Strangely, however, it wasn’t the deadly wildlife that caused the most annoyance. It was the stuff that buzzes about and tries to make a nest in your ears. We have flies and beetles and spiders in England, but nothing prepares you for the sheer size of the flies and beetles and spiders in the rainforest. They were big enough to have recognizable faces and character traits. One beetle I found, with Denis Healey eyebrows and a bit of a harelip, spent his night walking around my tent snipping the hind legs off grasshoppers. Well, I say grasshoppers, but of course they were no such thing. These things were 4 inches long and actually bled when their legs came off. I swear to God I heard one calling for its mummy.
Sleep was impossible. You would spend an hour in your tent, bashing everything you could find over the head with a shoe until you were convinced all was well, and then you’d lie down and close your eyes and, within a minute, you’d sense that a JCB was driving up your leg. This is extremely frightening.
Bashing rainforest insects over the head with a shoe is pointless. It just makes them sad. Setting them alight doesn’t work either. At one point I ignited the spray from a can of deodorant and used the whole lot on a particularly stubborn cockroach that looked a bit like Sean Connery. Only with curly hair. Net result: he survived intact, I smelt nasty the next day and my tent caught fire.
You might imagine that it’s worth putting up with the insect misery for the breathtaking array of flora and fauna. You’re wrong. There are no flowers at all, and apart from some absolutely beautiful butterflies that are the colour of an LSD trip and the size of Boeings, it’s all either dreary or deadly. One tree in particular caught my eye, quite literally, since it was made entirely from cocktail sticks. Others hide their roots under a thin veneer of moss so that you trip over them. And it goes on like this for ever. We’re told that an area of rainforest the size of Wales, or the Albert Hall, is cut down every day, and that may be true. But this pointless and unpleasant wood still goes on for thousands of miles in every direction. Frankly, I’d napalm the lot.
Occasionally you do reach a clearing, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you are out of the woods, so to speak. Because often it is full of armed men with mad eyes and sniffly noses who will shoot you in the head. Or, if you are unlucky, it will be a tumbledown and filthy village full of gap-year Brits with dreadlocked hair who have told their parents they wish to follow in Gordon Sting’s footsteps but are actually spending six months gradually giving their trust fund to Pablo Escobar.
Tribes? Elders? Chaps with saucers sewn into their lips? They may well be in there somewhere but the only locals I saw were crowded round a television set getting agitated about Carlo Ancelotti’s new diamond formation at Stamford Bridge.
If there are any people in the middle of the forest, it is not because they want to be there. Otherwise why, when they do get out, do they choose to live in La Paz, where all you can buy is cement and motor oil, and there is no air, and strangers take a dump in your lavatory every morning? It is our duty to help these poor people. Someone, then, must start a charity as soon as possible with the sole aim of turning that insect-filled forest of death, rain and misery into something a bit more like Hong Kong.
Sunday 1 November 2009
Get me a rope before Mandelson wipes us all out
I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more. He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt on to in the meantime.
I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.
There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GCSE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.
Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50 per cent on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist. And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.’
It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multi-cultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where? You can’t go to France because you need to complete seventeen forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for ‘organizing’ a plumber.
You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than forty and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany … because you just can’t.
The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at ten in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.
Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gent
ly wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.
I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.
So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit.
Sunday 8 November 2009
Stop the game, ref. We’re all too cross to play by the rules
Last weekend a man in a blue shirt fell over while playing a game of football. And a free-kick was awarded by the referee against the team playing in red shirts. This made the man who manages the team in red shirts very furious. ‘Och aye the noo,’ He told waiting reporters, angrily. The man in question, Sir Alex Chewing-Gum, is always very angry about referees. Not that long ago he said one man was too unfit to monitor a football game, and on Sunday he said the chap in black was in an ‘absolutely ridiculous’ position.
I’m with him on this. Referees are a very strange bunch of people that no one ever sees outside the confines of a footballing ground. Seriously. I once met a man who sexes the queen’s ducks for a living. I really do know a pox doctor’s clerk. I also know a butcher and a lorry driver and a man who puts food in his mouth and then earns a living from telling people what it tastes like. But I don’t know a single football ref. I’ve never even met anyone who knows one. This is because they must, by nature, be a bit weird. I mean, whatever they do at work, they can be assured that half the people watching will want to pull out their lungs and make them into comedy bellows. The only upside of the job is that you get to boss about a lot of very rich young men, and if they fight back you can make them stand in a corner. Football reffing is like being a policeman, only without the mace.
But, and I’ve given this a great deal of thought, there is no alternative. In rugby the official on the pitch may call on the assistance of a video recorder, and that is fine. It means the important decisions will be correct. But if a football official were to call for a slow-motion replay every time Didier Drogba fell over, each match would last about six weeks. One expert called last week for players to be asked if they have committed a foul. If they lie, and are subsequently found guilty in a video review, they face a five-match ban. That might work for handball, but what about the tackle that’s only a bit iffy? That’s where you need the little Hitler.
Yes, he will sometimes get it wrong, but that’s okay because football is supposed to be a sport. And in a sport it is nice to win but it doesn’t really matter if you don’t. And therein lies the problem, because of course football is no longer a sport. It is a global business, a sponsorship opportunity, a massive television event, and you can’t really have one little bloke with hairy knees deciding whether Samsung’s multi-million-pound contribution to Chelsea is rewarded to a greater extent than AIG’s multi-million contribution to the northernists.
