The trouble is: where do we spread out to? Scotland is the obvious answer, but it can’t be a very nice place to live, or there wouldn’t be so many Scottish people in London. Lincolnshire is a better bet in some ways but, from what I understand, it’s being eaten at an alarming rate by the North Sea, and Wales doesn’t really work either because it’s too mountainous.
My gut reaction is that we must at least consider the possibility of conquering France. There are good reasons for this. First of all, we can be assured the French will not put up much of a fight – they never do – so casualties would be small. And second, the fact is they don’t need all that space. And we do. Certainly, I can’t see any reason why they don’t hand over Lesser Britain, or Brittany, as they insist on calling it. I realize, of course, the United Nations would have something to say on the matter and that Britain might be ostracized internationally for a while, but I feel this could well be a price worth paying if it were to prevent Griff and Chris Tarrant from having an unedifying punch-up at the Cotswold Water Park.
Of course, I’m sure a lot of you reading this will be harbouring dark and dangerous thoughts about perhaps limiting the number of people who want to live in Britain. I’m thinking of the i-word.
We were told a few years ago by the Labour government that Britain needed many millions of Somalians and Estonians to fuel Mr Brown’s booming economy. But now what? The economy’s gone tits-up and I’m sure there are many people quietly harbouring a notion that perhaps Mr Mbutu and Mr Borat might like to go home again. I do not have these thoughts. I’d far rather have Mr Mbutu round for tea than, say, John Prescott. But I can quite understand why some people do. And that worries me.
Because how long will it be before Griff Rhys Jones stops attacking Ian Botham and starts throwing bricks through the window of his local Indian restaurant? How long before the stockbrokers of Guildford decide they don’t want any more homes and that Mr Ng’s Chinese takeaway must be burnt to the ground? In short, how long before this pressure on space and the need to breathe out once in a while leads to all sorts of problems that are very ugly indeed? Maybe, then, the government should consider asking GlaxoSmithKline to perhaps slow down the development of its vaccine for swine flu. Just a thought.
Sunday 26 July 2009
Soaking up the raw emotion of the best beetroot contest
As I write, millions and millions of pounds are being spent1 developing new stunts for this year’s Top Gear Live events in London and Birmingham. The reasoning is simple. Audiences are no longer happy to see a car behind a rope on a stand. They want to see it barrel-roll and explode. They want to see fire. They want to see Richard Hammond’s head come off.
We see much the same thing in the theatre. Gone are the days when people would be happy with The Corn Is Green and a bit of Colonel Mustard in the library. Now they want Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to fly over their heads and for a helicopter gunship to land on the stage. And of course, in film, the drive for more excitement knows no bounds. In The Way to the Stars, audiences were spellbound by some men talking. Whereas now, nobody’s really happy unless Paris blows up.
Or are they? I only ask because I’ve just been to a village show where nothing exploded. No one was raked with machinegun fire. Will Smith was not there. All we got was a burger van, a cow in a tent and some bees. But 10,000 people turned up.
City dwellers would argue that village shows remain popular because country folk lead such dreary lives. But I am a city boy at heart. I love Hong Kong and San Francisco. And yet, last weekend, there I was in the Women’s Institute, commiserating with Deirdre because her amazing knitted Elvis had been pipped to first prize by Maureen’s mother-of-pearl, hand-painted fan. I was then distracted by the sheep. I’ve always thought that a sheep was a sheep. But no. There was one that had been fitted with the head from a buffalo. There were vicious wolf sheep with spiky horns for stabbing ramblers. (I’m definitely getting some of those.) And then there was a sheep with quite the largest testicles I’ve ever seen. They would have looked ridiculous on even a brontosaurus. I swear each one was 2 ft in diameter. If the RSPCA wasn’t looking, you could have used them as space hoppers. I have seen Miss Saigon and I enjoyed it very much. But here’s the thing. I enjoyed looking at that sheep’s testes even more.
