There are a number of springs on the farm I’ve bought, one of which provides water to several properties in a nearby village. This arrangement was made when the land belonged to a fat man who had tea interests in India, and sealed in a document written with a quill, on bark. Fine. But what if the water supply dries up, or the pipe breaks, or everyone in the village gets lead poisoning and grows two heads? Common sense dictates this would not be my problem, but under New Labour’s legal guidelines, all landowners are in the wrong at all times. Especially when a little old lady with two heads is in court, sobbing and waving around a piece of bark from 1742. The legal fees for sorting this out have amounted to about £4.5 billion, and that’s before we get to the cost of trying to understand what I may and may not do with the land I’ve bought.
I thought some sheep would be nice but it turns out Gordon Brown has an opinion on this. He reckons the number of animals I have per acre should be determined by how much nitrogen is in their excrement. I am consequently allowed only 0.6 of a sheep per acre, which means I may have only seventy-five of the damn things.
Standard sheep are good lawnmowers but unless I buy a hitherto undiscovered breed that has blades instead of teeth, I’m going to need a tractor to keep the grass down, and this worries me. I don’t trust tractors. It seems to me that every single component is designed specifically to remove the operator’s left arm.
Then there are the woods. They seem perfectly nice to me, but according to experts, they need thinning. The cost of doing this, I’m told, is around £5 billion and none of the chopped-down trees can be sold because there is no demand for wood at all. I find that hard to believe, but there we are. I also find it hard to believe that a wood needs maintenance. When McDonald’s does that sort of thing in Brazil, it gets into all sorts of trouble, but it seems it’s my duty as the owner to execute the weaker trees so that the stronger ones may survive. I must also keep the woods warm. I have no idea how this might be achieved but I should imagine the cost will be about £2 billion.
One of the things I have accidentally bought is a Neolithic fort. It is, of course, no such thing. It is a slight ripple in an otherwise flat field, useful only as an exciting launch pad for the children’s quad bikes. But I feel fairly sure that if we use it for this purpose, Brown will make me apologize, in public, to the Piltdown man.
Certainly I know he is using satellites to make sure that I plant the right crop in the right field. Also, he is employing men called Colin to come round regularly to make sure I don’t have too many sheep. Can you believe that? That your tax money is being spent to pay a man whose job is to count sheep. How the hell does he stay awake? Then we get on to the thorny question of boundaries. I can see why they matter on a housing estate but trying to determine where they are when they’re in the middle of a blackberry bush and half an acre of nettles seems a bit pointless. And expensive.
And it turns out I’m going to need some buildings in which I can dry my rape, tup my sheep and keep a telephone to use when the tractor has severed my arm. I’m also going to need a topper, and that’s fine, except I don’t know what one is and therefore I have no clue whether to try to get one at the local garage or Toys ’ ’ Us.
Last week I had a long conversation with another local sheep farmer. And I promise you this. While I nodded sagely from time to time and gave the impression I agreed with his countryside ways, I did not understand a single word he said. Apparently, my soil is brashy, my herbage is low and I’ll have to dog and stick my ewes.
What I want to do most of all is plant some game crop so that I can rear a few pheasants. But guess what? It turns out that Brown has an opinion on this as well, and it’s not allowed. He has an opinion on everything, it seems. There’s one field I thought would look nice if I grew some poppies and cornflowers. But that’s not allowed either. Strangely, however, he will give me cash money if I promise to make a trout lake, and even more cash money if I don’t grow anything that could be turned into food. Quite how he squares this in his head when half the world is starving, I have no idea.
And nor do I understand why the forms I have to fill in to get this cash money are longer and more complicated than the instruction manual for a nuclear power station.
I thought that farming would be easy. You plant seeds, weather happens and food grows. But I fear that as the seasons slide by, I will discover that I’m working my nuts off for less return than I got from those useless bastards at AIG.
