‘It’s mission critical that we use blue-sky thinking and that we’re proactive, not reactive, if we’re to come up with a ballpark figure that we can bring to the table.’
Again, you raise an index finger to make a point. But you don’t know what that point might be, so you pour yourself another cup of winter-warming coffee broth, help yourself to another triangular tuna and cucumber sandwich and wait for the pastry-faced woman in culottes to finish.
‘We must maintain a client focus so that we can incentivise the team and monetise the deliverables, and only then can we take it to the next level.’
You look round the table at all the old hands, the sort of people who whip out their laptops every time they’re at an airport and know what a Wi-Fi looks like, and they’re all nodding sagely, so you stop yourself from actually saying: ‘I’m sorry but what the hell are you on about?’
Later on in the day, you ring the person who called the meeting and in less than a minute decide on a course of action. And then, when you get home, you wonder why it was necessary to have the meeting at all. So you can listen to a farmyard animal in a power suit turning nouns into verbs and talking rubbish for half an hour to mask the fact she hasn’t got a single cohesive thought in her head.
To get round this problem, a friend and I developed a new scheme to make meetings more interesting. We would give each other a band as we walked through the door and then we’d compete to see how many of their song titles we could lob into the conversation without anyone noticing.
That’s why, last week, I actually said: ‘Every breath you take is like an invisible sun. We are spirits in the material world, or, as they say in France, Outlandos d’Amour.’ And do you know what? Nobody batted an eyelid.
And nor did anyone cotton on when my friend replied by saying: ‘We’re on the top of the world looking down on creation, and we are calling occupants of interplanetary craft.’
Eventually, though, even this became wearisome so I went on holiday, but even in the Caribbean there was no escape. A fax arrived from my new business colleagues advising me that there was to be a conference call at 2 p.m. Barbados time between people in Los Angeles, Aspen, London and Cairo.
I’ve never felt so important in my whole life. Me? On a conference call? Spanning the globe? Wow. I was so excited that I completely forgot about it until 1.55 p.m., by which time I was very drunk, and on a sailing boat.
No matter, I dialled the number, entered the security pin I’d been given and was asked to state my name so I could be introduced. ‘Beep’ went the phone, and then on came an electronic voice to say: ‘Captain Jack Sparrow has joined the conversation.’
Conference calls are great. They’re exactly like a normal meeting in that nothing happens and nothing gets done and everyone talks rubbish, but you don’t have to sit there remembering not to fall asleep or what Culture Club did after ‘Karma Chameleon’.
You can just pour yourself another rum punch and look out of the porthole. At one point, when the boat went about, or whatever it is sailing boats do when they turn round, I fell off my chair, dropped the phone and couldn’t find it for five minutes, and when I finally rejoined the conversation nobody had even noticed I’d been away.
Unfortunately, one of the decisions made in a follow-up phone call to the man who’d hosted the conference chat was that we’d have to go to Los Angeles.
Hollywood. America. And have meetings, there, face to face with the people we hadn’t been talking about because they were in the box and we were outside it, at the top of a flagpole seeing which way the wind was blowing.
Gulp. American business meetings. That’d be scary. A whole new raft of power women and even more white-collar nonsense. I’d better get sober.
Strangely, however, the Americans have got meetings down to a fine art, which is probably why they have NASA and Microsoft and we have Betty’s tea shoppe. You walk in and the receptionist asks if you’d like some ‘wadder or something’. You are then ushered into a conference room where you say your piece, and when you’ve finished, their top man stands up, thanks you for coming and leaves.
They’ve realised that the meeting is useless for getting anything done, so they listen’n’go. And move straight to the follow-up phone call where the decisions are made.
I therefore have a new rule. If I go to a meeting, only I am allowed to speak. And then something happens.
Sunday 15 April 2007
Hell is a tent zip in the snow
I have spent the past three weeks in a tent. And I have decided that anyone who does this kind of thing for fun must be either nine years old or absolutely insane.
What disturbs me most of all is that all tenting equipment is obviously designed specifically to not work. Let us take the zip as a perfect case in point. For 47 years I have raised and lowered the flies in my trousers without getting it caught in the fabric once.
And yet, in the world of tenting, every single zip gets stuck all the time. So there you are, outside in the freezing cold, jiggling the damn thing backwards and forwards, knowing that with each tug, and each muttered expletive, more and more of the tent is being swallowed by the fastener.
Eventually, and often with the help of a knife, you get through what tentists laughably call the door – it’s a cat flap – and you are presented with your sleeping bag, into which you must climb as quickly as possible because tents are essentially heat exchangers.
They are always seven degrees colder than the ambient temperature outside. And that was a particular problem for me because on my tenting holiday it rarely rose above minus 17.
So, you dive into your bag, yank the zip and instantly the entire bag disappears into it. And you can’t fish it out because your fingers are bright blue and have become what a horse would call ‘hooves’.
To warm them up, you must light the stove. Simple, you might think. In the civilised world there are many burners that light at the touch of a button, or with the merest hint of a match. But this is tenting, so the stove you’ve been given is designed to not light at all for two hours, and then blow up in your face.