Other highlights? There were millions. I bought a jar of honey. I sat in a tractor. I had a lovely chat with a chap whose Yorkshire terrier had come second in the best dog competition because, just as he sat down, he was distracted by a fly and stood up again. The poor chap was inconsolable. All year he had been preparing for his moment of glory and because of one damn fly, one pesky little insect, he’d been beaten, yet again, by Brian and his ‘Newfoundland monster’.
This is what makes the village show so fantastic. It allows everyone a chance to shine. If, after years and years of blood and sweat, you win the best beetroot competition, you understand how Usain Bolt felt when he took gold in the Olympic 100 metres. And you in the audience get to see that raw emotion up close.
Seriously. What’s the difference between winning the Formula One world championship and winning the best beehive competition at a local agricultural show? Emotionally, there is none at all.
But the best thing about a village show is that there’s always a brass band. Brass bands make the best noise in the world. I have seen the Who. I have seen Pink Floyd. I have seen opera, ballet, piano recitals and the Proms. I have even heard a Ferrari V12 at full chat. But for sheer heart-tugging joy, nothing has matched the brass band I saw performing one chilly day at the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield. It is the soundtrack of the community. The village. The mine. The youth centre. And that’s why it works so well at a village show. Bending over to peer at something you would never imagine you could possibly find interesting while a group of spotty youths with some trumpets oils your ears with a rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ – it’s bliss.
Or rather it would be bliss, if only the man with the public-address system would shut up. I understand, of course, why village shows need such things. Lost children must be reunited with their mobile phones and it’s important to know when judging for the best hen contest is about to begin. You need to be there to see the unbearable sadness in Derek’s eyes when he’s beaten. Especially if the spotty youths are playing ‘Autumn Leaves’ at the time. Unfortunately, however, the people who volunteer to spend all day with the microphone do so because what they love most of all is the sound of their own voice. This means they are not capable of shutting up. For 364 days of the year, Ian is a forklift truck driver. But for one glorious afternoon, he’s the bugler. He’s the general. He can move 10,000 people from one side of the field to the other with a simple announcement. He can reunite families. He can sort out lost dogs. And by lunchtime the power has gone to his head. This is why I always take a pair of pliers to a village show. To dismantle Ian’s communication system.
Sadly, it’s illegal to use pliers on the other problem: the local lord who turns up in a crap suit with a walking stick to mooch about with a grumpy face, judging bonsai trees, cauliflowers and the face-painting competition. He looks like he’s hating it. He’ll tell his friends he hates it. But the fact is this: every year, he organizes his holidays around the show so that he can go. He loves it because for one marvellous day it’s 1850 again. He is not some moth-eaten old buffer in a leaky house. He’s the lord. He’s in charge. And he’s a prat for pretending it doesn’t make his heart soar.
I only intended going to the village show for an hour or so. But I stayed till I was so drunk I could barely stand up. I’d seen more emotion than I’ve seen in the past 100 Hollywood movies. I’d eaten horrible food, got a massively sunburnt face and laughed, really laughed, with my children at the sheep’s enormous testicles. It was, quite simply, the perfect day.
Sunday 2 August 2009
Nurse! The OAP mods are bashing the wrinkly rockers
We learnt recently that despite the best efforts of Herr Pope and Jude Law, there are no
w more old age pensioners in Britain than children under the age of sixteen. Many people have many theories on why this is happening: better medical care, better crumple zones in your car, less plague, fewer man-eating tigers, the invention of the high-visibility jacket and, of course, the increasingly zealous Health and Safety Executive with its bold remit that no one should die, ever.
There is, however, another, rather more serious reason for the general wrinkling of the general public that no one is talking about. It’s this. These days, few people have the time or the money to rear a child because they spend all their free time and all their spare cash buying hearing aids and mashing food for the toothless old crone that used to be their mum.
