So allow me to suggest a new resolution. A resolution that is easy to do, and that will cause you to live a longer and happier and more interesting life. Get rid of all your stuff.
We shall start – as you did a few minutes ago – with your coffee machine. It drives you mad, doesn’t it, because every time you ask it to do what it was designed to do, it says that it needs water, or beans, or some kind of decalcifying procedure, which means you have to spend the next half an hour shouting at your family because the instruction book isn’t in the drawer where instruction books are supposed to be kept. And when you do find it, it’s full of badly drawn diagrams that make no sense.
Of course, you may have a much simpler Nespresso machine that produces delicious coffee without much palaver at all. Yes, but is there anything on God’s green Earth that generates so much unnecessary waste? One day we will all drown in discarded Clooney capsules.
And have you tried to buy replacements? You are asked if you have an account with Nespresso, by which it means a facility that allows it to sell your personal details to other luxury-good suppliers. And if you do, you can simply put your purchases on account, which takes exactly five minutes longer than paying by credit card.
So if you want a happy and less stressful life in 2017, put your coffee machine in the bin and go back to a kettle. And then throw your wi-fi equipment away as well.
Think about it. No more rummaging around in a cupboard you can’t quite reach, trying to read the microdot on the back of the box that is your code. No more turning it off and then on again. No more frustration when the film you’ve selected starts to freeze. No more children glued to their phones throughout every meal.
Naturally, you will also be cut off from the world, but is that such a bad thing? I had a very happy Christmas precisely because, without a functioning wi-fi, I was blissfully unaware that every single celebrity in the world had died.
Next, you should throw away everything that needs a charger. Because imagine that. Going on holiday with a suitcase full of books and clothes rather than wires.
And do you need two cars? Yes. Definitely. There was that time in June when you had to be at your parents’ and your wife or husband had to take the kids to Alton Towers. You couldn’t have done that with just one set of wheels in the drive. But for the rest of the time they are just sitting outside, depreciating, costing a fortune in insurance and developing faults.
It’s the same story with your complicated driverless lawnmower and your octopus pool cleaner and your motorized pepper grinder. You imagined that such things would make your life easier, but instead you have to spend every spare moment shouting at them because they’ve gone wrong.
As you may have heard, I recently lost a bet with my colleagues on the television show we make, and as a result they blew up my house. This meant I had to get planning permission to build a new one, and on paper it all looks jolly enormous.
However, because it will take three or four years to finish, I’ve renovated a very small cottage and moved into that. It’s so small I can run a bath with one hand and clean the Aga with the other. And I’m sitting here now, with my laptop wedged between the dishwasher and the wood-burning stove, thinking, ‘Why did I buy a dishwasher?’ And more importantly, ‘Why do I need anything bigger or more complicated than this?’
The water comes – quite slowly, I admit – from the stream at the bottom of the garden, I’m warmed by logs I forage from the woods, there are no dimmer switches to break and no loos that shoot jets of water into my bottom, and if I want to close the curtains I’ll have to buy some first. At the moment, I have gaffer-taped blankets over the windows, and that seems to work fine.
The furniture – and there isn’t much – was scavenged from my mother’s lockup, and I must confess it’s quite nice sitting here, surrounded by memories from my childhood, knowing that, because it was all made from wood by warty peasants in the seventeenth century, none of it will ever snap.
In fact, up here in the sticks I have only two pieces of twenty-first-century engineering: a Range Rover, which has broken down, and a quad bike, which has also broken down, mainly because some kids from the village filled the petrol tank with what I hope is water but which I fear, having siphoned it out, is more likely to be urine. Because that’s what I’d have done.
This means that if I want to go to the village for supplies, I must walk. And as I am allergic to this kind of thing I went outside the back door this morning with my gun and shot a partridge. Tonight it will be supper. Along with some vegetables that I bought before Christmas at Daylesford with the £215 I’ve now saved by eschewing all form of modern living.
Later this week, of course, I shall have to go back to London, to my hi-tech flat, where I shall spend a few days trying to turn the thermostatically controlled windows off. It’ll be the sad end of my new year’s resolution to spend the rest of my life in the seventeenth century.
Although, as I near the end of this column, I realize that my trip back to the misery of modern living may have to begin a bit sooner. Because if I print this out and put it in the post, it won’t arrive at The Sunday Times until Tuesday. Damn.
1 January 2017
My body’s a write-off in waiting, so why have all these repairs?
If you have chosen to do the dry January thing, you will have realized by now that every single drink that doesn’t contain alcohol is either full of enough sugar to cause your heart to explode or so dreary that you’d rather die of dehydration.
If you’ve gone out at all, you’ll have stood at the bar for an hour thinking, ‘I don’t want a Coca-Cola, I’ve had enough elderflower cordial to have left an impact on Britain’s hedgerows, I hate water, and coffee will keep me awake all night.’ Then, much to the exasperation of everyone who was queuing behind you, you’ll have given up and gone home.
Where your friends won’t have called in, because why would they? They don’t want to sit around with someone who’s being sanctimonious and boring and who, by 10 p.m., would be finding none of what they have to say either funny or interesting.
