For Crying Out Loud!

Plainly, they can’t eat meat so here’s an idea to chew on. Why don’t we feed them vegetarians?

Sunday 3 June 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Stuff the tiger – long live extinction

As the population of China becomes more wealthy, demand for illegal tiger parts is booming. Up to 600 million Chinese people believe that tiger bones, claws and even penises will cure any number of ailments, including arthritis and impo-tency. And as a result we’ve just been told, for about the hundredth time, that if nothing is done extinction looms.

Well, not complete extinction. Obviously, tigers will continue to exist in Las Vegas for many years to come. And in Asia there are so many backstreet big-cat farms that they outnumber cows. But they will cease to exist in the wild.

Right. And what are we supposed to do, exactly? Send an international force tooled up with the latest night-vision gear and helicopter gunships to hunt down and kill the poachers?

Really? And what are these mercenaries supposed to say to the locals? ‘Yes, I realise that you have no fresh water, no healthcare, little food and that your ox is broken, but we are not here to do anything about that. In fact, we’re going to put an end to the only industry you have.’

Yes, say the conservationists, who argue that unless this is done now our children will grow up never being able to see a tiger in the wild. And that this is very sad.

Is it? I have never seen a duck-billed platypus in the wild or a rattlesnake. I’ve never seen any number of creatures that I know to exist. So why should I care if my children never see a tiger?

In fact, come to think of it, if they’re on a gap year trekking through the jungles of Burma I fervently hope they don’t.

There’s an awful lot of sentimentality around the concept of extinction. We have a sense that when a species dies out we should all fall to our knees and spend some time wailing. But why? Apart from for a few impotent middle-class Chinamen, or if you want a nice rug, it makes not the slightest bit of difference if Johnny tiger dies out. It won’t upset our power supplies or heal the rift with Russia. It is as irrelevant as the death of a faraway star.

So far this century we’ve waved goodbye to the Pyrenean ibex – did you notice? – and the mouthful that is Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey. Undoubtedly, both extinctions were blamed on Shell, McDonald’s, the trade in illegal diamonds, Deutsche Bank or some other spurious shareholder-led attempt to turn all of the world into money and carbon dioxide.

But if we look back to a time before oil, steam and German bankers, we find that species were managing to die off all on their own. The brontosaurus, for example. And who honestly thinks it’s sad that their children will never get to see a tyranno-saurus rex in the wild?

In the nineteenth century 27 species went west, including the great auk, the thicktail chub, the quagga, the Cape lion and the Polish primitive horse. Apparently, the Poles tried their hardest but it was no good. It was just too primitive.

Eco-mentalists ignore the fact that between 1900 and 1919 we lost most of the young men in Europe and prattle on about the passing of the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the Tasmanian wolf.

Honestly, who cares, because there are quite literally millions more fish in the sea. Only last week we heard that scientists in the South American rainforest have found 24 previously unknown species including 12 dung beetles, a whole new ant, some fish and a rather fetching frog.

It may not be as cuddly as a baby tiger or as primitive as a Polish horse, but it is groovier since its purple fluorescent hoop markings appear to have been drawn by Steve Hillage himself.

So is the world rejoicing at the sensational news that we’ve been joined on earth by a hippie frog? Is it hell as like. What the world is doing instead is crying into its eco-handkerchief because of what’s going on in the Arctic.

We’re told that because of the Range Rover, HSBC and Prince Bandar all the ice at the North Pole is melting and that as a result the polar bear has nowhere to live. Apart, that is, for the 3 million square miles of northern Canada that are completely untouched by any form of human encroachment.

Anyway, ignoring that, we are told that the polar bear is now at risk and as a result we’re all supposed to kill ourselves.

Why? Contrary to what you may have been led to believe by Steiff’s cute and squishy cuddly toys, the polar bear is a big savage brute, the colour of nicotine, with a mean ugly pointy face and claws that, if they were to be found in Nottingham on a Saturday night, would be confiscated as offensive weapons.

If the polar bear dies out it will make not a jot of difference to you or anyone you’ve ever met. The only people who’ll even notice are the Inuits, and its passing will actually improve their lives because they’ll be able to go out fishing and clubbing without running the risk of being eaten to death.

I do not believe that we should deliberately kill stuff because we find it ugly or offensive. Unless it’s a virus or a mosquito. But I do wish the world’s conservationists would learn a lesson from some of the more enlightened species in the animal kingdom: that when push comes to shove, the only creatures that really matter are those in our social group. And our children.

Sunday 10 June 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

I went to London and it had gone

Yesterday I saw something unusual. While sitting in a jam near London’s Parliament Square I noticed a huge queue for one of those old-fashioned phone boxes. The complicated red jobbies that take some poor chap six years to paint.

Why, I thought, are people queueing to use a phone box? Everyone has a mobile these days. And why is the woman who’s actually using it not using it at all? She’s half in and half out, with one leg in the air and a silly grin on her face.

It turned out she was a tourist posing for a photograph in the only slice of olde England she could find. And what’s more, all the people behind her were also tourists queueing to have their pictures taken with it as well. This made me rather sad.

How far have they travelled, I wondered? And how much have they spent on this once in a lifetime trip to the former capital of the free world?

And this – this crummy old phone box – is the only evidence that they’ve landed in the right place.

