For Crying Out Loud!
It has nothing to do with a lack of time, or a hectic schedule. And everything to do with the fact that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is the dullest and most stupid book in the history of literature.
Sunday 5 March 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
An Oscar-winning village hall bash
So, you’ve read all about the post-Oscar parties that were held in Los Angeles last week and now you fancy bringing some of that glitz, glamour and sophistication to a bash of your own.
Well, happily, the internet and the gossip magazines are awash with ideas. Obviously, you won’t be able to emulate Elton John, who for his do imported thousands of roses and adorned them all with hot-pink Swarovski crystals.
And nor will you have the clout of George Clooney, who peppered his party with people like Mick Jagger, Rachel Weisz and Madonna.
Still, there’s plenty of advice on what music to play, what clothes to wear, what sort of linen to use and how best to stuff a sugar snap pea with cheese made from the breast milk of a mongoose. Frankly, though, if you want to throw a party, I have a much better idea…
A couple of weeks ago an old friend hired a village hall in the hellhole that is Surrey and booked a Led Zeppelin tribute band to come and play.
Did I want to go? Honestly? No. I’d rather have walked through Tehran in a Star of David T-shirt.
It got worse. Our party would be all male and if there’s one thing I simply cannot abide it’s single-sex gatherings. What’s the point? The top five worst experiences of my life have all been stag nights. All that speedboat, snooker cue, business deal, BMW, golf, ‘whoa, look at the tits on that’ chest-beating nonsense.
Yes, the men in question would all be old friends, people I hadn’t seen much since leaving London 10 years ago. But if you’re going to play catch-up, why do it in a village hall while being assaulted by four blokes who think they’re Led Zep? And get this, the tickets were £15. Exactly £5 more than I paid once to see the real Led Zep.
Still, I went, and it was fantastic, precisely because no one had tried to stuff sugar snap peas with cheese. It was just a group of middle-aged people in a room who, for one night only, could pretend they were 18 again.
It wasn’t easy. For instance, when I was 18 I was very good at carrying up to eight pints from the bar to where my friends were sitting.
But I seem to have lost the knack. Three glasses had me so stumped I had to make two journeys. And when I was 18 I could stand for more than 10 minutes at a time without getting backache.
Another indication of old age came when I went to the lavatory, where I overhead one chap saying to another: ‘Sorry I had to land in your field the other day.’ How Surrey is that?
Also, at 1970s gigs the audience provided their own eerie light by holding cigarette lighters aloft in the ballads. Not there they didn’t. The light came instead from a million shiny bald patches. Viewed from the back the audience really did seem to be a big flat reflective disco ball.
Sadly, with no hair to let down any more, the audience had tried to dress down instead. This meant Boxing Day corduroy and quilted sleeveless Puffa jackets teamed with training shoes. It wasn’t a good look. But then looking good wasn’t the point.
At most middle-aged parties the hosts try to be sophisticated and grown-up. But why? We have to be responsible when we’re at work, and mature when we’re at home with the children. Surely, on a night out, we shouldn’t be quaffing cheesy peas. We should be getting drunk and shouting.
In Surrey that night we parked on someone’s lawn, drank gallons of beer from plastic glasses, never spoke about schools and listened to music that wasn’t dinner party Dido or background Bacharach.
This brings me on to the band.
If you closed your eyes you really could imagine that it was Plant and Page up there. And if you opened them again the illusion didn’t really go away. Wigs and lots of denim did create an illusion that they were the real deal. The lead singer even seemed to have a length of authentic hosepipe down his trousers.
Although, after the gig was over, the reality came flooding back. Because the man who was Robert Plant gave me a lift to the local pub in what was undoubtedly a Renault Scenic.
Being Surrey, of course, the pub had been bistrofied. It was also spinning round quite a lot. And then the next thing I knew I was in a bed, it was 8.30 in the morning and there was a Kalahari thunderstorm in my head. And some major tectonic shifting as well.
We moan about hangovers as we grow old. We complain that when you’re 40 rather than 14 they’re so much more difficult to shift. But a hangover is simply a reminder that you had a good time. You should learn to embrace it.
I certainly embraced mine. Along with the lavatory bowl, and all the soft furnishings in my house, for several days afterwards. It had been a very good party.
And here’s the thing. You can do it too, for nothing. Why waste a fortune on linen and roses? Why try to be like Elton John or George Clooney when you can rent a village hall, hire a £1,500-a-night tribute band and then flog a hundred tickets at £15 a pop?
No one will feel very glamorous. They’ll feel something so much better. Young.
Sunday 12 March 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
The secret life of handbags
Every week a new survey of some kind tells us how much time we waste sitting in traffic jams or watching television or waiting for automated call centres in Bombay to quote us happy.
Recently, I was told that over a lifetime the average man wastes 394 days sitting on the lavatory. That’s 56 weeks, wailed the report despairingly, though I can’t imagine why. They’re the happiest and most peaceful 56 weeks of a chap’s life. I love being on the lavatory more than I love being on holiday, and I certainly don’t consider it time wasted.
And anyway, 56 weeks is nothing compared with the amount of time I really do waste, standing outside the front door in the freezing cold waiting for my wife to find the keys in her handbag.
And then there are the aeons I waste waiting for her to answer her mobile phone.
Normally, it rings for 48 hours before she finds it nestling at the bottom of her bag, underneath a receipt for something she bought in 1972.
