Sunday 15 March 2009
You’re a bunch of overpaid nancies – and I love you
Over the years I have argued that football is a stupid game in which twenty-two overpaid nancy boys with idiotic hair run around a field attempting to kick an inflated sheep’s pancreas into some netting while an audience of several thousand van drivers beat one another over the head with bottles and chairs.
Nor could I understand how someone from Tooting could possibly support, say, Manchester United, a team sponsored by those hateful bastards at AIG and made up of players from Portugal, France, Holland and, in the case of Wayne Rooney, Walt Disney. Where’s the connection? What’s the point? I have also suggested that it’s preposterous to have football stadiums in the middle of cities. Why should anyone be delayed by match traffic just so a handful of thugs can watch a Brazilian man falling over? And as for those people who can’t cope if their team loses. Give me strength. If you get all teary-eyed just because someone from Latvia, playing in a town you’ve never been to, for an Arab you’ve never met, against some Italians you hate for no reason, has missed a penalty, how are you going to manage when you are diagnosed with cancer? I have always hated football, but then one day, out of the blue, my son announced that he had become interested in Chelsea.
This was a living nightmare. If he’d said that he’d become interested in smoking, I could have made all sorts of threats. If he’d said he’d become interested in homosexuality, we could have talked. But a football team? I had no answers. I didn’t even have any questions.
However, because he spent so much time watching football on television, I started pausing to watch. And I began to think that actually it’s a very beautiful game when it’s played properly. And that the offside rule, really, is no more complicated than the average power station. And then I started picking up bits of information from the commentators, which meant, for the first time ever, that when conversation with friends turned to football, I could join in, instead of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing sea shanties.
This meant that pretty soon people started asking if perhaps I’d like to go to a game. And that’s why last weekend I was at Stamford Bridge watching Chelsea demolish a team I used to call Manchester City. But that I now know is called Useless Money-Wasting Scum. This was my first Premier League game and, ooh, it was good. When you’re there, rather than watching on television, you get an overall view, which means you can see how the game works. You notice that Frank Lampard is like a blackbird, always looking around to see where the hawks are. You see that Carvalho runs with his arms up, like a begging puppy, and you work out that Michael Essien always seems to be able to find a piece of the pitch that the Useless Scum either hadn’t noticed or were frightened of.
The other advantage of being there is that on television the microphones are positioned so you can’t hear the chants. I’d heard, of course, about this mass spontaneity over the years, usually when a team is playing Liverpool. ‘Sign on. Sign on. With a pen in your hand. Cos you’ll ne … ver get a job.’ Or: ‘The wheels on your house go round and round. Round and round. Round and round.’ There are others too. Plymouth Argyll refer to any team they play as northern bastards. Then you have the Charlton fans who travelled down the M4 to Reading recently and, having failed to think of any suitable abuse, came up with: ‘What’s it like to live in Wales?’ The Chelsea fans topped all this last Sunday with a non-stop song, the lyrics of which were: ‘F*** off, Robinho. F*** off, Robinho. F*** off, Robinho.’ I joined in wholeheartedly, even though I wasn’t entirely sure who Mr Robinho was and why I wanted him to eff off so much.
No matter. It was all so brilliantly working class. Or it would have been, had I not been seated in a private box just outside the no-jeans-allowed Armani Lounge, where I’d feasted on smoked salmon and quaffed bucks fizz before kickoff.
But I got a reminder of footballing’s outside-khazi and jumpers-for-goalposts roots when Chelsea scored. I turned and smiled a patronizing smile at the man sitting behind me, the former Independent editor and all-round crap driver Simon Kelner. It turned out he was a big fan of the Scum and, honestly, I thought he was going to kick my head off. I wouldn’t have blamed him. I used to be surprised that football fans fought one another. Now, though, having experienced the white heat of pride and tribalism first hand, I’m surprised they don’t any more.
After the game I was taken to the Chelsea dressing room so that I could admire all the players’ penises – many were very enormous indeed. I talked to Roman Abramovich, who was charming, and Lampard, who, having just run around for ninety minutes, still found the energy to get the entire team to sign my boy’s Chelsea shirt. I don’t do that for kids who come to the Top Gear studio and I’m supposed to be the public-school-educated toff.
So there we are, then. I am now a football fan. I know this because in one afternoon I learnt I’m not a football fan at all. I’m a fan of Chelsea. Chelsea are the only team that can play. Chelsea players have by far the most impressive reproductive organs. Stamford Bridge is my church. The men who play there are my gods.
In short, I have a team, and that’s what’s always been missing. Because I was born in Doncaster.
Sunday 22 March 2009
Stand still, wimp – only failures run off to be expats
God tells us that there are ten rules in life: Sir Thomas Beecham, the conductor, maintained that there was only one – try everything except incest and folk dancing. Most people, however, reckon there are two. Never meet your heroes. And never turn your hobby into a job.
There is, however, a third rule. It’s a big one. It’s bigger than the one that says you should never meet Chuck Yeager, the US test pilot who became a hero for breaking the sound barrier, because he’ll turn out to be deeply unpleasant. It’s bigger than the one about not coveting your neighbour’s wife. It’s even bigger than not doing morris dancing. It is known simply as Rule Three and what it says is this: do not, under any circumstances, become an expat.
