And then she arrived. You’ve no doubt seen those television commercials where someone wearing a new kind of antiperspirant runs through the jungle without breaking into a sweat.
Well, I use that brand, and, be assured, it doesn’t work when you’re trying to offer your heroine a drink, only to find that your tongue, which has worked perfectly well for 44 years, has chosen this moment to become as bent and as twisted as a pig’s tail.
What if she wants a glass of Dom Perignon ’64 with a dash of yam juice? Because this would be the perfect aperitif for the swan and peacock she’d been expecting.
‘On Tuesday,’ she said, answering a question my tongue had asked all by itself.
‘No. What would you like to drink?’
‘Oh, mineral water if you have it.’
Thank God. At this rate, the next thing she’ll say is that what she really wants for lunch is a pork pie.
‘Ooh, Branston pickle,’ she said, having spotted the jar on the table. ‘I love that with pork pie.’ At this point, my whole heart exploded.
Behind the dazzling eyes, and the porcelain skin, she was normal, as down-to-earth as your mum, or mine.
I was expecting a prima donna because we are forever reading about Wayne Rooney’s minders, and that bloke from the Halifax commercial who goes everywhere with an entourage. We have grown to believe that celebrities are too busy quaffing champagne in London’s glittering West End to be capable of dealing with a sausage.
So each time I meet a famous person, I’m always staggered that they can cut up their own food. Last Sunday hammered the point home even further, so now I can offer you some valuable advice. If George Clooney does call, open a tube of Pringles and give him a can of beer.
Sunday 27 March 2005
Save me from my mobile phone
My last mobile phone was useless. Oh, it could take pictures and connect itself to the interweb, but its battery went flat every 30 seconds, and when it came to the business of wanting to make a call I had to be actually sitting on a phone mast.
Which has probably given me cancer of the bottom.
And then – and this is the worst part – its speaker was so microscopic it was absolutely impossible to hear what the person on the other end was saying. I wanted a tuba, but I’ve almost certainly ended up with a tumour.
This drove my wife mad, listening to me shouting ‘What?’ over and over again, so last week she bought me a replacement.
Now, I could, I know, have inserted the battery and been connected to the outside world immediately. But I didn’t. I made a mistake. This being a toy, and me being a man, I thought that it might be a good idea to disable the predictive text facility, which is the single stupidest invention since Sir Clive Sinclair’s electrical slipper.
You’re no doubt familiar with the way it works. You type in ‘to’ and it spends the rest of time guessing what the rest of the word might be. Tomorrow? Today? Toyota? Topazolite? Tonsil? It just can’t understand that you want to write ‘to’ – because, of course, in text speak that’s spelt 2.
Anyway, to disable the facility meant delving into the handbook, which contains 104 pages. Yes, 104 pages. For a phone. I knew I was in trouble.
And I was, because, while searching for the chapter on text messaging, I happened upon a passage explaining how I could download music from the internet straight into my new phone. This sounded exciting, and I’m not sure why.
You see, I can currently play ‘Long Train Runnin” on my record player, my CD player, my iPod, my Walkman, my computer and while I’m in my car. It is hard to think of any environment, anywhere in the world, where I am more than 4 feet from the Brothers Doobie.
But the notion of being able to harness a series of ones and noughts from the ether and then marshal them into a recognisable tune on a mobile phone – it was just too irresistible for someone who began his journalistic career with a Remington typewriter.
So I inserted the disc that had come with my new phone into my computer and sat back while it whirred and generally went about its business. Then things got tricky, because it wanted to know how it should communicate with the mobile.
This required some input from me, and everything started to go pear-shaped. I was an hour trying to hook up Bluetooth before I realised no such thing exists in my computer’s chip. So then I took out one of the wires that came with the phone – there were about four miles of flex from which to choose – hard-linked the two devices and tried to forge a link with the net.
And up came a message saying: ‘The PPP link control protocol was terminated.’ Now obviously, I have seen this kind of message before, usually in a film where a nuclear power plant is about to explode. But what does it mean?
I’m not a technophobe. I can work a Sky+ and tune a car radio. But I don’t know what a PPP link control protocol is and therefore have no idea how best to unterminate it.
No matter. I already had ‘Long Train Runnin” stored away in the bowels of my computer’s silicon heart, so I attempted to upload this into the phone. No joy. It was, said a message, forbidden. What is this? The music police?
It would accept ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd and I’ve now made this the dedicated ring tone for the band’s drummer, Nick Mason. How cool is that? Should he ever choose to call, it’ll actually play one of his tunes.
It would also accept ‘Summer of ’69’, which I’ve allocated to Bryan Adams. And it happily uploaded ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, which is now the personalised ring tone for Roger Daltrey. But it refuses the Doobies. Maybe it’s because I don’t know Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter’s number.
While searching for confirmation of this in the handbook – Concorde’s, by the way, was four pages thinner – I found that I could take a picture on the phone, then email it via the laptop to a friend. So obviously I tried to send A. A. Gill (who’s been given ‘Sing If You’re Glad To Be Gay’) a shot of my genitals. But this didn’t work either. I guess the PPP link control protocol was playing up again.
