Don’t worry – in lovely warm water the only sharks you’ll see are so small, they wouldn’t even classify as a hungry man’s starter. When a newspaper talks of ‘shark-infested waters’, though, we all immediately think of cold-water predators biting Robert Shaw in half.
Now, some housekeeping. Don’t, whatever you do, get yourself lost miles from land in some two-bit Third World backwater where all the rescue-boat captains are on heroin. You stand a pretty good chance of being out there for ever. Australia’s good. They are all used to being eaten, and because of this, the authorities will most likely send a destroyer to the rescue. This will look fantastic on the evening news and will up your saleability immensely.
Oh, and do please remember to have something pithy but brave prepared for when they haul you on board. Crying like a girl is no good unless you actually are a girl. Tony Bullimore, the round-the-world sailor, set a pretty good benchmark in this respect. He really had been in trouble, miles from anywhere and freezing cold; he’d even started to eat himself. All absolutely excellent if he’d thought to flog his story. And then, when he’d been rescued by the Aussie navy and, of course, offered counselling, he said: ‘What would I need that for? I’ve just been saved.’ Brilliant.
Next, you must choose who’s coming with you, and here there’s a big rule. No mingers. The girls must be prettier than a Caribbean sunset, partly because Hello! is not going to put someone who looks like Ann Widdecombe on the cover. The men, on the other hand, should be big and strong so that they can deal with any unfortunate attacks by cannibalistic fishermen or Portuguese men-of-war. But, critically, one must be a concave-chested prat whom you don’t like very much. Because someone has to come home with a half-eaten head, after all.
Things to pack? Well, obviously you’ll need some sandwiches so you have something to eat while you wait for the dive boat to go away. You’ll also need some sun cream, a torch, a portable sat nav system, a harpoon gun and some condoms, in case one of the pretty girls falls for the ‘Well, since we’re going to die, we might as well’ line.
Most important of all, though, you must take a camera with a flash. Last week we saw some incredibly dramatic photographs of a beautiful and healthy young woman swimming through ‘shark-infested waters’, at night, after she and some friends had been carried away by ‘fierce rip tides’ off Bali. This is textbook stuff.
The party of three Brits, a Frenchman and a Swede even came up with a fierce-looking dinosaur that had approached them when they did finally make land. It’s called the Komodo dragon and billed as the largest lizard in the world, so we have in our mind a Tyrannosaurus rex, peering through the window of their broken-down Jeep. It all sounds terrifying, and we’ll just gloss over the fact that it prefers carrion to live meat, and that they made it go away by throwing pebbles at it. Honestly, guys, it would have been more lucrative – not that you were going to sell your story, of course – if you’d scarified the Swede. We’d never have known.
Plus, it would have been better if, in the pictures you took as you sat on the island waiting for rescue, you hadn’t all been smiling.
I do hope my simple guide to making a fortune while on a lovely holiday in the Indian Ocean will come in handy this summer. Because the only way you’ll make more money is by sleeping with Wayne Rooney. And I really wouldn’t fancy that.
Sunday 15 June 2008
Oi, get your hands off my lap dancers
The machine needs to be fed. When you have 650 members of parliament elected to make laws, and an army of 500,000 civil servants whose job is to make sure that those laws work, and more legions in Brussels making more laws, there is never going to be any respite. The machine can never rest until absolutely everything is illegal.
Whenever I let my mind wander, I become quivery-lipped and frightened thinking about all the things I could do ten years ago that I cannot do now. I may not smack my children, for instance, or talk on a mobile telephone while driving or put too much salt on my mashed potato or smoke at home if my cleaning lady objects or give my donkey a tender burial or encourage my dogs to kill rats. And if I put the wrong thing in the wrong-coloured dustbin, I’m likely to spend the next five years digging tunnels.
