It was possible even sixty years ago to drop a bomb from 20,000 feet in the sky and hit a target on the ground. But somehow, people in public conveniences can’t even hit the target when they’re sitting on it. And never mind seventy-five centimetres of paper. Everyone at those sports days used all of it and then left it lying on the floor, before re-emerging to pour Paxman another glass of Whispering Angel.
At festivals, things are even more out of hand because everyone has to face the problem of doing their number twos and vomiting simultaneously. This gives them the opportunity to miss at both ends. And all of it makes me wonder …
When you go to the lavatory in someone’s house, it’s always immaculate. There are amusing hunting-scene cartoons on the walls and some tastefully framed school photographs. There’s a candle, of course, to mask any unpleasant odours, the lavatory paper is often folded into a neat V at the end, or it’s in a little box tied up with a ribbon, and there’s some soap made from the tears of actual angels.
If a Martian were forced to guess what goes on in such a room, he’d say it was used for heart transplants. We are all like this at home: fastidious, clean, tidy. And we are all like this when we are out in public. We behave ourselves. We don’t shoplift, we don’t push homeless people over for fun and we don’t set fire to municipal flower displays on roundabouts, no matter how much we hate them.
We are able to keep ourselves in check because we know we are being watched. And now we hear that drones will soon replace what some newspapers still refer to as ‘bobbies on the beat’.
This means we will know for sure that, if we decide to abandon our clothes and run naked through the park, the moment will definitely be witnessed. And I fear this may cause the freedom streak that lives in us all to become squeezed to breaking point.
My grandmother, in her later years, would often spend a whole day sitting in her local dress shop laughing openly at anyone who came out of the changing room. ‘Oh no,’ she’d say, ‘that’s terrible.’ Or she would sweep into a room full of pompous women having tea while their husbands were at the lodge, and push a cream cake into someone’s face.
I dream of being able to do that sort of thing and I’m sure you do too. Every time you walk past some neatly stacked tins of beans at your supermarket, you must occasionally feel a need to push them over. And when you are presented with someone’s new baby, there’s always a piece of you that says, ‘Go on. Say it’s a bit ugly.’
But we never do any of this. We can’t. We don’t like to be judged. And that’s why, when we are finally given a moment of absolute privacy in a public lavatory, we revert to being what we actually are. Apes.
We know we are not being watched. We know we can get away with doing whatever comes into our heads. And that’s why so many bright, normal, sensible people suddenly feel the need to leave a right mess.
I worry what will happen in China now the authorities are using what they say is ‘science and technology to control behaviour’ in the public loos. I fear it won’t be good. People have to let off steam somewhere and, if they are forced to behave while having a poo, the country could slide into anarchy, which would almost certainly precipitate a nuclear war.
26 March 2017
Moove over, refugees. Militant vegans have claustrophobic cows to save
Not long ago, after being accused of abusing its powers, the RSPCA decided it would stop bringing trumped-up prosecutions against children who fail to clean out their rabbit hutches properly and concentrate instead on the real villains.
There are plenty of targets, it seems. Last year one woman was successfully prosecuted for cutting the heads off her two pet snakes with a pair of scissors. And that’s only right and proper, because while they may only be snakes, you have to be fairly weird to think, ‘Right. I need to kill them, so I shall go through my sewing kit to find the right weapon.’ Certainly, it would only be a matter of time before a person like this were pushing babies into a waste disposal unit.
Then there was a man who kept a golden eagle in his kitchen, and two brothers convicted of headbutting their bulldog. Why would you do that? Bulldogs have already had their snouts headbutted into a concertina by the cruelty of deranged selective breeding. So all of them already look as if they’ve run into a wall while travelling at a thousand miles an hour.
I applaud the RSPCA for its new stance. It’s sensible to leave averagely lazy pet owners alone and go after the people who are plainly mad, and possibly quite dangerous.
However, there are other animal welfare enthusiasts who it appears are not quite so sensible. That brings us to a pro-vegan organization called Animal Equality, which believes that fish can be sad, that an egg is an abortion and that milk is murder. I don’t doubt that some of its supporters spend their evenings sending dog poo to scientists who make beagles smoke pipes.
Last week it released photographs and video of some cows living in sheltered accommodation on a farm in Dorset. It pointed out that the hutches in which the animals took cover when it was raining were too small and that many had open sores on their backs from trying to get inside. And it said that Marks & Spencer, which prides itself on the ethical nature of the food it sells, is still selling milk from the farm in question. M&S? S&M, more like.
The law – there’s a law for everything these days, it seems – says that cows can be kept in individual hutches only until they are eight weeks old, after which they must be allowed to stand in the rain in a field doing absolutely nothing until they die of boredom. And there seems little doubt that the cows in the pictures are more than eight weeks old.
However, M&S says it dispatched a team of experts immediately and that, after an investigation and assurances from the farmer, it will continue to buy his milk. The farmer says spot audits have been done and all were passed. Dorset Council’s trading standards people have also paid a visit and did not detect any breaches. So the farmer, the council and M&S say everything’s fine, but the animal rights people still argue it isn’t. And the photographic evidence appears to back them up.