The policemen have replaced their Dixon of Dock Green helmets and cheery demeanour with body armour and sub-machine guns, the home county turds in the river are now otters, no one is allowed to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and the absolute last language you will hear spoken on any street is English.

There’s more too. Today the beefeaters are women, the Cutty Sark has melted, Greenwich is a dome, the Queen has become Helen Mirren and the old double-decker buses are gone, purged by the maniac Livingstone, who sees everything from yesterday as an example of the global corporations’ love affair with money, slaves and carbon dioxide.

You get the impression that if some City chap actually walked across Waterloo Bridge wearing a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella he’d be mobbed by a grateful Sony-toting horde.

On my trip to London last week I did a river trip, saw the Eye, tootled about near Tower Bridge for a bit and went to Piccadilly Circus. And after a while I began to think I might be in a strange place, the result of an unusual sexual liaison between Geneva in 2027 and Moscow in 1974.

Hanging from every single lamp post in the West End – and that’s a lot of lamp posts – there’s a big sign saying ‘DIY Planet Repairs’. I have no idea what this means, any more than the workers in the People’s Tractor Factory No. 47 knew what the politburo’s encouraging slogans meant.

I guess it’s a sort of diktat from the commissariat, urging us to take exercise, work harder and gain strength through joy. Certainly, in every bus shelter there’s a poster from the mayor that says, ‘London was made for cycling’.

No it wasn’t. London was made for people to come and do business. There was a gap of several hundred years between the invention of Londinium and the day when some idiot invented the pedal and handlebar.

To take refuge from the constant political bombardment, I sought shelter in a well-known restaurant where a pot of tea for four and some cake cost me £78. That is not a misprint.

Then there’s the river. Oooh, the banks these days are a funfair of funk and groove with lots of smoked glass and teak decking. But you can see all the Korean ladies on the cruise ships not knowing what the bloody hell to take a picture of.

There’s absolutely nothing that says to the folks back home ‘I’ve been to London’.

Rather, it looks like they’ve been to a retirement home for people whose silly architect specs were so thin and so fashionable they couldn’t actually see what they were designing.

Of course, despite the idiotic prices and Ken’s best efforts to ruin everything, London is a better place to live now than it was 20 years ago. But in the drive to make it ‘modern’ and ‘edgy’, the period features, the things that make people want to come here, have been thrown out. No, really. How many people sit down with the travel brochures every year and think, ‘This year, for our summer holidays, let’s go somewhere really multicultural and green’?

None. What people want when they come to London is pomp and circumstance. And this brings me on to the Union Jack. I know it’s offensive to certain portions of the Muslim community and I know it got a bit hijacked by the British National party.

But do you think it might be possible to fly it somewhere? You won’t even find it on Tower Bridge.

Helen Mirren does a good job. All the way from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, the DIY Planet Repairs nonsense has been replaced with a lot of big flags.

And as a result the Mall is a seething mass of relieved tourists happily filling up their memory chips with something other than the lone red phone box.

But the truth of the matter is this: London is now further away from its image than any other city in the world. The postcards still paint a picture of the day when Rules ruled, but the reality is a city where tourists are greeted at reception by a Latvian and shown to their room by someone from Poland. They eat arugula from titanium plates and are reminded every time they go outside that the mayor thinks he’s Stalin. They want steak and kidney, and we give them Tate Modern with a hint of the Baltic.

Coming to London now is a bit like tuning in to an episode of The Ascent of Man to find it’s being hosted by Pamela Anderson. In a lime-green thong.

It’s not wrong. It’s just not what anyone was expecting.

Sunday 17 June 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Playing the fool at Glastonbury

On Friday morning my wife got dressed up like Worzel Gummidge, put some bog roll in a bag and roared off in her Aston Martin to watch a bunch of useless teenagers singing in the rain at Glastonbury.

I think she may have gone mad.

And she’s not alone. Helicopter companies all over the south-west have reported a booming demand for charters. Everyone in the de luxe tenting business is now on a beach in Barbados and all last week Brixton was doubtless awash with hedge-fund managers and BBC programme controllers trying to buy drugs.

And getting the wrong sort. ‘Yeah, man. You gotta try some of this horse tranquilliser. It’ll even you out.’ Honestly, I bet that this morning Glastonbury is full to overflowing with your accountant calling all the policemen pigs and trying to reverse onto a selection of other men, having ingested six gallons of crystal meth.

I understand the mentality, of course. You’re middle-aged. You have children. Your life is so boring you actually look forward to the arrival of the milkman. And you fancy, for just one weekend, the idea of transporting yourself from the humdrum and into the fetid sleeping bag of your youth.

I have no problem with that. I’m not going to spend the next foot of newsprint berating you for not acting your age and laughing at you as you try to remember how to roll a joint. But I do have a problem with Glastonbury.

Rock music is ours. By which I mean it belongs to anyone born between 1950 and 1971. We invented it, and we made the rules. You sit in a darkened room, in headphones, listening to Dark Side of the Moon, trying to work out whether it’s about hope, death or despair.

And not just a lot of nonsense from five blokes who were out of their heads.

For us, concerts were all about spectacle and volume. Jimmy Page strapped a laser to his violin bow and split the sky with a noise so huge that today it would not be allowed through the amps without a hi-vis jacket and half a dozen warning notices.

The Who rocked up at Wembley one year with a laser and hologram show of such immensity that officials were genuinely scared that it might bring down airliners on their final approach into Heathrow. You watched that while Daltrey belted his way through a rendition of ‘Listening to you, I get the music’ and it made the hairs on your lungs swell up.