Outside my little world, things are even worse. Schools must ensure that their urinals are a certain height off the ground. Trawlermen must throw everything they catch back into the sea. The makers of beer must tell their customers to drink responsibly. And if Rowan Atkinson were to make a joke about gypsies, he would be digging tunnels too.
Today the machine is running out of people wearing high-visibility jackets to enforce its avalanche of new laws and so it is dispensing with the courts system and locking up people who may be innocent. And still it whirrs, announcing last week that it is going to ban people from becoming sexually aroused. At the moment lap-dancing clubs are classified in the same category as coffee shops and karaoke bars. Quite why coffee shops or karaoke bars need to be ‘classified’ by a government agent in a high-visibility jacket we are not told.
Nor is there much evidence that this classification system is working because, so far as I can tell, every single town in Britain these days is equally terrible – a vomit-stained centre full of estate agents, charity shops and building societies, ringed with a prefabricated, fluorescent sprawl of people in purple shirts trying to sell you Pentium processors and button-backed leatherette sofas.
At least a lap-dancing club brings a bit of individuality to a town, a bit of a respite from the endless chain stores and horrible pound shops. Sadly, though, the machine disagrees. It says that such places provide ‘visual sexual stimulation’ and as a result councils must be allowed to prevent new ones from opening and perhaps must even close existing venues.
Does this mean that anything that provides ‘visual sexual stimulation’ must be erased from the landscape? That would be a worry for Dorothy Perkins, as I know one chap who claims that its mannequins are extremely stimulating. And let’s not forget, shall we, that some people are aroused by goats. I’ve even seen one photograph of a man making love to his Range Rover.
I struggle to see what’s wrong with lap-dancing bars. I would object, for sure, if anyone suggested building an airport for Somalian rapists in my backyard, but a gentlemen’s club? No. I don’t like them much. I don’t like the music or the volume it’s played at. I don’t like the businessmen who go there and I don’t like sitting on velour. But, unlike the vast majority of the objectors, I base my opinions on experience. Extensive experience, in fact.
What do the do-gooders think goes on in these places? Do they imagine it’s a sea of opium, with men in macs playing pass-the-parcel with their embarrassing itches? Because it just isn’t. Usually there is a handful of girls – all called Becki and all with unwise artwork on their shoulders and bones in their noses – sitting around wearing bits of chiffon and £1.99 underwear that was billed in the catalogue as ‘erotic’ but is no such thing. After a little while, a Becki will come over and tell you, usually in a Birmingham accent, that she likes to do lesbionics with her friends when the bar closes, in the hope that you will be so aroused that you’ll give her twenty quid for a dance. It’s not a dance that your grandparents would recognize. In fact, you don’t dance at all. You just sit there, with your hands over your ears to drown out the music, while the girl takes off her mum’s net curtain and puts two bagfuls of silicone near your face. This is like waving a steak in front of a hungry man. But the juices don’t flow because you know that if you even look as though you’re going to touch them, a bull elephant in a dinner jacket will arrive on the scene and break your liver.
Some clubs do allow the dancers to sit on the customers’ knees but these are to be avoided, partly because some of the younger customers are so full of testosterone that physical contact of any kind might cause them to burst. And partly because the Beckis who work in such places tend to be quite big. Get one of those on your lap and, if you’re not careful, you’re going to go home with gangrene.
This new scheme is proof that the machine has gone off its rocker. And you know what scares me most of all? It’s like the internet. We can never turn it off.
Sunday 22 June 2008
Dante’s new hell: my work canteen
Where did you buy your ironing board? You didn’t, did you? You were born with it. Everyone is, which is why everyone has one. I’ve seen tramps in Soho snuggled into shop doorways with nothing to their name except some string, a bin liner and an ironing board. My brother-in-law, who does not believe in possessions, stated proudly when I first met him that he owned nothing. But he was lying, of course. Like everyone, he had a wok. And an ironing board. What’s more, nobody ever thinks: ‘Ooh, my ironing board is getting worn out. I must buy another.’ Nor does anyone suddenly feel the need to upgrade, as they might do with a computer or a mobile phone.
