Unfortunately, when we explained what that was to the children their crying became what is known among psychiatrists as hysteria. ‘They’re going to chop Geoffrey up in our field,’ they wailed.
Plainly, he had to be towed to a quiet spot, but I know from my experience with the seal that dead animals tend to come apart when they’re being dragged. So we had to borrow a forklift and, afterwards, the vet discovered that he’d had a heart attack.
That was a relief but we still had a dead donkey in the garden. Actually, don’t tell my children, but we had two halves of a dead donkey in the garden.
In the end we told the children that Geoff was going to a taxidermist so he could be stuffed and used in school nativity plays – neat, eh? – and then we called a local underground movement known simply as ‘The Hunt’.
Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the Heythrop.
They arrived in a souped-up black van, we put both of Geoffrey in the back and I gave them a hundred quid to take him away. Today, I suspect, he’s in their hounds, which when no one’s looking will use Geoff’s energy to kill foxes, so that they can’t attack and maim our children.
On that happy note I’d like to wish all of you a very happy Christmas, especially my editor who rang last week to ask if I’d write a column about Christmas shopping. He actually used the line, ‘Can you drop the dead donkey?’ Priceless.
Sunday 24 December 2006
Let’s all stay with Lord Manilow
When choosing a holiday destination, Ilisten to friends, examine data from the Met Office and think hard about where the nearest paparazzi photographer might be. What I don’t do is thumb through my record collection, pick out my favourite, and rent the lead singer’s villa. You probably know where I’m going with this: the extraordinary holiday locations chosen by Mr and Mrs Blair.
Recently, it has been Sir Cliff’s sumptuous villa in glittering Barbados and now, thanks to a wonky landing at Miami airport, we know he’s staying at a waterfront mansion owned by Field Marshal Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.
Of course, I doubt either of these choices came from His Tonyness.
Having been to a public school in the 1970s, I should imagine his preferred choice of holiday location might be the Dutch canalside house of Thijs van Leer of Focus, or maybe the organic bean farm now run by Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson.
Unfortunately, most of the rock stars to whom Tony undoubtedly listened in the 1970s are now tweedy landowners in Wiltshire who like to shoot anything that moves and drive very fast from grouse to grouse in Range Rovers. I can see them in their delightful Tuscan villas discussing the Boden catalogue with Dave and Sam, but I can’t imagine that they have much in common with Tony and Cherie.
So, we can deduce that they’re actually working their way through Cherie’s record collection. Next year, I imagine, it’ll be Lord Manilow’s penthouse in Vegas and then, perhaps, General James Last’s schloss in the Bavarian Alps.
I’m actually rather surprised by this. I’ve always had Tony clocked as Snowball, and Cherie as Napoleon, a steady hard-a-port hand on the tiller. So I’ve rather imagined that her musical tastes started at Billy Bragg, moved through Kirsty McColl and then sort of ended up with the Pogues.
Plainly, though, I’m wrong. She obviously goes down the middle of the road so firmly that I’m surprised she doesn’t have a bruised arse from running over all the Catseyes.
Anyway, a bit later than planned, I shall now get to the point of this new year missive: that you can learn an awful lot about someone from their choice of holiday destination.
In the past couple of years I’ve been to Corsica, Iceland and Botswana. Next year it’ll be Canada. So you know from this list that we’re not an entirely conventional family and that, as a result, we’d make good dinner-party guests.
Likewise, if you meet someone who’s been to Ibiza you will know straight away that they are drug addicts and nymphomaniacs, and that if they’ve just come back from the Greek islands they are either homosexual or their husband has recently run off with his pneumatically breasted secretary.
Anyone who goes to France votes Conservative. Anyone who goes to Italy votes Labour, and anyone who goes to Spain has, at some point in the recent past, held up a post office. The only person who ever went to Germany for a vacation was Arthur Scargill.