These days, if I suspect her phone might be in her bag I write a letter instead.
It’s quicker.
The American army think they have a tough time trying to find Osama Bin Laden, who is holed out in a cave somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. But really they should thank their lucky stars he didn’t choose to hide out in my wife’s handbag.
God, I’ve just thought of something. Maybe he did. Maybe he’s in there now, with his AK-47 and his video recorder. Maybe he’s using the mobile she lost two years ago to supply Al-Jazeera with news.
I read last week that women in Britain spend £350 million a year on handbags and that there’s one particular brand that has a year-long waiting list even though it costs £7,000. You wouldn’t want to dance round one of those at a disco.
What’s more, it’s said that on average women have up to 40 handbags each. To find out why, I spoke to our children’s nanny, who reckons she has about 25. Apparently, it has something to do with the seasons.
She claims she couldn’t use her favourite bag in the summer because it’s made out of some cow and ‘would look all wrong’.
So what then? Should a summer bag be made out of cuckoos? Or dragonflies? Or Freddie Flintoff?
The idea that a handbag has something to do with style was backed up by a spokesman for Jimmy Choo, who said that if you have good shoes and a good bag you will look right.
Rubbish. If you are fat and you have only one tooth there’s no handbag in the world that will mask the problem, unless you wear it over your head. And I don’t recommend that because if you put your head in a handbag it would take two years to find it again.
On average, we’re told, the contents of a woman’s bag are worth £550. That sounds about right. Fifty-five thousand things worth one pence each. My wife, however, claims that the contents of hers are worth ‘over £3,000’. Not including cash. Or, presumably, the VAT due back on all the receipts in there.
So what does she have, then, that could possibly be worth three grand? Well, there’s an iPod and the aforementioned phone. And a bag full of make-up that probably cost a hundred quid or so. But we’re still £2,000 light.
So, though I know it’s poor form, I’ve just been to the kitchen for a look and here’s how it breaks down. Down below the crust, in the asthenosphere, we find a pair of spectacles that she doesn’t need and three – that is not a misprint – three pairs of sunglasses. Which seems excessively optimistic, frankly.
Why, I asked later, do you have a pair of spectacles in your handbag when your eyes are fine? ‘Well, I might need them at some point,’ she said. So does that mean there’s a Stannah stairlift in there as well, and some incontinence pads?
Below the eyewear, in the upper mantle, there is some chewing gum, which she never eats, coins for countries that don’t exist any more and pills for things that cleared up 15 years ago. I did not dare to go further than this, into the inner core, for fear of finding the bones of Shergar. Or a secret pocket being used by Al-Qaeda.
But there was something I noted. You know the ivory-billed woodpecker that ornithologists believe became extinct 50 years ago? Well, let me tell you. It didn’t.
I genuinely don’t understand this need to carry everything you’ve ever owned around with you at all times. No, really, when you’re out and about you don’t need to have cough medicine for children who have already grown up and finished university. And if you don’t believe me, ask a man.
When I go out I take keys for the house, keys for the car, a telephone, a couple of credit cards, some money, two packs of cigarettes, a lighter and a packet of mints. And even when I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt, which is always, I cope just fine.
Then there’s my wallet. I never leave this at home, principally because it contains the single most important thing a man can have about his person: endless pages torn from newspapers and magazines. Something to read, in other words, when I’m supposedly ‘wasting time’ on the lavatory.
Sunday 19 March 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
Bad-hair days on the local news
There seems to be a consensus that locally run businesses and organisations are better than multinationals and superstates.
We regularly reject the European Union in favour of quaint old Westminster, and we love the idea of local councils even though they’re run by people who are a) incapable of getting a proper job and b) mad.
All last week there was much brouhaha about plans to shrink the number of police forces in England and Wales from 43 to about 20.
This worries us. We don’t want Dixon of Dock Green to be replaced with the FBI.
Then, of course, there is the high street. We loathe supermarkets even though they are convenient and sell good, clean food at low, low prices. Yet we love local shops despite the fact that they’re preposterously expensive and all their vegetables are shrivelled-up weeds covered in mud.
For me, though, the worst example of parish thinking is to be found on the television every night. Local news.
I want to make it plain at the outset that I do not blame the people who run these journalistic outposts. They operate on a tiny budget that means they can only respond to fires, and idiotic press releases written by lunatics in high-visibility jackets.
Everyone interviewed on local news programmes is in a hi-vi. Just last week I watched some people clearing litter from a beach near where I don’t live and all of them were resplendent in Day-Glo over-clothing. Why?
Other givens on local news are that all reporters, when covering a flood, will stand in it. And that when there’s a helicopter involved, they’ll stand under it so they have to shout.
Then there are the pick’n’mix stories. There’s always someone laying garage flowers by the side of a busy dual carriageway. Then you’ll have something about the environment, a pointless vox pop, a cute animal, possibly on a skateboard, a broken baby incubator, and someone who’s just emerged from a not terribly important crisis and needs counselling.
In local news, counselling is the pay-off for pretty well every single story.
Local hospital closes down. Staff are offered counselling. Dog falls offskateboard. Owners are offered counselling. Child excluded from school. Stupid, fat parents in hi-vi jackets are offered counselling.
Then you have the slightly plump woman, with a charity T-shirt hastily pulled on over her normal clothes, who’s organised a fund-raising fancy-dress fun run for the hospital that saved her husband’s life after a car crash/bout of cancer/fire.
