For Crying Out Loud!

Now the fox has been sorted, ‘polytunnels’ are the latest must-have cause for concern in the shires. They enraged an old lady in Herefordshire so much last week that she pulled one up and tossed it aside. Not exactly suicide bombing but she seems to have got her point across.

Let me try to encapsulate the problem here. Growing strawberries under polytunnels increases the harvest window from six weeks to six months, which means we don’t have to fly them over from Namibia or Chile, or wherever it is that strawberries come from normally.

Fine. But polytunnels are more of a blot on the landscape than a rambler’s socks, and what’s more, strawberries grown in their shadow have the same nutritional value as office furniture.

Needless to say, the supermarkets say it’s all our fault because we demand year-round strawberries that look nice and feel firm, and to hell with the fact that you’d be better off eating the punnet.

Hmmm. And who exactly do the supermarkets mean when they say it’s ‘our fault’? We know that the working classes do not eat strawberries because they do not eat any fruit or vegetables, which is why they are all so ugly and malformed. And we know that the upper classes have no need of the supermarket strawberry because they have vegetable gardens in which they grow their own. Often, these vegetable gardens are called Lincolnshire.

So it’s the middle classes who are demanding tasteless but perfectly formed strawberries, is it? I don’t think so. Because the middle class is too busy poring over the olive-oil counter in Carluccio’s. Thanks to Gordon and Jamie we are now educated in the ways of the culinary world.

And we therefore know that eating a supermarket strawberry is a bit like making love to the most beautiful girl in the world and finding out she’s got bird flu.

Even though the 602,000 cigarettes I smoked have given my mouth the sensitivity of a smelting-plant crucible I know that the fruit and vegetables in my garden are a million billion times more tasty than the fruit and veg grown in a plastic bag in Kidderminster.

If you’re going to Wimbledon this year, chances are you’ll be offered strawberries grown in this manner. They’re called Elsantas and I suggest a test. Drop one on the floor and it’ll bounce. Which is fine if you want to play tennis with it, but it’s not so good if you’re planning on putting it in your mouth.

No, I’m sorry. Supermarkets buy polytunnel strawberries not because we want them, but because they are factory farmed, picked by Lithuanians, and are therefore cheap. Which means they make more money, which, of course, is fine by me.

What’s to be done? Well, to cure the problem we must, I’m afraid, turn our attention to Simon Cowell. Because, you see, it’s all his fault.

Simon’s a lovely chap but his stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap attitude to music means that these days pop stars never last long enough to make much cash. And that means the country is being starved of super-rich rock gods. And super-rich rock gods are the only people who know how the countryside should be managed.

Farming in Britain is now pointless because the working classes only eat fat, and the middle classes want everything to come from Tuscany. That’s why farmers have bubble-wrapped the countryside; it’s the only way to survive when you’ve been bubble-wrapped yourself, by a hundred miles of red tape.

There’s more too. At the moment the only respite from the mile upon mile of polythene is oilseed rape, which, I’m sure, is part of a communist European Union plot to feed the Continent’s swivel-eyed eco-loony vegetarians while punishing the blue-eyed intelligentsia with hay fever.

Of course, there are still a few small copses left to break up England’s yellow and plastic land, but when the metro-veg-heads in power get round to banning shooting, they’ll be torn up as well to make way for more polythene. Unless we get Simon Cowell out of the music business and find a new Pink Floyd.

One of my pleasant rock-star friends recently moved from London to the Cotswolds and bought a farm. And he’s now spending his children’s entire inheritance on making sure the new pad looks and feels like it did in the fourteenth century. There are sheep, not because they make nice money, but because they make a nice noise in the morning. There are woods, because they look pretty, and now, in the ancient barns, traditional cheese is being hand-churned by women with big breasts. It’s rock’n’roll and it’s cheesy. But I like it.

I’m making a serious point here. Britain, from the air, would be a butchered place were it not for the rock stars who spend so much money keeping their bits of it nice. So if you want to get rid of polytunnels there’s only one solution. Go out and buy another copy of Dark Side of the Moon.

Sunday 11 June 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

The united states of total paranoia

I know Britain is full of incompetent water-board officials and stabbed Glaswegians but even so I fell on my knees this morning and kissed the ground, because I’ve just spent three weeks trying to work in America.

It’s known as the land of the free and I’m sure it is if you get up in the morning, go to work in a petrol station, eat nothing but double-egg burgers with cheese – and take your children to little league. But if you step outside the loop, if you try to do something a bit zany, you will find that you’re in a police state.

We begin at Los Angeles airport in front of an immigration official who, like all his colleagues, was selected for having no grace, no manners, no humour, no humanity and the sort of IQ normally found in farmyard animals. He scanned my form and noted there was no street number for the hotel at which I was staying.

‘I’m going to need a number,’ he said. Ooh, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have one.’

This didn’t seem to have any effect. ‘I’m going to need a number,’ he said again, and then again, and then again. Each time I shrugged and stammered, terrified that I might be sent to the back of the queue or, worse, into the little room with the men in Marigolds. But I simply didn’t have an answer.

‘I’m going to need a number,’ he said again, giving the distinct impression that he was an autobank, and that this was a conversation he was prepared to endure until one of us died. So with a great deal of bravery I decided to give him one. And the number I chose was 2,649,347.

This, it turned out, was fine. He’d been told by his superiors to get a number.