In fact, I spent – and I’m not joking – a whole day playing with all the new and utterly useless features on my phone, most of which don’t work. And all I’ve learnt is that people who have personalised ring tones have far, far too much time on their hands.
I still have no idea whether the speaker is audible or whether it can receive a signal in, say, Fulham. And I also have no idea how to cancel the predictive texting facility. The handbook devotes 12 pages to this, suggesting it is so monumentally complicated that it’d be easier, and far, far faster, to send the recipient a letter.
The only good news is that the Motorola V3’s SAR is well within the 2.0 W/kg limit laid down by Cenelec. I found this nugget in the health and safety chapter, and I think it means I won’t catch ear cancer.
Sunday 17 April 2005
Ecologists can kill a landscape
Plans to build a forest of wind turbines on an escarpment in the Lake District ran into problems last week when Lord Melvyn Bragg said they’d mess up his hairstyle.
There’s no doubt we need to work on a new type of renewable energy because of one single fact. So far, mankind has extracted 944 billion barrels of oil, and there are only 764 billion barrels left.
But, quite apart from the problems with Bragg’s hair, I doubt wind turbines are the answer. They mince ospreys, make a god-awful racket and, worst of all, produce only enough electricity to run half a toaster. You’d need 100,000 to provide Britain with all the power it needs, and can you even begin to imagine the visual impact that would have?
Put simply, to preserve the beauty of our green and pleasant land, we’d have to destroy it.
This is the conundrum faced by all environmental effort. Michael Crichton, in his extraordinary recent book, State of Fear – you have just got to read it – highlights the case of the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming which was ring-fenced as a wilderness in 1872.
Unfortunately, the eco-beards couldn’t stop meddling. First, they thought the elk was about to become extinct s
o they shot all the wolves in the park, and banned Indians from hunting. Soon, there were so many elk, they started to eat the trees that the beavers used to make dams, so the beavers upped sticks and moved somewhere else. And without the beavers’ dams, the meadows dried up, the trout and the otter vanished and soil erosion became a serious problem. A problem exacerbated by the huge elk herds that were eating all the grass. So they had to start shooting the elk, by the thousand.
This brings me on to a plot of coastal land I’ve just bought on the Isle of Man.
It is a spectacular place, as wild and rugged and remote as you can possibly imagine. The air is needle sharp. The sea is ice clear. And then there’s the wildlife. There are seals, hen harriers, Manx shearwaters, many peregrine falcons, and some sheep.
There’s more, too, because the plot is the only European habitat of something called the lesser mottled grasshopper. Which means I’m now the sole custodian of an entire species. And how cool is that?
‘Not very,’ you might think, if you are one of the grasshoppers. You can imagine them, all huddled round, craning their little necks, trying to see who had bought their home: ‘Is it David Attenborough? Is it Bill Oddie? Or David Bellamy? Oh, bloody hellfire, it’s that fat yob off Top Gear.’
As a result, they all seem to have scarpered. I’ve been round the entire site on my hands and knees, looking for the damn things, but I think they may be hiding in one of the caves, fearful that I’m some kind of white hunter whose study walls are groaning under the weight of all the dead heads, and that I’m going to bludgeon them all to death with a baseball bat, for fun. Or spray the site with Agent Orange from a helicopter gunship. And then open a quad bike racetrack to run over the survivors.
They have me all wrong, though. Which is why I’ve signed a voluntary deal with the government to make sure all the indigenous wildlife survives my tenure. This sounds simple. But it isn’t.
The first objective listed in the agreement says I must ‘provide the grass length and warm conditions required by the lesser mottled grasshopper’. Now, I know how to keep the grass short – I shall use the woolly lawnmower known in farming circles as a flock of sheeps – but how in the name of all that’s holy do you keep an insect ‘warm’?
I must also harvest the crops from the middle of the field outwards, so the corncrakes have a chance to flee, I can’t use dynamite to clear the gorse, nor can I clear it in the bird breeding season, I must produce dung for choughs – what, me personally? – I must rebuild the sod hedge, I can’t use slurry and I must plant 200 berry-bearing shrubs. Naturally, clubbing the seals is right out.
Of course I get a small grant, but it doesn’t get close to covering the cost of the work. Especially as I shall now have to spend the rest of time blow-drying all my sheeps, harvesting the barley with nail scissors and providing the grasshoppers with central heating. But I really don’t mind, because hidden in all the rules and regulations is the most delicious irony.
You see, for centuries, this bleak wilderness has been popular with weird-beard types who come out to walk their dogs and peer at the hen harriers. On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, the whole place is a technicolor blizzard of cagoulery and livid walking socks.
And the fact is, these rambling types are frightening the birds. They’re also inadvertently treading on all my grasshoppers, which means they’re not in touch with the wildlife so much as standing on it.
The government wants them gone and, since the Isle of Man has no right to roam, I’m well within my rights to litter the place with landmines. It’s certainly tempting.
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are forever trying to ban the car because of the damage it does, and now I have the chance for some payback. To save an endangered species, the petrolhead has to ban the greens.