These are the sensations my wife is hoping to relive this weekend. She wants to be drunk, wet, deafened and assaulted by a blizzard of showmanship and spectacle. For one glorious weekend she wants to pretend she’s eight.

But what she’ll get is a bunch of reedy-voiced, stick-thin teenagers who’ve nicked what is rightfully ours and mangled it out of all recognition. A bunch of useless, talentless ne’er-do-wells who’d love to play you their next song but only after they’ve delivered a sermon on the evils of corporate America, global warming and how we should all club together to help some poor African kid with flies in his eyes. Oh for God’s sake. Either turn on the lasers or effoff.

Of course, there was a lot of peace and love and get the troops out of Vietnam at Woodstock, but that didn’t matter because the people on the stage were in tune with the people in the audience. At Glastonbury this weekend it’s all out of kilter.

It’s billed as a hippie festival and is, of course, sponsored by the newspaper of choice for those who like tie-dye – the Guardian. So, naturally, visitors are urged to leave their tents behind so they can be shipped to the Third World. They are asked to try horse dung as an alternative to Disprin. And some will be encouraged to hunt down ley lines using a forked stick. ‘They’re how pigeons navigate, you know, man.’

But of the 177,000 people due to attend – at £145 a pop – only six will be druids called Merlin. The rest will have Volvos and Bell JetRangers. And we don’t need ley lines to navigate because we’re clever and rich and we have sat nav.

Does anyone really imagine for a moment that my wife gives two stuffs about global warming? She certainly didn’t appear to be all that bothered on Thursday evening when, during the great carbon-saving switch-off, I ran round the house furiously turning on every light, hairdryer, dishwasher and toaster.

She can’t like the music very much either. Certainly, I’d rather spend the day listening to the score from Confessions of a Window Cleaner. And then Shirley Bassey will come on.

Sweet divine Jesus. What’s that all about? I would walk naked over a field of molten steel to avoid the shouty Welshster, but there she is, providing a respite for a bunch of delusional parents on a ley line in bloody Somerset. And I bet you a million pounds she gets the same rapturous reception afforded to Rolf Harris when he cropped up at Glastonbury a couple of years ago with his cardboard Aboriginal version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. It’s all just too ridiculous.

I’m not proposing for a moment we ban festivals. There are some good ones, where old bands, who know what they’re doing, play old favourites to old people on rugs.

But I do think the time has come for new bands to be banned from playing or performing rock music. It’s ours. They should go and invent their own plaything.

Sunday 24 June 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Kick the fans out of Wimbledon

As the All England Lawn Tennis Championship edges towards its thrilling conclusion in front of half-empty grandstands, there will be the inevitable calls for corporate fat cats to go away so the real fans can come along in their anoraks and their Daily Telegraph small-ad sandals.

It started on the first day with a million Henmaniacs clogging up the internet’s message boards, all saying it was disgusting that instead of watching His Timness, most of the audience was to be found slumped on a bar, yelling about City takeovers and drunkenly attempting to swab mysterious stains from the front of their chinos with their old school ties.

Blah blah class war blah toffs blah blah all right for some.

Hmmm. It’s certainly true that businessmen and their guests do tend to get stuck into the fine wines at lunchtime and some decide they’d rather spend the afternoon ogling the waitresses than utilise their precious Centre Court tickets.

And it’s also true that even those who do wobble back to the match often have no clue what’s going on, calling the racket a bat and generally leaving their mobile phones switched on. Some, and you know who you are, even spend the whole match speculating on what the crusty old ladies are doing to themselves under their tartan rugs in the royal box.

Last year I sat next to Johnny Vaughan who, probably excited by having such a large audience for once, decided he would regale pretty much everyone with a series of increasingly funny stories. I’m afraid I was party to the gales of laughter that provoked much shushing from the real fans and, inevitably, the intervention of a man in a blazer. Whom I called Stewart, before I realised his badge actually said steward.

Frankly, I can’t see what’s wrong with any of this. Quite apart from the fact that corporate guests spend pots of money on tents and exotic cheese, which allows the club to send its roof away for a polish, I’d rather watch an empty seat than some of the extraordinary specimens you see cheering and applauding when the real fans are allowed in.

I think the rot began with the creation of Henman Hill. It swarms each year with the sort of people who clap along in time to the music at the Horse of the Year Show and have all of Cliff’s records. Naturally, they all adored Princess Diana, principally because she stuck one to those swan-eating toffs in Buckingham Palace.

You’d imagine, as you watch this sea of flab cheering and hollering in their nasty clothes, that they’re having a brilliant time. But all they’re doing, in fact, is determinedly showing the fat-cat wallahs that they – the people – are having more fun. Which they’re not.

I don’t care how much you yell and wave your arms about, you will never convince me that sitting on a patch of mud eating a wizened Israeli strawberry is anything like as much fun as getting sloshed with Johnny Vaughan over a plate of poached salmon and some Jersey Royal new potatoes.

It just isn’t.

You may well say, ‘It’s all right for some’, and I’d agree. It is certainly all right for George Clooney, who was born with an attractive face. Or whatsername who’s going out with Shrek-ears Rooney. Some people are lucky. So sit down, shut up and get used to it.