And what’s the upside? Yes. You’ll have proved to yourself that you are in control of your own destiny and that you have a backbone. And you may even have lost an inch from your turkeyed-up waistline. But by 4 February, after you’ve let your hair down again, you’ll be back to where you started.
Plus. How do you know, as the long evenings crawl by in a cold, damp blur of films you’ve already seen, box sets that don’t make sense and endless trips to the fridge to see if there’s a cold chicken that you didn’t notice the last time, that you aren’t on the verge of a burst aneurysm or a heart attack? Or that one of your cells hasn’t just decided to become cancerous? In short, how do you know that you’re not going through a friendless, month-long hell for no reason?
That’s why before I started dry January I decided to make sure I wasn’t already booked in for an appointment with the Reaper. So I went for a medical. There was a bit of running on a treadmill and quite a lot of lying in a hot, noisy tube, but mostly it involved the doctor manually checking my eyes, hearing, skin and prostate by putting his whole head in my bottom and having a look around.
It’s really not fair. Women check themselves for cancer by playing with their breasts, which is a lovely thing to do. Whereas men have to allow another man to ferret about in their exhaust pipe. Which is not lovely at all.
But with crossed eyes and a slight sense of shame and regret I was told that, apart from a fat liver and some mildly bunged-up arteries, I’m likely to be around for a little while yet. So I went home, bought some elderflower cordial and poured the Château Léoube down the sink.
And then I decided that, rather than concentrate only on my liver, I’d sort everything else out as well. So, with my bottom still smarting from the medical, I went to the dentist, who hurt me even more, using various Marathon Man prongs and some jets of cold air. This enforced pain revealed that I needed three root canals, two fillings, four cr
owns and a wisdom-tooth removal.
Later that day, as I chewed idly on a piece of nicotine gum, trying to figure out whether ‘searing’ was a good enough adjective to describe the agony that lay ahead, a tooth that had been identified earlier as healthy broke in half. Which meant an emergency recall to the White Angel and the news that, actually, I needed four root canals, two fillings, five crowns and a wisdom-tooth removal.
And a new nose. The blood vessel that’s gone wonky on the top-left side is only a small thing at the moment but, if I fail to get it treated, I’ll end up with a port-wine stain as big as a medium-sized town, which would be at odds with my newly thin liver and my sound mouth.
So I went to see a man in Harley Street, who shot me – six times – in the face with a space laser. Apparently, it’s the same sort of treatment ladies use to keep their gardens in check, and I’ll tell you this: if I were a woman, it’d look like a 1970s welcome mat down there because, oh my God, it hurt. And I’ve to go back five more times before the blood vessel is dead.
Which will be tricky because I need to find time to do something about my numb thigh, my painful left shin, my gut and what I thought was a wart but isn’t on my right index finger.
I was also intrigued by a policy currently being pursued by my colleagues Richard Hammond and James May, who have both decided to become vegetarian.
At first I thought this was for health reasons, and I was intrigued. But as they are sporting identical beards at the moment and have bought identical motorcycles, maybe the vegetablist thing is just some kind of weird bonding. Whatever. I have chosen not to go down that road.
It’s for the same reason that I’ve decided not to accompany three friends on their annual trip to a clinic in Germany next week. They speak of the dried toast and the gruel and the misery, but they also talk – quite a lot – about the communal showers and the amount of all-male nakedness, and I’m not sure that’s my thing.
Besides, with the teeth and the liver and the nose and the finger and the thigh and the arteries, I have quite enough on my plate already. So much, in fact, that I’m beginning to wonder whether what I’m actually doing is trying to shore up one of those clifftop houses.
At great expense I’m putting in new foundations and building tidal barriers and inserting sturdy new props, but the sea is coming and it is going to win and, one day – no matter what I do – I’ll wake up at the bottom of the cliff and it’ll be cold and black and endless.
Would it be better, I wonder, to abandon the policy of raging at the setting of the sun and embrace it? Over a nice plate of cholesterol and a bottle of Château Minuty?
15 January 2017
Sure, you’ll get by on £85,000 a day – but the family won’t
It seems that Diego Costa, a charismatic and brilliant footballer who scores many goals for Chelsea, has been offered nearly £600,000 a week to sign with a club in China.
This raises an interesting question. How much would I have to be paid to pack a suitcase and start a new life in Beijing? And I think the answer is, ‘There isn’t enough money in the entire world.’
I once saw half a dog in China. From its nose to about three-quarters of the way down its ribcage, it was completely normal, with sticky-up ears and a doggy face, but at some point in its life it had obviously been run over by a steamroller, which meant that its back end, its tail and its hind legs had been converted into what looked like a weird rug.
It was going about its business as though nothing was wrong, scavenging in bins for food and using its front legs to pull its wafer-thin rear end around.
I’m not saying all dogs are like this in China, but the mere fact that this poor creature had had the time to come to terms with its significant disability meant that over a period of several months or even years no one had had the presence of mind to put it out of its misery. They’d seen it, noted it and then moved on.
