Needless to say, everyone is now running around waving their arms in the air and saying that no sport is worth the life of a participant and that bullfighting must be outlawed immediately. But that of course is nonsense. Almost everyone who takes part in horse riding is killed at some point, and it’s the same story with the Isle of Man TT races, which have a higher rate of attrition than the Ebola virus. And no one is suggesting that these sports should be banned.
Then there’s golf. On almost every course in the land, there’s a dead fifty-five-year-old businessman in one of the bunkers, his heart a ruined bag of mush and his face etched with pain and regret. But again, no one is saying that golf should be outlawed. Well, I am. Not because it will eventually kill many of my friends, but because I don’t like their trousers.
Bullfighting, however, is different. Yes, the trousers are pretty terrible, obviously, but actually it’s safer than Formula One motor racing, which these days is more safe than sitting in a box full of eiderdown, and about as exciting. Until Barrio got gored, no participant in Spain had died for thirty years. Apart from the bulls, obviously.
We can’t therefore ban it on safety grounds, and neither am I overly bothered about the animal-cruelty issues. I’m happy to poison a fly and watch it headbutt itself to death in a series of high-speed impacts against the French windows, so why should I get my knickers in a twist about a bull bleeding to death? However, I do think bullfighting should be stopped, because it is stupid.
Let me put it this way. If the concept of sport were to be invented next week, people would look at football and say: ‘Yes. That’s pretty good.’ It’s the same story with 100-metre races and rounders and the aforementioned pelota. But I’m fairly sure that if someone proposed bullfighting, everyone else would say, quizzically, ‘Just run that past me again.’
It goes something like this. A ‘matador’ goes into a ring, where a four-year-old bull, which weighs getting on for a ton, is wondering what the hell it’s doing there. The matador observes the bull’s behaviour and character while attempting to form an emotional bond with it.
Having failed to do this, because he’s a man and the bull isn’t, he summons a junior bullfighter, who arrives in the ring on a horse. The bull attacks the horse and tries to disembowel it. This makes several children in the audience cry. After the bull has failed to disembowel the horse, because it’s wearing a funky padded hazmat suit, the junior bullfighter sticks a spear into the bull’s neck, which makes it angry.
In the next stage, more junior bullfighters stick more spears into the bull’s neck until most of its blood is on the outside of its skin and its neck muscles are so worn out it can barely hold its head up. And at this point the matador himself, the senior man, waves a red rag at it while doing a disco dance. And then after a little while he stabs it with a sword and he’s the winner.
Sometimes, he decides for no particular reason that he will not stick a sword into it and the bull is allowed to live out the rest of its days on a farm, with a gaggle of lady cows, until one day Lamborghini names a car after it.
Now. If you were to suggest that as a sport, everyone would say, ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ and that would be that. Which is exactly what happens whenever someone suggests that it should be banned. They are told, firmly, that this will not be possible, and the debate is over.
The argument centres on the fact that bullfighting can trace its roots back to 2000 BC, when men would prove their manliness by fighting animals. Well, yes. But that’s because in those days they needed some light relief from making bronze and they had no PlayStations. Today, if a young man wants to prove he has testicles the size of water melons, he can invite a girl to watch him play Call of Duty.
Which causes bullfighting enthusiasts to say that it’s a tradition. And that makes me so angry that even my hair hurts. Because on that basis we could amuse ourselves by drowning women in a duck pond.
Britain’s red telephone box is a tradition. It’s a symbol of everything that made us great. But only a handful of lunatics minded when it was replaced with the iPhone. A policeman’s tall helmet is a tradition. But it was phased out because it’s not really practical in a terrorist shootout. And it’s traditional for our soldiers to wear red. But they don’t any more because it would be silly.
We have learned to let things go when they start to look ridiculous, and I’m afraid that Spain’s bullfighting enthusiasts must do the same. If they want to impress girls by killing animals, then fine. It’s not for me to stop them sneaking into the neighbours’ garden and strangling a cat. And if they want to make some kind of sacrifice to amuse their God, again, it’s not for me to interfere.
But I would point out that dressing up in a gold lamé suit and waving a red rag at a bull, on television, makes you look like an imbecile. Because the rest of the world has known for some time that bulls are colour-blind.
17 July 2016
Let Russia dope: I want to see the heroin hurdles
So it’s been claimed by various people with stern faces that the Russian secret service has been using all sorts of devious methods to conceal the fact that hundreds of the country’s athletes and sports people have been routinely testing positive for drugs. I think we are supposed to be surprised by this.
Well, I’m not. When I was a small boy I clearly remember wondering why half of Russia’s women shot-putters appeared to be men. One, I seem to recall, had chest hair that went all the way down to her scrotum. Another, from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, had plainly been taking something that had turned her into a tractor.
You had the pretty young woman from France and the game filly from Great Britain lobbing the discus forty yards, and then out would lumber Ivana Shrek, who’d throw it out of the stadium. And we all sat there thinking, ‘Oooh. Isn’t the Soviet Union scary and impressive?’ Which I suppose was the point.
