It may well be that you were a tremendous student. And that you did your coursework diligently while maintaining a neat haircut. But what do you think an employer wants: a kid who knows about Newton’s Third Law, or a kid who can use pay-by-phone parking without calling his mum for help?
You’d be staggered how gumption-free some school-leavers are. Average-speed cameras, passport application forms, where water comes from – all this stuff is beyond half of them. We even had one come to work for us the other day who believed to be true something they’d found on Wikipedia.
When I asked them to phone the person we were researching to find out the truth from the horse’s mouth, they looked at me as though I’d asked them to communicate with smoke signals. ‘Talk to him?’ they stammered.
They mock old people such as us for not being able to use Facebook or get a TV to work properly. But they can’t boil an egg or use a saw or wire a plug. And they have not even the vaguest inkling what is meant by the word ‘patience’.
When we grew up we had Marine Boy on a Thursday and then had to wait until the following Thursday to watch the next episode. Today, television is immediate. And it’s the same with dating. I used to have to chat up a girl by walking up to her and saying, ‘Have you seen Thin Lizzy? I have.’ Now you just swipe right. Or left. Or whatever it is.
Then there’s cooking. We actually had to chop stuff up before making it hot, whereas Emily, as she points out in her book, left school with no idea how to do this, and consequently relied on food that comes with an instruction manual. And that made her fat.
As a result of this ‘I want it now’ mentality, they can’t understand why, after a day in work, they are still junior researchers. ‘Why am I not managing director?’ they wail, after they’ve been in the job for a week.
School could rectify this by teaching patience instead of maths, which, as Jeremy Corbyn has proved with his spending plans, is not something you need if you want to get on in life. I’d also force kids to gamble, so they can see how easy it is to lose, and take out a loan, so they get a grasp of the problems of paying it back. I’d show them farmyard animals mating and make them perform complex tasks while drunk.
Could they be tested in any of this stuff? No, not really. Which is why I’d abolish all exams past the age of eleven. Exams ruin childhood and exist only as a yardstick for universities, which aren’t important either.
The result would be a country full of young people who have no idea about tectonic shift or algebra but who are worldly-wise enough to cook chicken properly, cross the road without using Google and see Corbyn for the dangerous fool he really is.
2 July 2017
Centuries of male suffering inflicted by Croatian ragamuffins and French fops
As we all know, the world is in a bit of a pickle at the moment, so you’d expect Parliament to be a hive of important activity as members scuttle about discussing Brexit, the latest North Korean missile test, the lawlessness of Libya and how many tower blocks in Britain are basically great big tinderboxes.
Strangely, however, they seem to be mostly bothered about the recent announcement that ties would no longer be compulsory in the House. This has plainly irked a transport minister called John Somethingorother, who stood up last week and said, ‘I ought to say as a matter of courtesy that I will not be taking interventions from any member who is not wearing a tie, on whichever side of the House that member may sit.’
At this point I’d have filled a paper aeroplane with the contents of my nose and aimed it at his head, but no one thought to do that, so on he went. ‘I believe in generosity … and I will provide a tie … for anyone who is sartorially challenged or inadequate.’
Did he think people would find this funny? Because it wasn’t. I’ve seen more amusing stuff in an instruction manual. But he ploughed on regardless, explaining that women could be exempt as he wouldn’t expect them ‘to dress in my tie, their own or anyone else’s’.
There are people with dogs without a job, sitting on the pavement outside my local supermarket, who are capable of being more relevant and amusing than this.
But, staggeringly, his observations seem to have struck a chord, because a new MP called Eddie Hughes leapt to his feet and said – hold on to your sides, everyone – ‘I bought this suit at the weekend specifically to wear when making my first speech in this chamber, and although obviously I will be wearing exactly the same suit for the rest of the week’ – punchline on its way – ‘at least for today I’m looking my best.’
What a bonehead. Seriously. He’s campaigned for months. He’s won his election. He’s now the member of parliament for somewhere awful in the Midlands and this is his big moment. And that’s the best he can come up with.
That night, I bet, he will have called his wife and said excitedly, ‘Were you watching, darling? Did you see me? It’s in Hansard and everything. I told them about my new suit and how I’d be wearing it all week.’ And she, if she had any gumption, will have thought, with a world-weary sigh and a pitying glance at her children, ‘Maybe I should think more seriously about starting that affair with my gym instructor.’
Half the problem is that these two men have managed to get hot under their collars precisely because both of them were wearing ties. And ties are stupid. No. Don’t argue. Because they are. They serve no purpose.
I’ve done some checking and it seems that the idea of the tie came about in the seventeenth century when some Croatian mercenaries turned up in France wearing knotted handkerchiefs around their necks.
Instead of saying, ‘Thank God you’re here. We need all the help we can get to fight these pesky Protestants’, the French – because they are French – said, ‘Wow. Cool neckwear, boys.’ And immediately rushed off to create what became known as the cravat.
Later it became fashionable for rich young Englishmen to do a grand tour of Europe so that they could become even more boring at dinner parties by talking about art and music. And to let everyone know they’d been away, they started wearing idiotic stuff round their necks to make them look more French.
