The salesman opened proceedings with a lot of technical gobbledegook I didn’t care about or understand, but I was expecting that. What I was not expecting was the sheer complication of giving him my money.
As a general rule, the only thing I ever buy is petrol. So I’m aware of how credit cards function. You dash into the shop, the Indian man pushes it through a swipy thing, you sign your name and dash back out to the car again. The job’s done in seconds.
I’ve heard that it’s the same story in supermarkets. A woman who breathes through her mouth drives your Loyd Grossman tomato sauce through a beam of light several times and then summons a colleague called Janet who goes to the back of the store to see how much it costs. It all sounds very efficient.
But apart from petrol stations and supermarkets, the whole buying process is now littered with an immense amount of needless baggage. I mean, have you ever tried to get something from the internet?
I watched my wife downloading songs from iTunes on to her iPod the other iDay and I reckoned it looked simple. And it is. But only after you’ve told Mr Apple who you are, where you live, what password you would like, whether you want some Viagra, how much you earn and all sorts of other stuff that is in no way relevant to the fact that I wanted to buy Radar Love by Golden Earring.
Back in the real world, things are just as bad. And the worst offenders, so far as I can tell, are those that sell stuff with plugs, the shops that show Richard and Judy in a hundred different ways: electrical retailers. What happens here is that the spotty man with enough product in his hair to fry a fish takes your credit card, goes to his computer terminal, logs on and begins to write War and Peace.
After a while – it was a week or so – I became so exasperated that I moved along the counter to see if he’d at least got to the bit where Marya chucks Anatole, but guess what? He wasn’t writing War and Peace at all. What he was doing was all the company’s internal accounting and stock control, informing some mainframe in Ipswich that he was in the process of selling a television.
This, I’m sure, is better than having a man in a brown store coat out the back, noticing when the pile of 42-inchers is getting a bit low. A big flashy computer program is something you can talk about with the suppliers at breakfast meetings.
It looks good.
Anyway, when the man with the solid hair had finished updating the company’s database, he started to ask me a series of impertinent questions. Like where I lived, my home phone number and my email address, presumably so that his bosses could sell my details to a spammer who, knowing I’d just bought a plasma television, would clock me immediately as someone who has breakfast meetings and therefore is someone in need of a larger penis.
By this stage, he had already taken up the time I usually set aside in a whole year for shopping. And he hadn’t even started on the credit card transaction, or the delivery address. Which was different from my home address. Which meant he had to re-program the company’s entire software package.
I began to be overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, a sense that I might be in the shop for ever. So I started giving serious consideration to the idea of popping next door and buying a knife. I’m not by nature a murderer, but I began to visualise the blade in question and how it might look sticking out of the salesman’s head.
All that saved him was the sure-fire knowledge that I’d get the same treatment in the knife shop, the same endless pitter-patter of a computer keyboard and the same requests for personal information; the only difference being that, if you buy a knife, you end up with an inbox full of messages from people in America wondering if you’d like to buy some camouflage trousers and maybe shoot a black man.
So listen up, shopkeepers. I am a busy man. I am dipping soldiers with businessmen long before you’ve got your shutters up and I do not have the time to stand around while your staff do all their in-store financial housekeeping. If you must update your records, then would you mind awfully waiting until I’ve gone away.
Shopping can never be a pleasant or worthwhile activity. The notion of exchanging money, which is useful, for goods, which by and large are not, is fairly pointless. So please, can you do your best to make it quick.
Sunday 8 May 2005
Fun: the true sign of a good school
It seems like a good week to speculate on whether private education works, or whether it’s a complete waste of time and money.
On the one hand, we heard recently about some poor girl who achieved about a million A-levels, all with an A grade, but couldn’t find a place at university because, she claimed, they were biased against her paid-for schooling.
Then, conversely, we heard last week that only public school children were getting on to engineering and science-based courses at university because today’s state school pupils only learn about hairdressing and how to win a knife fight.
So it’s all very confusing. Does private education give children a much-needed leg-up, or do the sneering bitterness and hatred of New Labour’s foot soldiers mean your expensively schooled child is taken straight from the examination room to a dacha in the woods and shot?
In other words, do £150,000, plus extras, guarantee a future lined with gold and myrrh? Do the money and the Latin iron out those annoying little creases in life and assure the child of a silky future? Or do you just end up with a floppy-haired twerp who can’t even get a job as a pox doctor’s clerk?
To find out, I decided to check on the progress of my contemporaries at the large public school I attended 27 years ago. Obviously, the easiest way of doing this is by grazing the Friends Reunited website, but I’m afraid this gives a jaundiced view, since anyone who bothers to keep former friends updated with career and marital progress is either a girl or a social retard.