That’s interesting, for the poor chap’s immediate family. But it’s of no consequence at all when it’s happened in Southampton and you don’t live there.
This is the big problem for local news teams. Unlike a local newspaper that only covers events within 10 miles, local television is nothing of the sort. Only last night, for instance, my local news programme brought details of a football match in Milton Keynes and exciting footage of a small heath fire in Dorset that injured no one and damaged no property.
I might have raised an eyebrow if I lived in one of the houses saved by what politically correct local news reporters always call ‘firefighters’ rather than ‘firemen’. But I don’t. I’m only watching because some budget-minded television executive has decided Chipping Norton, Milton Keynes and Dorset are all the same place.
So, why, you may be wondering do I tune in if these programmes make me so angry? Well, I love them. I love the gear-graunching mistakes. Last night, for instance, our local girl referred to Steve Redgrave as ‘Sir Redgrave’. And I love the way some reporters really do think they’re Jeremy Paxman, bludgeoning some dimwit councillor in a hi-vi jacket into issuing an apology for the cracked paving stone that caused the dog to fall off its skateboard.
But what I love most of all is the hair. The anchor’s barnet is always worth a giggle, but when it cuts to the chap in the field I’m like a Smash robot, rolling around in the sitting room, with barely enough breath to summon the children to come and have a look. How does it get like that? Do they take a picture of John Kerry to the barber’s? And what is it cut with? A spade?
Local hair is one of the main reasons why all the tear-jerking, bereaved-parent stories on local news go so wrong. They love someone in tears on local news.
They’ve seen it on Trinny and Susannah. They’ve seen it on The Apprentice and they know it is a ratings winner. They also know it means they have a chance to sign off with a line about counselling.
But they can never quite pull it off. The reporter does everything right. He puts on his special ‘caring’ voice. The cameraman tightens for a Big Close Up when the family photo album is produced. But the parent in question won’t cry because… well, you can’t when the chap with the microphone has a dead horse on his bonce.
That’s why they’re always taken outside, into the cold, for the cutaways and the wides. Because the chill and some grit will get the tear ducts going and then: bang. They have the money shot.
They can go back to the studio for a couple of quick puns, a spot of off-autocue flirting with the weathergirl and then hand you back to Huw Edwards for some proper news about Iraq.
Sunday 26 March 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
The lost people of outer Britain
As Gordon Brown droned through yet another dreary budget the other day, I was in the Yorkshire Dales, watching a hill farmer bump across the heather and snow in his old Land Rover.
Was he listening to the chancellor, I wondered. And if so, what would he make of those plans to impose a new higher rate of tax on people who drive four-wheel-drive cars, such as his old Defender.
It’s a hard, brutal life up there on the roof of England, especially at this time of year when the lambs are coming. Three times a night those hardy old souls have to drag themselves out of their warm beds to stomp about on the moors with half their arm up a sheep’s backside.
I watched them from my hotel room, their million-candle-power torches piercing the night like Second World War searchlights.
And for what?
A fat lamb these days is worth no more than £50. And now they have to rear five simply to tax their Land Rover. Just because someone from the bigoted metropolitan elite is waging a class war with the yummy mummies of Wandsworth.
Up there in the Dales most people think Leyburn is a long way away, Leeds is Hong Kong and London may as well be on the moon. So when they listen to the radio and the television, they must wonder what on earth everyone is on about.
What is meant, for instance, by immigration? If you look on the census form for the nearest town – Hawes – you will find that 99.6 per cent of the population is ‘white’ and just 0.4 per cent ‘non-Christian’. I presume this blip has something to do with the local Indian restaurant.
Mostly, a dalesman’s idea of exotic food is a bit of blueberry in his Wensleydale, and a foreign language is Geordie. God knows who does the plumbing.
Then you have crime. They must hear on the radio stories of gang rape and 16-year-old girls being shot in the face, and they must wonder if they’ve somehow tuned in to a station from Andromeda.
In a break from filming I was sitting on a bench in the middle of Thwaite (population 29) when into the village trundled the mobile library. That in itself was quaint enough. But it was nothing compared with what happened next. Because from out of the passenger door stepped a community support policewoman.
Now let’s not forget, shall we, that I’m not talking here about the 1940s, or some remote Scottish island. I’m talking about a twenty-first-century village just a couple of hundred miles from London… where the police patrol their patch in mobile libraries.
Car chases would be interesting. Especially if the villains head for West Stonesdale. Sadly, the library can’t follow on that road because it doesn’t have a good enough turning circle for the hairpin bends.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re assuming there are villains to chase.
‘Well, there are,’ said the (very pretty) policewoman. Oh yeah, I retorted with a southern sneer. ‘And how many people with ASBOs are there within thirty miles of where we’re standing now?’
Wrong question. ‘Aha,’ said the policeperson, ‘we do have a woman in Wensleydale with an ASBO.’ Right. And what had she done? Knifed a bouncer in a late-night brawl? Nicked a car? No, wailed Miss Dales Constable. ‘She hit her brother with a stick of rhubarb.’
I am not making this up. And nor is she. I’ve checked and a woman called Margaret Porter was indeed given an ASBO for throwing three sticks of rhubarb at her brother.
Other crimes? Well, someone had his quad bike stolen last year, but now that Kojak could roll into town at any time in her diesel-powered library that sort of thing has stopped.
