How Hard Can It Be?

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Now, I appreciate that any doctor who ends up working the night shift at a provincial hospital in Nowheresville is unlikely to be at the top of his game, and you can’t judge a country’s healthcare on his piss-poor performance. And nor should all of Canada be judged on Quebec, which is full of idealistic, language-Nazi lunatics. But I can say this. If private treatment had been allowed, my friend would have paid for it. He would have received better service and, in doing so, allowed Dr Useless to get to the woman with no face or ecstasy boy more quickly. Though I suspect he would have used our absence to spend more time sitting down.

  The other thing I can say is that Britain’s National Health Service is a monster that we can barely afford. But in all the times I’ve ever used the big, flawed giant, no one has ever pretended to be French, no one has spent more time swiping my credit card than ordering painkillers and there are many chairs.

  Sunday 30 August 2009

  It’s just not fair – donkeys get all the breaks

  Like most people, I can wire a plug and change a wheel. These are simple things. But I cannot reassemble the coffee machine that I took to pieces this morning, and I cannot drill a hole in a wall. Anything even remotely complicated and I’m stumped, which is why, when I came home yesterday to find one of my donkeys in the middle of the road, I knew the day would not end well.

  Have you ever tried to move a donkey when it wants to remain stationary? It’d be easier to move France. So what do you do? If you break off from traffic control to fetch an enticing apple from the kitchen, you know that when you get back to the scene, Uma – for that is her name – will have entered a passing car via its windscreen. And quite apart from the sadness that such an accident would cause me and the relatives of the person in the car – whose death will have been neither comfortable nor dignified – there would be many forms to complete and many stern words from a policeman.

  I was weighing all this up when the arrival of a noisy motorcycle galvanized Uma into action. Sadly, the action in question was a great deal of Elvis impersonations with the top lip and an industrial bout of heehawing. Eventually, other motorists arrived on the scene and, this being the countryside, where people have little else to do, everyone got out of their cars to help. When we had a thousand or so, we were able to push the poor animal, legs locked, back into the paddock from which she had escaped.

  And then, two hours later, the police called round to say that she, along with her mate Eddie, was out again. This time, on what is called an A road but is actually a motorcycle racetrack. With the help of most of the population of southern England, and tactical air support, they were heaved back into the field, and this time I set about finding the route they were using to get out. And it was the damnedest thing. I looked for holes in the fence. I looked under their stove. I looked under their vaulting horse. I even checked their beds for evidence of missing planks. But there was nothing, and so I concluded that they were getting airborne somehow. Maybe they’d built a glider.

  This is the other part of my condition. Like many men, I can never find anything that I’m looking for, even when I’m actually looking at it. In a fridge, I think milk is actually invisible to the male eye. And so, it turns out, are dirty great holes in the fence.

  I genuinely do not understand this. When an eighteenth-century carpenter tacked together two small pieces of mahogany, he could reasonably expect that they’d remain conjoined until the end of time. And yet fencing, which is held together by massive 6 in nails, falls to pieces, all on its own, every fifteen minutes.

  Why does this happen? And what do you do when it happens on a bank holiday Sunday? There was no possibility of ringing for help, which meant I would have to fix the damn thing myself. This, I worked out, would require some nails and the tool of the gods – a hammer. But, astonishingly, the only hammer we have in the house is the sort of gaily painted little thing Jane Austen might have used to pin a picture of Little Lord Fauntleroy to her bedhead. So I decided to use the butt of my AK-47 instead.

  Have you ever tried to nail two pieces of fence post together? It is literally impossible. The nail goes in well to start with but then, as you up the tempo and the vigour of your strokes, it gets a kink in the middle and all is lost. Once a nail is bent, it can never be made to go straight. You need to start again.

