But it wasn’t as disgusting as what happened next. The doctor had given me some cream to rub into all the affected areas, saying that after forty-eight hours all the lice would have left my body and died. Sadly for the next person into the cubicle, the forty-eight hours was up when I was in one of the lavatories at Kuala Lumpur Airport, on my way to Australia.
I pulled down my shreddies to see if any had fallen out, and it was like a horror film. There were hundreds and hundreds of dead lice, all of which I swept on to the floor before leaving.
You might imagine that illness and problems of this nature are all part of life when you are travelling to weird parts of the world, but last week I came back from a two-day trip to the part of France that is full of people who miss Terry Wogan and I had an itchy right nipple.
Further investigation revealed that I’d been bitten by a bedbug, which I thought was a harmless cartoon character designed to make young children feel all snuggly and safe when you tuck them up at night.
Well, it’s not. My nipple looks as though it’s exploded, and because it itches enough to make scratching impossible to resist, I find people are looking at me in restaurants as though I may be practising for some kind of weird transgender pole-dancing routine.
It turns out bedbugs are extremely common in even the most expensive hotels, and there is much advice on the internet about how you can minimize your chances of being bitten. One reputable site suggests that before putting your clothes, suitcase, or yourself on to the bed you should peel back the sheets very carefully and check for bugs using the torch you’re bound to have in your hand luggage, because everyone does.
Next, you must remove the sheets and scrape the mattress, using a credit card to peer under the buttons, before switching your investigations to the headboard. This is the most terrible game of Hide and Seek ever, and it gets worse, because you also need to check the stand on to which you will place your suitcase later, and the bathroom.
Now, excuse me, but if you are on holiday, you are not going to be inclined to do a four-hour CSI search of your room looking for something that, in the worst case, is going to make you a bit itchy for a day or two.
Far better to accept that, when you go away, there’s a chance that you will catch something either irritating or nasty. Or that you will be shot, kidnapped, irradiated or blown into the sea and drowned. It’s what travel agents mean when they describe a holiday as exciting: that you may come home in a box.
1 October 2017
The best art criticism is done not with words but with craft knife and spray can
As we know, the French have always been very open about sex. Thirty years ago, while we Brits were sitting in a hotel room watching a porn film that had been edited so heavily it was nothing more than a forty-minute close-up of a sweaty man’s face going up and down, Johnny Frenchman could sit down after a hard day on strike and watch full-on sex on terrestrial television.
Well, I say ‘full-on sex’, but most French films of this period usually had quite a lot of meaningless preamble. By which I mean we had half an hour of a man sitting outside a restaurant in Paris, stirring coffee and staring wistfully into the middle distance while smoking a Gitane. Then he’d ask the waiter if the ham was happy, and it would cut to a naked woman with armpits like Monty Don’s shrubbery writhing around in a bed. After which it would cut back to the man at the restaurant, who was now standing up, saying at the top of his voice, ‘What is the meaning of this table?’ Then there’d be some sex.
It was the same story on the beach. Frenchwomen were wearing nothing but a few inches of dental floss while we were still hopping up and down behind a windbreak as we tried to get our flab into an all-in-one romper suit.
Today a French infant can marry his primary-school teacher and go on to be president, and it’s not uncommon for a man to arrive home at the end of the day and say to his wife, ‘Sorry I’m late, darling. I stopped off at a hotel with my mistress for a couple of hours.’
Naturally, French art is just porn. A recent example was a video promoting an art exhibition that showed various naked people writhing around on the floor biting one another. It was all very odd until the camera pulled back and we saw they were spelling out ‘Sade’.
Now a panel of French art experts – can you imagine how little they find funny? – has decided that a thirty-ton sculpture by a Dutch art collective the name of which I can’t be bothered to remember should be exhibited in the Tuileries Gardens as a centrepiece of this month’s Paris contemporary art fair.