Small wonder Terry Wogan, normally the most genial man in the world, announced on his radio show last year that he’d like to go down to Henman Hill and ‘machine-gun the lot of them’.

Let them inside the courts themselves and, oh dear, things really start to go wrong. Replete with their sunburn marks and their Millets wet-weather gear, they applaud absolutely everything. Double faults from anyone who is taking on their beloved Tim Henman. The arrival of Sir Cliff Richard. Even a decision by the referee to keep on playing even though it’s technically the middle of the night.

But the thing they applaud most of all is when the umpire asks one of the corporate fat cats to switch off his mobile phone. They love that. Some toff full of swan being publicly humiliated. It gives them such a warm glow that the wiring in their Playtex bras actually starts to melt.

Unfortunately, what you have to remember is that Wimbledon attracts enormous television audiences from all over the world and I often wonder what these sophisticated people from abroad are going to think of Britain when they see some hysterical fat woman with raspberry-ripple arms and American Tan tights, fanatically applauding a pigeon that has just landed on Court One.

They’re going to think we’re all ugly and mad.

They’d know for sure if they could get into her head and find out that her idea of heaven, what she dreams about in the wee small hours, is a threesome with Tim and Cliff.

I would therefore urge Wimbledon to take a lead on the matter and start to get the real fans out of sport.

The place would look better, and remember: the fat cat’s host at Wimbledon has paid £23,000 for a five-year debenture. What’s more, corporate hospitality shovelled £1.4 million into the Natural History Museum’s coffers last year and keeps events like Ascot and Henley afloat.

Eventually, this idea could be rolled out into football as well. I went to the Cup Final this year – my first ever game – and I loved it. I might even be tempted to go back, so long as I can sit in a box, with a nice claret, and not squashed up against a fat man with a spider’s web tattooed on his face.

Sunday I July 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Hands off 007 or I’ll shoot you

I am not a jealous man. I do not sit around all day coveting my neighbour’s helicopter or your new hair system. Some people are fortunate and others are not, and anyone who fights that truism is on a path that leads to madness and communism.

That said, however, I fell to my knees and wept with envy and rage last week when I opened my morning newspaper to discover that Ian Fleming’s estate had asked Sebastian bloody Faulks to write the next James Bond book.

‘Nooooo,’ I wailed, in the manner of someone whose daughter has just fallen from a cliff, as I learnt that the manuscript has already been blessed by Bond movie producer Barbara Broccoli.

Getting Faulks to write a Bond book is like asking Polly Toynbee to write the next Die Hard film. It’s like casting Vinnie Jones as Mr Darcy. In the whole history of getting things wrong, this is right at the top of the list.

I met Sebastian once and he seemed like a nice chap. I have also read many of his books and they are marvellous. The scene at the end of On Green Dolphin Street where the woman howls was so powerful I thought I might have a feminine side after all.

Not a big side, you understand. Not big enough to make me even think of placing scented mini-cushions in my underwear drawer, but certainly big enough to have me reaching for the box of tissues.

And let’s be honest. Any author who can get 16 stone of beefheart blokeishness all teary-eyed and snivelling over some silly woman’s doomed and entirely fictional love affair is plainly very good at his job. But we’re talking about Bond here.

And I’m sorry, but when it comes to shooting people in the face with a harpoon, that job, by rights, is mine.

I suppose I should admit at this point that I’ve never read any of Fleming’s originals. But I don’t see why this should hold me back. If his estate and Broccoli were to tell me that Bond was a dark and brooding loner who managed to be both gallant and a seducer all at the same time, I think I could manage.

I’d simply begin by saying: ‘Bond woke up in bed with a girl who he liked very much. Darkly and broodily he hauled himself from under the sheets, kissed her on the ear and said, “My darling. You are marvellous. But I am a loner and I must go now because I have to blow up an oil rig”.’

Then I could get into the meat of what matters in the big wide world of Bond: gadgets, explosions, wisecracks and improbably large men who’ve had their hands replaced with spiky lumps of ebony.

Oh and the car chases. I bet I’d be a bloody sight better at those than Sebastian nancy boy Faulks with his Birdsong and his bloody Dolphin Street. Bastard.

Apparently, his new book, which is probably called Bond Joins the RSPB, is set in 1967 when 007 is damaged (yawn), ageing and is called in as a gunfighter for one last heroic mission.

Wrong wrong wrong. Bond cannot be damaged. Even if he were to fall out of a hot-air balloon and into the spinning blades of a Hughes 500 – and I bet Faulks thinks that’s some kind of lawnmower – he should emerge with nothing more than a slightly disarranged tie knot.

And he cannot age. He simply morphs from a Scottish milkman with a tattoo on his arm into a safari suit and keeps right on going.

Normally, when you compare a book with a film, the book is always better. But with Bond, a collection of old stories about a dark and brooding loner, written a million years ago by a man who spent most of his day snorkelling, cannot possibly hope to compete with a film franchise that has spanned the world for 40 years. Bond is now a product of the multiplex, not the library.

And if we have to have Bond books at all, they should reflect that. Instead of worrying how 007 might have been seen by a long-dead author, the powers that be should think more how he has been seen by two billion cinema-goers.

I have no doubt at all that Faulks will give 007 layers of character so intense and so well rooted that it’ll be page 148 before he shoots anyone.