  I started again many thousands of times until, eventually, the nail went all the way through the first piece of wood and was ready to penetrate the upright. Which, I should explain, was a solid post, set in concrete. You’d imagine, then, that it would not flex at all. But it did. Each time I hit my nail with the AK, it simply boinged backwards, out of the way, until it fell over. So now the gap, which had been just about big enough for a desperate donkey to get through, had become wide enough for a main battle tank.

  I’m not a man given to tears or tantrums, but as darkness began to envelop the scene, I felt close to both. And that brings me on to the thrust of this morning’s missive. In the olden days, friends would have laughed at my hopelessness. They would have enjoyed my inability to knock a nail into a piece of wood. It would have been amusing. But these days we are no longer permitted to mock the afflicted.

  If a child is dyslexic, it is no longer made to wear a dunce’s cap. Indeed, it is allowed extra time in its exams. And there’s more. I heard last week that if a child has hyperactivity problems, you don’t smack its bottom. In fact, if it has hyperactivity problems at Thorpe Park it is allowed to jump the queues. We live in a time when the playing field is levelled out for everyone: when the rich and the privileged are rejected by the universities they’ve selected, while the weak and the ginger are given a leg-up at every opportunity. And yet nothing is being done to help people like me. People who are spanners.

  You, reading this, can clear your drains. I cannot. You can service your lawnmower. I cannot. You can knock nails into wood and mend your fence.

  I ended up parking my car across the gap until I could find a professional. And now the horses have wiped their sweet-itch-ravaged backsides all over my Mercedes.

  Don’t you think, then, that if we are going to have a world where legislation erases all foibles and shortfalls, it should apply to everyone? In a society that’s truly fair, I think I should get free plumbing and fence repairs. Or am I missing something?

  Sunday 6 September 2009

  Forget Antigua, 007 – all the real action is in Acacia Avenue

  We’ve always known that in reality, not one of Britain’s secret agents has ever successfully fought a shark or garrotted Robert Shaw on a speeding train. In fact, we are told, over and over again, that most of what our secret agents do is boring; that instead of trying to stop Spectre from stealing our nuclear bombers, they actually spend most of the day trying to stop their wives checking Max Mosley’s hair for nits. To hammer the point home, they even advertise for new agents these days in the Guardian.

  And to reinforce the view that it’s all nasty coffee and budget meetings with flip charts, we should remember what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. Instead of dispatching their best man to blow up some submarines and sleep with as many Iraqi women as possible, the security services simply asked Alastair Campbell what he wanted. And then went on the internet until they found it. ‘Yes. Look. Saddam does have missiles with nerve-gas tips. It says so here in this student’s essay.’

  And yet, it became clear last week in the trial of some Muslims who wanted to blow up some airliners that the truth probably lies somewhere between the two points. Our agents are not shooting men with metal teeth in the face. But they are not getting all their intel from Wikipedia either. If you actually read the court reports, there is no doubt that what they did to catch those stupid weird-beards would make a better, more real and more gripping spy thriller than anything from the likes of Forsyth, Fleming or Ludlum.

  Admittedly, the locations don’t have the visual impact of Corfu or Bolivia. There are no deserts in Walthamstow and no glittering oceans in High Wycombe. And that’s part
of what makes the story so fantastic. These are ordinary British towns full of IT consultants and greengrocers. You expect to find arms dealing and bomb-making factories in Algiers and Marseilles. Not on a housing estate in Buckinghamshire.

  So it begins. Bond is brought into M’s office and told there is dirty work afoot. Pakistan’s interrogators have pulled out some fingernails and it’s emerged that some religious fanatics have hatched a plan to blow seven planes and thousands of people out of the sky, in a single day. The stakes are high and you’re gripped already.

  Bond heads off to the airport, where he’s told there are no flights to Buckinghamshire. Instead he must catch the Heathrow Express back into London and then a commuter train from Marylebone to High Wycombe. For a bit of light relief, and in the name of reality, he might like to try using the lavatory on this service, to see if he can get the door to close.