First of all, you must fill the fuel tank and then pump it to create some pressure.
That’s a) pointless and b) extremely dangerous in cold climates because skin sticks to metal and can be removed only with the aid of a chain saw.
Finally, though, after you’ve used 600 matches and emptied your Zippo, you get a flame. Which grows bigger and bigger until it engulfs the pressurised fuel tank.
This does at least mean some feeling returns to your hooves, which means you can feel the agony as you plunge your hand into the inferno and carry the bomb back through the slashed cat flap and into the snow outside. So now you have no heating, and your sleeping bag is still stuck in its own zip.
I do not believe that these design flaws can be accidental. I believe that people who manufacture tenting equipment deliberately make their products useless and dangerous because anyone who wants to live under canvas plainly wants their life to be as harsh and as uncomfortable as possible.
That’s why the tent and sleeping bag come in condoms that are slightly too small, so you can never get them back inside again.
It’s why your backpack and trousers have straps and fasteners that serve no purpose except to get tangled up in one another. It’s why the fabric for the modern tent is designed to burn with the savagery of petrol and flap noisily whenever there’s even the hint of a breeze.
And it’s why the sleeping bag is so slim that it is impossible – impossible, d’you hear – to do up the fastener once you’re inside.
You get it so far and then realise that if you keep going, your left hoof will end up deep inside your right nostril. So you attempt to zip it up from the outside, which means your entire arm is left sticking from the bag like the aerial on a satellite phone.
I didn’t find a single piece of tenting equipment, in three weeks, that worked properly. I had to eat from a plastic dog bowl that shattered when you
sat on it.
And when you’re trying to get out of a sleeping bag, with a frozen joint of lamb sticking out of your shoulder, in a tent that’s just a few inches tall, and lined with ice, and you’ve had no sleep because of the flapping, it is impossible not to sit on absolutely everything.
Then you have the mattress, which rolls up into an impressively small sausage. But it will not remain flat when it’s unfurled.
You have to put a weight on the far end, which means crawling into your tent with snowy boots. The snow then falls off, melts when your heater explodes and then freezes in the night so you awake to find you’ve been set in aspic.
Food? Well, obviously you could take beans and sausages. But no, tentists choose instead to feast on dried-up copies of the Guardian. You simply add water, which you get by melting snow, and hey presto, you dine on Polly Toynbee’s column garnished with a hint of George Monbiot.
You can’t even go for a pee properly because tenting trousers have no zip. God knows what they’d eat if they did. This means you must pull down each of the eight pairs you are wearing to keep out the cold.
And I can guarantee that when you pull them back up again one or two will remain below your arse, which makes walking difficult.
Needless to say, the only way you can do your number twos while tenting is to squat, like an animal.
And because tenting is so weak when it comes to personal hygiene and washing facilities, I came home after three weeks with a peculiar growth on my face.
Doctors tell me I may have grown a beard.
Sunday 13 May 2007
If you’re ugly you’ve got to be funny
As I career towards old age, there are many things which frighten me. All the hair on my head will start to grow out of my nose. My ear lobes will swell up. My bladder will cease to function. I will become even more baffled by new technology.
And then there will be the inevitable onset of cancer.
But the greatest fear I face is not that I might lose my sense of sight, touch or smell. No, it’s that people, once they reach the age of 50, seem to lose their sense of humour.
John Cleese is a prime example of this. One minute he’s strutting about in a Torquay hotel and the audience is reduced to Smash robot hysterics. The next he’s in a supermarket advert, barking at customers, and everyone is behind their sofas quietly dying of embarrassment.
Then you’ve got his old colleagues. Michael Palin is charming and warm, but as he trundles through India on yet another old train does he make you laugh? Eric Idle is responsible for Spamalot and that’s about as funny as a bout of chlamydia.
Terry Jones is wrapped up in 14 layers of Chaucer and we haven’t heard a squeak from Graham Chapman for years. Though this might have something to do with the fact that he’s dead.
Woody Allen springs to mind as well. In Sleeper and Play it Again, Sam, I honestly thought that I might need the services of a doctor to sew up my sides. But in his more recent films I’ve wanted to sew up his mouth. I’ve leant on funnier trees.
The funniest man I’ve ever seen on stage was Jasper Carrott. His act was so hysterical that halfway through I was taken out of the auditorium by a chap from the St John Ambulance because I had lost the ability to breathe. I honestly thought I was going to die. But is Jasper funny now? I doubt it.
And the reason for this, I’ve decided, is very simple: sex.
I remember vividly, back when I was at school, competing with a friend to chat up a girl. He was captain of the football team and was therefore equipped with a triangular torso, firm thighs and shoulders broad enough to double up as a runway for light aircraft. Me? Well, I looked like a telegraph pole on which a stork had made its nest.
The only way round this was to try and make the girl laugh. And so, even when she’d gone off with my footballing friend and was in the bushes, moaning at the glare from his sapphire-blue eyes, I was standing nearby prattling on about Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, horses with long faces and planes with only one parachute. This is the last, and indeed only, resort of the hideously deformed.