I’d given him a number. His job was done and so, just an hour or so later, I was on the streets of Los Angeles doing a piece to camera.

Except, of course, I wasn’t. Technically, you need a permit to film on every street in pretty well every corner of the world. But the only countries where this rule is enforced are Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and the United States of America.

So, seconds after breaking out the tripod, a policeman pulled up and demanded that we show him our permit. We had one that covered the city of Los Angeles… except the bit where we were. So we were moved on.

The next day I was moved on in Las Vegas too, because the permit I had didn’t cover the part of the pavement I was standing on. Eight inches away was fine.

You need a permit to do everything in America. You even need a passport to buy a drink. But, interestingly, you don’t need one if you wish to rent some guns and some bullets. I needed a 50 cal (very big) machine gun. ‘No problem,’ said the man at the shop. ‘But could you just sign this assuring us that the movie you’re making is not anti-Bush or anti-war.’

Also, you do not need a permit if you want – as I did – to transport a dead cow on the roof of your car through the Florida panhandle. That’s because this is banned by a state law.

Think about that. Someone has gone to all the bother and expense of drawing up a law that means that at some point lots of people were moving dead cows about on their cars. It must have been popular. Fashionable, even.

Anyway, back to the guns. I needed them because I wished to shoot a car in the Mojave desert. But you can’t do that without the say-so of the local fire chief, who turned up, with his haircut, to say that for reasons he couldn’t explain, he had a red flag in his head.

You find this a lot in America. People way down the food chain are given the power to say yes or no to elaborately prepared plans, just so their bosses can’t be sued. One expression that simply doesn’t translate from English in these days of power without responsibility is Ooh, I’m sure it’ll be fine’.

And, unfortunately, these people at the bottom of the food chain have no intellect at all. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a tree. I think this is because people in the sticks have stopped marrying their cousins and are now mating with vegetables.

They certainly aren’t eating them. You see them growing in fields, but all you ever find on a menu is cheese, cheese, cheese, or cheese with cheese. Except for a steak and cheese sandwich I bought in Mississippi. This was made, according to the label, from ‘imitation cheese’.

Nope, I don’t know what that is either but I do know that out of the main population centres, the potato people are getting fatter and dimmer by the minute.

Today the average petrol-pump attendant is capable, just, of turning on a pump when you prepay. But if you pay for two pumps to be turned on to fill two cars, you can, if you stare carefully, see wisps of smoke coming from her fat, useless, war-losing, acne-scarred, gormless turnip face.

And the awful thing is that you don’t want the petrol anyway, because it’ll simply get you to somewhere else, which will be worse. A point I shall prove next week, when we have a look at what happened in Alabama. And why the poor of New Orleans will sue if the donation you make isn’t as big as they’d hoped for.

Sunday 2 July 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Arrested just for looking weird

Last week I wrote about my recent trip to America, and to be honest it didn’t go down well. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the receiving end of such a blizzard of bile. One man called me an ‘imbosile’. Hundreds more suggested that it’d be better for everyone if I just stayed at home in future.

And do you know the awful thing? I haven’t finished yet. Last week’s column was just an introduction, an amuse-bouche, a scene-setter. It’s this week that things really start to get going…

So far we’ve looked at the problem in America of power without responsibility.

Step out of the loop, do something unusual and you’ll encounter a wall of low-paid, low-intellect workers whose sole job is to prevent their bosses from being sued. As a result, you never hear anyone say: ‘Oh I’m sure it’ll be all right.’

You know the Stig. The all-white racing driver we use on Top Gear. Well, we were filming him walking through the Mojave desert when, lo and behold, a lorry full of soldiers rocked up and arrested him. He was unusual. He wasn’t fat. He must therefore be a Muslim.

It gets worse. I needed money to play a little blackjack in Vegas but because I was unable to provide the cashier with an American zip code he was unable to help.

It’s the same story at the petrol pumps. Americans can punch their address into the key pad and replenish their tank. Europeans have to prove they’re not terrorists before being allowed to start pumping.

I seem to recall a television advertisement in which George W. Bush himself urged us all to go over there for our holidays. But what’s the point when you can’t buy anything? Or do anything. Or walk across the desert in a white suit without being arrested.

The main problem, I suspect, is a complete lack of knowledge about the world. I asked people in the streets of Vegas to name two European countries. The very first woman I spoke to said: ‘Oh yes. What’s that one with kangaroos?’

Then you’ve got New Orleans, which, nearly a year after Katrina, is still utterly smashed and ruined. Now, I’m sorry, but insects can build shelter on their own.

Birds can build nests without a state handout. So why are the people of Louisiana sitting around waiting for someone else to do the repairs?

I tried to help out. I tried to give a car I’d been using to a Christian mission.

But I was threatened with legal action because the car in question was a 91 and not the 98 that had allegedly been promised. A very angry woman accused me of ‘misrepresentation’.

Not everyone in America is deranged, of course. Sammy certainly isn’t. Sammy was helping us out washing cars, and one night, over dinner, he explained how he’d become so badly burnt. And why, as a result, the best he could hope for out of life was washing cars for cash.

His car had exploded after it was rammed from behind by an off-duty cop. He was taken to a hospital that had no air-conditioning, in California, in the summer.

Not nice when you have third-degree burns to half your body.