  On arrival, he has to wait until the fanatics are out before placing listening devices in their house. And presumably he must do this so that no one else in the Close notices. Maybe he could sleep with Mrs Needham at No 43 to keep her quiet. That bit’s optional. I’m sure it didn’t happen in real life.

  But whatever, it transpires that there is a plot and several Muslims are in the process of building some advanced liquid bombs. And here’s the really good bit. Bond can’t simply take them to a field and leave them with nothing but a can of engine oil to drink. He must wait and collate evidence, because in the real world that’s what is needed to secure a prosecution in the courts. Even when he knows, and M knows, and you and I know some of the men are guilty, he has to have enough hard facts to convince the looniest, stupidest jury. And juries can be very loony and very stupid indeed.

  Then comes the twist. An idiotic American man called Dick Cheney decides he must make George Bush, another idiotic American man, look like he was winning the war on terror, so he ignores British pleas for patience and orders the arrest of a shadowy figure with links to Al-Qaeda and the bombers in Britain.

  This is likely to derail the entire operation. With the shadow in jail in Pakistan, where people tend to talk eventually, some of the British bombers may feel their operation has been compromised and decide to go ahead sooner than anticipated. So what do the intelligence people do? Arrest them, even though they know they probably don’t have enough evidence for a conviction? Or continue to watch and wait with crossed fingers? Imagine what it must have been like at that meeting. The sheer rage at the American stupidity. The tension. And the certain knowledge that if a wrong decision is made, either the bombers walk free or thousands of people die. This is cinema gold. And it actually happened.

  Eventually, some bombers were arrested and you’d imagine the film would be over. But no. Thanks to Britain’s legal system, which allows tradition to trample all over common sense, the electronic intercept recordings of the men were inadmissible. And the jury could not agree on whether the plot to blow up aircraft actually existed.

  So now you’re in the cinema, shaking with impotent fury. How can this have happened? All that watching and listening. All those late nights. Naturally, the film does have a happy ending because eventually they found a way around the rules on intercept evidence and at the retrial three men were found guilty of a plot.

  Although, I do like the idea of a final scene in which Bond is seen at a meeting with Colonel Gadaffi, arranging for BAE Systems to ship some missiles to Cuba in exchange for the release of the convicted men on compassionate grounds.

  This, really, is what has emerged from the proceedings. That no matter how real and how gritty the Bond producers try to make their films, they will never be able to match the tension of what almost certainly is happening today, possibly just down your street, just outside the post office.

  Sunday 13 September 2009

  Mad Johnny Baa Lamb is here to save the pit bulls

  Last week the ringleaders of a Lincolnshire-based international dog-fighting gang were found guilty of various offences and warned that they faced lengthy jail terms. Needless to say, the whole country is now in a state of shock, completely at a loss to understand why on earth someone would get pleasure from watching their much-loved dog being ripped in half in someone’s front room.

  This raises a question. Why are we so shocked? The pit bulls used in dog fighting are not like the doe-eyed mounds of fur and slobber that come to your breakfast table in a morning, hoping that a piece of bacon will fall on the floor. They are Millwall dogs. They are born to fight one another and when they are not fighting they fill their time by eating babies. Trying to get a pit bull to lead a peaceful life, reading poetry and pressing the buttons on pelican crossings for blind people, is as impossible as getting Michael Palin to hose down a bus queue with machinegun fire. It can’t be done and for this reason you aren’t even allowed to own such a dog in this country.

  But people do. They take the risks. They spend the money. They train their animals and they meet with other members of the Enormous Tattoo Owners’ Club in garages and sitting rooms in Lincolnshire, where they get their outlawed dogs to fight.

  They’ve been doing this for ages. Dog fighting was such a big problem in the early nineteenth century that in 1835 Britain became the first country in the world to make it illegal. Today, almost every other country in the civilized world, and America, has followed suit.