Those who go on long-haul holidays can be split into two neat groups. If they go west they are likely to be shallow, materialistic and fitted with hair that isn’t entirely normal. Those who go east will be interesting, dynamic and have unruly pubes.
Dubai is right out. It’s all very well having an indoor ski slope in the desert and guaranteed sunshine and lots of things to do in the empty quarter, but you cannot drink outside your hotel. And I’m sorry, but anyone who puts quad-biking and wadi-bashing above the need for a glass of something chilled is plainly out of their tiny minds.
So what about taking a holiday at home? Tricky this, because obviously Rock is tremendous if you’re 19 and you’re being propelled through life by a cocktail of testosterone and cannabis. And Norfolk is also wonderful if you have developed a television programme and you want to meet commissioning editors in the local oyster bar.
But the worry I have about people who go on holiday in Britain is that they might be caravanists or, worse, environmentalists. They might think, in other words, that by not going on an aeroplane they have in some way saved the life of a Tasmanian butterfly.
Happily, however, Napoleon and Snowball have rather blown this argument into the middle of next week by going to stay chez Lord Sir Field Marshal Gibb.
We know from the plane crash that they did not go to Florida on an organic sailing boat, and we know from the press coverage that they are being transported to and from the Big Pink restaurant in a big black Cadillac SUV.
His Tonyness has told us again and again that man’s effect on the environment, and in particular on climate change, is large and growing. He’s asked us to reduce our carbon footprints. And so, while we’re all at home eating our low-energy light bulbs, it’s a bit annoying to find that to satisfy his wife’s lust for the Bee Gees he’s straddling the Atlantic with a big carbon stomp.
In the olden days Labour leaders were more careful. Harold Wilson holidayed in the Isles of Scilly, Michael Foot liked Venice and John Smith would go walking in Scotland. Not because he wanted to meet Sheena Easton but because he liked the mountains.
Of course, back then, all the animals were equal. But now, thanks to Napoleon and Snowball, some really are more equal than others.
Sunday 31 December 2006
Brought down by bouncing bangers
Last week Britain severed its last tie with the 1950s. The monarchy has modernised itself. Homosexuality is now desirable. And Dave doesn’t wear a tie.
But, until now, we’ve never been able to completely free ourselves from our grimy, black-and-white, music-hall past, thanks to the umbilical cord that is Little Chef.
Little Chef seemed to exist in a world of post-war catering, where the banana was considered exotic and nylon tights were decadent and risque. The coffee was brown, simply because the main ingredient was mud. But now you can rejoice because last week it went into administration. And now it’s been sold.
According to press reports, 20 million people a year visited Little Chef’s chain of restaurants. I bet they did. They’d walk in, think they’d gone through some kind of time portal and that Tommy Trinder might leap out of the next booth, and then they’d not so much walk straight out again as flee.
I know a very great deal about Little Chef and its picture-book menus because its restaurants were always a handy main-road rendezvous point when I had to meet film crews in the back end of beyond. The only thing I ever found to eat in there was the sugar.
Even film crews, who are known throughout the civilised world for their capacity to eat abs
olutely anything, up to and including wheelie bins and manure, would draw the line at the Little Chef all-day breakfast.
There was a letter in the Sun last week from a woman who plainly shares their views. She ordered an omelette and was told they hadn’t come in that morning. Apparently, they were delivered frozen and then simply heated up.
It’s lucky she didn’t go for a Little Chef sausage or she’d still be in there, wondering what on earth they’d made it from. Mashed-up tennis balls probably, because, and I’ve tried this, the Little Chef sausage is the only sausage in the world which, when thrown to the floor, will bounce.
Then there’s Little Chef’s ‘traditional’ fish’n’chips. No no no no no. You look at it on your plate and you think: ‘Jesus H. Christ, did a cod really give up its life to end up here?’ And then you put it in your mouth and you think: ‘No, it didn’t. I don’t know what this is but it sure as hell isn’t a fish.’
To me, it tasted like a dishcloth.