And to make matters worse, there was nobody to help him go to the loo, so he either did his business where he lay – or went through untold agony by rolling over to pee on the floor.

The bill for his botched plastic surgery was half a million dollars, $15,000 of which came from the cop’s insurance. This means Sammy can never get a proper job, or buy a house or find credit.

The government, he says, is waiting for him to pop up on the radar and then they’ll come round to get their greenbacks back.

Of course, many Americans would say our health service is far from perfect and I’d agree. I’d agree there are lots of things wrong with Britain.

I’d also agree, having been to every single state in the US – apart from Rhode Island – that there are good things about America. The hash browns, for instance, served up by Denny’s are delicious, you can turn right on a red light and er… well, I’m sure there’s a lot more but I can’t think of anything at the moment.

Among the things I don’t like is the way everyone over 15 stone now moves about in a wheelchair. As a result, it takes half an hour to get through even the widest door. And I really don’t like the way that every small town looks exactly the same as every other small town. Palmdale in California and Biloxi in Mississippi are nigh-on identical. They have the same horrible restaurants. The same mall. The same interstate drone. Live in either for more than a week and you’d be stabbing your own eyes with knitting needles.

But it’s the idiocracy that really gets me down. The constant coaxing you have to do to get anything done. ‘No’ is the default setting whether you want to change lanes on a motorway or get a drink on a Sunday. It’s like trying to negotiate with a donkey. Once, I urged a cop in Pensacola, Florida, to use his common sense and let me load a van in the no-loading zone, since the airport was shut and it would make no difference. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you don’t need common sense when you’ve got laws.’

That, I think, probably says it all.

Sunday 9 July 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

School reports are agony for parents

For most people, childhood memories are dominated by cloudless summer days and lashings of Robinson’s barley water. Not mine, though. Mine are dominated by the mornings when I’d come downstairs to find my school report had arrived.

Throughout the term I’d assured my parents that I’d been working hard, and that the small fire in the chapel had been nothing to do with me. But there, in the report, was solid, irrefutable proof that I hadn’t been working hard at all.

Even today, 30 years later, I can recite, verbatim, the comments from a history teacher. ‘Even if, as he claims, he was unwell, his mock exam looked like it had been written by someone who was trying to be deliberately stupid. Or who was four years old.’

I can recall, too, the way my parents looked as they thumbed through page after page of abuse and home truths. And also the look of utter bewilderment when the general studies master said I’d been a ‘quiet’ member of the set. This might have had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t been to a single one of his lessons. Because I’d been in the chapel, playing with petrol.

My father would point out calmly that I’d let the school down, the family down and that I’d let myself down. My mother would throw frying pans at me. And I’d sit there, unable to conceive of a more horrible experience.

Well, it turns out that there is something more horrible after all. Yes, it’s bad being the child in these situations, but I have now learnt that it’s even worse to be the parent.

In the early years of a child’s schooling, reports are fairly meaningless. You learn that your pride and joy has made a lovely paper plate without cutting her head off and that she has grown some watercress, and you swoon with joy.

But then, as common entrance approaches, everything changes. For 12 years you’ve known, with no question or shadow of doubt, that your child is the greatest, most brilliant and most popular human being in the whole of human history. His paper plates were magnificent and his watercress divine.

You have had visions of him, on stage, thanking the Nobel academy. But then, suddenly, along comes a report that says that, actually, he’s a bit thick.

Teachers, of course, are very good at softening the blow. They use words such as ‘pleasing’ and ‘encouraging’, no matter how many members of staff he has stabbed that term. ‘Johnny is becoming very adept with his knife. Perhaps he would do well if he were to think about a career in a slaughterhouse.’

My housemaster was brilliant at this. In my final report he said: ‘We like Jeremy very much. When he is sent to borstal, we hope it is not too far away so that we can come to visit him from time to time.’

The trouble is that no matter how hard they try to mask the truth, you can’t ignore it, in the same way that you’d find it hard to ignore a tiger if it were in your car. Praise is lost in the background clutter. You’re used to it. Everyone is always nice about your kids. They have been since they were in a pram.

But criticism; that’s a whole new area. That leaps off the page and hits you straight in the heart. ‘Annabel needs to concentrate more,’ is no different from saying ‘Annabel has a face like a duck’s arse’. It smarts.

Take Zidane, who was sent off while playing football for France: he was showered with sympathy when he explained that the Italian player had insulted his mother.

So why should you not headbutt your child’s teacher in the chest when he writes to say that Johnny daydreams too much in Latin?

God knows, I know what it’s like to get a poor review. I know how much it stings, and I’m 46. So imagine how much it must hurt when you get one aged 11.

No, really, imagine if your boss wrote a report on how you were doing at work… and then sent it to your children. ‘Peter has made pleasing progress in mergers and acquisitions this year and we’re encouraged with his efforts to stop looking up the secretaries’ skirts. But he must try to avoid selling stocks too early or he won’t be getting a promotion any time soon.’

My wife came downstairs the other night and asked what I thought of her new outfit. I was honest. I gave her a proper report and said it made her look mad. And was she pleased? Was she hell. As we got into the car to go out, the windows frosted over on the inside.

It’s not the done thing to present others with an honest appraisal of their performance. I know I’m useless on the tennis court but I don’t like my partner to say so.

And yet that’s exactly what a school report does.

