I offer a piece of advice, then, to Mr Pot-Porritt this morning. Try living like I do. Don’t drop litter. Recycle whatever can be recycled, without talking about it. Grow your own vegetables. Eat meat. Use whatever means of transport is the most convenient. And when you wake to find the sun is shining, call some friends round for a barbecue and be happy.
Don’t worry about the topsoil and the coral reefs. Remember that in 1900 we lived for an average of 49 years and that now we live to an average of 78. Remember, too, that we have reduced poverty more in the past 50 years than we did in the preceding 500. And rejoice at the news that all the waste generated by the United States in the whole of the twenty-first century – all of it – will fit in a landfill site just 18 miles across.
You will enjoy your short time here on earth so much more, and what’s more, if you stop telling us what to do all the time, so will we.
Sunday 4 June 2006
Simon Cowell ate our strawberries
I forgot to buy a book for a flight from Edinburgh to London this week, so I stared out of the window the whole way. And two things became obvious: Britain has a great deal of water. And while nobody was looking it seems that someone has bubble-wrapped the entire countryside.
Now the fox has been sorted, ‘polytunnels’ are the latest must-have cause for concern in the shires. They enraged an old lady in Herefordshire so much last week that she pulled one up and tossed it aside. Not exactly suicide bombing but she seems to have got her point across.
Let me try to encapsulate the problem here. Growing strawberries under polytunnels increases the harvest window from six weeks to six months, which means we don’t have to fly them over from Namibia or Chile, or wherever it is that strawberries come from normally.
Fine. But polytunnels are more of a blot on the landscape than a rambler’s socks, and what’s more, strawberries grown in their shadow have the same nutritional value as office furniture.
Needless to say, the supermarkets say it’s all our fault because we demand year-round strawberries that look nice and feel firm, and to hell with the fact that you’d be better off eating the punnet.
Hmmm. And who exactly do the supermarkets mean when they say it’s ‘our fault’? We know that the working classes do not eat strawberries because they do not eat any fruit or vegetables, which is why they are all so ugly and malformed. And we know that the upper classes have no need of the supermarket strawberry because they have vegetable gardens in which they grow their own. Often, these vegetable gardens are called Lincolnshire.
So it’s the middle classes who are demanding tasteless but perfectly formed strawberries, is it? I don’t think so. Because the middle class is too busy poring over the olive-oil counter in Carluccio’s. Thanks to Gordon and Jamie we are now educated in the ways of the culinary world.
And we therefore know that eating a supermarket strawberry is a bit like making love to the most beautiful girl in the world and finding out she’s got bird flu.
Even though the 602,000 cigarettes I smoked have given my mouth the sensitivity of a smelting-plant crucible I know that the fruit and vegetables in my garden are a million billion times more tasty than the fruit and veg grown in a plastic bag in Kidderminster.
If you’re going to Wimbledon this year, chances are you’ll be offered strawberries grown in this manner. They’re called Elsantas and I suggest a test. Drop one on the floor and it’ll bounce. Which is fine if you want to play tennis with it, but it’s not so good if you’re planning on putting it in your mouth.
No, I’m sorry. Supermarkets buy polytunnel strawberries not because we want them, but because they are factory farmed, picked by Lithuanians, and are therefore cheap. Which means they make more money, which, of course, is fine by me.
What’s to be done? Well, to cure the problem we must, I’m afraid, turn our attention to Simon Cowell. Because, you see, it’s all his fault.
Simon’s a lovely chap but his stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap attitude to music means that these days pop stars never last long enough to make much cash. And that means the country is being starved of super-rich rock gods. And super-rich rock gods are the only people who know how the countryside should be managed.
Farming in Britain is now pointless because the working classes only eat fat, and the middle classes want everything to come from Tuscany. That’s why farmers have bubble-wrapped the countryside; it’s the only way to survive when you’ve been bubble-wrapped yourself, by a hundred miles of red tape.
There’s more too. At the moment the only respite from the mile upon mile of polythene is oilseed rape, which, I’m sure, is part of a communist European Union plot to feed the Continent’s swivel-eyed eco-loony vegetarians while punishing the blue-eyed intelligentsia with hay fever.
Of course, there are still a few small copses left to break up England’s yellow and plastic land, but when the metro-veg-heads in power get round to banning shooting, they’ll be torn up as well to make way for more polythene. Unless we get Simon Cowell out of the music business and find a new Pink Floyd.
One of my pleasant rock-star friends recently moved from London to the Cotswolds and bought a farm. And he’s now spending his children’s entire inheritance on making sure the new pad looks and feels like it did in the fourteenth century. There are sheep, not because they make nice money, but because they make a nice noise in the morning. There are woods, because they look pretty, and now, in the ancient barns, traditional cheese is being hand-churned by women with big breasts. It’s rock’n’roll and it’s cheesy. But I like it.
I’m making a serious point here. Britain, from the air, would be a butchered place were it not for the rock stars who spend so much money keeping their bits of it nice. So if you want to get rid of polytunnels there’s only one solution. Go out and buy another copy of Dark Side of the Moon.