My mother has made it very plain that at the first sign of incontinence my sister and I are to wheel her over Beachy Head. Other mums – and dads, for that matter – are less considerate, and continue to sit about in their expensive inconti-panties, dribbling and insisting that The Antiques Roadshow is played at full volume, for probably twenty or thirty years.
I should imagine it’s jolly hard to make a baby with your husband if you spent the first half of the evening looking for your mum’s teeth and the second half trying to pluck them from the puddle of her wee.
And what for? At least, with a child, you are able to see the fruits of your labours grow into adulthood and become self-dependent. You lavish all that care and cash on a parent and all that happens is they get worse and worse until one day, when they are nothing but a bag of skin and methane, they keel over and you have to fork out for a funeral.
It’s also a huge problem for the state because in Britain there are now more than 2.7m people over eighty, and all of them have to be kept alive and fed using taxes from a working population that is shrinking.
However, there is a business opportunity here. Some people say that, right now, property is a good investment. Others say it’s zinc or farmland. But they’re all wrong. The absolute best, most watertight investment is an old people’s home. You need only look at the numbers to see this makes sense. Because now that there are more people over sixty-five than there are under sixteen, it stands to reason that there should be more care homes for the elderly than schools. And I bet there aren’t. Not by a long way.
Demand, then, is bound to be strong, and what’s more, running an old people’s home must surely be the easiest thing in the world. It’s not like a school, where you have to have teachers and all your guests are either lippy or armed with a knife, or both. And it’s not like running a hotel, where people want food at all hours of the day and hot and cold running satellite television. All you need in an old people’s home is a pack of cards, a telly with big speakers, some Gracie Fields records and a bit of cabbage for the old dears to eat. They won’t mind. They like cabbage. They think it’s exotic.
The other great thing about old people is they don’t complain. If you accidentally forget to change their nappies for a few weeks, they will tell you cheerfully that things were much worse during the blitz. And you needn’t worry about their families getting angry, because the selfish bastards only come round at Christmas. And they’re usually too busy making up excuses for leaving to notice the sheets are a bit crusty.
It’s strange, but if you run a farm, the government will send inspectors round every five minutes to ensure your goats have Bang & Olufsen stereos. Indeed, the courts are always jammed up with people who’ve been nasty to a horse. But when did you last read about someone being cruel to a pensioner? It never happens. So you can feel free to turn the central heating off to save a bit of cash.
The only trouble is that you need to get in on the act quickly because soon, I suspect, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to get away with a cabbage-only diet and a handful of wipe-down inconti-wingbacks. Today’s old people grew up before global warming. They lived up a chimney until they were eight, they had one bath, made from tin, in the whole street and they spent most of their early lives fighting the Hun. They still think nylon is a luxury good and chocolate is for special occasions. So they don’t mind a bit of discomfort. And, mostly, they have manners and respect authority. It’ll be a very different story twenty years from now. Think about it. Last week there were photos of Mick Jagger in the newspaper, and it struck me that soon those from his generation are going to be populating the nation’s old people’s homes. Which means many changes will be necessary.
They’re going to want to zoom about on wheelchairs, in ripped pyjamas, listening to ‘Anarchy in the UK’. And you can forget beetle drives. They will want spitting competitions, and fights will break out, often with those who were new romantics. It’ll be a nightmare when Sid has smashed up Ethel’s collection of Spandau Ballet hits and you can’t reason with him because he’s been in the medicine cupboard again and used up everyone’s crystal meth. What’s more, many of your inmates will be from other cultures, in which families pop round on an hourly basis and want the very best for their parents. Not a beetroot once a week and a Monopoly set with Park Lane missing.
And then, before you know it, you’ll be running a home full of people weeing while they Wii, demanding Call of Duty 4 on PlayStation 3 and complaining noisily every time the internet connection goes down. This, then, is the real problem we’re facing today. Not how many old people there are. But what they are like.
Sunday 9 August 2009
Dr Useless, what’s the Canadian word for ‘lousy care’?