This is why I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to hear last week that Currys has seen a big fall in profits. Of course it has. It’s ironing board central. If you were to win a trolley dash in one of its branches, you’d scoot off and – after a while – you’d think: ‘Actually, you know what? I’ll just take the trolley.’ Every time I set foot in one of its branches, my head spins with the dreariness of it all. Indeed I came to the conclusion recently that Currys is the only shop in the world that sells absolutely nothing I want to buy. It turns out, however, that I was wrong …
Last month my BBC office was moved to something called a media village in White City, west London. It’s a place where people in thin spectacles gather each day to try to make a difference. Designed by Guardian readers, for Guardian readers, it’s a riot of impenetrable symbolism, concrete and sharp designer fountains, which would be arousing if you had mad hair and a degree in environmental poetry from a Fairtrade, organic peace workshop in Hackney. I don’t see it like that at all, however. In fact, after just a few minutes I began to think that Dante got everything wrong. There are not nine circles of hell. There are ten.
After just one morning in this edgy, pedestrianized, eco-friendly cuboid, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to pile up some old tyres and set them on fire, using diesel. I don’t like vandalism, but if someone were to decorate one of the buildings with a giant purple cock and balls, I’d be tempted to give him a pat on the back and a puppy dog.
Hopefully, I’ve now set the scene. Lots of women sitting around on Ozwald Boateng benches, working out how miserable their next programme can be and whether they can make all the interviewees cry on camera. And me, oiling my machine pistol …
Which brings me to the door of the village’s grab’n’go takeaway cafe. The place where everyone goes for lunch.
Trust me on this. Currys has definitely lost its title as Britain’s most out-of-step high-street retailer. Because I stood in this cafe for a full ten minutes and decided that the tastiest things in there were the tables and chairs. Maybe, if you were a budgerigar, you might have been excited by some of the offerings. But even then, you wouldn’t know whether to put them in your mouth or use them as a lavatory. Finally I asked a pretty young waitress if there was anything on the shelves that, by even the loosest dictionary definition, might qualify as food. She looked perplexed. Is there anything in here that once had a face? Or anything with chocolate on it? Bewildered, she reached down and presented me with a plastic bowl full of lettuce. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am not a rabbit. I am a fully grown man. I am hungry and I want a kebab.’
Eventually she led me away from the Cellophane trays full of weeds to a rack selling what can only be described as Trill. I mean it. They were selling seeds to human beings. How insane do you have to be to think that’ll work? And how certifiable do you have to be to think: ‘Mmmm. Yes. Those’ll keep me going for the afternoon.’
I would eat seeds, of course, but only if my harvest had failed and the soldiers had confiscated my goat. Why anyone would want to eat them in Britain, where we have pylons and plasma, I have no idea. So to find out I spent 50p on a small packet, opened it and made the catastrophic mistake of putting the contents in my mouth.
It turns out that these seeds are rich in magnesium, iron, phosphorus, calcium, selenium and zinc. In other words, you would get precisely the same nutritional benefit from eating a car. Taste-wise? Well, I’m no expert on these matters, but I’d say it was exactly like sucking on a box of matches.
Eager to make the nausea go away, I headed for the drinks counter – hoping for a Fanta or a Red Bull. But there is no place for these symbols of capitalist excess in a modern-day, west London media village, so I was offered a choice of elderberry juice, which is the first resort of the hippie and the druid, or something called wheatgrass.
It’s hard to encapsulate the flavour in a sentence. Fans describe it as ‘unusual’ or ‘strong’, but I’d go further if only I could think of the right word. ‘Vile’ doesn’t begin to get close. ‘Horrendous’ is wrong, too. A cancerous lung is horrendous. Wheatgrass is way beyond that. Combined with the phosphorus from the seeds, it felt like my mouth was hosting a bomb-makers’ convention. Acid, metal, fertilizer, plastic, hate: all of these flavours swarmed round my head until, genuinely, I thought I might have to vomit all over the waitress.