The one I read this morning even went so far as to reveal the class average time for a 100-metre race, and how long, in hours, it took my daughter to cover the same distance. And the point of this is… what exactly? To make me feel guilty for breeding a mutant?

Well, it hasn’t worked because those who can run fast are, in my experience, apes.

I can, however, end with a crumb of comfort for those of you whose children received poor reports last week. Nobody who is successful in life ever had a good one.

Sunday 16 July 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

How to make a man of a mummy’s boy

Last week, on a Radio 4 show called The Moral Maze, a woman said that all men are wife-beaters and warmongers, and that a boy brought up by women is bound to become a better balanced human being.

Maybe this is so. But he is also bound to spend too much time on the telephone talking about nothing in particular. What’s more, he will be late for the start of all TVfilms and will therefore have no clue what’s going on, he will read books in which nothing ever happens, he may well turn out to be a teensy bit gay, and worst of all he will grow up never having seen an F-15 fighter jet loop the loop at an air show.

He may well have seen a B-i bomber make a full-bore, combat-power take-off, but only through the fence at Greenham Common. And that means he won’t have been in the company of someone who agreed that, yes, it’s much prettier and far more amazing than anything from the dreary and pointless mind of Jane Austen.

Last weekend I took my boy-child to the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford. This is not something that would have happened if he’d been brought up by a heavily-breasted feminist with greasy hair.

Sadly, we didn’t quite make it in time for the Red Arrows, which meant we ended up watching their routine from the side of the road a few miles away. Strangely, it was much better.

Of course, the display is designed to look choreographed and excellent from one side of the airfield, where the audience is standing. It’s designed so you go ‘ooh’ and ‘wow’ at all the carefully rehearsed passing manoeuvres.

But if you look at it from three miles away, on the other side of the airfield, it’s like looking at the underside of a tapestry. It looks like a mess, like a selection of people with Parkinson’s disease have climbed into their jets after getting very, very drunk. You don’t go ‘ooh’ or ‘wow’. You find yourself shouting: ‘Jesus Christ. They’re going to f∗∗∗∗∗∗ hit each other.’ And diving for cover in the hedge. Or was that just me?

After that, the other team displays looked a bit weak, if I’m honest. Oh, except for the Swiss. Perhaps because they never have to train for any actual combat, their formation flying was as precise as their watches. The Jordanians weren’t bad either. Sadly, the Israelis couldn’t make it. They sent a note saying they were a bit busy.

I’d say the highlight of the day went to the Russians, who turned up with a Power Ranger fighter jet called the MiG-29, which can fly – and I’m not making this up – backwards and upside down at the same time. It can also stop, fall from the sky like a leaf and then tear over your head so low that it gives you a new parting at 500 mph, while making a noise so immense it very nearly undid the Duke of Kent’s tie.

It was an epic spectacle, as magical as anything you’ve ever seen in the West End and as loud as anything you ever heard at Knebworth. And what made it even more breathtaking is that there were no wires and no special effects. What you were watching was Johnny Russian spending 15 minutes idly tearing up the laws of physics.

Next up were the Americans, who have nothing in their armoury that can even get close to the lunacy of the MiG. It was like giving Paul Daniels a white rabbit and putting him on stage after the Cirque du Soleil.

Can this have been deliberate on the part of the show’s organisers? To bring the Americans on after the main event. To humiliate them a little bit. I do like to think so.

It turned out, however, that the Americans are quite capable of humiliating themselves. While the F-15 was whizzing about, a USAF staff sergeant came on the public-address system to tell us all what was going on. Unfortunately, he’d brought exactly the same script he uses back at home…

‘You are watching with pride,’ he began and was wrong immediately. I wasn’t watching with pride. I was watching with a Pimm’s.

The rest of his spiel was like listening to the fingernail express screeching to a halt on a blackboard the size of Alaska. The F-15, he said, has patrolled the skies for 30 years, protecting ‘this great nation’s way of life from the tyranny of terrorism, blah blah blah’. It was even accompanied by that swelling one-cal soft rock music that causes visitors at American air shows to rise to their feet and weep.

I looked around at the RAF bigwigs with whom I was sitting and, amazingly, none of them was openly vomiting. Mostly, they were smiling the smile you might give your boss if you’ve got him round for dinner and he’s just made an inappropriate remark about your wife’s panty line.

My boy-child wasn’t. He was beaming the beam of someone for whom the meaning of life had just become clear. He spends most of his life with two sisters, a mother, a granny, a nanny and a housekeeper. Even our dogs are girls. And yet here he was watching an F-15 climb with its burners lit from ground level to 17,000 feet in 11 seconds. With his dad. And he loved it.

So here’s a tip. It’s the Farnborough air show this weekend. If you’ve got a son, go. If you haven’t, go upstairs and make one.

Sunday 23 July 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

My near-death toilet experience

When we heard recently that Syd Barrett, the reclusive former member of Pink Floyd, had died at his semi-detached home in Cambridge, many things intrigued those who remember his music. Why did he choose to live alone? Why did he shun the money? What was he doing in such a small house?

But for me only one thing was truly shocking. He had died at the age of just 60.

Now I know that if you’re 17 years old, 60 is as far away as the moons of Jupiter.

But for me, living in the accelerated space–time continuum of middle age, 60 is tomorrow morning.