We are told that China is a technological powerhouse and that it is home to the brainiest and best-funded scientists in the world, but none of them had seen the half-a-dog and thought, ‘Hmmm. Tonight I shall fit its back end with a set of steerable wheels.’
That’s what would have happened in Britain, and we’d have seen the results in a tear-jerking film on Blue Peter.
There are other things in China that are odd. For example, on my most recent trip I ordered sushi and was presented a few minutes later with a fish that was still alive.
It was flapping around on the plate, which would have been fine, except that one whole side of it had been carved into thin slivers that were still attached. The waiter explained that I should simply tear the strips off, one at a time, and eat them.
Well, now, look. I appreciate that sushi should be as fresh as possible, but I feel fairly sure that, if the fish had been killed in the kitchen before it was carved up, my taste buds wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Nothing’s going to decompose noticeably in sixty seconds.
Other things. Well, pop socks are seen as some kind of fashion highlight, the smog is bad, the traffic is worse and the weather is nuts. The first time I went to Beijing it was a hundred degrees – and pouring with rain.
Plus, I wouldn’t be able to go to the cinema because I wouldn’t understand what was going on. And there wouldn’t be enough leg room.
And I wouldn’t be able to tell the time because after two days the second hand would have fallen off my new Rolex, indicating that it wasn’t really a Rolex at all.
Most important of all, though, I’d get home every night and sit in my sumptuously appointed apartment all alone, trying to make my television work and then giving up because it wasn’t really a proper Sony. My bank balance would be swelling at the rate of £85,000 a day, but I’d have no one to spend it on. Because that’s the next thing you have to think about when you are offered a big-money deal to move to the other side of the world: your family.
You’d have work to keep you occupied, and therefore a reason for getting up in the morning. But your wife? Your children? It’s fairly safe to assume that, if they tagged along, they’d be so bored they’d be sniffing glue by week two, just for something to do.
And it’s not just China. It’s everywhere. If you were offered £30 million a year to move to Los Angeles, where the fishes are dead before you eat them and there are patrols to remove halved dogs from your line of sight, you’d be off in a flash. But what would your family do while you were lunching at the Ivy in LA with your new colleagues?
In your mind they’d be invited round for tea and buns by Cameron Diaz and they’d spend all day at the beach, sharing ice creams with George Clooney. But that wouldn’t happen. They’d know no one, they’d have nothing to do and, as a result, they’d all be alcoholics and drug addicts by the middle of March.
There are many places in the world that I truly love. The south of France is right up there. I’m always overcome by a tidal wave of joy when I land at Nice Airport. I think it is completely impossible to be unhappy if you are in St Tropez … unless you actually have to live there.
Because how many games of boules can you play? How many bits of raw cauliflower can you eat at Le Club 55? And how long would it be before you gave up pretending that you weren’t looking at breasts on the beach and just gawped openly like a lunatic?
I’m not a lunatic, so I’m not going to pretend that money is the root of all evil and that you’d be happier with nothing more than an orange and a piece of string.
But we must face facts and accept that, while money enables you to do all sorts of stuff, it is no good on its own; you need something else as well. You need your friends. And the fact is: they’re here.
Unfortunately, from Chelsea Football Club’s point of view, Diego Costa’s friends are not here. They are in Brazil, which is where he was born. So from his point of view London and Beijing are exactly the same. Neither is home. So either will do.
22 January 2017
Our inner ape is released in a most inconvenient way
Disturbing news from the public lavatories of China. To prevent people from using too much lavatory paper or, worse, stealing the whole roll, the authorities in one of Beijing’s parks have installed a system that dispenses just seventy-five centimetres of paper at a time.
It works, rather distressingly, on facial recognition. So when you’ve finished your business you are asked to remove all of your facial furniture – hat, sunglasses, smog mask, and so on – and then, after a photograph is taken, you get your paper. Nine minutes must elapse before the software allows the same person to receive more.
I’m not sure that’s long enough. I can easily while away half an hour on the loo if I have access to Instagram and Twitter and the Mail Online’s sidebar of shame but, on the face of it, China’s efforts to remind people of their responsibilities while visiting a lavatory are understandable.
I work in an office that’s staffed by extremely bright, university-educated twenty-somethings. They can sort out complicated customs forms, manage James May’s constant demands for more beef Hula Hoops and arrange filming schedules at the drop of a hat, on the other side of the world.
You’d imagine, then, that they could manage a simple trip to the loo without any problems. But no. Every time I go in there, it’s as though it has been used to house Bobby Sands for a year. And it was the same story at a firm of top lawyers that I visited the other day. The visual evidence suggested that all the partners were suffering from a bout of dysentery.
I used to go every summer to a school sports day, and it was middle-class heaven. You’d have Jeremy Paxman lying in the long grass by the river, watching the punts go by, and you’d have Niall Ferguson holding court on important issues of the day. People had their pinkies raised and their hampers arranged just so.
Everyone was always on their absolute best behaviour. They would never, for instance, say they were going to the lavatory. They’d either slip away quietly or ask to be excused for a moment. But when they got into the portable loo and closed the door, they all turned into cavemen.
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