And then I bet he spends the following 148 pages agonising over what he’s done. Who cares? Who goes to a Bond film to see a man in a bar agonising? And who goes to see Charles Gray’s bath-o-sub being dropped into a shark-infested lagoon?

That’s why you need me to be the next Bond author. Because I get this.

I’d have Bond shoot someone on page two and then, instead of analysing how this felt, I’d explain in quite a lot of detail about how the baddie’s head erupted in a thin grey and red mist as Bond leapt onto his jet pack and hurtled through a wall of noise into the night.

In fact, I’m so angry that I wasn’t asked by Mrs Cauliflower or whoever to write the next book I might write a spy thriller anyway. It’ll be about an agent who’s more shallow than a summer puddle. After shagging a netball team for fun, he’ll walk into a bar where Bond is agonising over something. And shoot him in the back of the head with a short-nosed Heckler & Koch machine pistol.

Get out of that one, Faulks. I’m going to shoot your superhero in the head. Then you’ll have to go back to your birdsong and your howling women and I’ll get what was rightfully mine in the first place.

Sunday 15 July 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Get back in your stockings, girls

We know from Big Brother that today’s young ladies have replaced their appealing thongs with pants the size of spinnakers, and now comes news that the sales of stockings are in free fall. Down from £10 million sales in 2002 to £5 million in 2006.

According to the Suns woman editor – as opposed to the real editor, who’s a woman – this is because girls have better things to do these days than get dressed up like a Parisian hooker every time they go to the shops.

I absolutely understand that. Getting dressed in the morning is something that should never take more than 20 seconds and putting on a pair of stockings and suspenders can take anything up to three hours.

Actually, this is only a guess, based on how long it takes me to undo a suspender belt. Even when I’m armed with a head torch and a pair of scissors.

Anyway, I fully appreciate that in a post-Mrs Robinson world, where women work and raise children, stockings are to the wardrobe what the quill is to online banking.

But here’s the thing, girls. Tell us that you won’t wear stockings because they are impractical and you may well find that we’ll give up as well.

At the moment we tend not to pick our noses when in your company because it is a bit slovenly. But if you’re going to slob around in a pair of footless tights and a sack, then you won’t mind if we bury an index finger in each of our nostrils and dig away.

I was at London’s City airport this morning surrounded by a group of middle-aged chaps who, I presume, were going to Scotland to watch some golfists.

At home, each of these men would, I’m sure, eat all their yoghurt and pretend to be interested in Victoria Beckham’s opinion on interior design.

But at the airport, with no wives and girlfriends to keep them in check, they quickly reverted to type.

By 7.45 a.m. they were on their third pint and as I boarded my plane, I believe they were beginning a farting competition.

This is not a criticism. I recently spent a couple of weeks camping in Africa with 20 or so other men and you wouldn’t believe how neanderthal we became. Or how quickly.

Every morning would begin with a conversation about who’d been for their number twos, what the number twos had looked like, what they’d smelt of, how much more there was to come, and whether any records for sheer tonnage had been set.

Then we’d move on to who’d crept into whose tent the night before, what it had felt like, and how long, if we were the last 20 people on earth, it might take for one of us to sleep with James May.

You might argue that your husband is not like this, but I assure you that beneath the veneer you see at home, he is.

He may do the washing-up and take the children to the park, but when you’re not around, he’s like the light in a fridge. He’s a completely different animal, obsessed with bottoms, buggery and belching.

So, girls, do you want that sort of thing at home? Really? No? Well, get down to the petrol station, then, and buy some bloody stockings.

You may say that tights are practical and warm but have you seen what they do to a bank robber’s face?

And hold-ups won’t do either. Thanks to all that elasticated rubber, they ruin the shape of your thighs and, in all probability, cut off the blood supply to your feet, causing gangrene. And no man fancies a girl, no matter how sparkling her eyes and wit might be, if she is gangrenous.

Pop socks, meanwhile, would be completely banned if I were in power. And anyone found wearing them would be made to parade in nothing else through their local town, and then shot.

It must be stockings, with a suspender belt, because what this combination does is mask everything that doesn’t matter and lay bare everything that does. A picture is nice, but before you hang it on the wall it needs a frame.

And apart from anything else, if you flash your stocking tops at a man you can, and I mean this literally, get him to do anything you want. Unless you have the figure of a bison, obviously, in which case he won’t do anything at all. Because he will be too busy being sick.

Assuming, however, you have legs which clearly belong on a human, you only need let a man know you’re wearing stockings and you will be empowered to a point you may have thought impossible.

I honestly believe that if David Milibandilegs really wanted to solve this Russian crisis, he could simply ask Rene Russo to re-enact that scene from the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and Putin would have the Litvinenko murder suspect on the next flight to London.

And please, let’s not have any of this ‘ooh, stockings make us sex objects’ nonsense because that simply isn’t true.

We all saw Sharon Stone cross her legs in Basic Instinct and we all tittered in a schoolboy way. But when Rene popped a stockinged leg from that split skirt, I damn nearly fainted with admiration at the size of her brain.

Plainly, she’d worked out that what she really needed to gain control over the entire New York police department was not a degree from Harvard. But a pair of £4.99 stockings from Pretty Polly. That makes her smart. As well.

Sunday 22 July 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Save rural Britain – sell it to the rich

For the past 19 years the European Union has argued that it’s expensive and wasteful to run a grain mountain. So, to get round the problem, it’s been paying farmers large lumps of our money to grow nothing at all.