Speeding? Difficult to say, because the policewoman set up a dot-matrix site the other day but it didn’t work. She’s taken it to the fire station to see if they can figure out what’s wrong. And if they work it out, they’ll doubtless get a local coal merchant to run it back to the police station.
You get my point. We accept ID cards and traffic cameras because we know there are Albanian people-traffickers in our midst. So why are they accepted in Thwaite, where the most offensive weapon is a vegetable?
There’s more too. I listened to Jonathan Ross talking about some obscure shop on Marylebone High Street. I knew what he was on about. You probably knew what he was on about. But I’d bet my left ear that the hill farmers of West Stonesdale, who can no longer read library books, had absolutely no idea at all.
Likewise the news. We hear, every day, about the chronic water shortage and how we must all stop cleaning our teeth. But up north the reservoirs are overflowing, the brooks are babbling and the concept of a water shortage is as daft as the concept of a diplomatic row over parking tickets.
Last week I suggested that local news programmes on the television are a waste of time. And that national news is much better. But the news we get is not national.
It’s centred on London, which is home to just an eighth of the country’s population. This, if I lived in the Dales, would be very annoying.
Nearly as annoying, in fact, as being made to pay an extra £45 a year to tax my Land Rover because someone in Chelsea recently bought a Hummer.
Sunday 2 April 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
Cut me in on the hedge fund, boys
I have no idea what a hedge fund is, but after a day trip to Mustique last week I think I need to plant one.
At first I couldn’t quite work out whether this privately owned island in the Caribbean is heaven on earth or a small piece of hell. Certainly, it’s the first country I’ve ever been to which is completed mowed, from end to end, in nice neat strips. Honestly, I’ve been to dirtier, messier nuclear laboratories.
It seems sanitised somehow, but then I thought, what’s wrong with that? A lot of very rich people have come here and built a world where there is no crime, no disease and no unpleasant working-class people on the beaches. Not unless they’re in an apron and they’re toiling over a barbecue, roasting yams.
After a day drinking wine, and swimming in the preposterously turquoise sea, going back to Barbados felt like going back to Birmingham. As our little plane took off from the freshly mowed airfield, I looked back and thought: ‘No. Mustique is more than all right. It’s living, breathing proof that the resurrection’s a load of nonsense.’
Because if Jesus really had come back from the dead, he’d still be alive today.
And if he were still alive, it’s sensible to assume he’d be living in the best place on earth. So he’d be in Mustique. And he wasn’t.
Of course, some of the 90 or so houses that sit like big wedding cakes on the newly mowned hillsides belong to high-profile stars such as Mick Jagger, Tommy Hilfiger and Stewart Copeland – the second of only two policemen on the island.
But the vast majority belong, it seems, to hedge-fund managers.
Now I can describe these people to you very easily. They are all quite young, and they all appear to be super-fit. None smokes. Few drink. All have swept-back hair and dazzling teeth, and all, you imagine, would quite like to murder someone, to see what it’s like. You’re thinking Bret Easton Ellis. So am I.
They are also lip-slobberingly rich. There are estimated to be 9,000 funds worldwide which, between them, have assets of $1,500 billion. So they’re not really hedges at all. They’re bloody great leylandii.
What’s more, a whopping 78 per cent of all the hedges in Europe are grown and nurtured in London. That’s $255 billion. And that’s great, but before we get too excited, we must first of all try to work out what a hedge fund is.
According to a friend in the City, they’re brilliant because whether the stock market goes up or down, you still make pots of money. Great. Sounds like my kind of gambling. But what are they exactly?
‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘You rent shares from someone who has a lot of them and then you sell what you’ve rented.’ Now this, so far as I can tell, is actually called ‘theft’. Small wonder they’ve all got houses on Mustique. They’re all burglars.
‘No,’ said my friend, ‘because you always pay back the person you’ve rented them from, plus interest.’ I see, so you rent some shares, sell them, and then give the profit (if you’ve made any) to the person from whom you did the renting. That seems like a lot of effort and risk for no gain at all.
My friend became exasperated and told me to stop thinking so literally because the money never actually exists. ‘It’s like a house of straw, then?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she tutted. ‘It’s like a house of straw that’s a hologram. It isn’t there.’
On the worldwide internet, a hedge fund is described thus: ‘A fund, usually used by wealthy individuals and institutions, which is allowed to use aggressive strategies that are unavailable to mutual funds, including selling short, leverage, programme trading, swaps, arbitrage, and derivatives.’
Gibberish. And galling, too, because I’m not a stupid man. I’m able to grasp the most complicated concepts, especially if it means I can walk away from the table six years later with £100 billion in my back pocket, a Gulfstream Vand a house on Mustique. But this hedge-fund business was eluding me.
One thing I did note was that hedge funds are not regulated like normal share dealings. I’m not surprised. How could a flat-footed policeman possibly be expected to investigate a house of straw that doesn’t exist?
And there’s something else. While hedge funds operate outside the law, don’t exist, and always make money whether the market rises or falls, 85 per cent fail. How’s that possible? That would be like losing money at the races whether your horse came in first, third or in a big tube of Evo-Stick.
To find out, I turned to a publication called Money Week which, in a lengthy and indescribably boring article, explained why hedges are starting to crumble. There are many reasons, apparently, none of which I could understand. But all of which are wrong.
I’ve given it a moment’s thought and I know exactly why the business is in trouble. It’s obvious. In order to function, hedge funds need wealthy investors.
