So, girls, do you want that sort of thing at home? Really? No? Well, get down to the petrol station, then, and buy some bloody stockings.
You may say that tights are practical and warm but have you seen what they do to a bank robber’s face?
And hold-ups won’t do either. Thanks to all that elasticated rubber, they ruin the shape of your thighs and, in all probability, cut off the blood supply to your feet, causing gangrene. And no man fancies a girl, no matter how sparkling her eyes and wit might be, if she is gangrenous.
Pop socks, meanwhile, would be completely banned if I were in power. And anyone found wearing them would be made to parade in nothing else through their local town, and then shot.
It must be stockings, with a suspender belt, because what this combination does is mask everything that doesn’t matter and lay bare everything that does. A picture is nice, but before you hang it on the wall it needs a frame.
And apart from anything else, if you flash your stocking tops at a man you can, and I mean this literally, get him to do anything you want. Unless you have the figure of a bison, obviously, in which case he won’t do anything at all. Because he will be too busy being sick.
Assuming, however, you have legs which clearly belong on a human, you only need let a man know you’re wearing stockings and you will be empowered to a point you may have thought impossible.
I honestly believe that if David Milibandilegs really wanted to solve this Russian crisis, he could simply ask Rene Russo to re-enact that scene from the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and Putin would have the Litvinenko murder suspect on the next flight to London.
And please, let’s not have any of this ‘ooh, stockings make us sex objects’ nonsense because that simply isn’t true.
We all saw Sharon Stone cross her legs in Basic Instinct and we all tittered in a schoolboy way. But when Rene popped a stockinged leg from that split skirt, I damn nearly fainted with admiration at the size of her brain.
Plainly, she’d worked out that what she really needed to gain control over the entire New York police department was not a degree from Harvard. But a pair of £4.99 stockings from Pretty Polly. That makes her smart. As well.
Sunday 22 July 2007
Save rural Britain – sell it to the rich
For the past 19 years the European Union has argued that it’s expensive and wasteful to run a grain mountain. So, to get round the problem, it’s been paying farmers large lumps of our money to grow nothing at all.
It’s called the set-aside policy and I’ve always hated its communist overtones.
So I should have been delighted yesterday when I heard that this autumn it’s expected to be abolished. But I’m not. I’m filled with an awful sadness, a sense that something truly terrible is about to happen.
The problem is that unlike the rest of the world, where all the most beautiful views were created by nature, here in England almost all the countryside was made by man.
If you gaze up Swaledale it’s the labyrinth of drystone walls that mark it out as special. If you scan the Vale of Burford it’s the patchwork of fields that make it all so splendid. And, of course, the last time Country Life had a competition to find the best view in England it was won by a scene that had Salisbury Cathedral parked slap bang in the middle.
Great. But now 1.2 million acres of Britain, which for the past 19 years have been sitting around doing nothing, have suddenly got to become economically viable again.
This is a huge chunk of land. The National Trust only owns about 620,000 acres.
Mrs Queen’s farming land only runs to 110,000 acres. Add them together and you are still short of what’s currently set aside for yellowhammers and lapwings. And what must soon start to generate cash.
You can forget the notion of it all being covered in barley or lavender. There just isn’t the demand. And you can forget grassland for cows and sheep because these days there are too many stupid vegetarians to make that work.
So now put yourselves in the stout working boots of Johnny Farmer. You’ve got 70 acres down by the bottom pond and you’ve got to think of something that’ll make it pay.
Some will be lucky. They will be given the equivalent of a lottery cheque in the shape of planning permission to build 400 new executive homes for people in IT and call centres. But some won’t. And what if you’re in this camp? How long’s it going to take before you realise the answer is to be found in the country’s current obsession with global bloody warming?
ScottishPower announced recently that some of its power stations will soon be running on willow and cereal. The crops will take up a staggering 12 per cent of Scotland’s agricultural land – but will replace only 5 per cent of the coal currently used. Pretty soon, then, the Lowlands will start to look like Winnipeg.
Meanwhile, in Wales every single south or westerly facing escarpment is being smothered in wind farms.
Giant tubular bird mincers that whir and moan 24 hours a day and eventually, after a year or so, produce just enough energy to light up Mrs Llewellyn’s bedside lamp.
Then there’s England, which will be smothered with so many polytunnels it’ll start to look like the freezer cabinet of an American supermarket. Oh, and the bits that aren’t under polythene will be smothered in a yellow sea of asthma, bronchitis and eczema as our friend in the stout boots realises that the only crops anyone wants these days are the ones that you can put into the petrol tank of your infernal Toyota Prius.
In other words, to save the sky we will completely wreck the land.
There’s no point turning to Gordon Brown for help because he represents some godforsaken pebble-dashed constituency in Scotland, lives in Westminster and believes that everything in between is full of Tory bastards who need burying in executive homes, polythene and asthma. And that all their horses should be fed through an eco-windmill.
Nor can we rely on the Campaign to Protect Rural England. It’s terribly noble, especially now it has Bill Bryson as its president, but the simple fact is that it took it 20 years to get the government to save the nation’s hedgerows. On that basis, saving 1.2 million acres would take it about 4,000 years.
