And working out how on earth you will get the mini submarine your wife gave you on Christmas Day home in your suitcase.
You’ll also have the usual, year-round travel problems. You’ll have to queue for six hours so that someone can X-ray your shoes and confiscate your toothpaste. You’ll get deep-vein thrombosis and sunburn and explosive diarrhoea and chlamydia.
Sure, it’s nice to be warm when it’s cold back at home. But Christmas is supposed to be cold. It’s supposed to be a time of families and friends, and trees and log fires, and useless nutcrackers and horrid jumpers, and falling asleep in front of the Queen.
So trust me on this. If you are going away at Christmas, twang the hostesses’ suspender belts when they walk by and call the stewards ‘ducky’. That way, they will ignore the courts next year and strike anyway. Then you won’t have to go away again.
Sunday 20 December 2009
So, Piggy, Buttocks and Rat – what shall we call Gordon?
As we know, there is an awful lot wrong with the education system in Britain. Nobody learns to read or write, most children are stabbed, no primary teachers have scrotums, there are too many managers, history is almost nonexistent and too much emphasis is placed on league tables – it’s a school, for crying out loud, not the second division in football. But the thing that’s wrongest of all is that, so far as I can tell, nobody at school has a nickname any more. My children regularly bring their friends round to the house and all of them are known by their Christian names. Even if they are enormous and ginger.
It was a different story when I was at school. The housemaster was Buttocks, James Smith – a white boy from Trinidad – was Chicken George, the man who taught English was Rat, the clumsiest boy in school was Spanner, my history teacher was Piggy and I was Ness. I like to think this is because I was long and thin but I suspect it’s because I looked like a monster. There was one girl we called Butterface. This is because she was ravishingly beautiful in every single respect … but her face, which was that of an eroded gargoyle. Then there was a boy who, because he hadn’t started shaving at the age of fourteen, was referred to always in the third person as ‘she’.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this simply wouldn’t be allowed any more. Calling a boy ‘she’ would be an infringement of his human rights and the school would undoubtedly be demoted to the Gola League. The headmaster might even be branded a paedophile and banned from the sports pitches.
We still see nicknames in the army and I’m delighted to say we still have nicknames in the Top Gear office, where there is Jewish Brian and German Brian – which is a bit annoying for the poor soul because he’s Danish. But he sounds German to us. Then there are two researchers who were once sent out to buy some clothes needed for a shoot. They are now called Dolce and Gabbana.
Elsewhere, though, nicknames are found only on blogs, and that’s not right at all. You cannot give yourself a nickname, because it will be Pretty Face or Massive Cock, and that’s completely wrong. You have a Christian name, which is bestowed on you by the baby Jesus, and you have a nickname bestowed on you by Old Nick, aka the Devil, aka Lucifer. It must therefore be unpleasant and insulting.
The best nicknames are born in a moment of excruciating embarrassment. That’s why one chap I sometimes work with is called Adam – after the apple he found on the neck of the, er, girl he took to bed one night in Hong Kong. Then you have the fighter jocks who fly F-16s in America. They are all known as cross-dressers because one of their number was once found in a hotel room in Las Vegas in items of women’s apparel.
I realize, of course, that nicknames are exclusively a male thing. This is because boys rejoice in the downfall of others. We like to watch our friends fall over and say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We love it when they come out of the loo having not shaken their old chap properly. The boy–boy bond is glued together with teasing, and nicknames are part of that. As a general rule, girls console one another when they fall over. They ring one another for uplifting chats. The girl–girl bond is glued together with something fluffy and pink and nice. That’s why a girl who accidentally farted in a lift is not known by her mates for the rest of time as Windy.
And that brings me nicely on to the thrust of this morning’s missive. How come we still all call Gordon Brown ‘Gordon Brown’? Why is he not called Cyclops? Or, bearing in mind that funny thing he does with his lower jaw while talking, Concorde? It’s the same story with Alistair Darling. How in the name of all that’s holy has he not been tagged Badger? John Prescott once admitted that he had a Jaguar at home and a Jaguar for work and that was it. He was known for the rest of his professional career as Two Jags. But I’m stumped to think of any other politician who has a nickname. Even Margaret Thatcher escaped. And Tarzan never really caught on, any more than the Beast of Bolsover did.
Boris Johnson is an obvious candidate. His hair looks like seaweed, his suit has gravy on it, he likes to speak in ancient Greek and there have been revelations of a personal nature too, all of which are fertile hunting grounds for a nickname. But we all call him Boris. Then there’s Charles Kennedy. He has ginger hair. He likes a dram. He’s Scottish. But we call him Charles. And who’s that other Lib Dem? That Limp Biscuit chappie? The one with the dislocated face? You know … the one who pulled a Cheeky Girl? How in God’s name is he not called Bloody Hell, There’s Hope For All Of Us? Then you’ve got Douglas Hogg, who charged the nation £2,000 to clean his moat. And David Heathcoat-Amory, who bought some manure with our taxes. I think we can be assured that if I used licence fee money to buy a duck house, you’d start calling me Viggers. So how come Viggers got away with it? Historically, I suspect politicians were spared the ignominy of a foisted moniker because they were respected by those who’d elected them to high office. Nobody ever called Winston Churchill Fatso, for instance. But these days, we don’t respect them at all. And the other thing we don’t do is like them very much.
That’s presumably why Gordon Brown is called Gordon Brown. Because we all pretty much hate him and you don’t give a nickname to someone you can’t abide.
It’s why I can’t bring myself to call Peter Mandelson ‘Mandy’. Mr Mandelson is so much more insulting.
Sunday December 27, 2009
1. Relax. It’s not millions and millions of licence fees. It’s private money we’re spending.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 26