  Of course, fans of the ‘sport’ would doubtless maintain that it’s traditional, that war dogs were used for fighting in Roman times and that in fourteenth-century Japan fighting dogs could be used instead of money for paying taxes to the shogun. Doubtless this is true but it’s also nonsense. I’m happy to shoot a partridge and eat a cow’s front leg. I’m also happy to watch a lion being torn apart by a crocodile – and so are you, to judge by the popularity of warts-and-all nature documentaries. But in a civilized country you can’t really have people running dog fights. Common sense dictates it’s just wrong.

  So, what’s to be done? The government, believing that everything can be solved with more laws and more enforcement, would undoubtedly decide that a special taskforce should be set up, but this is impossible since the police are far too busy these days learning how to use ladders and bicycles. Women with frizzy hair and disappointing breasts would inevitably say that it could all be solved if violent video games were banned and more money were spent on education. Publicans, meanwhile, would suggest that it’s because all the nation’s pubs are closing down so there’s nothing else to do.

  Me? I believe the best course of action is to provide those who like dog fighting with an alternative. In short, we should look for another sort of fighting animal they can use. Cocks won’t work because watching two roosters going at one another is even more traumatic than watching two dogs. Especially as they can keep on fighting even when their heads have fallen off. Bears are right out too. I was minded to suggest moose because they seem to spend most of their lives trying to poke one another’s eyes out with their antlers but I fear keeping them would be impractical. Butterflies would be easier but the fights would, I suspect, be boring.

  So, what about sheep? There are many advantages to this, chief among which is that sheep are unique in the animal kingdom for having no sense of worth and no particularly strong will to live. You may think humans are imaginative when it comes to committing suicide. We jump in front of trains and off cliffs. We drive into Saigon and set ourselves on fire. Some of us even go to Switzerland. But when it comes to the art of killing ourselves, we are rank amateurs compared with Johnny Baa Lamb. Wales is a billion acres of pastureland but you must have noticed all the sheep hang around by the side of the road, choosing to saunter across whenever a motorcycle is coming. Sheep are the only animals in the world that like to garrotte themselves on fences and that can develop non-specific illnesses unknown to veterinary science. Given half a chance, a sheep will excrete its own lungs. That’s what those dangleberries are: internal organs they’ve managed to squeeze out of their own bottoms.

  There’s anothe
r reason sheep fighting is sensible. They like it. When there are no cars to run them over, or fences to impale themselves on, they will run at one another and try to fracture their own skulls. You may have seen this on YouTube. It is very funny because, of course, it doesn’t work. They just end up a bit dizzy, and that’s funny too – watching a sheep walking round in circles and falling over because it’s just headbutted its best mate.

  Quite rightly, televised dog fighting would be condemned, but televised sheep fighting would be the comedy smash of the decade. And with the viewers would come the high-rollers. Pretty soon, everyone would forget all about their pit bulls because the rewards from sheep would be so much greater.

  There’s more good news too. Unlike dogs, sheeps don’t use their teeth and have no claws, so a death is unlikely. But if there were to be a tragic accident, the body would not go to waste. Unlike a dead dog, which is useless, a dead sheep can be garnished with mint sauce and eaten.

  This is what’s missing from the legislature today. A bit of lateral thinking. Our leaders need to understand that we will never stop dog fighting with laws. But we will stop this heinous crime by offering its fans something better.

  Sunday 20 September 2009

  Up to the waist in Brown’s slurry on my new farm

  Last week I bought a farm. Though financially speaking, it’s entirely possible I’ve bought the farm. But let’s look on the bright side. I can’t possibly make as much of a hash with the investment as the bankers made when they had the money.

  Or can I? You might imagine it’s very easy to buy a farm. Unlike a house, you don’t need a surveyor to check on dry rot because a field cannot fall over, and rising damp is a good thing because it means free water. It turns out, however, that it’s actually very difficult, mostly because of the Georgians. Let me give you one example so you can see the scale of the problem.