Scientists say the smallest measurement of time is a femtosecond. A million-billionth of a second. But when you’re older than 45, the smallest measurement of time, actually, is one year. And if I live to 60, I only have 14 left. That’s 5,000 days. And that’s only 120,000 hours.

I think often about how I shall die and when. I find myself looking at really old people and wondering what it must feel like; to know that you’ve reached a point where your life expectancy is measurable in minutes. Why aren’t they all running around waving their arms in the air panicking; because they must surely know that soon everything that they hold dear – everything – will be replaced by the utter blackness of eternity?

I get a lot of practice at thinking these things because in my life every lump, bump, cough, ache and pain is the onset of some terrible killer disease. I catch ebola three times a week, and back in June, having discovered a nodule of something unpleasant near my left elbow, became fairly convinced I’d become the first person in human history to catch arm cancer. A few days earlier, I had managed –just – to shake off a nasty bout of ear TB.

Of course, most of my ailments are designed so that I can lie on a sofa while my wife brings me poached eggs on toast. I’ve never really thought I had cancer, so I’ve never really known what it must be like to stare the Grim Reaper in the face and know that time’s up. Last weekend, however, all that changed…

Now I want to make it absolutely plain before I go any further that I do not find bottoms or anything which comes out of them even remotely funny. I am not seven years old and I am not German. But there’s no way of saying what I’m about to say without being lavatorial. I’m sorry for that.

What happened, you see, is that after my usual morning’s number twos, I noticed that the water in the bowl was red. Which meant, of course, that I had, without feeling any pain, passed a small amount of blood. Plainly, I had prostate cancer.

I am aware of this disease. I know that it is the most common form of cancer among men and it is likely to strike when the victim nears 50. I even know what colour wristband you should wear to show you support it (blue).

I knew, too, that I needed, urgently, to check mine out and so, armed with nothing but a well-oiled finger, went ahead and violated what for 46 years has been a strictly enforced one-way street.

I shall spare you the pain and the humiliation of this hideous potholing expedition, but I feel duty-bound to explain that once I was in there, ferreting about, I realised that I didn’t know what a prostate is, or what it feels like or where it is exactly.

It’s much the same story with the endless requests we get from doctors to check out our testicles for early signs of cancer. I’m sure this is jolly good fun, but unless you tell us what we’re looking for, how will we know when we’ve found it?

And skin cancer too. How can you tell the difference between a mole and a melanoma? I’m sure it’s possible if you’ve spent seven years studying medicine, but what if you’re a fork-lift truck driver? I’ve examined thousands of photographs of malignant skin growths and they all look like every freckle on my body.

After a bit of research on the internet I discovered that a prostate is about the size of a walnut, that it’s used to make fluid in which sperm is transported and that it lives ‘near’ the rectum.

And eventually I did discover something in my bottom that fitted the description.

But with knowledge gleaned solely from the BBC website – which almost certainly will blame the rise in popularity for prostate cancer on either the Israelis or global warming – and with nothing to hand except a soapy index finger, I’m afraid I wasn’t able to say whether whatever I’d found had cancer or was in rude good health.

The only evidence I had was the blood, and that really was enough.

I was finished. I wasn’t even going to last as long as Syd Barrett.

I heard the other day that 80 per cent of patients, when told by a doctor that their tests for cancer had been positive, make a joke of some sort. Wearily, I went downstairs wondering what mine might be. Something about getting the spare room painted, perhaps…

And there in the kitchen was my wife. ‘Morning,’ she said cheerily. ‘Have you been to the loo yet, because that beetroot we’ve been eating doesn’t half make it red.’

I’ve never felt so happy in all my life.

Sunday 30 July 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

When I am the Mayor of London

It seems that while I wasn’t paying attention someone publicly suggested that I stand against Ken Livingstone as the official Tory candidate in the forthcoming elections to find a London mayor.

My initial reaction was predictable. Why should I give up a handsomely paid job which involves driving round corners in a selection of Ferraris and Lamborghinis so that I can earn £134,000 a year doing something I don’t want to do, for a party I’m not sure about, in a city where I don’t live?

However, since that initial moment of shock and awe, I’ve given the matter some serious thought and I’ve decided that, actually, I’d rather like to give it a shot. I mean, how hard can it be?

Sure, the white paper drawn up to create the post was the largest parliamentary document since the Government of India Act in 1935, but so far as I can tell, the job of running the capital is no harder than being a lift attendant.

For starters, the original white paper stated that the Greater London Authority should have up to 250 staff, at a cost of£20 million. But Uncle Ken has blasted through this and employed 630 people at a cost of£60 million. And with that lot running around, crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s, what’s left for me to do?

On the first day I’d instruct my people to go out into the capital and get rid of all the bus lanes. And then I’d sell off all the bendy buses to somewhere like Los Angeles, which has big enough roads to handle their vast bulk.

Then I’d go to the Ivy for lunch.

On Tuesday I’d look out of the window for a bit and marvel at how the traffic was moving freely. And then I’d go to the Caprice.

And in the afternoon I’d have a nap. Then, in the evening, I’d put the mayoral eco-car on eBay and buy a Range Rover.

Wednesday is when we record Top Gear, so I’d pop down to Surrey and drive round some corners in a Lamborghini. And then I’d go back to London in the Range Rover and maybe take in a show.