To the casual eye it looks like a collection of shipping containers held together with oddly angled beams. But if you study it for more than about one second, it’s very obvious that it’s a man – how can I put this in a family newspaper? – hanging out of the back of a dog.
Now you may think this is the sort of thing the French show on Pierre Bleu at five in the afternoon, but it seems not. The people who run the gardens where the gigantic One Man and His Dog sculpture was to have been displayed have said non.
Naturally, they’ve said non not only because it would be inappropriate to have a forty-foot sculpture of animal sex in the middle of the city but because they think it might be vandalized.
This would not be a first. A few years ago an American artist was asked to make a modern-day Christmas tree sculpture, which was then mounted in Place Vendôme.
That all sounds very jolly and festive, but anyone who’s even walked past a sex shop would tell you that the sculpture was nothing more than an enormous gentleman’s sex toy. I believe the term is ‘butt plug’. I also believe the sub-editors will take that reference out.
Anyway, it was vandalized, and so, at the Palace of Versailles, was a huge hollow tube that at one end flared out into the shape of – there’s no other way of saying this – a lady part.
There are those who say that this vandalism is the work of right-wing religious nutcases, but that seems unlikely, because no right-wing religious nutcases have vandalized Brigitte Bardot’s breasts. No. I think it’s more likely these things were vandalized by people who like art.
People in France have lived with sex and general disgustingness for decades, so why should they suddenly decide now that it’s time to make merry with the spray cans? Aren’t the culprits more likely to be people who think, ‘No. I’m sorry. But filling the beautiful gardens at Versailles with a massive metal tube, no matter what shape it is at the end, is just not on’?
Things in Britain are a bit more tricky, because sex here died when Robin Askwith hung up his Y-fronts and Barbara Windsor put her bosoms away. We don’t do metal vaginas or bestiality sculptures in Hyde Park, so our art fans have no excuse to become vandals. Which is a pity.
Last week a contemporary art fair opened in Regent’s Park in London, and I don’t doubt for a moment that true connoisseurs were appalled by the collection of cardboard boxes that had been fastened somehow to a wall, or the enormous lollies that were to be found outside, stuck into the lawn. And that’s before we get to the skeleton draped over a chair.
Unfortunately, the whole place was full of visitors wandering around scratching their chins and using lines on one another that they’d picked up from watching the Pierce Brosnan remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
Some of them were actually shelling out because, like pretty much everyone in Britain, they have walls, and walls need to be covered with stuff.
Something must be done about that. It’s tricky enough for normal people to buy art, because we don’t know what’s good and what’s tosh. We therefore need people who do know to become a bit more French and smash stuff up before we have a chance to make fools of ourselves.
And come home from an art fair with a boot full of empty cereal packets.
8 October 2017
Oh blow, our star role in a hurricane epic has gone with the wind
It can’t be much fun being a weather forecaster in Britain because there’s almost always nothing to do. You spend all day looking at isobars
and algorithms and they always say the same thing: tomorrow will be grey and boring with a slight chance of rain.
You look from time to time at weather forecasters in other parts of the world and you are green with envy because they have hurricanes and cyclones and tornados and temperature extremes that can shatter or melt steel. Whereas all you ever have is another minor low trundling across the Atlantic, which means that tomorrow it will be fifty-seven degrees and drizzling. Same as it was yesterday and the day before that.
You dream of the day when something interesting happens because then you will be promoted from the tail end of the news to who knows? The lead item? You may even be sent out of the studio to stand in the weather you’ve forecast. You’ll be an actual reporter, with messed-up hair and maybe even a bulletproof vest with ‘Press’ on it.
Which brings us on to Hurricane Ophelia. It started to form a couple of weeks ago several hundred miles south-west of the Azores. This was on approximately the same latitude as Morocco and that’s way further north than the zone where hurricanes usually gird their loins. Because it was so far north the sea temperature wasn’t particularly warm, so it took longer than usual to develop its eye and that familiar circular cloud pattern. But eventually it was up to strength and off it set …
Doubtless the forecasters in Britain sat at their desks, looking at it with their chins in their hands, thinking about how their colleagues in the Caribbean and Florida were going to get all the action – again. They’d be the ones standing in front of huge, crashing waves while pointing at advertising hoardings as they tumbled down the streets.