But as my recent trip to Mustique demonstrated, all the world’s richest people these days are hedge-fund managers. This, then, has become a business that can only invest in itself.
Soon these guys are going to have to forget about the super-rich and chase down those who are simply well off. That’d be me, and that’s great. Lend me your house on Mustique for two weeks next Easter, and we’ll talk.
Sunday 23 April 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
Flying with the baby from hell
Memo to the nation’s religious leaders. When delivering a sermon, here’s an idea: try to make it relevant or interesting in some way.
I bring this up because last week on Radio 2’s Pause for Thought a Buddhist was trying to tell us to think of others and not just ourselves.
Now there are many examples he could have used here. There’s the parable of the good Samaritan, which has worked well for thousands of years. Or there’s the parable of the John Prescott, an inarticulate fat man who was steered through life by his pant compass and his class hatred and ended up lost in a tabloid world of hate and ‘Two Shags’ ridicule.
But no. The story we got was about a ‘wicked man’ whose only good deed on earth was not treading on a spider. So when he died, the spider lowered a sliver of thread into hell so he could climb out.
With me so far? Unfortunately, lots of people also used the thread to get out and it snapped and they were all killed.
So what’s the good Buddhist trying to say here? That if you let others share your good fortune, everyone will die? That the wicked man wasn’t wicked after all? Or that he’d written the sermon after sniffing several pints of glue?
Whatever, the story was rubbish, so this morning I’m going to see if I can do better with my own sermon on selfishness. It’s called the parable of the British Airways Flight to Barbados.
There was a wicked man who had agreed to go on a golfing holiday with his boss.
Plainly, this had not gone down well with his wife, who had demanded that she come too, and their children, one of whom was a baby.
Now British Airways does not allow you to smoke while on board, or carry knitting needles or have sexual intercourse with other passengers.
You are also not allowed to board if you have shoes with explosive soles or if you’ve had one too many tinctures in the departure lounge. And if you make any sort of joke, about anything at all, in earshot of the stewardesses, you will be tied to your seat as though it was 1420, and you were in the stocks.
But you are allowed, welcomed even, into the club-class section of the plane even if you are accompanied by what is essentially a huge lung covered only in a light veneer of skin.
I want to make it absolutely plain at this point that I never took any of my children on a long-haul flight until they were old enough to grasp the concept of reason. It is simply not fair to impose your screaming child on other people, people who have paid thousands of pounds for a flat bed and therefore the promise of some sleep.
There’s talk at the moment of introducing planes with standing room for economy-class passengers. Imagine the sort of seat you get in a bus shelter and you’ll grasp the idea. Fine. So why not soundproofed overhead lockers into which babies can be placed? Or how about flights where under-twos are banned? I’m digressing.
The family at the centre of this morning’s parable were seated in club class, between me and another columnist on the Sunday Times, Christa D’Souza. I said I wanted to write about them. Christa said she wanted to kill them.
The crying began before the Triple Seven was airborne, and built to a climax as we reached the cruise. And this was the longest climax in the history of sound. It went on, at Krakatoan volume, without hesitation, until we began the descent eight hours later. At which point, thanks to a change in pressure on the lung’s tiny earholes, the noise reached new and terrifying heights. I honestly thought the plane’s windows might break.
And what do you suppose the mother did to calm her infant? Feed it some warm milk? Read it a nice soothing story? Nope. She turned her seat into a bed, puffed up her pillow, and pretended to go to sleep.
I know full well she wasn’t actually asleep for three reasons. First, it would have been impossible. Second, no mother can sleep through the cries of her own child, and third, every time I went to see Christa I made a point of trailing a rolled-up newspaper over the silly woman’s head.
So why was she pretending? Aha. That’s easy. I know exactly what she said to her husband as they left home that morning. ‘If you’re going to play golf while we’re on holiday, you can be childminder on the plane. I spend all day with those bloody kids. I’m doing nothing.’
This is almost certainly why the lung was so agitated. Because the person it knows and loves was apparently dead, while it was being jiggled around by a strange man it had never seen before. Because he leaves for work at six in the morning, doesn’t get back till 10 and is away all weekend playing golf.
And that’s why he was put in charge of the children, and that’s why the flight was ruined for several hundred people. Who then had to spend a fortnight in the Caribbean, terrified that the lung would be on their night flight back to Britain.
It wasn’t. And this is the point of my sermon. I do not know what happened to it.
But if there really is a God, I like to think it was eaten by a shark.
Sunday 30 April 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
With the gypsies in junk heaven
Back in February I told you about my Cupboard of Shit. It’s a glass-fronted Georgian cabinet in which we house quite the most startling collection of pointless, tasteless rubbish it’s possible to conceive.
A particular favourite of mine is the plastic figurine of a New York fireman carrying his wounded buddy through what appears to be a half-eaten tomato sandwich. But it is, in fact, supposed to be the ruined remains of the World Trade Center.
Then there’s the Corsican shepherd with the melted face, the endless array of stupid creatures made from shells, a particularly horrible snow shaker and a Jesus on a rope.
British seaside gift shops are a fine hunting ground for all this stuff but even better are retail establishments within 400 yards of anything to do with the Catholic church. You should see my alabaster Last Supper in which all the disciples are wearing coats made from different-coloured glitter.
Anyway, out of the blue, I found a whole new seam to mine in my relentless quest for horror: Stow-on-the-Wold.