Sunday 11 June 2006
The united states of total paranoia
I know Britain is full of incompetent water-board officials and stabbed Glaswegians but even so I fell on my knees this morning and kissed the ground, because I’ve just spent three weeks trying to work in America.
It’s known as the land of the free and I’m sure it is if you get up in the morning, go to work in a petrol station, eat nothing but double-egg burgers with cheese – and take your children to little league. But if you step outside the loop, if you try to do something a bit zany, you will find that you’re in a police state.
We begin at Los Angeles airport in front of an immigration official who, like all his colleagues, was selected for having no grace, no manners, no humour, no humanity and the sort of IQ normally found in farmyard animals. He scanned my form and noted there was no street number for the hotel at which I was staying.
‘I’m going to need a number,’ he said. Ooh, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have one.’
This didn’t seem to have any effect. ‘I’m going to need a number,’ he said again, and then again, and then again. Each time I shrugged and stammered, terrified that I might be sent to the back of the queue or, worse, into the little room with the men in Marigolds. But I simply didn’t have an answer.
‘I’m going to need a number,’ he said again, giving the distinct impression that he was an autobank, and that this was a conversation he was prepared to endure until one of us died. So with a great deal of bravery I decided to give him one. And the number I chose was 2,649,347.
This, it turned out, was fine. He’d been told by his superiors to get a number.
I’d given him a number. His job was done and so, just an hour or so later, I was on the streets of Los Angeles doing a piece to camera.
Except, of course, I wasn’t. Technically, you need a permit to film on every street in pretty well every corner of the world. But the only countries where this rule is enforced are Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and the United States of America.
So, seconds after breaking out the tripod, a policeman pulled up and demanded that we show him our permit. We had
one that covered the city of Los Angeles… except the bit where we were. So we were moved on.
The next day I was moved on in Las Vegas too, because the permit I had didn’t cover the part of the pavement I was standing on. Eight inches away was fine.
You need a permit to do everything in America. You even need a passport to buy a drink. But, interestingly, you don’t need one if you wish to rent some guns and some bullets. I needed a 50 cal (very big) machine gun. ‘No problem,’ said the man at the shop. ‘But could you just sign this assuring us that the movie you’re making is not anti-Bush or anti-war.’
Also, you do not need a permit if you want – as I did – to transport a dead cow on the roof of your car through the Florida panhandle. That’s because this is banned by a state law.
Think about that. Someone has gone to all the bother and expense of drawing up a law that means that at some point lots of people were moving dead cows about on their cars. It must have been popular. Fashionable, even.
Anyway, back to the guns. I needed them because I wished to shoot a car in the Mojave desert. But you can’t do that without the say-so of the local fire chief, who turned up, with his haircut, to say that for reasons he couldn’t explain, he had a red flag in his head.
You find this a lot in America. People way down the food chain are given the power to say yes or no to elaborately prepared plans, just so their bosses can’t be sued. One expression that simply doesn’t translate from English in these days of power without responsibility is Ooh, I’m sure it’ll be fine’.
And, unfortunately, these people at the bottom of the food chain have no intellect at all. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a tree. I think this is because people in the sticks have stopped marrying their cousins and are now mating with vegetables.
They certainly aren’t eating them. You see them growing in fields, but all you ever find on a menu is cheese, cheese, cheese, or cheese with cheese. Except for a steak and cheese sandwich I bought in Mississippi. This was made, according to the label, from ‘imitation cheese’.
Nope, I don’t know what that is either but I do know that out of the main population centres, the potato people are getting fatter and dimmer by the minute.
Today the average petrol-pump attendant is capable, just, of turning on a pump when you prepay. But if you pay for two pumps to be turned on to fill two cars, you can, if you stare carefully, see wisps of smoke coming from her fat, useless, war-losing, acne-scarred, gormless turnip face.
And the awful thing is that you don’t want the petrol anyway, because it’ll simply get you to somewhere else, which will be worse. A point I shall prove next week, when we have a look at what happened in Alabama. And why the poor of New Orleans will sue if the donation you make isn’t as big as they’d hoped for.
Sunday 2 July 2006
Arrested just for looking weird
Last week I wrote about my recent trip to America, and to be honest it didn’t go down well. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the receiving end of such a blizzard of bile. One man called me an ‘imbosile’. Hundreds more suggested that it’d be better for everyone if I just stayed at home in future.
And do you know the awful thing? I haven’t finished yet. Last week’s column was just an introduction, an amuse-bouche, a scene-setter. It’s this week that things really start to get going…
So far we’ve looked at the problem in America of power without responsibility.
Step out of the loop, do something unusual and you’ll encounter a wall of low-paid, low-intellect workers whose sole job is to prevent their bosses from being sued. As a result, you never hear anyone say: ‘Oh I’m sure it’ll be all right.’
