in on the house where I grew up. Now this is Doncaster. A town that we were told would wither and die when the mines closed.

I don’t think so, because the spy in the sky reveals that the parkland at the bottom of the garden has been converted into an 18-hole golf course.

So even there, among the out-of-work miners, there are people who have so much spare time in their lives they will spend half of it playing what’s essentially an expensive game of marbles. Doubtless in the £200 jumper they drove all the way to Notting Hill to buy.

There are now 2,500 golf courses in Britain covering half a million acres. That means golf takes up slightly less space in the nation than Carmarthenshire. And with 1.2 million registered players, is about seven times more popular.

And shooting. Way back when the Tories were in power the only people who blasted away at pheasants were the idle rich and the blue bloods. Not any more. Now, for four months of the year, every wood in the land is full of people stomping about in the rain.

Today there are so many people with so much spare time on their hands that 569,000 own a shotgun certificate. And their hobby is now such big business it has created 40,000 jobs.

Then you have people who spend their free time doing surveys. One lot last week said they’d watched 168 hours of prime-time television and that gay and lesbian people were only featured for 38 minutes. How can your lives be so empty that you think this is a worthwhile use of the most precious resource you have: time?

And what about the people who decided to find out why so many parents were not reading their children a bedtime story. And then came up with the wrong answer.