Hmmm. Who knows? Dairy farming is a tricky business these days. You need a gigantic herd to make more than £2.75 a year, and one tiny blip in the weather or one punctured tyre on a milk tanker can wipe out any profit in an instant. So maybe for a short while cows that were more than eight weeks old were kept in hutches that were a bit on the tight side.
Maybe, then, the book should be thrown at Farmer Giles. Maybe he should be imprisoned and fined so heavily he is forced to sell his farm to property developers. Or maybe, instead, we should seek out the lawmakers who decided how much space a veal calf needs to be happy and ask them, ‘What were you thinking of, you imbeciles?’
Near where I live in the countryside there are fields that, at this time of year, fill up with tin boxes that are, in some cases, no more than fourteen feet long. They are called ‘caravans’, and whole families sleep and eat in them for weeks at a time.
Others are even less fortunate and have to live in a plastic triangle with nothing to protect them from the elements other than a jammed zip and a small stove that they use to keep warm and heat what they call ‘food’. Often this amounts to nothing more than a thin gruel with some beans in it. And do we have legislation to prevent this kind of cruelty? No. We do not.
You could argue that people are not forced to live in these ‘caravans’ and plastic triangles, but that’s not so. If they’d had a decent education and had earned more money, you can be sure they’d rent a villa in St Tropez instead.
And anyway, what about the people who live in the refugee camps of Jordan or South Sudan? They are trudging through a mind-numbing existence of acute hunger, disease and devastating loss and they don’t even have the privilege of being milked twice a day. No one comes with clean bedding every morning. No one mucks them out. No one supplies food or clean water or shelter when it’s cold.
Occasionally, a big-hearted volunteer will arrive with a few sacks of grain and a bagful of aspirin, but these v
isits are few and far between. Because, I’m sorry to say, most people are too busy hiding in the bushes in Dorset, filming cows that may or may not be too large for the sturdy and clean accommodation with which they’ve been provided.
I’d like to close with a message to the friends and supporters of Animal Equality. Why don’t you go to a small coastal village in Africa one day and tell the people there that the fish they’ve just hauled from the sea are sad as a result? And let’s see how far you get.
1 April 2017
Oi, Fatty! Join me in a little act of rudeness and we’ll make Britain normal again
Now that we have Mr Trump in the White House, and Mrs Hitler on course to take France out of the EU through a hole in the fence made by the elderly folk of northern England, many people are wondering what has gone wrong with the world.
Well, for an answer we should look no further than an announcement made during the FA Cup semi-finals at Wembley last weekend. The gist of it was: if you are offended by someone’s behaviour, you can text the person’s seat number to God knows who and he or she will be given the full United Airlines treatment as security men hurl him bodily from the stadium.
This worried me greatly because I know that over the years I have caused a great deal of offence to a great many people: vegetablists, socialists, the French, the Americans, short people, fat people, bicyclists, football referees, public sector workers, the Koreans, people who drive Peugeots, people who are left-handed, people who wear stupid shoes, traffic wardens, Highways England traffic officers … The list is endless, and so there was a good chance my seat number would be texted to the thought police, and shortly afterwards I’d end up in a skip with a loose tooth.
Causing offence has somehow become the nation’s number-one crime. Which means that if you live in the public eye your number-one rule must be: grin and be medium.
The result of this on television is Matt Baker, who hosts The One Show and Countryfile. He would host everything else if they could clone him in some way, because Matt is the sort of man you’d want your daughter to marry. Matt has never looked at pornography on the internet or put a stickleback down a waste disposal unit. Matt has great teeth and a range of jumpers that are lovely. Also, he speaks with one of the regional accents that we find cute (not Birmingham) and, I bet, writes long and brilliant thank-you letters.
On Newsnight we see that the acerbic Jeremy Paxman has gone and in his stead there’s a small, bald man who smiles a lot. At home the small, bald man wears weird clothes, but at work he wears a suit and an open-necked shirt and is polite to his interviewees, all of whom wear burqas and turbans, so they don’t offend anyone who’s watching.
And it’s not just on television. You may not be noisy any more when leaving a pub, in case you cause offence to the neighbours. You may not smoke within half a mile of a child. You may not roll your eyes at the post office counter girl, no matter how stupid she has been, because abuse of staff will not be tolerated.
Only last week we were told in an Oxford University newsletter that, if you avoided eye contact with someone, you could be guilty of racism. But that’s OK, because these days everything is racist, except all the stuff that is sexist as well.
All this makes life virtually impossible for politicians. Because if they don’t establish eye contact with Emily Maitlis when they are being interviewed, they are being racist, and if they do, they are being misogynistic bastards.
And things are even worse when it comes to answering an actual question. Last weekend Jeremy Corbyn, who leads the Labour Party, was asked if he’d drop a bomb on the head of the man who runs ISIS. Well, that’s impossible for the old goat, because if he says no, he will offend the Daily Mail, and if he says yes, he will offend everyone in ISIS.
It’s the same for the Tories. When asked about the NHS, they can’t say, ‘We really should shut the bloody thing down,’ because that will cause offence. So they have to pull a serious face and make noises until the reporter is bored, or reports them for being racist.