I assume that back then it was not possible to determine who’d taken what. But now it is – hence the alleged involvement of Russia’s FSB. It’s said that at the Sochi Winter Games laboratory staff passed tainted urine samples from athletes through a secret hole in a wall to agents, who somehow broke the tamper-proof seals and replaced them with urine that was as fresh and natural as Sophie Raworth’s next fruit salad.
Investigators reckon that in the four years until 2015 there were 312 dodgy results covered up by Russia’s sports ministry, which then said that the man mountains it was sending to toss the caber and the supercomputers who were turning up to play chess were able to become so brilliant because they’d been brought up on a healthy Russian diet of turnips and beetroot. And vodka.
Now of course there are calls for Russia to be banned from all Olympic competitions. And I get that. If I’d trained for twenty years to be the best pole vaulter in the world and then I was beaten by someone whose blood sample would trouble a Geiger counter, I’d be livid.
But I haven’t trained for twenty years to be the best pole vaulter in the world. I’m just someone who quite likes to watch sport when I’m bored. And I must confess I find myself hoping Russia reacts to the proposed ban by setting up an alternative Olympic Games where anything goes.
That way, the athletes who’ve trained and done everything the old-fashioned way can play Dodge the Mosquito in Rio, which is all very lovely for those who enjoy watching people running about and jumping over stuff. While on cable TV the rest of us could watch – all the way from Moscow – Olympians on Drugs.
Come on. Who wouldn’t want to watch a 400-metre race for people who’d just filled themselves up with heroin? Or a tennis match between two people who were suffering from massive paranoia? Stoned hurdling – that’d be good too. I think this would work especially well at the Winter Games, because I know from many years of experience that my skiing in the morning is timid and slow and rather boring. But after lunch, when I’ve had some wines, it becomes fluid and fast and thrilling. And then I have a crash and break a small bone. Drunk skiing would be a tremendous spectator sport.
If it revealed they were under the limit, they were made to drink three pints of beer before they were allowed to rejoin the race. A similar idea would, I think, transform Formula One. ‘Oh, look. It’s Fernando Alonso and – ha-ha-ha – he’s going the wrong way round the track.’
I could of course go on, matching various sports to various hilariously inappropriate intoxicants, but actually there’s a serious point to be made here. Scientists have already developed genetically modified wheat that is more resistant to disease than the wheat that nature invented. So why should they not be allowed to genetically modify human beings?
Boffins have already worked out that by altering the CCR5 gene they could make someone incapable of catching HIV. Sickle cell anaemia, muscular dystrophy and certain types of blindness could be eradicated too.
Recently doctors announced that by using stem-cell technology they had effectively cured a teenager from Bristol of a rare blood disorder that had already killed his big brother.
Jesus enthusiasts, I know, have some issues with this sort of thing, and so do various tub-thumping politicians. Even some very wise people have pointed out that we’ve only had a complete map of human genes for thirteen years and it’s too soon to start fiddling. They say more research must be done, and that brings me back to my Olympians on Drugs idea.
Because here we would have many fit young men and women who, because they want to be the best of the best of the best, would readily volunteer to become the first real-life Jason Bourne. They could be the guinea pigs.
Obviously, they’d have to be neutered in some way. Because if the genetic modification and drug combo didn’t work and they became werewolves or Daleks or something, we wouldn’t want them breeding and creating a master race that would wipe the rest of us out.
But what if it did work? What if science could turn even the most stupid person into a genius? What if it could make Captain Fat capable of running the hundred metres in six seconds? And what if there were no drawbacks?
So long as we all rush around, waving our arms in the air and accusing Russia of cheating, we’re never going to know if they’re on to something. Far better, I reckon, to shut up and let them get on with it.
24 July 2016
Sun, seeds and squirrels – it’s hell in the parks police
At school we had a careers master who was on hand to help pupils choose what job they’d like after they left. And at no point did he say to me, ‘Well, son, I should think you’ll be able to make a pretty decent living by driving other people’s cars too quickly round corners while shouting.’
In fact, he gave me the choice of being an estate agent, a bank clerk or an accountant – and then he gave me a two-hour detention for saying, ‘I want to be a homosexual astronaut.’
Actually, I was lying. What I really wanted was to be a meteorological officer in the Sahara Desert. I’d file my report every morning, saying the day would be hot and sunny, and then I’d go back to sleep, knowing that, 98 per cent of the time, I’d be correct.
My son had an even better idea when he was asked at school what he’d like to do. He said he wanted to be A. A. Gill, but without the writing. In other words, he wanted to go to excellent restaurants and watch television, and then spend the rest of the day doing as he pleased.
Today, as I understand it, a huge number of young girls say that when they grow up what they’d like to do most is ‘Be famous’. They read the sidebar of shame in the Mail Online and all they see is an endless parade of women ‘jetting’ in and out of Los Angeles International Airport and lying by the pool, earning a living simply by having breasts.