So, as usual, it falls to me to come up with a plan. And I have.
You may have read recently that Sir Tom Hunter, who is a businessman, decided to give £1 billion to charity because he feels the gap between rich and poor is now too wide. This is all very worthy and they will probably give him another knighthood.
However, Sir Sir Tom is wrong. What he should do is spend £1 billion buying up as much of the countryside as possible. And then he should encourage the rich to become richer so they can do the same.
I even suggest that we tax the poor, who cannot buy land, and give the money to the wealthy so they can buy even more.
No, really. If the land is taken out of the hands of the farmers, who earn on average £10,000 a year, and bought by private individuals, the need to make money will be shoved aside by the need for better aesthetics.
And not only would the countryside look better, there would be no overproduction of crops, no intensive farming, no need for set-aside payments, no more polythene or windmills. There would be a much greater diversity of animals and birds because they won’t all be choked to death by the oilseed rape, and the few remaining miners could continue to produce coal for the power stations.
And the quality of cheese in our supermarkets would improve.
Everyone wins – except for Janet Street-Porter, and she doesn’t count.
Sunday 29 July 2007
Dunked by dippy floating voters
I’m confused. When I left for a short working trip to Spain io days ago Gordon Brown was languishing in the polls and everyone knew that, at the next general election, Tory golden boy and all round floppy-haired good guy David Cameron would win.
This made perfect sense because Gordon’s jaw doesn’t work properly, he has no discernible sense of humour and the charisma of a boulder. And what’s more, in the past io years, h
e has been number two in a government that has almost completely ruined Britain.
Today you can’t land unless the tray table is up, you can’t smack your children, you can’t smoke in a pub, you can’t take shampoo on a plane, you can’t climb a ladder if you’re a policeman, you can’t eat more than six grams of salt a day, you can’t urge your dogs to kill a rat, you can’t sell food unless you explain on the packet precisely what’s in it and where it came from, you can’t reverse without a banksman, you can’t go to work unless you have a yellow high-visibility jacket, you can’t have an operation if you smoke, you can’t tell Irish jokes to your friends, you can’t say ‘ginger beer’ on television, you can’t talk on your mobile phone in a traffic jam, you can’t sit on a coach unless you’re wearing a seatbelt and you can’t drive a boat if you’ve had a beer.
Of course, you can’t blow up an airport terminal building either, and that makes sense. But then you cannot blow up someone’s armbands at a municipal swimming pool. And that doesn’t.
David Cameron, meanwhile, has never done anything to annoy you. In fact, so far as I can tell, he has never done anything at all.
So why, then, when I got back from Spain, had he somehow become public enemy number one?
What the hell had happened?
It must have been something dramatic because the opinion polls were suggesting a massive swing in Gordon’s favour. When I left, the only people who said they’d vote for him were his wife and two former steelworkers in Sheffield. But when I got back he had nearly 40 per cent of the vote in the bag and the bounce showed no sign of abating.
Had Gordon suddenly decided to abolish taxes and give away a free George Clooney to any woman who buys two books of stamps? Or had David Cameron announced that he wants to eat anyone who doesn’t earn at least £150,000 a year?
I checked back through a stack of newspapers and could find no evidence of either thing. A shark had appeared off Cornwall, someone with pretty knickers had left the Big Brother house, it had stopped raining – and that was about it.
I therefore checked to see what the leaders had been up to and, again, it’s nothing much. Gordon had been to America where, it seems, people were very impressed by his suit. And David had been to Afghanistan where he’d been photographed smiling at some children. Nothing there that could cause the nation to change its voting intentions.
But then I did some more digging and an awful truth began to dawn. Gordon Brown had enjoyed a huge leap in the polls because during the recent flooding he put on his nice suit and a serious face and went to Gloucestershire to thank the emergency services for actually doing what he pays them to do, instead of selling spurious stories to the Daily Mail.
Meanwhile, David Cameron had been transformed from golden boy to a splodge on the Tory party’s windscreen because instead of standing in a puddle up to his welly tops in Charlbury he’d been in Rwanda lecturing the government there on global warming.
What possible difference could it have made if he’d stayed at home? No, really. If your sofa has just floated out of an upstairs window why does anyone think your life would be improved by a politician posing for pictures in the lake that used to be your front lawn?
And how in the name of all that’s holy can this possibly be a basis for choosing a system of government? Are you really saying that we must endure another five years of Labour’s bossiness and bullying simply because its leader went to see some fat old crow in Tewkesbury whose ghastly button-backed DFS furniture had got a bit soggy?
I knew politics had become shallow but I didn’t realise you could now succeed in it without it even coming up to your knees.
What staggers me most of all, though, is that almost all the people I know have either voted Conservative all their lives or Labour all their lives. And I’ve always been led to believe that swings in general elections come down to a tiny number of people on a tiny number of streets in a tiny number of marginal constituencies.
But, plainly, this isn’t so. There must be millions and millions of people out there who will change their mind about which party to vote for on an hour by hour basis, using only the smallest amount of information on which to base their volte-face.
