Unfortunately, all this now has to stop because in April I’m going on an expedition. I can’t tell you where because it’s a secret but I can tell you that it’s full of many perils, such as being eaten. And that if it all goes wrong, I may have to walk many miles over the most difficult terrain you can imagine.
Last week, then, I was sent to a training camp, where the instructor, a former Royal Marine, simply could not fathom what unholy cocktail of lard and uselessness lay beneath my skin. The upshot was simple.
Unless I did something dramatic about my general level of fitness, I would not be going. So I bought a rowing machine.
It cost a very great deal of money and is bigger than a small van. Modelled, I presume, on something from the KGB’s cellars, you tie your feet to a couple of pedals and then move backwards and forwards until your shoulders are screaming so loudly that they are actually audible.
According to the digital readout – powered by my exertions, I might add – I had covered 35 yards. This was well short of the four kilometres I’d planned, so I had to grit my teeth and plough on.
Eventually, after several hours, I’d made enough electricity to power Glasgow and I’d reached my goal, so I tried to dismount. But it was no good. My magnificent brain was so stunned by what had just happened that it had lost control of my legs. I also felt dizzy and sick. Fondly, I also imagined that I had a tingling in my left arm and chest pains.
Part of the problem is that to go on my expedition, I must be six pounds overweight. This means losing a stone so I have been living on a diet of carrots and Coke Zero, which simply doesn’t provide enough calories to rock back and forth in my conservatory for half a day.
Actually, conservatory is the wrong word. I had produced so much sweat while moving about that, technically, it was a swimming pool.
Now one of the things I should explain at this point is that I am always hugely enthusiastic about new projects, but only for a very short time. If I was to get fit and thin, it needed to be done fast, before I lost interest, so once some feeling had returned to my legs, I went for a walk. And since then time has passed in a muddy blur of cycling, trudging, rowing and discovering that it’s uphill to my local town, and uphill on the way back as well.
This has made me dull, thick and, because there’s no beer or wine in my system at night, an even bigger insomniac. And all the while I have this sneaking suspicion that what I’m doing is biologically unhealthy.
Pain is designed to tell the body something is wrong and that you’d better do something fast to make it go away. So why would you get on a rowing machine and attempt to beat what God himself has put there as a warning? That’s like refusing to slow down when an overhead gantry on the motorway says ‘Fog’.
Today, then, my magnificent brain is questioning the whole philosophy of a fitness regime. If God had meant us to have a six-pack, why did he give us the six pack?
In the olden days, people had to run about to catch deer so they all had boy-band torsos and good teeth.
But now, we Darwin to work in a car. Trying to look like a twelfth-century African is as silly as a seal trying to regrow its legs.
No, really. The thing about evolution is that each step along the way has a point. Cows developed udders so they could be plugged into milking machines. And humans developed the remote-control television so they could spend more time sitting down.
Fitness fanatics should take a lead from nature. Nobody looks at water and suggests it would be more healthy if it spent 20 minutes a day trying to flow uphill and nobody suggests a lion could catch more wildebeest if it spent less of its day lounging around.
Plainly, then, our stomachs are designed to demand food and feed fat to our arteries for a reason. I don’t know what the reason might be but I suspect it may have something to do with global warming. Everything else does.
Sunday 21 January 2007
The end is nigh, see it on YouTube
I have the most horrible feeling that the only possible conclusion to the problem of Muslim extremism – and I’m looking 30 or more years down the line here – is mass deportation and an all-new cold war between Mecca and Rome.
I am also fearful that unless we stop thinking of ways to prevent global warming, and start to address the problems it will cause when it gets here, our children are going to finish their days in an overcrowded, superheated vision of hell.
Where they can’t even get a cold drink, because all the corner shopkeepers have been made to go and live in Pakistan.
Unless, of course, America goes bust in the meantime… which it will. It is a mathematical certainty, unless George W. Bush announces, today, a tax hike for both individuals and companies of 69 per cent or he cuts federal spending to zero. Not just for a month or two. But for ever.
Since George Bush is unlikely to do either, the world’s biggest economy will collapse, which means we can’t rely on Uncle Sam when your neighbourhood mullah beats your daughter with a stick for not going to school in a tablecloth. Because it’s 47°C out there and getting hotter, and Jonathon Porritt won’t let you have air-conditioning.
Strangely, however, my biggest fear for the future of the planet and the well-being of our children is YouTube.
At present it is full, mostly, of young men falling off their bicycles and catching fire. But in addition to this you can log on if you wish to see next week’s episode of 24.
This means the producers of 24 have gone to all the trouble of making a show, and paying the actors, and getting all those phones to go ‘beep beep eeoooh’ and then finding that no television company in the world is all that bothered about screening it, because everyone’s seen it already on the web.
Naturally, the company that makes 24 – and I suppose I should point out that it’s Fox, which is part of News Corporation, the parent company of this newspaper – has started proceedings against YouTube.