Those of you who have read A. A. Gill’s book on the English will know that he described this Cotswold hill town as unquestionably the worst place in the world. And a lot of the locals have failed to understand why he feels like this.
It’s simple. Adrian doesn’t know one end of the Cotswolds from a nasty dose of cot death. He was simply aiming his poisoned quill at the town where I live. And missed.
The fact is that Stow is a wonderful place. For 364 days of the year. And then for 24 glorious hours in May it becomes the biggest campsite in the world for… er, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to call them now.
Travellers seems wrong since they all live in houses in Dart-ford in Kent. I know pikey’s a no-no. Er, gypsies? Is that okay?
It’s easy to remember when this is on because all of a sudden the shutters come down on the normal shops and everyone within 40 miles suddenly loses all their five-bar gates. And their lawn mowers.
Oh, and every grass verge in the region is suddenly bedecked with a million chromed caravans. One of which, I couldn’t help noticing, had been fitted with a wheel clamp. Who did they think was going to nick it? The Duke of Marlborough?
Anyway, the fair. Primarily, it’s a place where you can buy and sell horses, some of which go for £40,000. A bauble compared to some of the Range Rovers I saw. But as is the way with these things, there are a number of stalls where you can buy canaries for £3,000, 30-year-old Ford Transits for £1,800, and terriers. I don’t know how much they cost because while I was in the middle of finding out, one of them leapt six feet off the ground and tried to eat my head.
You can also buy caravans, of course, and five-bar gates, and lawn mowers. But no heather, surprisingly, or pegs, or tarmac.
As soon as I walked into the field I was assaulted by a 1 o-year-old kid. I reckoned that he would want to talk about Top Gear or some obscure Ferrari. But no. He had seen my Breitling from 700 yards away and liked it very much. Then he was joined by another kid who had noted I had the new B&O phone. Pretty soon, I figured, I’d have neither.
The people here were simply incredible. All the women appeared to have stepped straight off the stage at Stringfellows. Except that they all had double-decker pushchairs full of half a million babies. And all the men had necks like birthday cakes and forearms thicker than my upper thigh.
Aren’t they all just so lovely, said the girl I went with. Well, yes, here, when they’re prising a terrier offyour head, I agree, they are lovely in a salt-of-the-earth sort of way. But when it’s 3 a.m. and you come downstairs in a nightie to find one of them in your sitting room helping himself to your television set, then no: lovely isn’t a word that springs to mind.
One thing. They were all spectacularly good-looking. I’m afraid I know very little about the origins of these people; I recall that they originated in India but they don’t look Indian to me. They look like gods. With beer bellies and pushchairs. If you can imagine such a thing.
The trinkets they were selling, though, were not good-looking at all. They were absolutely hideous. Within minutes I had found at least 30 items that would fit nicely into my cupboard. But I have strict rules.
I’m only allowed to buy one thing per venue or day.
At first I was tempted by a rose bowl made from etched cut glass. And that was just the start. Some of the cut faces were brown, some were finished in ‘hand painted’ enamel and some in gold leaf.
I can’t begin to describe the foulness of the thing. But it was £50 so I moved on.
I finally settled on a £25 pot horse. Painted by… well, I have no idea. By a team of primary-school children, I think. It stands a foot tall and has golden ears and Romany scenes on its flanks. It is extraordinarily terrible and made me very happy.
Sunday 14 May 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
Listen to me, I’m the drought buster
After two unusually dry winters Britain is no longer classified by the world’s climatologists as ‘unbelievably wet and miserable’. We are now listed as ‘soggy and horrid’ and, as a result, I’ve had a letter from my local water company telling me not to clean my teeth or wipe my bottom.
There is a chilling warning too. If I persist with my personal hygiene, they will ban me from topping up the swimming pool.
Of course, everyone is now running around saying that instead of sending out threatening letters, the water companies should spend some of their profits fixing the leaks.
Why? The whole point of a company is to make money, not to spend every single penny it has digging up every single road in the country to repair a system that is 150 years old and completely knackered.
Even more annoying are the swivel-eyed loonies who have blamed the water shortage on people who eat meat. They argue that thanks to climate change, south-east Britain has less rainfall per head than Sudan. So what? Monte Carlo probably has less rainfall per head than the moon. It just means that a lot of people live in Monaco, not that the Monegasques have to walk to a standpipe every morning with buckets on their heads and flies in their eyes.
On top of all this you have those who say that the hosepipe ban is not the fault of climate change or the water companies but is all down to John Prescott and his insane plan to house everyone from eastern Europe, Africa and South America in a starter home on the outskirts of Canterbury. ‘That’s why there’s a water shortage,’ they say. ‘It’s all being stolen by Somalian rapists.’
Of course, normally, I would leap at the chance to pour scorn all over Two Shags but I’m afraid I don’t subscribe to this ridiculous blame culture. And so, instead of sitting around with a dirty bottom and scuzzy teeth, pointing an accusing finger at anyone and everyone, I have been working out what might be done.
The fact of the matter is that from 1760 Britain’s rainfall patterns have been up and down like a pair of whore’s drawers. We have a handful of very wet years and then a handful of dry ones. And we’ve always managed just fine.
What has changed recently is that Mr Prescott has moved south. I’ve moved south.
Everyone’s moved south. Ever wondered why you never hear about anything going on in Scunthorpe these days? It’s because the entire population now lives in Guildford. And what are all these emigres doing?