You know the Stig. The all-white racing driver we use on Top Gear. Well, we were filming him walking through the Mojave desert when, lo and behold, a lorry full of soldiers rocked up and arrested him. He was unusual. He wasn’t fat. He must therefore be a Muslim.
It gets worse. I needed money to play a little blackjack in Vegas but because I was unable to provide the cashier with an American zip code he was unable to help.
It’s the same story at the petrol pumps. Americans can punch their address into the key pad and replenish their tank. Europeans have to prove they’re not terrorists before being allowed to start pumping.
I seem to recall a television advertisement in which George W. Bush himself urged us all to go over there for our holidays. But what’s the point when you can’t buy anything? Or do anything. Or walk across the desert in a white suit without being arrested.
The main problem, I suspect, is a complete lack of knowledge about the world. I asked people in the streets of Vegas to name two European countries. The very first woman I spoke to said: ‘Oh yes. What’s that one with kangaroos?’
Then you’ve got New Orleans, which, nearly a year after Katrina, is still utterly smashed and ruined. Now, I’m sorry, but insects can build shelter on their own.
Birds can build nests without a state handout. So why are the people of Louisiana sitting around waiting for someone else to do the repairs?
I tried to help out. I tried to give a car I’d been using to a Christian mission.
But I was threatened with legal action because the car in question was a 91 and not the 98 that had allegedly been promised. A very angry woman accused me of ‘misrepresentation’.
Not everyone in America is deranged, of course. Sammy certainly isn’t. Sammy was helping us out washing cars, and one night, over dinner, he explained how he’d become so badly burnt. And why, as a result, the best he could hope for out of life was washing cars for cash.
His car had exploded after it was rammed from behind by an off-duty cop. He was taken to a hospital that had no air-conditioning, in California, in the summer.
Not nice when you have third-degree burns to half your body.
And to make matters worse, there was nobody to help him go to the loo, so he either did his business where he lay – or went through untold agony by rolling over to pee on the floor.
The bill for his botched plastic surgery was half a million dollars, $15,000 of which came from the cop’s insurance. This means Sammy can never get a proper job, or buy a house or find credit.
The government, he says, is waiting for him to pop up on the radar and then they’ll come round to get their greenbacks back.
Of course, many Americans would say our health service is far from perfect and I’d agree. I’d agree there are lots of things wrong with Britain.
I’d also agree, having been to every single state in the US – apart from Rhode Island – that there are good things about America. The hash browns, for instance, served up by Denny’s are delicious, you can turn right on a red light and er… well, I’m sure there’s a lot more but I can’t think of anything at the moment.
Among the things I don’t like is the way everyone over 15 stone now moves about in a wheelchair. As a result, it takes half an hour to get through even the widest door. And I really don’t like the way that every small town looks exactly the same as every other small town. Palmdale in California and Biloxi in Mississippi are nigh-on identical. They have the same horrible restaurants. The same mall. The same interstate drone. Live in either for more than a week and you’d be stabbing your own eyes with knitting needles.
But it’s the idiocracy that really gets me down. The constant coaxing you have to do to get anything done. ‘No’ is the default setting whether you want to change lanes on a motorway or get a drink on a Sunday. It’s like trying to negotiate with a donkey. Once, I urged a cop in Pensacola, Florida, to use his common sense and let me load a van in the no-loading zone, since the airport was shut and it would make no difference. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you don’t need common sense when you’ve got laws.’
That, I think, probably says it all.
Sunday 9 July 2006
School reports are agony for parents
For most people, childhood memories are dominated by cloudless summer days and lashings of Robins
on’s barley water. Not mine, though. Mine are dominated by the mornings when I’d come downstairs to find my school report had arrived.
Throughout the term I’d assured my parents that I’d been working hard, and that the small fire in the chapel had been nothing to do with me. But there, in the report, was solid, irrefutable proof that I hadn’t been working hard at all.
Even today, 30 years later, I can recite, verbatim, the comments from a history teacher. ‘Even if, as he claims, he was unwell, his mock exam looked like it had been written by someone who was trying to be deliberately stupid. Or who was four years old.’
I can recall, too, the way my parents looked as they thumbed through page after page of abuse and home truths. And also the look of utter bewilderment when the general studies master said I’d been a ‘quiet’ member of the set. This might have had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t been to a single one of his lessons. Because I’d been in the chapel, playing with petrol.
My father would point out calmly that I’d let the school down, the family down and that I’d let myself down. My mother would throw frying pans at me. And I’d sit there, unable to conceive of a more horrible experience.
Well, it turns out that there is something more horrible after all. Yes, it’s bad being the child in these situations, but I have now learnt that it’s even worse to be the parent.
In the early years of a child’s schooling, reports are fairly meaningless. You learn that your pride and joy has made a lovely paper plate without cutting her head off and that she has grown some watercress, and you swoon with joy.
But then, as common entrance approaches, everything changes. For 12 years you’ve known, with no question or shadow of doubt, that your child is the greatest, most brilliant and most popular human being in the whole of human history. His paper plates were magnificent and his watercress divine.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 7