Sometimes, my wife would have the salad which, this being !953, was a bit of lettuce and some tomato. Celery, in the world of Little Chef, was a bit too la-di-da. And eggs in their time zone were, of course, powdered.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine that you could go too far wrong with lettuce and tomatoes.
Oh yes you can. Especially if you select only the oldest lettuces that have been left in the sun for too long, and tomatoes which have that squishy ‘Best before the Boer war’ texture.
What were the management thinking? They must have known that all over Britain people would get up in a morning, have some espresso from their zinc kitchen appliances, then drive out of their towns, past the internet cafes and the Bang & Olufsen centres, while listening to some RnB on their MP3 interfaces.
So what made the bosses think that these cool, funky, twenty-first-century people would get 30 miles down the road and think: ‘Ooh, what I fancy for elevenses is a taste of the 1950s’?
It’s only 15 months since Little Chef last changed hands. It was bought by what was called ‘the People’s Restaurant Group’.
One of the backers was a chap who’d been on the Gumball Rally, sold surfer gear to dudes, and helped fund Cafe Rouge. A modern sort of guy, you might imagine.
But what did they do with Little Chef? The worst thing. They slashed the prices so that customers could enjoy a traditional fishcloth’n’chips, plus a mug of tea, for £4.99.
Do the maths. How much for staff costs, for heating, for rent and rates? How much for the tea, the water, the milk, the sugar, the potatoes, the peas and the batter? Now deduct the profit margins and you’re left with the inescapable conclusion that somehow he was buying each fish for a unit of currency so small that it doesn’t exist. It was ration-book catering for the Jamie Oliver generation.
John Major probably gave them hope. Famously, the former prime minister admitted once that he liked Little Chef. But of course he would, because John wanted to go back to basics.
In his 1993 speech, he urged us all to gather round the Light Programme every night, and have side partings. This was a man who thought that putting Currie in his mouth was dangerous and exciting.
But, as we now know, he was out of step, and the administrators had to be summoned. So what should the new owners do to jazz the place up?
Well, all of us fancy the idea of a proper fry-up, so why not simply take the Little Chef formula and do it like the war is over. Get your eggs from the back of a hen, use bread that doesn’t contain any Crimplene, and serve sausages that are made from dead pigs.
You will also need someone to cook it, rather than heat it up. Get a Bulgarian and don’t worry about the cost. People have come in a car. They can afford it.
In essence, don’t make a trip to Nottingham a trip back in time.
Sunday 7 January 2007
TV heaven is an upside-down skier
With the demise of Dibley’s vicar, home-grown comedy continues its downward spiral, and now, to compound the problem, they’ve neutered the funniest programme ever shown on British television: Ski Sunday.
I like skiing very much. And the thing I’ve always liked most of all about it is flopping into an armchair and watching other people do it for me.
Ski Sunday was always the highlight of my viewing week. In the olden days you had David Vine in the commentary booth, talking us through the brilliance of some tanned and muscular young man from Norway.
You’d marvel at how he made it look so easy, his skintight suit revealing every sinewy twitch and, according to my wife, whether he was a cavalier or a roundhead.
But let’s be honest, all of us, really, were waiting for the falls.
Oh sweet Jesus. The falls. They were the best accidents a man can have without actually exploding, and they always went on for hours, a tangle of flesh and ego bouncing down the mountain until it crashed into the crowd in a technicolour explosion of joy, Gore-Tex and snow.
And better still, you knew that after the paramedics had collected all of the limbs and hosed most of the blood off the piste, you were going to get it all over again in super-voyeur slow motion. And it would all be set to David Vine’s completely humourless commentary, which somehow made it funnier still.
We watch the Horse of the Year Show for the same reason. Not because we want to see Sanyo Music Centre score a clean round but because we hope it will brake suddenly, sending Harvey Smith through the fence in an ear-splitting jangle of splintered wood and bone.