You think I’m joking here. But I’m not. Uncle Ken is plainly so bored that he spends his day thumbing through The Observer’s Book of Despots, seeing which swivel-eyed lunatic he can have round for dinner that night. So far he’s had Islamic cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who spends his free time urging people to beat up their wives and throw stones at homosexuals.

And then, of course, he played host to the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, who after just six months in office has even managed to upset the Swedes. They’re so cross with him they’ve refused to sell him any more Saabs, which must have shaken him to the core.

I’m not sure who I’d have round. Probably one of those porn stars that keep being elected to non-jobs in Italy. But, whatever, on Thursday I’d reintroduce fox-hunting to the boroughs of Islington and Hackney. You might think this provocative, encouraging men in hunting pinks to gallop around Tofu central, but it’s no more offensive than Ken’s obsession with ‘ethnic inclusivity’ in places like Kensington and Chelsea. And there’d be fewer upturned wheelie bins for the bin men to worry about.

I suppose I should have a look at the congestion charge too. I’ve thought about this and I’ve decided there’d be a charge of £50 a day for all cars, which would keep tatty rubbish out of the city, and £500 a day for bicycles.

Anyone who’s too mean to buy a car is too mean to spend anything in the shops, so there’s no point having them. They can go to Dunstable instead, or Bedford, and not spend anything there.

Implementing this would take, what, 15 minutes. Which means that by Friday I’d be a bit stumped for something to do. Maybe I’d call the police, who would be under my command, and tell them to catch some burglars.

Oh no, wait. I know. I’d get someone to replace the statue of that woman with no arms and legs in Trafalgar Square with a full-size bronze model of a Spitfire.

Of course, this life of leisure presumes that I’d get elected in the first place, but I can’t see this presents too much of a problem. I mean, Ken has a pool of 381,790 voters on whom he can call – this being the current circulation of the Guardian. That means there are 5.6 million Londoners who don’t want their town hall full of marketing assistants and equality advisers.

I’d therefore replace them with a team who’d look into ways of changing the Notting Hill carnival into an annual drag race for monster trucks. And I’d pass a law banning people from entering the London marathon in diving suits or chicken outfits. This kind of thing is acceptable at provincial fancy-dress parties, but if your outfit prevents you from finishing the race within six hours, don’t come crying to me if you’re mowed down by a stockbroker in a BMW.

In the second week I’d sell the mayoral offices to a property developer, sack the 630 staff and, after turning out the lights, sack myself. Because when you actually stop and think about it, a London authority is a tier of government we can’t afford and don’t need.

There. That’s my manifesto. Still think I’m a good idea, Dave?

Sunday 6 August 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

How to blow up a dead seal

Last weekend the Sunday Times Home section devoted a lot of space to moving to the seaside and living for the rest of your life in a chunky polo-neck sweater and yellow wellies. It all looked terribly idyllic.

But I have a cottage by the coast and let me tell you there are certain aspects of life by the sea that you might not have considered: like, for instance, what you are supposed to do when an 8-foot seal comes to the beach outside your house and dies.

No, I didn’t club it. And nor had it become entangled in the £4-0 worth of fishing equipment that I lose in the oggin every evening. Global warming? Perhaps, but contrary to the teachings of Rolf Harris there is another, more common way for seals to die. It’s called old age.

Whatever, it was dead and despite a limited knowledge about these things I knew that I had maybe two days before it would start to smell pretty bad.

‘Push it into sea,’ said one local. A fine plan, I’m sure, but such was the weight of the thing I think it would have been easier to push the sea onto the seal. God, it was heavy.

And worse, while trying to manhandle it through the shallows, its eyes fell out.

So now I’m standing up to my shins in water that’s being stained a sort of pungent reddy brown, and all around small fish and crabs are fighting one another to eat the eyes. This is something David Attenborough doesn’t show.

The gruesome, cruel, revolting side of nature.

I’m not ashamed to admit that after only a very short while I was prodigiously sick. And then the crabs start to eat that.

Happily, I recently bought a special eight-wheel-drive vehicle for just such an emergency, so I reversed this on to the beach with a view to pulling the seal above the high-water mark. Carefully, I tied a rope to its flippers, and promptly pulled them off.

Say what you like about seals, that they’re cute and so on, but I can assure you they are incredibly badly made. The slightest tug or nudge causes bits of them to come away.

Anyway, after much revving and many arguments with my wife about what sort of knot would be best, we finally had the beast on dry land. But then what?

Momentarily, I considered towing it to a nearby beauty spot where people were camping illegally. A rotting seal with no eyes or feet would soon clear them away. ‘No,’ said another passing local, ‘you should turn it into a coat.’

This raises an interesting point. You might think you’re prepared for a life by the sea. You can probably paint, and arrange flowers, and make jam from kelp, but can you skin a seal? I’m willing to bet you can’t. And neither can I, so I decided to burn it.

Of course, I’ve watched Ray Mears many times and I know that it’s easy to light a fire with nothing but patience and some dry wood. But this is the Isle of Man and I’d like to see him find some dry wood here. It all falls into two categories: damp or sodden.

I collected as much of it as I could, along with half a ton of litter that’s always easy to find on a beach, and made what would pass for a Viking funeral pyre… and then went to the garage to buy a couple of gallons of diesel.

Not since the wreckers were operating round these parts has the Isle of Man seen such an enormous blaze. All day it spat and crackled and I went to bed that night pleased that I’d found an appropriate and dignified way for the seal to be dealt with.