It’s not Big Brother, for crying out loud. It matters. And you can’t change your mind just because one of the candidates has picked out a nice suit.
Or because he was in Africa talking about global warming when you think he should have been in Oxfordshire talking about global soaking.
Choosing who to vote for on this basis could be an unmitigated disaster. Because if Ming Campbell put on a particularly appealing tie one day we may well end up being governed by the Monster Raving Lunatics. Or, as you know them, the Liberal Democrats.
Sunday 5 August 2007
The hell of being a British expat
Alarming news. It seems that all the world’s clever people have gone missing. We know where the stupid people are. They’re in the White House, or they’re on Big Brother, or they’re singing for Simon Cowell’s supper. But while we are absorbed with this lot, the rocket scientists and astrophysicists have disappeared.
Seriously. America claims that the huge influx of Mexicans is in no way compensation for George Clooney, who has moved to Italy, and Madonna, who now lives in Wiltshire. And that it has a net brain drain.
It’s the same story in Egypt, Iran, India, Russia, New Zealand and France. Germany claims to be in the middle of the biggest brain drain since the 1940s. Everywhere you look, governments are saying that while they’re up to here with housekeepers and swimming-pool attendants, their graduates are all moving out.
So where are they going? Could it be, I wondered, that all the Tefalheads have come to Britain? Certainly, we seem to have so many scientists that there aren’t enough serious projects to go round. On Thursday, for instance, two Manchester doctors announced that they’d been studying dinosaurs and found that the T-rex had a slower top speed than Frank Lampard. Wow.
Further evidence came to light on Thursday with the GCSE results. Every 16-year-old in the land, except those who have recently been shot, had scored at least 415 per cent in advanced Latin and applied maths.
Yes! I thought. Britain is pinching all the Russian billionaires, the American singers, the French chefs, the Egyptian doctors and the German businessmen. We may not be the happiest nation on Earth or the richest. But we are the brainiest.
And then came the latest migration figures, which showed that while Britain received 5.4 billion west African pickpockets last year, we lost what the Daily Mail calls 196,000 British citizens. White, middle-class families who have moved abroad.
These figures would lead us to suggest that, like everywhere else, Britain is suffering from a brain drain. That all our well-educated, well-spoken young professionals are being replaced by Borat.
Unfortunately, this argument fails to hold any water when you look at where these middle-class people are moving to. Australia is the number one choice, apparently, with 1.3 million British emigrants living there.
Fine, but in the whole of human history, nobody has ever woken up and thought, ‘I know. I have a wonderful family, lots of money, a great job and an active social life. I shall therefore move to Australia.’
Australia is where you go when you’ve made a mess of everything. That’s why the 1.3 million Brits who live there are known as whingeing Poms. Because they’re all failures.
Another popular destination is Spain, which is home these days to 761,000 Brits.
Are they all brain surgeons? Inventors? Did Sir Christopher Cockerell invent the hovercraft and then move to Puerto Banus? No. Spain is where you go when you’ve sold your taxi.
What about America, then? We imagine that the Brits living there are successful and bright, like David Beckham and, er, Kelly Brook. But mostly, I suspect, the people who move from Britain to the States do so because they are interested in guns and murdering.
Twice I’ve bumped into expats while in America and both times they were w
andering around in woods carrying preposterously large guns and wearing combat fatigues.
One was chewing tobacco which, when combined with his broad Birmingham accent, made him appear to be the stupidest person in the world. He probably was.
The fact is, I’m afraid, that anyone who emigrates from Britain, no matter where they end up, is a bit of a dimwit.
I mean, why leave? Because you have no friends? Well, what makes you think it’ll be easier to make friends somewhere else? Because of the weather? Oh come on.
Sunny days work when you’re on holiday but when you’re stuck in an office, you need it to be 57°F and drizzling.
Maybe you’re fed up with the crime in Britain. What, and you think California has fewer murders than Bourton-on-the-Water? You think there are no syringes on Bondi Beach?
Public services? Puh-lease. Even if you can convey to the chap on the other end of the phone that you are up to your knees in raw sewage, he will still take two weeks to dispatch some walnut-faced thief who’ll make everything worse and charge you £800.
Maybe you fancy a tax haven? Great, you save a few quid but you end up with a bunch of other ingrates in a cesspit like Monaco. Seriously, would you rob a bank knowing you could keep the money but that you’d have to do some time? No. Well, don’t be a tax exile, then, because it’s the same thing.
Honestly, every single expat I’ve ever met is the same: hunched at a bar in a stupid shirt, at 10 in the morning, desperately trying to convince themselves that they are not alcoholics, that the barman really is their friend and that it’s only 11 hours till bedtime.
And then, when they clock your accent, they launch into a slurred tirade about Gordon Brown and the British weather and how their prawns are the size of Volkswagens. And then they ask if by any chance you’ve got a copy of The Week.
Anyone who fails to realise that this is how they’ll end up is monumentally idiotic and we’re better off without them. So go, and we’ll see you back here when you need some brain surgery.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 20