Bernie Ecclestone probably thinks we watch Formula One because we want to see Michael Schumacher’s supreme car control. Wrong. If he wants the big viewing figures back he must arrange that in every race some floppy-haired Brazilian playboy disintegrates.
Skiing, however, has always been the best because the contestants are going so fast, and they are protected from the forces of nature by nothing more substantial than a big Durex. We could actually see their arms coming off.
So, a single half-hour of Ski Sunday provided more naked laughs than a million crying babies falling in paddling pools on You’ve Been Framed.
Nowadays, however, the show is presented by two greasy-haired dudes who I suspect may be snowboardists.
Now snowboarding, so far as I’m able to determine, is a sport where you dress up in clothes from the Dawn French Baggy Collection and then ingest as much cannabis as possible. The last man still making sense is the winner. This is not great TV.
Mind you, in last weekend’s episode of Ski Sunday, we were treated to the edifying spectacle of one young chap from America who spent an age plugging an iPod into his ears and selecting the right track before setting off. Much to my intense pleasure, he fell over almost immediately.
Amazingly, the commentary team didn’t seem to realise that any sport where the participants wear iPods doesn’t really cut the mustard. So instead of pointing out that the competitor was an imbecile, we cut straight to a link where one of the presenters was addressing us while skiing backwards through a forest.
I can’t tell you what he was on about because, like absolutely every one of the show’s viewers, I was on my knees, praying to God that he’d slither backwards into a tree. More than a long life full of health and happiness, I wanted to see him try to finish the piece to camera with half a fir tree poking out of his bottom.
This is the whole point of skiing. We don’t flog to the Alps every winter simply because we like the mountain views, or because we want to perfect the stem christie. Mainly, we go because we know that snow’s slippery, and that there’s a good chance we’ll see someone fall over.
Why do you think YouTube is so popular? Because of the irony, or the subtle use of hyperbole in a situation that’s both morally uplifting and tragic? No. It’s banana-skin humour: a million billion clips of people falling off bicycles, and as often as not catching fire.
The Office and Alan Partridge were both brilliantly written. My respect for Gervais and Coogan is boundless. But did you ever laugh while watching Dave Brent? I doubt it. Not like you
laugh when someone comes a cropper on Deal or No Deal, or trips over a paving stone in the town centre and falls flat on his face.
This is what the Ski Sunday team seem to have forgotten. They showed us how much flare should be in evidence in our skiing pants, and how the glove should be worn in relation to the cuff. And all the time, I kept thinking: ‘Oh for God’s sake. Show me a Norwegian falling over.’
Instead, we got a whole segment on snowboarding, and that won’t do. There’s nothing unusual in a stoned Finn getting all wobbly, because that’s what people do when they’ve had a spliff. And my wife doesn’t like the big clothes because, she says, she can’t see their tackle.
The whole point of Ski Sunday is to take the ludicrous art of skiing and present it in a sensible fashion. It’s the juxtaposition of the sane and the insane that works. Someone falling over is brilliant. Someone falling over and then pretending they meant it to happen: that’s comedy gold.
Sunday 14 January 2007
No pain no gain (and no point)
On the surface, the human being appears to be a flawed design. Obviously, our brains are magnificent and our thumbs enable us to use spanners. Something an elephant, for instance, cannot do.
However, there seems to be something wrong with our stomachs. It doesn’t matter how many pints of refreshing beer we cram into them, they always want just one more roast potato. And then, instead of ejecting all the excess fat, they feed it to our hearts and veins, and we end up all dead.
Of course, we can use willpower to counter these demands, but this makes us dull and pointless. You need only look at the number of people in lonely-hearts columns who neither drink nor smoke to know I’m right. If they did, they’d have a husband. It’s that simple.
What I tend to do when it comes to the business of being fit is not bother. I eat lots, and then I sit in a chair. The upside to this is that I have a happy family and many friends. The downside is that I wobble and wheeze extensively while going to the fridge for another chicken drumstick.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 14