Fine, you might think. YouTube will be forced to treat the copyright laws with a bit more respect and that will be that. Except it won’t. Because the internet’s like mercury, so as soon as it becomes impossible to post copyrighted material on YouTube, some other computer nerd in Bangladesh will, for an outlay of 35p, start a new video-sharing site. And you’ll be able to post it there.
This morning there are 921 Jeremy Clarkson clips on YouTube, for which, obviously, I receive not a penny. Of course I could sue them – and now they’re owned by Google I think I might – but then the 921 clips would simply appear on the new sharing site based in Bangladesh. And what’s the point of suing someone whose only assets are a laptop and a loincloth?
The upshot is that films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, songs, anything published or recorded, can be put on the internet. And the person who published it or recorded it doesn’t get any money. So what’s the point of publishing or recording anything?
Obviously, if Jonathon Porritt were to write a book, it would be jolly funny to buy the first copy and put it all online, so he ended up with a royalty cheque for 50p. But it’s not so funny if you are Jonathon Porritt.
At present, everyone is obsessed with the internet. Every large media company in the world is investing millions in their websites and not one, so far as I can tell, has even the remotest idea of how it can possibly generate any money.
A prime example is iTunes. It doesn’t. Apparently, Apple doesn’t make a penny from the music you download to your computer. But if you want to put that onto a portable device you have to buy an iPod, and they make lots of dosh from that.
It’s a brilliant wheeze, but now the Norwegian ombudsman has decided that Apple must make its loss-making music library available to anyone, no matter what sort of hardware they have. France and Germany are thinking of following suit. And if the rest of the world falls into line, that’s pretty much that for Apple.
It’s all a nonsense anyway, because there are countless sites out there in cyberspace where you can download music for nothing and then put it onto whatever sort of MP3 player tak
es your fancy.
Small wonder that last week Music Zone, a chain of Manchester-based record shops, went belly up. Who would buy a CD these days when with two or three clicks they can have it for nothing? That’s as idiotic as saving up for a BMW motorcycle when you live in Branscombe.
And it’s not just the media that are under threat. Why go to a doctor when there’s NHS Direct? Why have sex when there’s always some bird in Latvia who’s happy to get her knickers off? Why buy an encyclopaedia when there’s Wikipedia (apart from the fact that everything on Wikipedia is wrong)? Why go to Tesco when you can shop online? Estate agents. Property developers. Motorcycle dispatch riders. They’ve all had it.
The only people I can think of who won’t lose their jobs to the internet are those who empty cesspits. And nobody seems to have spotted this.
One day, of course, they will. The world will wake up and realise it’s unemployed; that we’ve all been terminated by machines. And please don’t try to argue that men will always triumph over machinery because we can always turn it off. Because that’s the thing with the internet. You can’t.
Sunday 28 January 2007
Robbie and I know about pills
I wish to state from the outset that, mostly, I have no problem with people taking drugs. If you want to shovel a ton of coke up your nose before going to the Brits, that’s fine by me. Just so long as I don’t have to sit next to you.
In fact, I read last week that Robbie Williams has checked into rehab because he’s getting through a handful of happy pills, 36 espressos, 60 cigarettes and 20 Red Bulls every day, and I thought ‘Pussy’. If you substitute the happy pills for Nurofen, that’s my daily diet as well, and I’m fine. ‘Fine, d’you hear.’ Apart from the fainting.
However, I must say at this point that I intensely dislike all drugs that affect my ability to think properly. You see people in the garden at parties, hiding behind trees, claiming loudly that Jesus is out there too, and wants to eat them. And you think, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ And why are you now in the fridge, sprinkling frozen peas onto a sherry trifle?
I once saw a group of people who’d taken some magic mushrooms, lying on the floor laughing hysterically at a tube of toothpaste. And toothpaste, so far as I can tell, has exactly the same comedic properties as Russell Brand.
Magic mushrooms, then, do not make you clever, or horny, or buzzy, all of which would be fine. They make you mental, and that’s not fine at all.
I don’t even like to take alcohol in such large quantities that no matter how carefully I marshal my thoughts into a coherent sentence they come out as a stream of incoherent gibberish.
Once, in Houston, Texas, I arrived back at my very large hotel and couldn’t remember either what room I was in or my name. So I had to spend the whole night trying my key in each of the doors, a job made doubly hard because they each appeared to have 16 or 17 locks. Fun? No, not really, unless the alternative is being eaten by a shark.
The worst drug, though, by a mile, is the common or garden sleeping pill. I tried one once, on a flight from Beijing to Paris, and was so removed from anything you might call reality that to this day I have no recollection of the emergency landing we made in Sharjah. Being so out of it that you can sleep through a plane crash: that’s bloody frightening.
So last weekend, when I was offered a couple of pills for the flight back to London from South Africa, I smiled and said no. But the paramedic was very pretty and very persuasive and said they were only antihistamines rather than proper sleeping pills, so I relented and as the plane took off popped them into my mouth.
The first indication that something was wrong came 20 minutes into the Martin Scorsese film I was watching. It didn’t make any sense. Mark Wahlberg had become Leonardo DiCaprio who, in turn, looked just like Matt Damon. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t care. And then I fell into such a deep sleep that, legally, doctors would have been able to remove my spleen for transplant.