It’s called the set-aside policy and I’ve always hated its communist overtones.

So I should have been delighted yesterday when I heard that this autumn it’s expected to be abolished. But I’m not. I’m filled with an awful sadness, a sense that something truly terrible is about to happen.

The problem is that unlike the rest of the world, where all the most beautiful views were created by nature, here in England almost all the countryside was made by man.

If you gaze up Swaledale it’s the labyrinth of drystone walls that mark it out as special. If you scan the Vale of Burford it’s the patchwork of fields that make it all so splendid. And, of course, the last time Country Life had a competition to find the best view in England it was won by a scene that had Salisbury Cathedral parked slap bang in the middle.

Great. But now 1.2 million acres of Britain, which for the past 19 years have been sitting around doing nothing, have suddenly got to become economically viable again.

This is a huge chunk of land. The National Trust only owns about 620,000 acres.

Mrs Queen’s farming land only runs to 110,000 acres. Add them together and you are still short of what’s currently set aside for yellowhammers and lapwings. And what must soon start to generate cash.

You can forget the notion of it all being covered in barley or lavender. There just isn’t the demand. And you can forget grassland for cows and sheep because these days there are too many stupid vegetarians to make that work.

So now put yourselves in the stout working boots of Johnny Farmer. You’ve got 70 acres down by the bottom pond and you’ve got to think of something that’ll make it pay.

Some will be lucky. They will be given the equivalent of a lottery cheque in the shape of planning permission to build 400 new executive homes for people in IT and call centres. But some won’t. And what if you’re in this camp? How long’s it going to take before you realise the answer is to be found in the country’s current obsession with global bloody warming?

ScottishPower announced recently that some of its power stations will soon be running on willow and cereal. The crops will take up a staggering 12 per cent of Scotland’s agricultural land – but will replace only 5 per cent of the coal currently used. Pretty soon, then, the Lowlands will start to look like Winnipeg.

Meanwhile, in Wales every single south or westerly facing escarpment is being smothered in wind farms.

Giant tubular bird mincers that whir and moan 24 hours a day and eventually, after a year or so, produce just enough energy to light up Mrs Llewellyn’s bedside lamp.

Then there’s England, which will be smothered with so many polytunnels it’ll start to look like the freezer cabinet of an American supermarket. Oh, and the bits that aren’t under polythene will be smothered in a yellow sea of asthma, bronchitis and eczema as our friend in the stout boots realises that the only crops anyone wants these days are the ones that you can put into the petrol tank of your infernal Toyota Prius.

In other words, to save the sky we will completely wreck the land.

There’s no point turning to Gordon Brown for help because he represents some godforsaken pebble-dashed constituency in Scotland, lives in Westminster and believes that everything in between is full of Tory bastards who need burying in executive homes, polythene and asthma. And that all their horses should be fed through an eco-windmill.

Nor can we rely on the Campaign to Protect Rural England. It’s terribly noble, especially now it has Bill Bryson as its president, but the simple fact is that it took it 20 years to get the government to save the nation’s hedgerows. On that basis, saving 1.2 million acres would take it about 4,000 years.

So, as usual, it falls to me to come up with a plan. And I have.

You may have read recently that Sir Tom Hunter, who is a businessman, decided to give £1 billion to charity because he feels the gap between rich and poor is now too wide. This is all very worthy and they will probably give him another knighthood.

However, Sir Sir Tom is wrong. What he should do is spend £1 billion buying up as much of the countryside as possible. And then he should encourage the rich to become richer so they can do the same.

I even suggest that we tax the poor, who cannot buy land, and give the money to the wealthy so they can buy even more.

No, really. If the land is taken out of the hands of the farmers, who earn on average £10,000 a year, and bought by private individuals, the need to make money will be shoved aside by the need for better aesthetics.

And not only would the countryside look better, there would be no overproduction of crops, no intensive farming, no need for set-aside payments, no more polythene or windmills. There would be a much greater diversity of animals and birds because they won’t all be choked to death by the oilseed rape, and the few remaining miners could continue to produce coal for the power stations.

And the quality of cheese in our supermarkets would improve.

Everyone wins – except for Janet Street-Porter, and she doesn’t count.

Sunday 29 July 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Dunked by dippy floating voters

I’m confused. When I left for a short working trip to Spain io days ago Gordon Brown was languishing in the polls and everyone knew that, at the next general election, Tory golden boy and all round floppy-haired good guy David Cameron would win.

This made perfect sense because Gordon’s jaw doesn’t work properly, he has no discernible sense of humour and the charisma of a boulder. And what’s more, in the past io years, he has been number two in a government that has almost completely ruined Britain.

Today you can’t land unless the tray table is up, you can’t smack your children, you can’t smoke in a pub, you can’t take shampoo on a plane, you can’t climb a ladder if you’re a policeman, you can’t eat more than six grams of salt a day, you can’t urge your dogs to kill a rat, you can’t sell food unless you explain on the packet precisely what’s in it and where it came from, you can’t reverse without a banksman, you can’t go to work unless you have a yellow high-visibility jacket, you can’t have an operation if you smoke, you can’t tell Irish jokes to your friends, you can’t say ‘ginger beer’ on television, you can’t talk on your mobile phone in a traffic jam, you can’t sit on a coach unless you’re wearing a seatbelt and you can’t drive a boat if you’ve had a beer.