Because they were not only boring, but bored, they started to invent new ways of tying up this neckwear. And there were various publications, all of which were edited by Dylan Jones Esq., which helped them learn how to look more preposterous.
So when you put on a tie today, what you are actually saying is: ‘I’m a bore. I’m vain. And I want to be French. Oh, and it doesn’t matter that I have a piece of silk dangling round my neck because obviously I don’t work on the shop floor so it’s unlikely I’ll be garrotted by a piece of heavy machinery.’
I made a vow on the day I left school that I would never again wear a tie and, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral and a couple of television appearances, I haven’t. I’m not sure I can remember how to tie one any more. I also, between the months of April and November, rarely wear socks.
This means my performance in the day is vastly improved, partly because I don’t have to waste time in front of a mirror every morning trying to make my tie the right length. And partly because I’m never too hot. I’m relaxed. So relaxed that today I spilled some noodles down the front of my shirt.
If I were to turn up for a discussion in the Houses of Parliament looking like this, the Tory MPs – whose wives, even as we speak, are texting their gym instructors – would huff and puff and suggest I wasn’t capable of thinking straight.
But that’s the thing. I am. And what I see these days is a world run by tech giants who slob into work wearing jeans and a T-shirt, Kim Jong-un, who wears a boiler suit, and various rock stars who put on whatever doesn’t smell too bad.
Nobody says to Mr Bonio, ‘I’m sorry but we aren’t interested in what you have to say because you aren’t wearing a tie.’ And no one has yet asked Mr Edge to take off his hat.
Whereas whenever a man in a tie comes on the television, we always turn it off because we know he’s not being funny or interesting in any way.
9
July 2017
Clarkson on the horror of modern stag dos
Boating enthusiasts on the Norfolk Broads – or UKIP, as they’re known these days – have taken to the internet to express their dismay about how the peace and tranquillity of this enormous bog is being ruined by the rowdy behaviour of visitors. ‘Some of them may even be foreign,’ no one has said specifically. But you can bet it’s what many were thinking.
Stag weekends seem to be the main cause for concern, and when I read that my eyes started to roll with despair. Yes. No one likes to share so much as a postcode with a bunch of boorish drunks celebrating the forthcoming nuptials of a mate. But these things are a part of the fabric of society, so we just have to accept that from time to time a night out in the pub is going to be spoiled by some sick and a bit of broken furniture. ’Twas ever thus.
However, if you actually examine the complaints from Captain Farage and his mates, it looks as though they may have a point. One says he recently witnessed a stag do where all the participants got drunk and then started throwing one another into the water. So far, so normal – back in your box, Boaty McBoatface. But then he goes on to say they stripped the groom naked, in front of everyone, waxed him – that’s weird – and, after throwing him into the water too, took out their penises and urinated on him.
I’m sorry, but that’s disgusting. I thought a stag night was something that involved a group of friends. Which raises a question. What sort of friends would decide to urinate on their host? I once urinated on someone who tried to get a selfie while I was standing at a motorway service station’s urinals. But I’ve never peed on a friend and never would.
It turns out, however, that this is far from an isolated incident. Recently, a plane had to make an unscheduled landing at Gatwick after someone on a stag party thought it would be hilarious to set fire to the groom. So he did. He looked at his mate, someone he’d presumably known for years, and he thought, ‘I think it would be for the best if he were to be married while sporting some third-degree burns.’ So he set fire to his hair.
It gets worse. Several years ago, various people on a stag party on a blazing-hot day in Bournemouth decided that the bridegroom and his best man should be cooked. So they staked them out in the sun using handcuffs, stripped them naked and covered them in flour, eggs and tomato sauce. I find that odd. Because I’ve been drunk many times, but I’ve never looked at Jimmy Carr, who’s a friend, and thought, ‘You know what? He’d be lovely on a bed of fresh pasta.’
I’ll be honest. I’m not really a fan of stag nights. I find the whole idea of all-male company extremely distressing. All that cigar-infused nonsense about snooker cues, speedboats, business deals and hookers that men feel compelled to talk about when left to their own devices makes me nauseous.
Things are even worse when you sprinkle a bit of forced jollity into the mix. Taking off a man’s clothes and chaining him to a set of traffic lights could possibly, if you are twenty, be mildly amusing if it’s spontaneous. But feeling obliged to do it? Nah. That’s just rubbish.
That said, there was one occasion I was on a stag night and was hauled out of my dining chair to hold down the groom while other chaps shaved off his pubic hair. It seemed to me to be a terrible thing to do and I was very unamused about being forced to join in. Until they got his boxers down and we noticed the poor man had quite the smallest penis we’d ever seen. The embarrassed silence was eventually broken by someone saying, ‘You can’t get married with that.’
Mostly, though, the stag nights I went on in the 1980s and 1990s were reasonably calm affairs. I think I once played football with a bin bag on the Fulham Road. And I seem to recall that in an Indian restaurant someone once threw a nan into the ceiling fan. I fear it may have been me. But that’s it. No one ever got driven to London Zoo and fed to the lions or strapped to the live-fire targets on Salisbury Plain.