Perhaps that’s why the people round these parts assume I’m going to turn it into a racetrack. They couldn’t be more wrong. I’m going to grow buddleia for the butterflies and build boxes for the barn owls. I’m going to love it. Especially the cheap diesel that Brown says I mustn’t put in my Range Rover. But I will.
Sunday 27 September 2009
Help, quick – I’ve unscrewed the top on a ticking bomb
Like any responsible parent, I would not leave a loaded gun in the children’s playroom or keep my painkillers in their sweetie tin. But it turns out that for two years there has been a nuclear bomb in one of my kitchen cupboards, between the tomato ketchup and the Rice Krispies.
It’s an American chilli sauce that was bought by my wife as a jokey Christmas present. And, like all jokey Christmas presents, it was put in a drawer and forgotten about. It’s called limited-edition Insanity private reserve and it came in a little wooden box, along with various warning notices. ‘Use this product one drop at a time,’ it said. ‘Keep away from eyes, pets and children. Not for people with heart or respiratory problems. Use extreme caution.’
Unfortunately, we live in a world where everything comes with a warning notice. Railings. Vacuum cleaners. Energy drinks. My quad bike has so many stickers warning me of decapitation, death and impalement that they become a nonsensical blur. The result is simple. We know these labels are drawn up to protect the manufacturer legally, should you decide one day to insert a vacuum-cleaner pipe up your bottom, or to try to remove your eye with a teaspoon. So we ignore them. They are meaningless. One drop at a time! Use extreme caution! On a sauce. Pah. Plainly it was just American lawyer twaddle.
I like a hot sauce. My Bloody Marys are known to cure squints. And at an Indian restaurant I will often order a vindaloo, sometimes without the involvement of a wager. So when I accidentally found that bottle of Insanity, I poured maybe half a teaspoonful on to my paella. And tucked in.
Burns victims often say that when they are actually on fire, there is no pain. It has something to do with the body pumping out adrenaline in such vast quantities that the nerve endings stop working. Well, it wasn’t like that for me. The pain started out mildly, but I knew from past experience that this would build to a delightful fiery sensation. I was even looking forward to it. But the moment soon passed. In a matter of seconds I was in agony. After maybe a minute I was frightened that I might die. After five I was frightened that I might not. The searing fire had surged throughout my head. My eyes were streaming. Molten lava was flooding out of my nose. My mouth was a shattered ruin. Even my hair hurt.
And all the time, I was thinking: ‘If it’s doing this to my head, what in the name of all that’s holy is it doing to my innards?’ I felt certain that at any moment my stomach would open and everything – my intestines, my liver, my heart, even – would simply splosh on to the floor. This is not an exaggeration. I really did think I was dissolving from the inside out.
Trying to keep calm, I raced, screaming, for the fridge and ate handfuls of crushed ice. This made everything worse. So, dimly remembering that Indians use bread when they’ve overdone the chillies, I cut a slice, threw it away and ate what remained of the very expensive Daylesford loaf, like a dog.
Nothing was working. And such was my desperation, I downed two litres of skimmed milk – something I would never normally touch with a barge pole. I was sweating profusely as my body frenziedly sought to realign its internal thermostat. I felt sick but didn’t dare regurgitate the poison for fear of the damage it would cause
on the way out.
Even now, the following morning, I feel weak, shell-shocked, like I may die at any moment. And all I’d ingested was a drop.
Limited-edition Insanity sauce is ridiculous. It’s made in Costa Rica, from hot pepper extract, crushed red savina peppers, red tabasco pepper pulp, green tabasco pepper pulp, crushed red habanero peppers, crushed green habanero peppers, red habanero pepper powder and fruit juice. Well, that’s what it says on the tin. But I don’t believe it. I think it’s made from uranium, plutonium, fertilizer, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid and ammonia, with a splash of mace. I do not believe it’s a foodstuff. It’s a weapon. And I may have a point, since on the Scoville scale, which measures the intensity of chilli peppers, the habanero sits just below the ‘daisy cutter’, that American bomb designed to wipe out nations.