Well, mostly they’re standing in dried-up lake beds wondering where all the water has gone.
What’s urgently needed in the south-east are more reservoirs. And that’s a problem.
In the north when you build a reservoir you lose, at worst, three small villages and a couple of bats. But wherever you build such a thing in the south-east would mean drowning something a bit more substantial. Like Marlow, for example. Or Windsor Castle.
What’s to be done? Well, if we head back up north we find Kielder Water, one of the largest man-made lakes in Europe. It was first mooted in the 1960s, when everyone felt that heavy industry in the north-east would need more and more water to stay competitive. But it was opened in 1976, at pretty well the precise moment when the last of the region’s heavy industry closed down.
I’m sure there are people there now, still working out who was to blame for this mistake. I’m not. I’m wondering how it might be possible to get some of those 44 billion gallons of water to my toothbrush.
How hard can it be? An idea, first mooted in the Sunday Times seven years ago, suggested that the water could be scooped into massive plastic bags and then floated down the North Sea. This idea was tested in Greece and then forgotten. I’m guessing because plastic bags full of water when put in the sea will, er, sink.
No, the only sensible way to move water from the north to the south is in pipes, and please don’t tell me this can’t be done. If we can get gas from Siberia to the back of my Aga, without a single leak at any point on the journey, then, I’m pretty certain, we can get water from Tyne and Wear to my lavatory bowl.
Doubtless you are all thinking that the cost and disruption of such a pipeline would far outweigh the benefits. But who says it has to go by land? Why not run it offshore down the east coast?
You wouldn’t even need any energy-sapping pumps because the base of the dam at Kielder Water is 460 feet higher than central London. It would be downhill all the way. Complicated? I don’t think so. Brunel could probably have designed and built such a thing in about a week.
I have another idea. In places like Dubai, where the rainfall is even lower than ours, they build desalination plants and get their water from the sea. Why can we not do this? At the very least, drinking sea water will help to keep the sea levels down.
Unfortunately, none of these ideas will ever come to fruition because everyone is far too busy blaming everyone else. You can take the consequences if you want to and end up in the Middle Ages.
Me? I’m going to spend the summer washing my bottom with Evian and topping up my swimming pool with gin.
Sunday 21 May 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
Trust me, work is more fun than fun
Last week David Cameron suggested we should think less about money and more about the quality of life. And immediately every socialist in the land started running around shaking his fist, saying it’s all right for some with their big houses and their floppy hair. But that some people have to work to have money for pigeons and whippets.
Of course, that’s true. But I don’t think Mr Cameron was addressing the nation’s factory workers, who already have a good life. They clock off at 5.30 on the dot and are in the Dog and Communist 10 seconds later.
I think he was talking to the middle classes, who work and work and work and never have time to play Monopoly or Swingball with their children. And I bet his ideas had some appeal.
Staying at home all day, tending the garden, never missing a school play and rearing geese all sounds lovely. Especially if you’re a provincial GP who’s just spent the morning lancing boils and playing with the varicose veins of the town’s pensioners.
Certainly, there are days when I think of jacking it all in. Last night, for instance, I was driving round a sodden airfield in Surrey in a Vauxhall Vectra while my son was third soldier from the back in Beowolf. I should have been there.
And what’s more, I could have been there. Thanks to the kindness of those who bought my book last year I probably do have enough now to stop working.
Of course, there would have to be some sacrifices. I wouldn’t be able to afford a car, for instance, and we’d have to move to a much smaller house. And there’d be no more holidays, or birthday presents for the children. And we’d have to eat lawn clippings. But the biggest loss of all would be my job.
This is the point I think Mr Cameron missed. Yes, for five minutes a day the idea of living the Railway Children dream with my kids in pinny dresses waving at trains all day long sounds great.
But for the rest of the day I love what I do.
Of course, there are times when I have to drive a Vauxhall and it’s raining. But there are times when I drive a Ferrari and it’s not. And best of all there are times like right now when the house is quiet and I’m tucked away in my little office writing. This is not a chore. It’s called work, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be.
And come on, be honest, it’s the same for you. Yes, the provincial GP may not like having to examine an endless parade of sagging, ageing flesh, but who knows, the next person through the door may be Kate Moss.
Furthermore, deep down, a doctor must feel pretty good when, after a seven-minute appointment, he makes someone better. He could not replace that contentment if he were at home arranging flowers.
Take Saturdays as a prime example. This is the day when I hide away in the office, writing the following week’s Top Gear show. Sure, I could be playing Cluedo with the kids. But they like to watch MTVmore, and if I watch MTVwith them I become very agitated, which causes a row.
For family harmony, then, the best place I can be when they’re watching MTVis in the office. They like this too, because when I’m in the office I’m earning money that they can spend on PlayStation games, and that improves their quality of life hugely.
Also, if we have money, they can go to school in a car, which is more comfortable and much safer than going on an ox cart. And, I suppose, if I’m honest I didn’t really want to be at Beowolf last night. It is a very dull play when performed by professionals. Give it to a bunch of io-year-olds, and you know what? I’d rather drive a Vauxhall Vectra in the rain.
Then there’s the question of marital happiness. At present, I come home late, fall asleep on the sofa and dribble slightly until bedtime. My wife is very happy with this arrangement. Whereas she’d be very mad if I were here all day trying to be helpful.