Of course, you can’t blow up an airport terminal building either, and that makes sense. But then you cannot blow up someone’s armbands at a municipal swimming pool. And that doesn’t.

David Cameron, meanwhile, has never done anything to annoy you. In fact, so far as I can tell, he has never done anything at all.

So why, then, when I got back from Spain, had he somehow become public enemy number one?

What the hell had happened?

It must have been something dramatic because the opinion polls were suggesting a massive swing in Gordon’s favour. When I left, the only people who said they’d vote for him were his wife and two former steelworkers in Sheffield. But when I got back he had nearly 40 per cent of the vote in the bag and the bounce showed no sign of abating.

Had Gordon suddenly decided to abolish taxes and give away a free George Clooney to any woman who buys two books of stamps? Or had David Cameron announced that he wants to eat anyone who doesn’t earn at least £150,000 a year?

I checked back through a stack of newspapers and could find no evidence of either thing. A shark had appeared off Cornwall, someone with pretty knickers had left the Big Brother house, it had stopped raining – and that was about it.

I therefore checked to see what the leaders had been up to and, again, it’s nothing much. Gordon had been to America where, it seems, people were very impressed by his suit. And David had been to Afghanistan where he’d been photographed smiling at some children. Nothing there that could cause the nation to change its voting intentions.

But then I did some more digging and an awful truth began to dawn. Gordon Brown had enjoyed a huge leap in the polls because during the recent flooding he put on his nice suit and a serious face and went to Gloucestershire to thank the emergency services for actually doing what he pays them to do, instead of selling spurious stories to the Daily Mail.

Meanwhile, David Cameron had been transformed from golden boy to a splodge on the Tory party’s windscreen because instead of standing in a puddle up to his welly tops in Charlbury he’d been in Rwanda lecturing the government there on global warming.

What possible difference could it have made if he’d stayed at home? No, really. If your sofa has just floated out of an upstairs window why does anyone think your life would be improved by a politician posing for pictures in the lake that used to be your front lawn?

And how in the name of all that’s holy can this possibly be a basis for choosing a system of government? Are you really saying that we must endure another five years of Labour’s bossiness and bullying simply because its leader went to see some fat old crow in Tewkesbury whose ghastly button-backed DFS furniture had got a bit soggy?

I knew politics had become shallow but I didn’t realise you could now succeed in it without it even coming up to your knees.

What staggers me most of all, though, is that almost all the people I know have either voted Conservative all their lives or Labour all their lives. And I’ve always been led to believe that swings in general elections come down to a tiny number of people on a tiny number of streets in a tiny number of marginal constituencies.

But, plainly, this isn’t so. There must be millions and millions of people out there who will change their mind about which party to vote for on an hour by hour basis, using only the smallest amount of information on which to base their volte-face.

It’s not Big Brother, for crying out loud. It matters. And you can’t change your mind just because one of the candidates has picked out a nice suit.

Or because he was in Africa talking about global warming when you think he should have been in Oxfordshire talking about global soaking.

Choosing who to vote for on this basis could be an unmitigated disaster. Because if Ming Campbell put on a particularly appealing tie one day we may well end up being governed by the Monster Raving Lunatics. Or, as you know them, the Liberal Democrats.

Sunday 5 August 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

The hell of being a British expat

Alarming news. It seems that all the world’s clever people have gone missing. We know where the stupid people are. They’re in the White House, or they’re on Big Brother, or they’re singing for Simon Cowell’s supper. But while we are absorbed with this lot, the rocket scientists and astrophysicists have disappeared.

Seriously. America claims that the huge influx of Mexicans is in no way compensation for George Clooney, who has moved to Italy, and Madonna, who now lives in Wiltshire. And that it has a net brain drain.

It’s the same story in Egypt, Iran, India, Russia, New Zealand and France. Germany claims to be in the middle of the biggest brain drain since the 1940s. Everywhere you look, governments are saying that while they’re up to here with housekeepers and swimming-pool attendants, their graduates are all moving out.

So where are they going? Could it be, I wondered, that all the Tefalheads have come to Britain? Certainly, we seem to have so many scientists that there aren’t enough serious projects to go round. On Thursday, for instance, two Manchester doctors announced that they’d been studying dinosaurs and found that the T-rex had a slower top speed than Frank Lampard. Wow.

Further evidence came to light on Thursday with the GCSE results. Every 16-year-old in the land, except those who have recently been shot, had scored at least 415 per cent in advanced Latin and applied maths.

Yes! I thought. Britain is pinching all the Russian billionaires, the American singers, the French chefs, the Egyptian doctors and the German businessmen. We may not be the happiest nation on Earth or the richest. But we are the brainiest.

And then came the latest migration figures, which showed that while Britain received 5.4 billion west African pickpockets last year, we lost what the Daily Mail calls 196,000 British citizens. White, middle-class families who have moved abroad.

These figures would lead us to suggest that, like everywhere else, Britain is suffering from a brain drain. That all our well-educated, well-spoken young professionals are being replaced by Borat.

Unfortunately, this argument fails to hold any water when you look at where these middle-class people are moving to. Australia is the number one choice, apparently, with 1.3 million British emigrants living there.

Fine, but in the whole of human history, nobody has ever woken up and thought, ‘I know. I have a wonderful family, lots of money, a great job and an active social life. I shall therefore move to Australia.’