At present you are allowed to take 100 ml of liquid on to a plane because the authorities believe such a small amount could not possibly bring down an airliner. They are wrong. If I painted just 1 ml of Insanity sauce on the window of a 747, it would melt. And this is stuff you can buy on the internet. Stuff that has been sitting in my kitchen for two years.
So, what’s to be done? As you know, I am not Gordon Brown. I do not think problems can be solved with a ban, even though I really believe that a bottle of Insanity sauce is more deadly than a machinegun. The obvious course of action is to remove warning notices from household goods that are not dangerous – cakes, for instance, and staplers. This way, we would pay more attention when something is supplied with labels advising us of great peril ahead.
Sadly, however, since we are now one of the most litigious countries in the world, this will never happen. Nor can Insanity be uninvented. It exists. A bottle of the damn stuff is sitting on my desk now and I have no idea what I should do with it.
I can’t pour it down the sink because it would get into the water table. I can’t put it in the bin because it would end up as landfill. And that’s no good for something which has a half-life of several thousand years. I can’t even take it – as I would with a grenade I’d found – to the police because they’d be tempted to use it as a legal device for getting information out of criminals. And that wouldn’t work at all. Last night, when the bread had failed and the milk was finished, I would happily have confessed to forty-three counts of homosexual rape. Plus there is a side effect – certain death.
Sunday 4 October 2009
Cleverness is no more. It has ceased to be. This is a dumb Britain
Forty years ago, my dad came into my bedroom and made me get up. I was nine and sleepy. I was snuggly and warm. I wanted to stay under the covers. But he was insistent. ‘There is something on television you need to see,’ he said. And I remember the next bit vividly: ‘It’s going to be important.’ So downstairs I went and there, in black and white, were some men talking, while nearby, various sheep fell out of trees. I laughed so much, my teddy bear’s arm came off. And so it was that, at the age of nine, I became Monty Python’s first and youngest fan.
Aged thirteen, I was taken to the Grand in Leeds to see the Pythons perform in what they called their ‘first farewell tour’, and afterwards we all went out for supper together. John Cleese, whom my father had befriended, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and me. They all signed a copy of my Big Red Book and it remains the one possession I would save should my house choose to explode.
I would spend hours listening to their records, and reliving their television programmes in my head. And eventually – my dad said it would be important – this fanaticism caused me to pass my English O-level. I was sitting there, in my study at school, listening to Snow Goose, with the dreary Merchant of Venice swimming around on the page, none of it making any sense at all. And then I thought: ‘Hang on a minute, if it is possible to learn off by heart Eric Idle’s travel agent sketch, then how hard can it be to memorize this twaddle?’ So that’s what I did. Learnt it.
I knew all the Python sketches off by heart. And the books. And the films. I still do. And I still fly off the handle when someone misquotes. It was Norwegian Jarlsberger, you imbecile. I know it’s really called Jarlsberg but that’s not what Cleese said. How can you not know that??!!? Only last week, I was asked by a keen young reporter to recite my favourite Python sketch into her camera for a feature she was making. I did Novel Writing.
Novel Writing is another reason Python turned out to be important. It’s the reason I’m married. My wife is a huge fan of Thomas Hardy and was deeply impressed that I knew the opening page of The Return of the Native. She never realized that I was simply reciting a Python sketch. In the same way that she never knew when I hummed ‘Nessun Dorma’ that I was singing what I thought was the music from a commercial for Pirelli. Novel Writing is at the very heart of what makes Monty Python so brilliant. The notion of Thomas Hardy writing his books, in front of a good-natured bank holiday crowd in Dorset while cricket-style commentators and pundits assess every word he commits to paper is a juxtaposition you don’t find in comedy very much any more.
To get the point you need to know that, while Hardy may be seen as a literary colossus, there’s no escaping the fact his novels are dirge. We see these attacks on intellectualism throughout Python. To understand the joke, you need to know that René Descartes did not say, I ‘drink’ therefore I am. You need to know that, if you cure a man of leprosy, you are taking away his trade. And that really Archimedes did not invent football.