You may be thinking of moving to South Africa because some communists have smashed the windows in your agreeable home. You may imagine that you should go to New Zealand because the police have found a builder with a broken bottom in your swimming pool. Or you may consider moving to a cave on the North-west Frontier because you have knocked over some skyscrapers. But don’t give in. It is always better to stay where you are and face the music.
Even if the music in question is the tinkling of your broken sitting-room window or the screams of other prisoners in the showers or the gristly, gooey sound of your fingernails coming out.
The fact of the matter is this: every single person who ever moves to another country – with the exception of America where you go to grow – is a failure. Seriously, no one has ever woken up and said: ‘I am completely happy. I have a lovely family, many friends, a great job and plenty of savings. So I shall move to Australia.’ It’s always the other way around. ‘My wife has left me. My children don’t want to know. The divorce cost a bundle and I don’t have any mates. So I shall move to Oz.’ That’s why they call us whingeing poms. Because the poms they get do nothing else.
Of course, I have been to a great many palm-fronted island paradises and I’ve thought, as I’ve watched the sunlight dancing in my rum punch, how lovely it would be to live in a place where you just wear shorts and read books.
But I know two things. First, home is not where you live; it’s where your friends are. And second, within a week, I’d be a raging alcoholic. I’d start by trying not to drink before twelve. But then it’d be ten and before I knew it I’d be pouring gin on my cornflakes and my nose would be enormous and covered in what look like barnacles.
Then the drink-addled bitterness would set in. I’d realize that my existence was shallow and pointless and that every girl I ever met would either be made from leather or interested only in men who had 65 ft cruisers in the harbour. Not noses that looked like the bottom of a battleship.
To keep myself sane, I�
��d have to keep reminding myself, by reminding absolutely everyone within earshot, constantly, that I couldn’t possibly live in Britain because it’s full of bloody foreigners who hadn’t bothered to learn English. Then I’d summon Manuel and, in English, order another pint of gin.
I was in Majorca last weekend, which is jammed full of British expats, all of whom would begin their explanation of how they got there with the same thing: ‘Well, after I sold the cab …’ There they were, in their chips and footie bars with their desperate eyes and their booze-ruined noses, regaling everyone with their stuck-record views on life back in Blighty.
‘Don’t know how you can live in Britain. Bloody weather. Bloody Muslims. Bloody Brown,’ and then, after a wistful pause, ‘… you don’t have a copy of today’s Telegraph do you?’ I’ve always felt desperately sorry for expats and now, of course, life wherever they may be is even worse than ever because, all of a sudden, their hacienda is worth less than the plot of land they built it on ten years ago, and they can’t let the holiday flat they bought to supplement their pension. Which is now worthless as well.
It’s proof really that there is no God. Because no one who’s supposed to be a force for good would keep on hitting people like that. ‘I’m going to make you so miserable, lonely and friendless that you break Rule Three. And then I’m going to take away your home, and your income until you are a homeless drunk in a land where you can’t speak the language and you’re vomiting gin into the gutter through your barnacle-encrusted nose at three in the morning.’ You’d have to be a complete bastard to inflict that much pain on someone.
Sadly, I fear that in the coming months, as deflation takes hold, a great many people will begin to wonder if life wouldn’t be happier on the sunny side.
I urge you all to think carefully. Even if they’ve taken your land and your homes, they cannot take your friends. Or your family. And no matter how infrequently your children drop by now, you can trust me on this: if you live abroad, you’ll probably never see them again. Ever.
You will sit there in a bar, in your stupid Hawaiian shirt, pretending the waiter is a friend, reading the barcode on a two-year-old copy of The Week, trying desperately to convince yourself that you are happy. But you won’t be, because abroad is where you go on holiday. Britain is home.
And you know what? Yes it’s cold. Yes it’s run by idiots. And yes, I wasn’t bothered about Jade Goody either. But at least we don’t throw our donkeys off tower blocks and we don’t cook our food in the garden.
And because it’s always 57 degrees and drizzling, we are less inclined to sit outside all day getting sloshed.
Sunday 29 March 2009
It’s pure hell in the mountainous Cotswold region
Forbes, which is a magazine for American people who wear loafers with no socks, has said that the best place to live in Britain and, indeed, the sixth-best place to live in Europe is the pretty Cotswold market town of Burford. They reckon it’s better than Barcelona, better than Paris, better even than Rome. Its reasons for suggesting this are that it lies in a ‘mountainous region’ and that it’s home to a wealth of celebrities including the Tory leader, David Cameron, Kate Winslet, Kate Moss and various members of the rock band Radiohead – a group of people who, interestingly, are linked by one common bond: none of them lives anywhere near Burford.
Whatever. The result will infuriate my colleague James May, who has stated very often that the RAF should be instructed to wipe Burford from the map. Burford, in fact, is about the only word in the English language that can make him even remotely excitable and animated. He loathes its tweeness, its gingham-lidded, horse-brass-and-knick-knack, backward-looking smugness and maintains that its haywain, ‘Morning, vicar’, low-ceilinged, ‘pint of best’ pace of life belongs on a postcard, not in a modern society. Sixth-best place to live in Europe? May would argue that it’s the sixth circle of hell. And he’s right. But for the wrong reasons.