But it didn’t work. The seal emerged with nothing more than a lightly singed coat.

So I built an even bigger fire. This one was going to make the conflagration in Hemel Hempstead look like the pilot light in your boiler. I bought diesel, petrol, meths, engine oil, kindling and even a light sprinkling of gunpowder. Then I lit a match and knew immediately I’d overdone it. The pile didn’t catch fire. It exploded.

The savagery was incredible. It looked like Beirut out there. Nothing within 50 yards was as it had been. Except the seal. It remained in one piece, only now it had a small gash in its stomach through which its intestines were poking. These smelt terrible.

I therefore rented, for the not inconsiderable sum of£175 a day, a bulldozer so that I could dig a grave for the lightly singed, mildly split corpse.

This is an expense you might not have considered when thinking about moving to the seaside.

Have you ever tried digging a grave on a shingle beach? It can’t be done. Shingle is the geological equivalent of the Hydra. You scoop 10 stones out of the way and immediately 10 grow back to fill the cavity.

By the time my 24-hour bulldozer rental period was up, the hole was just about big enough for Willie Carson. But not a big dead grey seal, so I’m afraid there’s no happy ending. It’s still out there, making the whole postcode smell like Cambodia’s killing fields.

I thought that a life by the sea would be relaxing. I thought it’d be nice to work here.

And it is, although I must say this is the first newspaper column I’ve written while wearing a gas mask.

Sunday 13 August 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

The Royals, a soap made in heaven

So, Prince Harry has been photographed in a nightclub squeezing the ample right breast of a pretty young blonde. Good. I wish he’d gone further, caught a spot of syphilis, and then driven home in a bright red Ferrari at 150 mph.

For years people have argued about whether or not we should have a royal family, and that if we should, what kind of role it should play in today’s world.

Should it be old and stuffy, a moth-eaten metaphor for the Britain that once was? Or should it have a more meaningful role than opening hospices and asking visiting dignitaries from Bongo Bongo land if they’ve come far?

And if it does have a more meaningful role, what should it be? I mean, how can you move something along when it has the millstone of history around its neck?

You can’t, so how’s this for a brilliant idea I’ve just had? You simply cut those irksome ties with the past and move the royal family into the most modern arena of them all…

We have a craving for soap opera in this country. Coronation Farm and EastEnders are watched by millions of people every night. We can’t, it seems, get enough of who said what to whom, and what the ramifications of that might be. Other people’s lives.

Other people’s trivia. We lap it up.

And now we’re drinking from the saucer of Big Brother as well, which when you think about it is just another soap opera only with no storyline, no plot and no actors. Just a lot of very clever editing to make these dreary non-people look interesting.

And boy, does it work. So desperate are we to keep abreast of their fortunes that even today, several years after she left the Big Brother house, Jade Goody, who is part woman and part scientific blunder, is still unable to go to the gym or pop to the shops without being papped.

Is there room for more? More Love Island? More I’m in a Jungle?

More soap. More bit-part nobodies to feed the insatiable hunger of the British red-topped tabloids and the legions of readers?

Yes, of course there is, and so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… The Royal Family. We turn the whole damn shooting match into a reality soap opera, stripped across the week’s TV schedules with late-night updates and a big publicity machine to feed the morning papers.

At present the cost of the royal family to each taxpayer in Britain is 6op a year.

That looks like bad value when all the key players ever do is open stuff and talk to vegetables. But 6op a year for a five-times-a-week soap opera. That would be the best-value television in the world.

We already have the cast of characters. There’s Miss Ellie, in the shape of the Queen. Quiet. Dignified. And always in charge. Then you’ve got Wills as JR, Harry as Bobby, and Charles, who had no equivalent in Dallas but only because they never thought to include an eco-mentalist uncle who talks to his food and gets cross with buildings.

Of course, we’d also need a Cliff Barnes. A bit of a joke. A bit of a loser.

Someone with a real and genuine grudge against the Windsors. And I know just the man: Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son died in a car smash in Paris with the eco-mentalist uncle’s first wife. Jesus. What scriptwriter could have come up with a plot line as good as that?

We even have a modern-day interpretation of Pam in the increasingly gorgeous shape of Zara Phillips. She’d pop up from time to time in dresses with lower and lower necklines, on the arm of her boyfriend, who plays rugby for his country.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? That the story’s already been written. That the characters are already in place. So no clever editing is necessary. That we have the house – several houses actually – and best of all that the family, with the possible exception of Philip, and maybe Anne, would leap at the chance to have their currently rather silly lives given some meaning and purpose.

I’m not joking. Being born into a ‘soap opera’ is no more stupid really than being born into a ‘royal family’. And I do think that at a stroke it would make Queen Victoria, and the Queen Vic for that matter, look hopelessly out of date.

We wouldn’t ask them to do anything different to what they do already. But instead of being shocked when Harry drives his small hatchback through Wiltshire at 60 mph, we’d be dismayed that he wasn’t doing twice that, in a Lamborghini.

And when he leans over to fiddle with the bosoms of a blonde, we won’t wonder what the country’s coming to. We’ll hope that shortly after the picture was taken, and under the glare of the watching cameras, he slipped into his Hermann Goering outfit, bent her over the DJ’s deck and gave her a damn good seeing-to.

Why not? At the moment everyone is screaming for contestants on Big Brother to make jiggy-jiggy, so why would it be any different for Harry and Wills, and the delectable Zara?