Today, things are very different. Now, a stag night is as often as not a stag weekend. You get to the airport, drink a hundred pints, get on the plane, drink a hundred more pints, say something offensive to the stewardess, get off the plane, say something racist to the immigration officer and then spend a thousand pounds drinking more pints until it’s time to experiment with some drugs your mate’s bought. And then, when you wake up from the coma, you find Instagram is rammed full of pictures of your naked and freshly tattooed arse with a chicken sticking out of it.
Strippers are now compulsory. And give me strength on that one because what face exactly are you supposed to pull while some enormous Romanian woman pushes her pudendum into your mate’s sunburned forehead?
I blame The Hangover. It was a brilliant film. I laughed a lot at nearly all of it. Unfortunately, for a whole generation, it was more than that. It was a new minimum standard. Anything less than an angry Chinese person in the boot, some amateur dentistry and a stolen police car and you haven’t given the groom the send-off he deserves.
Hmmm. I’m not sure. I think – and I’m going to have the backing of the Norfolk Broads boating community on this one – that, more than anything else in modern society, someone needs to press the stag-night reset button and go back to the days when you drank a bit too much port on the night before the wedding. And then went to bed.
16 July 2017
Living to 125 is a doddle: you simply get the government to make dying illegal
As we know, because Lily Allen keeps telling us, the Conservative Party wrapped Grenfell Tower in petrol-soaked rags and then set it alight on purpose so that as many poor people as possible would burn to death. And now comes news that the evil blue bastards are deliberately starving the NHS of cash so that the maximum number of elderly people die too soon and in a puddle of their own urine.
To try to understand the reasoning behind these latest accusations, I turned to the BMJ – formerly the British Medical Journal – which says that in 2015 there was a blip and a lot of people in the UK did die. But that last year almost everyone stayed alive. And that, as a result, the life expectancy for people in Britain continues its inexorable rise.
Somehow, though, Channel 4 and the Guardian managed to look at the same figures as the BMJ and come to a completely different conclusion. They ran headlines saying our life expectancy had stalled. Whereas the BBC – which perhaps had other things on its mind, such as where to go for lunch – recently said that it had actually fallen back and that soon everyone will die when they are two.
Many reports quoted a chap called Sir Michael Marmot, who said the trend for longer lives had pretty much stopped; he blamed this on Tory austerity measures. ‘They are deliberately killing your mum and dad,’ he implied, ‘so that Starbucks can pay less tax.’
Naturally, I assumed Sir Marmot was in some way related to Lily Allen, but it turns out the two are simply joined at the hip politically. He is director of University College London’s Institute of Health Equity (me neither), having once been an adviser to Gordon Brown.
According to the Guardian, he is held in high regard, but I can’t see why, because the man says he is surprised by the figures and had expected us to keep living longer lives. What? For ever? You expected everyone to live in the future to be what? A hundred? Two hundred? A million?
The fact is that we no longer send every young man in the land to fight the Germans in a Belgian field. That’s helped. We are also getting on top of HIV and many sorts of cancer, which is good news too. But by surviving AIDS and the big C and the Germans, we have now been driven into the arms of dementia.
Doubtless, Sir Marmot sees the day when science gets on top of that – and I do as well – but afterwards who knows what terribleness might be lurking in the shadows? We might die because our eyes fall out or we spontaneously combust.
And what’s life going to be like in Sir Marmot’s world when everyone is living to be a thousand or more? How will everyone be housed? How will they be fed? And who will change their sheets?
Then you’ve got the most important question of them all. Yes, I’d like to
live for ever, but only if I had the physical attributes of an eighteen-year-old, not if I were sitting there with no teeth, no bladder control and fingers like burst sausages.
This, then, is what Sir Marmot should worry about. How to stop the able-bodied dying before their time. Because if you eliminate death in younger people, you naturally raise the average age at which we croak. Let me put it this way: eighteen-year-olds falling off motorcycles play havoc with the statistics.
There’s a simple solution right there. Ban the motorcycle. I bet Sir Marmot is making a note on that as we speak. And we can’t have forty-year-olds catching lung cancer, so we’d better ban the sale of tobacco too, and alcohol, while we are at it. Because no good can ever come of that pesky and debilitating toxin.
Already, there is a great deal of health and safety in the workplace. In our office we have to jump through hoops like police dogs at a Horse of the Year Show intermission before we can get insurance to film anything. But even though we have to assess the risk of a giant meteor landing on someone’s head, Richard Hammond still manages to put himself in hospital every time he tries to drive anywhere. And that has to stop too, which means health and safety must be tightened up still further.
Then we have the roads. At present the annual cull amounts to about 1,700 people, some of whom are children or fools who use children’s toys to cycle to work. Drastic measures must be taken here, because if we can keep this lot alive until they are 127, the figures will look tremendous. That means more average-speed cameras, lower speed limits, a ban on cars on roads used by cyclists and a new type of tarmac made from feathers.
Maybe we could take a leaf out of the book they use in southern France, where they routinely live to be 112. This would mean encouraging people to sit in a plastic chair at the side of the road in a grandad shirt eating foie gras all day.
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