A lot of people would imagine that living in the countryside is easy now that there are tarmac roads, no tithes and no plague and you can’t be executed for being a witch. But actually it’s harder now than at any point in history.
The first thing that will happen if you move to a land of clean air and big skies is that, immediately, some ramblers will come and sit in your kitchen claiming that they’ve done so for twenty-one years without let or hindrance and that, if you complain, you will have to spend all your life savings in legal fees.
Eventually you will lose and Janet Street-Porter will bring all her mates round to sit by your Aga, explaining that it churns out six tons of carbon dioxide every year and you are a murderer. But you won’t notice because you’ll be too busy attempting to rid your garden wall of slogans urging you to go back to London and thus free up property in the countryside for the glue-sniffing, pimple-faced locals.
You might try pointing out that no one ever complains about the army of country folk who come to the capital every year and buy up all the flats that could have been used to house inner-city kids. But I wouldn’t recommend this unless you want to know what it feels like to be hit in the face with a shovel.
Next, we should look at the case of Mike Batt, who wrote the music for Watership Down and is said to love rabbits. Last week it was reported that he employed a marksman to go out and shoot thousands of them in the face. There are good reasons for doing this. Rabbits ruin trees, poison the soil and eat so many crops that each year it’s reckoned they cost the agricultural industry more than £100m. But, of course, if you shoot a bunny-wunny between the eyes, a million vegetablists are going to jump up and down claiming that you are a fascist and should be ashamed of yourself.
So now you’ll have Street-Porter, some glue-sniffers with paint cans and all of the League Against Cruel Sports in your garden. And, as a result, you won’t dare go outside to shoot the magpies that have been such a nuisance of late.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. You may not kill rabbits or badgers or foxes or crows but the vegetablists announced on Thursday, just a day after Mr Batt was lambasted for killing Hazel and General Woundwort, that they want you to kill as many magpies as you can. Bag a bunch and the RSPB will send you a special achiever’s badge.
Confused? Oh, you wait till you try to find a post office or a bank. Or just try popping into Burford to try to buy something you might actually need. They can sell you a teapot in the shape of a Norman church and some local shortbread. But a packet of bog rolls? Some cat food? Not a chance.
Then there’s the problem of socializing in the countryside. Because there are no buses, no taxis and no trains, you are faced with two options when you go out at night. Drink bitter lemon or drive home drunk. The only good news if you choose to drink and drive is that you won’t get caught by the police – because there aren’t any. And you’re more likely to find a dustman than a doctor.
Other problems? Well, yes, a few. You won’t be able to hear the birdsong because of all the motorbikes, your view will be ruined when a masonic handshake seals the deal on a light industrial unit at the end of your garden and every time you go for a walk you will come home dead, having been run over by a drunken yobbo in a Citroën Saxo.
And your dog won’t fare much better because it will have been shot by a farmer.
Pretty soon, then, you will do what most people do in the countryside at some point: commit suicide.
Still, it could be worse. You could have ended up in Gaiole, the Tuscan town that Forbes reckons is the best place in Europe to live. Here you will be woken at four every morning by some walnut-faced peasant with a strimmer and driven mad all day by barking dogs. And then you will come home one day to find that your wife has put on 3 stone, grown a moustache and decided to spend the rest of her days cleaning the front step.
Sunday 19 April 2009
What a difference now I’ve stopped drinking fish fingers
As we know, the government has been waging a campaign of hate against the middle classes for many years. It’s never the fat and the laz
y, with their ancient cars and their unlagged lofts, who are targeted in the war on climate change. No. It’s people with Agas and Range Rovers and patio heaters at their second homes in Gascony.
It’s the same story with obesity. In my experience it’s the dim and the gormless who have become enormous in recent years, but rather than telling Colleen and Lee to walk to the working men’s club every night and stick to orange juice, our glorious leaders have produced a guide on how you can provide your dinner party guests with less alcohol in such a way that they don’t notice. Mainly, it involves serving what I like to call beer-free beer and not topping up everyone’s glass quite so frequently. They also provide some handy cut-out-’n’-keep recipes for low-alcohol cocktails … which will ensure that at midnight the few remaining guests will still be talking about property prices in Fulham and school fees.
Plainly all this advice from Mr Brown’s taxpayer-funded dinner party advisers is rubbish but to make sure we all understand the need to lose friends and alienate people, they recently announced that one glass of Chablis contained the same amount of calories as four fish fingers. I found this a bit far-fetched and so, on your behalf, I decided to conduct a simple experiment. I would give up drinking, to see what effect it would have on my planetary waistline.
This is a big deal because, as I’ve explained in the past, I drink a lot. On my recent holiday I would have two beers before lunch, a bottle of rosé with it, a banana daiquiri for pudding, a snooze in the afternoon, four rum punches before dinner, another bottle of wine with that and then some piña coladas to get me in the mood for more sleeping. It works out, if the government is to be believed, at 3,500 calories a day in booze alone.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 16