Today my encyclopedic knowledge of everything Python is seen as a bit sad. Former fans point out that Cleese has lost it, that Jones is married to an eight-year-old and that Spamalot was a travesty. Worse. Liking Python apparently marks me out as a ‘public-school toff’.
There’s a very good reason for this. Nowadays people wear their stupidity like a badge of honour. Knowing how to play chess will get your head kicked off. Reading a book with no pictures in it will cause there to be no friend requests on your Facebook page. Little Britain is funny because people vomit a lot. Monty Python is not because they delight in all manifestations of the terpsichorean muse.
When you go on a chat show, it is important you tell the audience straight away that you were brought up in a cardboard box and that your dad would thrash you to sleep every night. If you want to get on and to be popular you have to demonstrate that you know nothing. It’s why Stephen Fry makes so many bottom jokes.
And then you have my colleague James May, who says that, occasionally on Top Gear, he would like to present a germane and thought-provoking piece on engineering, but I won’t let him unless his trousers fall down at some point. I’m ashamed to say that’s true.
It’s also true that today no one ever gets rich by overestimating the intelligence of their audience. Today you make a show assuming the viewers know how to breathe and that’s about it. It’s therefore an inescapable fact that in 2009 Monty Python would not be commissioned.
The only example of intelligent sketch-show comedy in Britain today is Harry & Paul. And what’s happened to that? Well, it’s been shunted from BBC1 to BBC2. And you get the impression it’ll be gone completely unless they stop using Jonathan Miller as a butt for their wit. Today you are not allowed to know about Jonathan Miller because if you do, you are a snob.
That’s why my Monty Python appreciation society is so small and secret. Members speak every morning, each giving one another a word or phrase that has to be placed in context by six that evening. Last month I was given one word: ‘because’. And I got it. It’s from the Four Yorkshiremen. ‘We were happy … Because we were poor.’
The Pythons were laughing at that idea then. We’re not laughing any more.
Sunday 11 October 2009
I’ve got a solution for the rainforest: napalm the lot
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks in Bolivia, and I didn’t shoot a baboon. This is because there aren’t any. In fact, there is no evidence of intelligent life at all. Let me give you a small example. I was lying in my hotel roo
m one morning when, without so much as a knock, a cleaner walked in. With a mumbled, ‘Buenos dias’, he went into my lavatory, closed the door and took a dump.
Let me give you another example. The electrical shower head in another hotel I stayed in was connected to the wall of the cubicle by several bare wires. There was even a fuse box in there as well. This, then, was a bathroom that could get you clean and give you an amazing new hairdo all at the same time.
If you ask a Bolivian to do something, he either won’t do it at all or he will do it wrongly. This is because most Bolivians live at extremely high altitude, where there simply isn’t enough oxygen to power your limbs and your brain at the same time. You either sit in a chair all day and think or you move about and don’t. At one stage I spent several moments trying to light a cigarette with a battery.
You may wonder, then, why the Bolivians don’t simply move out of the mountains and down to lower ground. Well, that’s because all the country’s low-lying area is covered with a massive and hideous wood. We call it the rainforest and say it is the ‘lungs of the world’ but plainly it isn’t. Or there’d be some air in La Paz, and there isn’t.
The rainforest is portrayed by rock stars and schoolteachers as a magical and mystical place full of wonder and majesty. This is nonsense. It is the worst place in the world, and the sooner a burger company chops it all down, the better. Everything in the rainforest is specifically designed to make your life either a little bit worse or completely over. At one point my left arm brushed against a leaf, and even now, many days later, it is a mass of weeping sores and pain. And that was just a leaf. One of my friends was bitten by a brown recluse spider. Another was chomped by a 12 ft anaconda. Twice, I climbed into my tent to find a bloody tarantula in there.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 23