The next thing I knew we had landed at Heathrow and Richard Hammond – or it could have been Matt Damon – was shaking my shoulder, pointing out that I had to get off. ‘This isn’t the Circle line,’ he said. ‘You can’t just sleep till your stop comes around again.’
I vaguely remember collecting a bag from the carousel – I think it was mine – and driving into central London to the accompaniment of many blown horns and harsh words. And I dimly recall climbing into bed thinking, ‘I’ll just have an hour’s kip before I go to work.’
And then it was five hours later, and I still wasn’t entirely sure how the world worked. I stared at my coffee machine for what must have been 20 minutes until the sheer complexity of the thing made me feel all weepy. So I went to work, made a mess of everything, and then went home for more sleep.
I’d love to report that the next day I felt refreshed, but in fact everything was worse. I wanted to be well, but I couldn’t shake off the immense soggy blanket that had been laid on my head. Or the dead horse that had been nailed to my back.
And do you know what? I’d only taken a couple of anti-histamine tablets. Whereas in Britain 16 million full-strength sleeping-pill prescriptions are issued every year.
Only some of which go to Robbie Williams.
Research estimates that anything up to 1.75 million people are going through life in a state that puts them somewhere in the middle of the River Styx.
Which certainly explains why I meet so many bores in the course of a normal day.
Technically, anyone on temazepam is not really what scientists would call ‘alive’.
Certainly, I would like to see a law imposed whereby anyone who takes a prescription for sleeping pills is forced to hand over their driving licence. And their children, for that matter.
You may write to me saying that you have trouble nodding off at night but I have no sympathy because I too lie in bed every night, in a fug of smoking primrose oil, with a tummy full of lettuce, counting sheep, and I can’t sleep either.
But I know that getting through the next day on half an hour’s shut-eye is better than trying to get through it with the reaction times, humour and conversation of a boulder.
Sunday 18 February 2007
Drip-drip-drip of a revolution
The news last week that olive oil, Marmite and porridge cannot now be advertised during television programmes aimed at children confirms something I’ve suspected for a few months. There’s a revolution going on in Britain and no one seems to have noticed.
When the French and Russian proletariat rose up against the middle and upper classes, they made a lot of noise and used pitchforks. Whereas here the revolutionaries are using stealth and a drip-drip-drip policy of never-ending legislation.
It started when they let ramblers trample all over your flowerbeds and then, of course, there was hunting. We know that the antis couldn’t really have cared less about the well-being of foxy woxy, but they hated, with a passion, the well-heeled country folk who charged about on their horses shouting tally-ho.
Then came the attack on four-wheel-drive cars. ‘It’s the environment,’ they smiled, but it’s no such thing. Otherwise they’d be up north taxing people with clapped-out Ford Orions and telling fat people in council houses to get out of the chip shop and lag their bloody lofts.
No, they go after Chelsea Tractors because these are symbols of middle-class success. You have to remember that trade unionists and anti-nuclear campaigners didn’t go away. They just morphed into eco-mentalists because they realised that global warming was a better weapon than striking, or doing lesbionics for mother Russia in Berkshire.
Think about it. They tell you not to go to Tuscany this summer, and they throw withering looks at the Ryanair flights to Gascony. But when Kentucky Fried Chicken starts advertising a bucket of supper with disposable plates and non-biodegradable plastic cutlery so you don’t have to get your fat arse out of your DFS sofa and wash up, do we hear a murmur? You can cup your ears as much as you like but the answer is no.
But Marmite, porridge, raisins, cheese and manuka honey? ‘Fraid not. This is what middle-class kids eat so it’s all wrong, and now it can’t be advertised on television in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, you have John Prescott insisting that each new housing development can only get a planning green light if it ‘spoils some Tory bastard’s view’.
It gets worse. Ken Livingstone has not extended the congestion charge into Tower Hamlets or Newham. Nope. He’s gone for Kensington and Chelsea. And we learnt last week of plans to turn Sloane Square, the epicentre of middle-class shopping and conviviality, into a tree-free crossroads.
I’ve checked and strangely there are no plans to build a new road through the statue of Harold Wilson in the north’s equivalent of Sloane Square – George Square in Huddersfield.
There are, however, plans afoot to give Janet Street-Porter and others of a Gore-Tex disposition access to a 10-yard-wide corridor around all of Britain’s 2,500-mile coastline. So you worked hard all your life and saved up enough to buy a bit of seclusion by the sea? Well, sorry, but Natural England, a sinister-sounding bunch, has advised DEFRA, which sounds like something the Nazis might have dreamt up, that your garden should be confiscated and that there should be a ‘presumption against’ giving you any compensation.
You see what I mean? On its own, that’s no big deal. But lob everything else into the mix and it becomes clear that traditional Britain is under attack. It’s porridge and Jonathan Ross’s back garden today, but tomorrow Mrs Queen will be transported to Scotland and summarily shot. You mark my words.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 15