Australia is where you go when you’ve made a mess of everything. That’s why the 1.3 million Brits who live there are known as whingeing Poms. Because they’re all failures.

Another popular destination is Spain, which is home these days to 761,000 Brits.

Are they all brain surgeons? Inventors? Did Sir Christopher Cockerell invent the hovercraft and then move to Puerto Banus? No. Spain is where you go when you’ve sold your taxi.

What about America, then? We imagine that the Brits living there are successful and bright, like David Beckham and, er, Kelly Brook. But mostly, I suspect, the people who move from Britain to the States do so because they are interested in guns and murdering.

Twice I’ve bumped into expats while in America and both times they were wandering around in woods carrying preposterously large guns and wearing combat fatigues.

One was chewing tobacco which, when combined with his broad Birmingham accent, made him appear to be the stupidest person in the world. He probably was.

The fact is, I’m afraid, that anyone who emigrates from Britain, no matter where they end up, is a bit of a dimwit.

I mean, why leave? Because you have no friends? Well, what makes you think it’ll be easier to make friends somewhere else? Because of the weather? Oh come on.

Sunny days work when you’re on holiday but when you’re stuck in an office, you need it to be 57°F and drizzling.

Maybe you’re fed up with the crime in Britain. What, and you think California has fewer murders than Bourton-on-the-Water? You think there are no syringes on Bondi Beach?

Public services? Puh-lease. Even if you can convey to the chap on the other end of the phone that you are up to your knees in raw sewage, he will still take two weeks to dispatch some walnut-faced thief who’ll make everything worse and charge you £800.

Maybe you fancy a tax haven? Great, you save a few quid but you end up with a bunch of other ingrates in a cesspit like Monaco. Seriously, would you rob a bank knowing you could keep the money but that you’d have to do some time? No. Well, don’t be a tax exile, then, because it’s the same thing.

Honestly, every single expat I’ve ever met is the same: hunched at a bar in a stupid shirt, at 10 in the morning, desperately trying to convince themselves that they are not alcoholics, that the barman really is their friend and that it’s only 11 hours till bedtime.

And then, when they clock your accent, they launch into a slurred tirade about Gordon Brown and the British weather and how their prawns are the size of Volkswagens. And then they ask if by any chance you’ve got a copy of The Week.

Anyone who fails to realise that this is how they’ll end up is monumentally idiotic and we’re better off without them. So go, and we’ll see you back here when you need some brain surgery.

Sunday 26 August, 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Binge drinking is good for you

Who are they? The people who decide how we should run our lives. The busybodies who say that we can’t smoke foxes or smack our children. The nitwits who say that we should have a new bank holiday to celebrate traffic wardens and social workers.

Where do they meet? Who pays their wages? And how do they get their hare-brained schemes onto the statute books?

Honestly? I haven’t a clue. But I do know this. It’s very obvious that their new target is people who drink alcohol – i.e., everyone over the age of eight.

Over the years we’ve been told that we can’t drive a car if we’ve had a wine and that we should avoid alcohol if we’re pregnant. But now they seem to be saying that all people must steer clear of all drinks always.

Having told young people that they must stop drinking while on a night out, in case they are stabbed or end up having sex with a pretty girl, they now say that older people, who think it’s acceptable to enjoy a bottle of wine with their supper, are clogging up hospital wards that could otherwise be used to treat injured foxes.

We are told that alcohol rots your liver, makes you impotent, gives you stomach ulcers and turns your skin into something that looks like a used condom’s handbag.

Only last week we were shown photographs of a stick-thin man with a massive stomach who had died at the age of 36 because he’d had too many sherry trifles.

The BBC says that if you drink too much your brain stem will break and you will die. The British government tells us that if a man drinks more than two small glasses of white wine a day he will catch chlamydia from the barmaid in the pub garden after closing time. Rubbish. If a man drinks two small glasses of white wine every day it’s the barman he needs to worry about.

Me? Well, what I love most of all is binge drinking. Really getting stuck in.

Hosing back the cocktails until the room begins to swim and my legs seem to be on backwards.

It’s not just the recklessness and freedom that result when massive quantities of alcohol unlock the shackles. It’s the promise that in the morning you can share your pain with a bunch of other similarly afflicted friends.

Normal pain, such as an eye disease or toothache, is a lonely and solitary pursuit, but a group hangover is a problem shared and that seems to bring out the best in us. Like the Blitz. Like when you’ve just stepped off a terrifying roller-coaster ride. Everyone’s in it together. And a problem shared is a problem pared.

Of course, the trouble these days is that the binge drinking that is necessary to produce collective hardship is a complete no-no.

They say that if you go out and get blasted you’ll die in a puddle of blood and vomit down a back alley long before you get the chance to catch chlamydia from the barman, and that no one will come to your funeral.

Happily, this is rubbish. I’ve just done a calculation and on holiday this year I drank 55 units of alcohol a day. I would start at 11 o’clock with a beer which, because it was hot, was like trying to irrigate East Anglia with a syringe. So I would have three more.

Then I would guzzle wine and mojitos throughout the afternoon, the evening and the night until I fell over somewhere and slept. Am I now dead? No. In fact, because I drank so much I was more relaxed, which means that I’m back at home now feeling fresher and more rested.

So there you have it. Serious binge drinking is not only a nice thing to do and jolly good fun, but also – and here’s something that you won’t get from the mongers of doom – it’s good for you too.