While I was away, there was a big debate about how Barack Obama might sort out America’s healthcare system, which, say the critics, is chronically awful and fantastically unfair. It’s also bonkers. I was once denied treatment at a Detroit hospital because the receptionist’s computer refused to acknowledge that the United Kingdom existed. Even though I had a wad of cash, and a wallet full of credit cards, she was prepared to let me explode all over her desk because her stupid software only recognized addresses in the United States.
Some say America should follow Canada’s lead, where private care is effectively banned. But having experienced their procedures while on holiday in Quebec, I really don’t think that’s a good idea at all. A friend’s thirteen-year-old son tripped while climbing off a speedboat and ripped his leg open. Things started well. The ambulance arrived promptly, the wound was bandaged and off he went in a big, exciting van. Now, we are all used to a bit of a wait at the hospital. God knows, I’ve spent enough time in accident and emergency at Oxford’s John Radcliffe over the years, sitting with my sobbing children in a room full of people with swords in their eyes and their feet on back to front. But nothing can prepare you for the yawning chasm of time that passes in Canada before the healthcare system actually does any healthcare. It didn’t seem desperately busy. One woman had lost her face somehow – probably a bear attack – and one kid appeared to have taken rather too much ecstasy, but there were no more than a dozen people in the waiting room. And no one was gouting arterial blood all over the walls.
After a couple of hours, I asked the receptionist how long it might be before a doctor came. In a Wal-Mart, it’s quite quaint to be served by a fat, gum-chewing teenager who claims not to understand what you’re saying, but in a hospital it’s annoying. Resisting the temptation to explain that the Marquis de Montcalm lost and that it’s time to get over it, I went back to the boy’s cubicle, which he was sharing with a young Muslim couple. A doctor came in and said to them: ‘You’ve had a miscarriage,’ and then turned to go. Understandably, the poor girl was very upset and asked if the doctor was sure. ‘Look, we’ve done a scan and there’s nothing in there,’ she said, in perhaps the worst example of a bedside manner I’ve ever seen.
‘Is anyone coming to look at my son?’ asked my friend politely. ‘Quoi?’ said the haughty doctor, who had suddenly forgotten how to speak English. ‘Je ne comprends pas.’ And with that, she was gone.
At midnight, a young man who had been brought up on a diet of American music, American movies and very obviously American food, arrived to say, in Frenc
h, that the doctors were changing shift and a new one would be along as soon as possible.
By then, it was one in the morning and my legs were becoming weary. This is because the hospital had no chairs for relatives and friends. It’s not a lack of funds, plainly. Because they had enough money to paint a yellow line on the road nine yards from the front door, beyond which you were able to smoke. And they also had the cash to employ an army of people to slam the door in your face if you poked your head into the inner sanctum to ask how much longer the wait might be. Sixteen hours is apparently the norm. Unless you want a scan. Then it’s twenty-two months.
At about 1.30 a.m. a doctor arrived. Boy, he was a piece of work. He couldn’t have been more rude if I’d been General Wolfe. He removed the bandages like they were the packaging on a disposable razor, looked at the wound, which was horrific, and said to my friend: ‘Is it cash or credit card?’ This seemed odd in a country with no private care, but it turns out they charge non-Canadians precisely what they would charge the government if the patient were Céline Dion. The bill was C$300 (about £170).
The doctor vanished, but he hadn’t bothered to reapply the boy’s bandages, which meant the little lad was left with nothing to look at except his own thigh bone. An hour later, the painkillers arrived.
What the doctor was doing in between was going to a desk and sitting down. I watched him do it. He would go into a cubicle, be rude, cause the patient a bit of pain and then sit down again on the hospital’s only chair.
Seven hours after the accident, in a country widely touted to be the safest and best in the world, he applied sixteen stitches that couldn’t have been less neat if he’d done them on a battlefield, with twigs. And then the anaesthetist arrived to wake the boy up. In French. This didn’t work, so she went away to sit on the doctor’s chair because he was in another cubicle bring rude and causing pain to someone else.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 21