It is a known fact that men, when bored, cannot last for more than 15 minutes without imagining that DIY is an instinctive ability like mating and eating: that being a male means we simply must be good with an electric sander. Men must never be bored while at home, then; otherwise the whole house will fall down.
Furthermore, we need the buzz we get from working; the juice. When I read out the script I’ve written for Top Gear and the production team sit there yawning, I have 12 hours to write a new one.
And that’s a roller-coaster thrill. I love it. I love the pressure. And I fear there wouldn’t be any if I spent my days waving at trains and growing cabbages.
The simple fact of the matter is that, for the vast majority of the time, the vast majority of the people like and enjoy their jobs.
So stick at it. Unless you’re Tony Blair, that is. You are allowed to go home and spend more time with your family, because that way we’ll get David Cameron, who promises he’ll do the same.
And that, a country with no leader, would improve the quality of all our lives immeasurably.
Sunday 28 May 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
Pot-Porritt wants me eliminated
For many years I’ve poked fun at environmentalists, fondly imagining that my opposition to their nonsense was about as ineffectual as Denmark’s opposition to American policy in the Middle East.
Oh sure, the eco-people sprang out of the bushes from time to time to plant a custard pie in my face, in the same way that a 16-stone man might leap out of bed at night and swat a particularly annoying bluebottle.
And yes, when I make jokes about gassing badgers, funny little men with curious downloading habits go onto the internet and put my name and address in their To Be Killed folders. But despite this, I’ve always felt like a bit of beef dripping in a big vat of tofu.
No, really. The eco-ists have the ear of the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, the whole of the BBC, most of the country’s newspapers, every single university campus and nearly every government in the world. Whereas I have the ear of the Ford Capri Owners Club. Which is comprised of half a dozen men in Dennis Waterman-style leather bomber jackets.
Last week, however, it transpired that I may be more of a nuisance than I imagined. Jonathon Pot-Porritt, the former director of Friends of the Earth, who now heads the government’s UK Sustainable Development Commission, says he can’t get his message across because everyone’s too busy watching me driving round corners too quickly on Top Gear.
He called me a bigoted petrolhead and said that anyone who shuts me up should be given a knighthood.
Now I’ve seen Goodfellas, and as a result I know that ‘shutting someone up’ is Martin Scorsese-speak for having someone killed. Crikey. A man in the government wants me dead. And it’s not like they haven’t done this kind of thing before…
So I’d just like to say, if my body is found in a wood at some point in the not too distant future, it wasn’t suicide. Tell Lord Hutton that Swampy Porritt did it.
I should be worried, I suppose, but mostly I’m rather flattered. For years I’ve felt like King Canute sitting on the beach, watching helplessly as the tide of eco-offal rolls inexorably towards the shore. But now Mr Pot-Porritt has come out of nowhere to say that I really do have the power to hold back his plans to make trains out of cardboard and create electricity by composting Tories.
I should explain at this point that Pot-Porritt and I have history. I once interviewed him on a television show, and out of common courtesy the producer edited the slot to ensure we both scored an equal number of points. In fact, Porritt made a tit of himself, trying to argue that cars were responsible for the then floods in Uckfield, East Sussex.
Unfortunately, my mother-in-law lived in Uckfield and I knew full well that the waterlogged high street had nothing whatsoever to do with global warming, and everything to do with the way the local flood plain had been buried under a million tons of Prescott-approved housing.
Porritt stammered a lot and was forced to agree. But he said the heavy rain was all our fault. In much the same way that he now says the drought is all our fault.
And what’s more, he even has Sir David Attenborough on side these days.
Now my respect for The Attenborough as a broadcaster is boundless. He could tell me that I was a giant panda and I’d believe him. He could come on the television and say koala bears can fill in tax forms and I’d stroke my chin appreciatively.
But when he comes on the television to say Sienna Miller’s Range Rover has broken the Gulf Stream and overheated a guillemot, well, I’m sorry, but I just nod off.
Because finger-wagging environmentalism, even from the God of the electric fish tank, is catastrophically boring.
No, honestly. Being told to give up polythene to prevent something that might not happen is like being told to give up drink because it might damage your liver.
Yeah, but, when you’re at a party having a nice time, really who gives a damn?
I can prove this. Because last weekend the BBC ran a save-the-planet quiz show on BBCi against Top Gear on BBC2. And guess what? More people watched the planet being savaged than watched a load of weird beards trying to save it.
I offer a piece of advice, then, to Mr Pot-Porritt this morning. Try living like I do. Don’t drop litter. Recycle whatever can be recycled, without talking about it. Grow your own vegetables. Eat meat. Use whatever means of transport is the most convenient. And when you wake to find the sun is shining, call some friends round for a barbecue and be happy.
Don’t worry about the topsoil and the coral reefs. Remember that in 1900 we lived for an average of 49 years and that now we live to an average of 78. Remember, too, that we have reduced poverty more in the past 50 years than we did in the preceding 500. And rejoice at the news that all the waste generated by the United States in the whole of the twenty-first century – all of it – will fit in a landfill site just 18 miles across.
You will enjoy your short time here on earth so much more, and what’s more, if you stop telling us what to do all the time, so will we.
Sunday 4 June 2006
For Crying Out Loud!
Simon Cowell ate our strawberries
I forgot to buy a book for a flight from Edinburgh to London this week, so I stared out of the window the whole way. And two things became obvious: Britain has a great deal of water. And while nobody was looking it seems that someone has bubble-wrapped the entire countryside.