But then something odd happened. Instead of heading west, Ophelia began to move north-east. This had happened before. In 2012 Hurricane Nadine did the same thing, but then became trapped by a combination of witchcraft and who knows what and just sat there for nearly a month – the fourth-longest-lasting Atlantic hurricane in recorded history.
Weather reporters went off to ground zero dressed up like Kate Adie.
Everyone expected Ophelia to do the same thing, but it didn’t. It broke free and set a course directly for the British Isles. Well, you can imagine how exciting that must have been for our forecasters. ‘We have five days,’ one of them will have said, ‘before it hits.’
In my mind, whooping alarms will have sounded and someone will have leapt to his feet and ordered no one in particular to ‘secure the perimeter’. The weather services computer room will have looked like the bridge of a nuclear submarine at Defcon 1. Or is it 5? I never know which way round that goes.
Britain was going to get a hurricane, and every weather reporter went into the television station’s war room and half-inched every bit of combat kit they could find. They were going to be the lead item and they wanted to look good when Armageddon arrived.
They also wanted to be at ground zero, which they’d worked out would be on the west coast of Ireland. So off they went, dressed up like Kate Adie, and every half an hour they’d film updates for the rolling news channels.
Sadly, they weren’t getting quite what they’d wanted because the Irish, being Irish, had decided that, instead of boarding up their windows and stocking up on bottles of water, they’d be better off at the pub. Some had even decided to go for a swim. So we were treated to the ridiculous spectacle of someone dressed like they were off to the South Pole reporting on scenes of intense jollity.
In a desperate attempt to make the locals frightened, a flock of birds was photographed flying overhead. ‘Look,’ screamed the reporters. ‘You’ve seen 2012, that disaster movie with John Cusack. The birds knew the end of the world was coming in that. And they know something’s up here too.’
Warnings were issued that wind speeds would hit 75mph, but then someone decided 75mph didn’t sound that bad. So it was converted to 120kph and that sounded much better. Meanwhile, an amber warning was issued that, said the man in the anorak and storm boots, meant lives were in danger. Millions would be mangled. The UK and Ireland would be wiped out. This would be an extinction-level event.
But then disaster struck. As the hurricane began to near Ireland it decided to become a storm. And then a stiff breeze. But there was no way they’d admit to this because then they’d have to go home and return to looking at isobars. So they stuck it out, desperately finding narrow passageways that would amplify the wind and make their hair look messier, and puddles in which to stand while reporting.
Five hundred hacks raced to the scene of a fallen tree in Dublin. And Instagram was rammed with shots of upended wheelie bins. Three people died. And the roof of a school came off. ‘And it’s heading your way, London.’
Well, we waited and, at three in the afternoon, it looked as if the warnings were all going to come true. The sky went the weirdest colour I’d ever seen, a phenomenon caused, we were told, by Stiff Breeze Ophelia whipping up Saharan dust and smoke from forest fires in Portugal.
By four it was horror film-tastic. And strangely warm. And still. Too still. At any moment I expected a howling burst of energy to rip the Chiswick flyover from its mountings and send fire engines high into the ionosphere. But by five the sun came out again and that was that.
I’d like to say it was the biggest anticlimax in modern recorded history, but that accolade still rests with the Great Storm of October 1987. Which was not quite severe enough to wake anyone up.
22 October 2017
Wine bore’s red? Wide-awake white? No, I’ll take the vino in-betweeno
Right, then. That’s it. British summertime is over and for the next five months it will be constantly dark and cold and foggy. There will be steamed-up windows and runny noses too. So it’s time to put away the Pimm’s and break out the Bovril. Or is it?