It’s why there are queues round the block for the chance to warble your way through a Celine Dion song on The X Factor, and it’s why every newsagent’s is rammed with people frantically rubbing away at a scratchcard. Everyone wants to be Katie Price, or me, or Adrian Gill. To do something that doesn’t apparently involve any actual work.
It is a noble dream. But it so very rarely works out …
I was in Liverpool last year, in the back of a taxi, moaning about how I didn’t want to be there, doing whatever it is I was on my way to do. And in the gloom of a wet and cold November evening I went past a branch of PC World where I saw a young man in a purple shirt doing whatever it is that shop assistants in PC World do.
And in a moment his life flashed before my eyes. He’d work hard until he was made store manager and then, with some careful arse-licking, he might one day become a regional manager, which would enable him to attend the annual conference at a hotel in North Wales, where he’d get a bit drunk and accidentally insert himself in Janet, the regional manager for the north-east.
And that would be the highlight of his life. The moment that would bring half a smile to his greying lips as he lay on his deathbed many years in the future. I stopped moaning immediately and I haven’t since.
PC World man is not alone. I look at Nicholas Witchell on the news, endlessly commentating on Prince George’s new hairstyle and how the Duchess of Cornwall smiled at an old lady, and I think, ‘Is that how you wanted your life to turn out? Really?’
It’s the same story with people who chisel fat from London’s sewers or those who sit at an air traffic control computer, or the man who comes to dust the plants in my office. If you’d said to any one of them when they were sixteen that this is what they’d be doing twenty years down the line, they’d have jumped in front of a train.
It’s not a money thing I’m talking about. I have many friends who work in the City, and they all have Range Rovers and stick-thin wives and adorable, clever children who attend agreeable, leafy schools where no one gets knifed. But all they do, all day, is watch ones and noughts float across a computer screen. And that’s a terrible way of filling time between the two eternities.
All last week I was thinking about this, about what job would allow our children to spend their days doing not much of anything at all. And while sitting in Holland Park, in the sunshine, enjoying a morning cup of coffee, I cracked it. They should join the parks police.
The normal police are obviously no good because you have to spend all day talking gibberish while waiting for someone to throw a petrol bomb at your head. And you aren’t allowed to climb ladders or rough up crims or do anything that is fun because there’d be too much paperwork afterwards.
The parks police, however, are different because parks, by and large, are used by people on Tinder dates and quite attractive women with dogs. Maybe you will occasionally have to ask someone to cycle more considerately and sometimes you will have to put a carelessly discarded sweet wrapper in a bin. But that’s about it. They even give you a Volvo.
Think about it. Have you ever heard of a parks police shootout, or witnessed a parks police high-speed car chase? Has there ever been a criminal gang that has decided not to ram-raid the sweetshop by the boating lake in case it gets collared by a burly parks policeman or policewoman?
The parks police website says you may be asked to provide security at any concerts that are being staged in the park, which means you get free tickets and front-row viewing of something you’d want to see anyway. Also, it says you may be called upon to advise the public on dog chipping and cycle marking. But it adds that, if you see any crime that may involve running, you can call upon the actual police, who will do it for you.
This means you are free to spend your days sitting in your comfy Volvo, in pleasant surroundings, watching pretty women walking past with their dogs. It is then, quite literally, the perfect job for somebody who doesn’t want one.
31 July 2016
Blow a billion quid – only fatties and idlers need apply
After the riots of 2011, which were so massive and so terrifying that I can’t
remember where they were or what they were about, or how much damage was done, the government decided that everyone would go back to an Enid Blyton-style state of contentedness if the nation’s poor people were given £448 million.
On paper this looks a promising plan because if someone who is fat and unwashed is suddenly given a large lump of money it’s likely he or she will immediately send their child to school instead of letting them do burgling and drugs.
And a child who’s read Milton and Chaucer is statistically less likely to throw a brick through a shop window than a child who hasn’t. There’s no actual proof of this, obviously, but we know it to be so.
The trouble is that, having decided to narrow the gap between Waynetta Slob and Roman Abramovich, the government faced a bit of a problem. Because it couldn’t just load £448 million into a van and drive round council estates in the north of England throwing bundles of it at anyone in a tracksuit. Ministers needed a system so they could work out who was deserving of the money and who was not.
And they decided that this responsibility should be handed over to local authorities, which, again, sounds good on paper. You ask a government minister where all the poor people live in Bolton and he won’t have a clue. But people on the borough council will.
There is a problem, however, with this scheme in practice, and it’s this: by and large, the people who work for borough councils are just traffic wardens who got lucky.
Think about it. No one grows up dreaming of the day when they can work for the local council. It’s what you do when the pox doctor says he doesn’t want a clerk any more.
Have you met someone who works for a local council? No. Strike that. It’s a silly question, because of course you haven’t. You only see them in the town hall, behind a glass partition, below a sign saying, ‘I am useless at my job. I know that. But if you remind me, you will be prosecuted for verbal assault.’
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