Will they oblige? Well, that’s just the point. That’s the fizz. Because we just don’t know. Of course, we could employ scriptwriters, but no matter how good they might be they’d never come up with what the royal family manages all by itself.

Sunday 20 August 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

I’m calling time on silly watches

After many years of faithful service, my watch has gone wrong. It just chooses random moments of the day to display meaningless times which, speaking as the world’s most punctual person, is a nuisance. Especially as I shall now have to go to a shop and buy a replacement.

Yes, I know I could send it to the menders but, because I really am the most punctual person in the world, what am I supposed to do while it’s away? Use the moon? For me, going around without a watch is worse than going around without my trousers.

Of course, I have a back-up. My wife bought it for me many years ago with her last salary cheque and it’s very beautiful. But, sadly, my eyes are now so old and weary that I can’t read the face properly. Which means I turned up to meet an old friend one hour late last week. And that, in my book, is ruder than turning up and vomiting on him.

It also brings me on to the biggest problem I’ve found in my quest to find a new timepiece. There’s a world of choice out there but everything is unbelievably expensive and fitted with a whole host of features that no one could possibly ever need.

I have flown an F-15 fighter and at no point in the 90-minute sortie did I think: ‘Damn. I wish my watch had an altimeter because then I could see how far from the ground I am.’ All planes have such a device on the dashboard.

Similarly, when I was diving off those wall reefs in the Maldives I didn’t at any time think: Ooh. I must check my watch to see how far below the surface I have gone.’ Thoughtfully, God fitted my head with sinuses, which do that job very well already.

You might think, then, that my demands are simple. I don’t want my new watch to open bottles. I don’t want it to double up as a laser or a garrotte. I just want something that tells the time, not in Bangkok or Los Angeles, but here, now, clearly, robustly and with no fuss. The end.

But it isn’t the end. You see, in recent months someone has decided that the watch says something about the man. And that having the right timepiece is just as important as having the right hair, or the right names for your children, or the right car.

Over dinner the other night someone leant across to a perfect stranger on the other side of the table and said: ‘Is that a Monte Carlo?’ It was, apparently, and pretty soon everyone there was cooing and nodding appreciatively. Except me. I had no idea what a Monte Carlo was.

Then we have James May, my television colleague, who has a collection of watches.

Yes, a collection. But despite this he has just spent thousands of pounds on a watch made by IWC. Now I know roughly what he earns and therefore I know what percentage of his income he’s just blown on this watch and I think, medically speaking, he may be mad.

It turns out, however, that his IWC, in the big scheme of things, is actually quite cheap. There are watches out there that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. And I can’t see why.

Except, of course, I can. Timex can sell you a reliable watch that has a back light for the hard of seeing, a compass, a stopwatch and a tool for restarting stricken nuclear submarines, all for £29.99. And that’s because the badge says Timex.

Which is another way of saying that you have no style, no sense of cool and that you may drive a Hyundai.

To justify the enormous prices charged these days, watchmakers all have idiotic names, like Gilchrist & Soames, and they all claim to make timepieces for fighter pilots and space-shuttle commanders and people who parachute from atomic bombs into power boats for a living. What’s more, all of them claim to have been doing this, in sheds in remote Swiss villages, for the last six thousand years.

How many craftsmen are there in the mountains, I wonder? Millions, by the sound of it.

Breitling even bangs on about how it made the instruments for various historically important planes. So what? The Swiss also stored a lot of historically important gold teeth. It means nothing when I’m lying in bed trying to work out whether it’s the middle of the night or time to get up.

Whatever, these watch companies give you all this active-lifestyle guff and show you pictures of Swiss pensioners in brown store coats painstakingly assembling the inner workings with tweezers, and then they try to flog you something that is more complicated than a slide rule and is made from uranium. Or which is bigger and heavier than Fort Knox and would look stupid on even PufFDiddly.

I think I’ve found an answer, though. There’s a watch called the Bell & Ross BR 01-92 which, according to the blurb, is made in Switzerland from German parts by a company that supplies the American military and is used regularly by people who make a living by being fired from the gun turrets of Abrams Mi tanks while riding burning jet skis.

Who cares? What I like is that it’s very simple and has big numbers, but what I don’t know is whether it’s reliable and whether people laugh at you because of it at dinner parties. Anyone got one? Anyone know?

Sunday 27 August 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Amazing what you can dig up in Africa

Not that long ago a chap from the town where I live took his metal detector for a walk in some local fields and found a hoard of coins, one of which revealed the existence of a Roman emperor who was not mentioned in any of the history books.

It all sounds jolly exciting, but I suspect that for every man who finds gold at the end of his garden there are about a million who devote their lives to the search for buried treasure and end up with a collection of old Coke cans and the gearbox from a 1957 Massey Ferguson.

That’d be like devoting your whole life to DIY and never once erecting a single usable shelf.

Nevertheless, last week I joined an archaeological search party on the Makgadikgadi saltpans in Botswana. And guess what? Within just four hours we’d unearthed an early Iron Age burial ground. That’s like taking up alchemy and making gold on your first attempt.

Our guide, quivery with excitement, stepped from his quad bike and told us in a hushed whisper, as though he might disturb the scene with sound waves, that we must go lightly in case we trod on what might turn out to be an important artefact.