Next weekend the nation will gather round various bonfires, oohing and aahing at all the fireworks. We will be in our duffle coats, and our children will have pink cheeks and sparklers, and we’ll be wondering how on earth it’s possible for the smoke to blow into our eyes no matter which side of the fire we choose to stand.
Naturally, our host will provide liquid refreshment, which will be either warm brown beer made by a brewery with a silly name, or mulled wine. Both of which will be disgusting, so I have a suggestion. If you are thinking of hosting a bonfire party, do what I’d do: serve only rosé wine. With lots of ice.
Some people find my love of lady petrol rather weird. And when I point out that Noel Gallagher has similar views, they look quizzical and say, ‘Well, he must be weird too.’ But we are not alone, because the world is divided into two distinct camps. Those who have realized that rosé is the only drink worth drinking. And a tiny number who haven’t. Yet.
There was a time when you’d only drink rosé when you were staying with friends at their villa in the south of France, in August. You wouldn’t dream of buying it in England, in November, because, well, you are a man and you have your own tankard in the pub and you wouldn’t be seen dead drinking pink. But not any more.
Waitrose and Marks & Spencer say rosé sales have recently leapt by more than 100 per cent, and it’s easy to see why. If you drink white wine with your supper, it will turn to sugar in your stomach and at three in the morning you will sit bolt upright in bed as though John Travolta had just pumped your heart full of neat adrenaline.
If, on the other hand, you choose to drink red, your face will be in the bouillabaisse by eight in the evening and you’ll snore all through the main. Rosé, meanwhile, steers a neat course through the two extremes, getting you nicely tipsy without waking you up in the night or putting you to sleep during the starter.
And there’s more: if you drink rosé, everyone will know you know nothing about wine. This is a good thing because anyone who does know something about wine is incapable of keeping this knowledge to themselves.
This is a problem for me at the moment because recently I was given a case of something called Château Cheval Blanc that was made in 1985. I’m told this is an excellent wine and should be shared only with those who’ll t
ruly appreciate it. Which would mean inviting that sort of person round to my house, and that’s not something I’m prepared to do. In case they appreciate it out loud.
Mind you, things are worse in restaurants, because nothing – and I do mean nothing – causes my blood to boil quite so quickly as some pompous arse in red trousers sitting at the head of the table poring over the wine list for half an hour and then wasting another half an hour discussing his knowledge and brilliance with the sommelier.
And that’s only the start, because when the red-trousered arse has finally decided what heavy red he’d like and the sommelier has congratulated him on his ‘excellent choice’, there’s that whole swirling and examining against the light and sloshing procedure to be endured. I know he thinks that everyone round the table is sitting there, with faces like raisins, thinking, ‘What a cultured fellow this man must be’ – but we are not. We are all sitting there thinking, ‘What an insufferable show-off.’
How would he feel if he climbed into the passenger seat of my car and I sat there in silence for an hour listening to the engine and blipping the throttle occasionally? He’d think I’d taken leave of my senses. Almost certainly he’d say that a car is just a car and ask if I wouldn’t mind setting off sometime this week. Well, quite.
To express his displeasure at a restaurant full of wine snobs, my dad, upon being asked to taste the wine, once took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeve and dipped his elbow into the glass before saying to the wine waiter in a loud voice, ‘Mmmm, yes. That’s delicious.’
Rosé gets round all that nonsense. You don’t have to let it breathe. You don’t have to swirl it around or smell its cork. And if you comment on its quality, or how it’s ‘opened up nicely’, people are going to laugh at you. I’m not saying all rosé is lovely. It isn’t. If it cost you £1.99 from the petrol station and it’s the colour of Ribena and the bottle has a screw top, it’ll make you go cross-eyed every time you take a sip. But if it’s a Château Minuty or a Whispering Angel or, best of all, a Château Léoube, you can cut the top of the bottle off with a sword and get cracking immediately because it will be tremendous.
If You'd Just Let Me Finish Page 26