I mean it. Do you look at Stephen Fry and think ‘Phwoar’? No? So what about Ben Elton or Paul Whitehouse? Did you ever think Bernard Manning was Johnny Depp in a fat suit? Paul Merton is no prettier than the town from which he takes his name and Ian Hislop looks like he ought to spend his day in a wheel, squeaking.
I could go on, so I shall. Steve Coogan looks like a plumber. Jimmy Carr looks like a moon. Rowan Atkinson appears to have been made from polyurethane. And precisely because of this, they’re all funny.
They’ve all lost a girl to the captain of the football team. They’ve all stood in front of a mirror, thinking: ‘Well, there’s nothing for it. I shall have to be a homosexual.’ Or was that just me?
I think, and I hope I don’t get clobbered for this, that the evidence is even more acute for women. Jo Brand. Dawn French. Victoria Wood. Notice anything they have in common? Yes, you’re right! They’re all much funnier than Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley and Uma Thurman.
At dinner parties I look around at the yummy mummies in their short skirts and their flirty tops. And I hope and pray that I will end up sitting next to the fat bird, because that way there’s at least a chance that I’ll have a laugh.
So, if it’s true that good-looking people aren’t funny and that fat, ugly people are, then it stands to reason that humour is essentially used as a tool for whittling out a bit of sex that might not otherwise be available. And that brings me neatly to the problems when we reach 50.
No one, not even Sean Connery or Joan Collins, can stand in front of a mirror, naked, when they’re starting to sag and think ‘mmmm, yeah’.
I stand there and think, ‘How the bloody hell can a telegraph pole with a stork’s nest on top get pregnant?’
By rights, then, older people should try to compensate for their withered looks and wobbly skin by being funny. But what’s the point? Chances are you’re married; and anyway these days there are many, many things you would rather do at night than have sex. Sleeping. Reading. Being dangled from a tall building by what’s left of your hair, even.
So, if you’re not after a mate and you’re not motivated by the need for rumpy-pumpy every minute of the day, then you may as well give up trying to be funny and start writing Abba musicals.
The only hope that we all have is Viagra. Because it keeps the old chap working, even when everything else has broken down completely, it means there is still a point to making people laugh.
This probably explains why Adrian Gill can still dole out the giggles at the age of 52.
Sunday 20 May 2007
Why Brits make the best tourists
Can you imagine the horror of being able to read other people’s minds: to find out what they really think about you? Well, last week we were able to do just that, as 15,000 hoteliers from all over the world explained exactly what they thought of the British.
We harbour a cheery notion that Britain and its people are a shining beacon of hope and goodness to the dirtier and less well educated. We assume that when our glorious island nation is mentioned, people all over the world imagine us going to work in bowler hats and volunteering to be out in a game of cricket, way before the umpire has actually made up his mind. When they think of us, they think of Kenneth Kendall reading the news on the BBC. In a tie.
‘Fraid not. It turns out that, mostly, they think we’re arrogant, badly dressed, untidy, loud, drunk and nowhere near as much fun to have around as the Japanese.
It turns out that hotel staff in Corfu don’t actually like it when we do the conga through reception at two in the morning and then rush into the gardens with one another to catch chlamydia. They think this sort of thing is antisocial.
Further digging reveals that while we spend quite a lot of money while we’re on holiday, it’s mostly on beer, burgers and Satan’s favourite snack, Cheez Whiz.
This, according to another report, from the Lonely Planet guide, is because
we are all obsessed with celebrity, we worship people who have no talent, we’re all binge drinkers and that back at home there’s a general air of disillusionment in the wake of the London Tube bombings.
Small wonder that the people who write this book are lonely. You won’t get any friends if you mooch about all day in an Eeyore blanket of drizzle. Cheer up, for God’s sake.
The fact is that Britain, right now, is a jolly place to live. Tony Blair is going. Everyone’s house is worth a million pounds. And the summer, thanks to a few dedicated souls like me and that chap at Ryanair, is likely to be warm. That’s why we do the conga at two in the morning: because we’re happy. And that’s why the hoteliers don’t like us: because they’re jealous.
They have to live in a country where the wine’s made from creosote, the women don’t shave their armpits and you need to bribe the plumber with something from Faberge to get him to mend your dishwasher.
And they can’t cope when they see us lot bouncing into the hotel with our sexually liberated girlfriends and our big strong pounds.
I know this to be true because anyone who’s ever been abroad knows full well that on any international league table of bad behaviour, we are a long, long way from the bottom.
Have you ever shared a hotel swimming pool with a South African? What they like to do, and you’ve got to remember they’re all fairly big-boned, is climb to the top of the diving board and jump on your head. And as you helplessly flop about with a broken spine, the rest of their equally big-boned family hoots with derision and orders another round of Castle.
Or what about the Swedes? You think we can drink. Ooh you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen a party of Thors locusting their way through the swim-up bar. The only difference is that when we get drunk, we like to catch a venereal disease. When they get drunk, they like to commit suicide.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 17