Isn’t that wonderful! To protect the environment, I have to get rid of the environmentalists.
Sunday 24 April 2005
What we need is a parliament of 12
Feeding white noise into a prisoner’s cell is classified as torture. The practice is banned by all civilised countries because the human mind cannot cope with endless random sound. It causes insanity, eventually.
But that’s what we’re getting with this election campaign. An endless white noise of promises that can’t be kept, statistics that mean nothing, and a smattering of pantomime personal abuse.
Why? Well, put simply, it is very cheap to cover a general election campaign.
Unlike, say, in a war, newspapers and television stations don’t have to buy their reporters airline tickets, flak jackets and satellite phones. For the price of a train ticket to the stump in Peterborough, they can fill hours of airtime and hundreds of pages, and if anyone dares to complain about the bombardment, they’re told it’s important. Really?
When you push the switch on the wall, light comes into the room. When you are hungry, you go to a shop and buy food. When you are tired, you go to sleep. And when you are bored, you arrange to see friends. None of this has anything to do with whatever government happens to be prevailing at the time.
I’m willing to bet that none of the problems you have in life at the moment has anything at all to do with the decision-makers in Westminster. Is your daughter having a rough time at school? Is your wife having an affair? Neither of these things will be solved by the outcome of a general election.
Boris Johnson once claimed that a vote for the Tories would cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3. He even had some science to back these claims, but it’s nonsense really.
The Conservative Party likes to say Tony Blair is responsible for the emergence of MRSA, but this is political arrogance. MRSA is caused by nurses and doctors not washing their hands properly, and personal hygiene is not a political issue. Nor should it be.
On the flip side, I’m also pretty sure that none of the joy in your life has been created by politicians, either. Did they write the book you’re enjoying at the moment, or make the film you watched last night? Do they make your children giggle, or your dog wag its tail?
Whatever it is that turns you on – watching a soufflé rise, making an Airfix model of a Mosquito bomber, riding your motorcycle – all will be unaffected by the general election.
What’s more, whichever way the vote goes, the sewage network will continue to function and so will the company for which you work. Roads will continue to be fixed, doctors will continue to mend the sick, the police will continue to maintain law and order (except in Nottingham, obviously). We now have a system in this country, an infrastructure, and for the most part it would continue to run even if all the 650 Members of Parliament decided to spend the rest of time dressed as Hiawatha on a remote Scottish island.
Each one of us is now governed by a parish council, a district council, a county council and the European Union.
Unless we live in Scotland or Wales, in which case there’s Holyrood or the assembly as well.
So, what is it, exactly, that the House of Commons does? I’ve thought hard about this, and the only thing that’s truly changed in my life since Mr Blair came to power is the M4 bus lane.
Other than that, he’s blundered about, making a lot of speeches, but unless you’re a Polish plumber, or you’re in the army, or you hunt foxes, he and his kind have made no difference at all. We all still get up, go to work, pay our bills and go to bed. New Labour has been, for the vast majority, utterly irrelevant.
And I’m not being party political here. All the main parties are making all sorts of promises about what they’ll do if they win the election: 600 border guards, the abolition of top-up fees, a base rate for stamp duty, local income tax. But it’s all just fiddling with a finite pot of money. None of it will make any difference.
Unless it’s the Lib Dems, who want us all to have wire-wool hair and go everywhere on an ox.
I’m not suggesting we don’t need leaders. We shall always need someone to react to American requests for soldiers, or an African ne
ed for food. But I do think the finite pot of tax money might be stretched a little further if there weren’t 650 leaders, all on expenses.
Could it not be run, perhaps, like a cross between a parish council – which, now we’re in the EU, is exactly what it is – and jury service? Can we not just have a dozen people, picked at random from the current electoral register, who sit in a village hall somewhere, making decisions only when they’re necessary?
If Ruth Kelly and John Prescott can do it, then anyone can. And in case the random selection procedure does cough up the odd loony who wants to invade France, majority decisions will be taken.
What I’m talking about is benign, reactive government rather than cancerous, proactive government whose endless schemes dominate our viewing and reading pleasure and, with the exception of the M4 bus lane, achieve nothing of significance.
A poet once wrote, ‘Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.’ It has become the mantra of the terminally disillusioned. But this morning I offer a solution. What if there were no boss at all?
Sunday 1 May 2005
Why won’t shops sell me anything?
Not long ago, I wrote a column saying that high street stores have got completely out of sync and only sell clothing that is in no way relevant to the prevailing weather conditions. So on a cold day in March you cannot buy a coat. And on a hot day in August you cannot buy a pair of swimming trunks.
What I did not realise at the time is that these days, unless you have a spare fortnight or so, you cannot buy anything at all.
Last week, for instance, I was strolling home from my first ever breakfast meeting – it made me feel very important – when I saw a plasma television set in the window of a shop. ‘Ooh,’ I thought, ‘because I’m now the sort of person who gets invited to breakfast meetings, I should have one of those.’ And since I had five minutes to kill, I went inside with my credit card greased and ready for a battering.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 17