I must therefore finish with a warning. You must never put this stuff in your mouth. If you are hungry, eat your ironing board.
Sunday 29 June 2008
Look, Mr McChap – you’re part of Britain, so just get over it
If you were part of the Wimbledon centre court crowd on Monday, when Andy Murray came back from two sets down to beat Richard Gasquet, I hope you are thinking seriously this morning about doing the decent thing and committing suicide.
As I sat watching the revolting spectacle on television, I was – and this doesn’t happen often – ashamed to be middle-class and English. Because there they were, 15,000 phlebitis-ridden Surrey women in their size 16 summer frocks, furiously banging their bingo wings together every time that poor Frenchie made a mistake. And raising what’s left of the roof every time Murray, who looks like a piece of string with a knot in it, got a point.
This was not Britain versus France. It was two individuals who have worked hard to become their country’s number ones, bashing it out at the world’s premier tennis tournament for a chance to be flattened by Nadal. And because of that noise, and the whooping and the idiotic bias, the best man lost.
Sport is as much about mental attitude as talent, and it’s hard to get your head in gear when you are faced with a sea of highlighted raspberry-ripple women waving their Daily Mails at you and applauding every time you do a double fault. Rabble-rousing does not happen in other countries to anything like this extent. Because their tennis crowds have manners. And the thin-lipped, surgical-stockinged, Volvo-driving masses who descended on Wimbledon this year plainly do not.
I wouldn’t mind but they were cheering for a man who has, in the past, made it plain that he is not English at all, or British. But Scottish. And that, for me, is becoming a problem. When we kindly gave the Scots their Stone of Destiny back, I thought that that would be that and Sean Connery would go back to playing golf. But no. Every day there’s another rabid attack on the English from up there in the heather, another demand that we simply sever all ties and let them forge their own path in the world.
This I don’t understand. I can see why the English might want independence from them. Scotland is a drain on our economy to the tune of about £10 billion a year. But them wanting to leave us? Isn’t that a bit like the oxpecker spitting in the rhino’s eye? They’d have to have their own embassies around the world. They’d have to get their own currency. And think of how much
it would cost to set up a whole new state, especially in a country that managed to spend £414m on a parliament building. That works out at £1m for every man, woman and child still living there.
Scotland would even have to get its own army. Oh no, wait a minute. I’ve just remembered. They have one already. It’s called the SAS.
There’s more, too. Only last week there were calls from north of the border for a separate Scottish entry for next year’s Eurovision song contest. What? The Proclaimers? Or just a random collection of men in dresses blowing into their tartan bags? Either way, I can’t see them getting too many votes from Estonia.
It’s funny. I’ve never had a problem with Scotland or its people. I recognize the massive contribution it’s made to the world of inventions. I like haggis. Local Hero is my all-time favourite film. And in a rugby match, I’ve always supported the boys in blue so long as they weren’t actually up against us. Certainly, if I felt the need to poke a bit of fun at someone, the Welsh made much better targets. Now, though, things seem to be changing because, when I stop and think about it, I’ve never met a Welshman whom I’ve disliked. Apart from Piers Pughe-Morgan, obviously – and he claims to be Irish. Whereas, these days, every Scotchman rides into the room on a wave of bile and nationalism.
They have become the new Australians; unable to get through any conversation without bringing up a litany of English failures and embarrassments. Ask a barman up there for a glass of Scotch, and what you get instead is an essay on Culloden and Stirling and Bannockburn, and Murrayfield back in March.
All of this is fine when it’s good-natured, but I have a sense these days that the veneer of friendly rivalry is being replaced with a mask of smiling anger. Sometimes I get the distinct impression that, if I mention Falkirk, the McChap will lean over the bar and pull my arms off.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 7