We see the same sort of problem these days in all events that used to be sporting fixtures. In rugby big men cover themselves in fake blood so they can be substituted for a player who’s more adept at whatever sequence of play is required next, and in motor racing we have people letting people past while under a ‘go slow’ yellow flag and then claiming they have been overtaken unfairly, resulting in the other driver’s disqualification. We even have people crashing deliberately so that the safety car is deployed. In athletics, people with scrotums are pretending to be women; in cricket, people pick at the stitching on the ball – for something to do, I suppose; and in Scrabble, my wife claims ‘jo’ is a word in common usage when, plainly, it bloody well isn’t.
Only tennis seems to have escaped the slow, inexorable slide into shadiness, greed and deceit. But even here we find players drifting around the court on crystal meth, in wigs.
Some say the easiest way of ensuring that this ugliness stops is to remove such massive prize funds from the events in question. They reckon that if Wayne Rooney were playing for the love of the game, he’d be less inclined to argue when a decision didn’t go his way. Really? Ever seen a Sunday league pub game? Honestly, pop into your local accident and emergency centre on a Sunday afternoon and you’ll find half the people in there are amateur refs who’ve been beaten up by amateur players for awarding free-kicks and penalties. I have spent most of my life watching children play rugby and you wouldn’t believe how they behave towards the refs and one another. It’s often nothing more than an eighty-minute brawl with a ball. I’ve even seen parents put down their BlackBerry, stride on to the pitch and punch the ref in the middle of his face for not spotting something no one else spotted either. So don’t tell me it’s money that’s ruining sport these days because it isn’t.
No. The real culprit is us, twenty-first-century man. We are simply not suited to playing games with one another any more, and there’s a very good reason for this. In the past, people were allowed to abuse post office staff without fear of prosecution. We were allowed to shout at our children without being followed home and persecuted by social services and we were allowed to hate whatever country we were at war with. No one ever said in 1940, ‘But you know, most Germans are decent, law-abiding souls.’ Today, of course, none of this is possible. We must welcome foes into our midst and big signs insist that we remain calm when presented with gross stupidity at the post office. And if our children misbehave we must give them money and a few sweets.
It all sounds like utopia but of course the human being has a temper. It has an aggressive streak. It likes to take on an opponent and win, massively; not to have the game stopped halfway through so we don’t hurt the other team’s feelings.
The upshot is simple. Because we can’t act normally any more, we vent our anger and bile on the sports pitch. We won’t accept rules and we will cheat our way to victory. Banning big prize money won’t stop this. Banning sport, I’m afraid, is the only way.
Sunday 15 November 2009
Call me a spoilsport but I’m glad my dad wasn’t a lesbian
When it comes to sweeping generalizations, I am the daddy. All Germans have no sense of humour, all instruction manuals are pointless, all cruise ships are ghastly, every single American is fat, all golfers are boring, and all Peugeots are driven by people you wouldn’t have round for dinner.
Of course, I’m well aware that most generalizations are nonsense. I know several very funny Germans, and Obama Barrack is actually quite skinny. But without generalizations, anecdotes would take two years, points would never get made, comedy would suffer and everyone would sound like James May: ‘Actually, 42.7 per cent of instruction manuals are quite useful; but first let me quantify “useful” …’ Life would be a terribly dreary assault course if every fact had to be precise, but, that said, generalizations have no place in serious scientific research, which is why I was a bit startled to read last week that a government adviser from the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners said lesbians made better parents than what we can no longer call ‘normal couples’.
I’m not sure this is quite right because, so far as I can remember, a woman is not able to have a child after having sexual relations with another woman. Unless that woman is from an athletics squad. In order for a lesbian couple to have had a child, either a turkey baster must have been involved – which is not how most people would like to imagine they came into the world – or they must have visited the state-sponsored British Association for Adoption and Fostering, which thinks that anyone who objects to same-sex parents is a ‘retarded homophobe’.
Happily, I’m a bit more sensible than this. I do not think that someone who objects to homosexual parents is a
retarded homophobe. I believe they have an opinion. But, that said, I emphatically don’t agree that lesbians necessarily make better parents than me. It is impossible to say that someone will make a better parent because she fancies other girls. There will be some lesbians who’ll go out all night and take drugs and there will be some who’ll read a child a bedtime story and be excellent.
I have done some checking on this, and the only evidence I can find comes from research endorsed by the national academy itself. The study examined children raised by just twenty-seven single mothers, twenty lesbian couples and thirty-six, er, differently genitalled parents and concluded that those raised by women grew up with a better psychological well-being. You can’t possibly draw any conclusions after testing twenty lesbians. Test twenty Italians and you could well end up concluding the whole nation was full of calm, incorruptible dullards with no interest in sex. Test temperatures over just twenty years and you’d end up concluding the world’s climate was changing.
I like lesbians, especially proper ones in stockings that you find on the internet. Certainly, I think more women should try lesbianism. It’d be great. But on a personal note, and please don’t call me a retarded homophobe, I’m not sure I’d have been very happy if my mum had been one. I like to imagine that Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron sometimes get it on under the covers, but my mother and Peggy from the tennis club? No. And the idea that Peggy from the tennis club would have been a better dad than my actual dad is laughable. Nearly as laughable, in fact, as the alarming news that the country has a parenting academy looking into this sort of thing.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 24