This means no politician can say what he or she is thinking. And neither can they tell the truth. They know, without a shadow of doubt, that badgers transmit tuberculosis to cattle. But if you say, ‘Do badgers transmit tuberculosis to cattle?’, I guarantee that not a single one will say yes.
At home we know this. We know, as they waffle on while staring at the bridge of the reporter’s nose so as not to be thought either racist or sexist, that they are lying, that they are spinning a yarn designed to keep Paul Dacre and Gary Lineker and the Twitter hordes off their back, and we are fed up with it.
Nigel Farage, by contrast, offended vast swathes of the population with his red-telephone-box, Morris Minor, Love Thy Neighbour vision of Britain. But people liked him because they could see he was talking from the heart. And it was the same story with Trump. And it’s the same story with that mad Frenchwoman whose name I can’t be bothered to spellcheck.
Sensible, centrist politicians must start taking note. They’ve got to stop trying to please everyone, which is impossible, and say what they think. And we can help them by agreeing not to be offended quite so easily.
We can start at the FA Cup final next month. When the announcer comes on the loudspeakers asking you to report anyone who’s being offensive, report him to the number on the screens. Because unless we clamp down on this sort of nonsense, we are going to see the rise of a new Hitler.
30 April 2017
A licence to cull could be a lifeline for Prince Philip – and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle
Most people seem to agree that after nearly seventy years of pretending to be interested in tribal dancing and civic arts centres the Duke of Edinburgh is entitled to put his feet up and enjoy what little time he has left.
Hmmm. At present my diary is a hilarious collection of parties I’ll have to cancel because I’ll be out of the country, flights I’ll miss because I’m too hung over, scripting days that will get forgotten and newspaper deadlines that won’t be met.
And in among it all there’s the horror of next Sunday. I get back from Croatia late on Saturday night, and the next thing I must do is get to a filming location in Berkshire by 7 a.m. on Monday. This means I have a whole day with nothing to do, nowhere to be and nobody to see. It frightens me.
Because when you get into bed at night knowing that you have done nothing that day apart from looking in the fridge every half-hour to see if there are any cold sausages that you didn’t spot last time, you know you have wasted what is a significant portion of your life. You have drained the world’s resources and given nothing back. You’ve been a human sponge. A wastrel.
This is what will happen to Prince Philip. When he doesn’t have to get up and put on a suit so he can listen to stuttering bores who’ve set up a jam festival, he will lie in bed thinking, ‘What’s the point of getting up at all?’
Eventually, at about ten, he will start to think about having a small whisky, and at ten past he will succumb. After a short while, the combination of alcohol and inactivity will be fatal and he will die.
The facts bear this out. Studies have found that people who work beyond the age of sixty-five tend to die about 10 per cent later than those who put their feet up. Except if you’re German, in which case it’s the other way around. This is bad news for Mrs Queen, who is from that neck of the woods. But good for Philip, who, as we know, is Greek.
Actually, I’m only guessing that it’s good news for the Greeks. No one knows for sure what happens there, because the concept of ‘stopping work’ doesn’t apply in a country where no one ever really starts.
Whatever, it’s bad news for you and me because it means that, if we retire when we are sixty-five, we get about ten minutes before the Grim Reaper comes up the drive in his beige people-carrier.
The only way to deal with the problem is to retire from your normal job and then keep busy in some other way. Not exercising, obviously, because there’s nothing as tragic as an old wrinkly person in an Ali G outfit dragging the
ir arthritis round the park. And not golf. Everyone dies on the golf course. And not bridge, which is just blackjack for the incontinent.
No. It needs to be something with a point, and that brings me neatly on to what’s happening in the small village of Burton Fleming in East Yorkshire. A couple of years ago terrible floods drowned every hedgehog in the region, and now a seventy-two-year-old called Kate Mercer has decided that she and her friends from the village hall should do something about it.
Taking advice from a genial-looking seventy-eight-year-old hedgehog enthusiast in the next county, she has transformed the village, drilling holes in fences, installing little ladders in ponds and erecting feeding stations. Her work has been described as ‘the best thing that’s ever happened’ to the community.
I was, at this point, going to say that beating Hitler was probably even better, but the truth is, I quite like the idea of old people staging a hedgehog reintroduction. It’s gentle and everyone wins, because hedgehogs are like ice cream and David Attenborough and Rome. Everyone likes them.
Put it like this. When I drive past a road sign saying, ‘Thank you for driving slowly through our village,’ I always think, ‘But I didn’t.’ However, if there were a sign saying, ‘Please slow down for our hedgehogs,’ I’d crawl along at 2mph, straining my eyes like the tail gunner in a Halifax.
Cars, however, are only one of the threats that hedgehogs face in these difficult times. Another is habitat loss. Replace your lawn with decking and you are robbing Spiny Norman of his insect-rich feeding ground. Put up a fence and you are imprisoning him.
And then there’s Tyson Fury, who, to strengthen his gypsy credentials, said recently that he’d eaten a hedgehog. He’s unusual, though. Most travellers these days prefer a party seven of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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