Instead, then, I turned to the school magazine which, through its old boys’ news section, seemed like a good indicator of whether or not a private education has worked.
It hasn’t. Which, on a personal note, is wonderful news because, of course, it’s only fun to succeed if you can watch your contemporaries fail. Which most of them have done, in spades.
One is working on a special disinfectant to kill mouth bacteria, for instance, while another has written a book called Guidelines for the Use of Personal Data in System Training. Then there’s a chap who’s actually written to his old school magazine, at the age of 39, to say he’s been made the East Midlands regional director for a building company no one’s ever heard of.
The only fly in the ointment, so far as I’m concerned, is a direct contemporary of mine who’s now the director of international security at the Foreign Office. That sounds pretty cool. The bastard.
What I’m trying to say here is that, every year, this school pumps a hundred people into the system and in the past 30 years or so not one of them has ended up being Queen, or in space, or on the silver screen. Whereas the state system has given us Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Prescott, Ant and Lard, and countless others who now live a glossy, chauffeured life of Riley.
Public school used to guarantee you a place under the punkah wallah on an agreeable veranda in Calcutta; but today, for every Hugh Grant, there are a million Denise Van Outens. As the screw is tightened on university selection procedures, the pendulum shows no sign of swinging back. On that basis, then, there is absolutely no point sending your children to an expensive school. They will be denied a place at university, become regional managers for stationery companies and will write to their old school magazine after 20 years to say they have just bought some new decking for the patio. If they go to a state school, at least they stand a chance of becoming a minister, or an actor, or Alan Sugar.
However, the simple fact of the matter is this. School is irrelevant. University is irrelevant. And qualifications are irrelevant, too, because you can put anything you like on a CV and I absolutely guarantee an employer won’t check. And let’s be honest here: saying you have 12 A-levels is a damn sight easier than actually getting them.
&nbs
p; What’s more, if I were an employer, I’d far rather take on someone who lied about his academic achievements than someone who wasted his precious childhood by reading John Donne poems and doing algebra. Lying shows you have a bit of nous.
And this brings me on to the whole point of public school. It’s not designed to make you cleverer or more likely to succeed. It’s all about ensuring your children have the happiest possible childhood.
Mine was. Conjugating verbs, the periodic table, cricket. Yeah, we did all that, but when the lessons were over I didn’t slope home to spend an evening with my parents, or in the bus shelter; it was night after night of full-on, Harry Potter-style japes and pranks. With only a light sprinkling of buggery.
This is what we seem to be forgetting with our league tables and our university selection complaints. That when you pay for a child’s education, you’re not buying jam for tomorrow. You’re buying it for today. Success in life is down to what sort of person you are, and not how many chemical symbols you can remember or how casually you can toss a V-neck over your shoulders. Put a dunderhead into the system and it doesn’t matter what sort of education they get, you’ll get a regional manager out the other end.
Sunday 15 May 2005
Nuts and dolts of an eco-boycott
When someone from Oxford Brookes University called recently to say its School of Technology wanted to give me an honorary degree – for championing the cause of engineering – I was thrilled. It had been only a couple of years since a similar honour was bestowed by Brunel University.
So I would be Jeremy ‘two doctors’ Clarkson, which isn’t bad for someone who barely managed O-levels.
However, much to the delight of the BBC’s fanatically pro-fox, anti-car internet news service, my nomination is being boycotted. Because, in this day and age, it’s preposterous to honour someone who has a four-wheel-drive Volvo and a ride-on lawnmower.
This means I’m in the same boat as Margaret Thatcher, who was snubbed by Oxford University for stealing milk or something, and Tony Blair, who wasn’t even nominated because he accused the dons of being élitist.
Honorary degrees were first introduced about 600 years ago and are still the highest honour that a university can bestow. They are designed for the great and the good, thinkers, men of vision, women of principle. And Alan Titchmarsh.
Noddy Holder from Slade has one, as does Robson Green from everything on ITV.
David Attenborough is reputed to have 19. It’s easy to see why. A celebrity in a floppy hat and a huge red cape does bring a touch of glamour to what might otherwise be a rather dull day.
You may think this devalues the concept of honorary degrees, and I would have to agree. But my nomination is not being boycotted because I’m a two-bit television presenter from some poky motoring programme. Crikey no. I’m being boycotted because I’m seen as anti-environmental.
Craig Simmons, leader of the Green group on Oxford City Council, said: ‘Awarding Clarkson an honorary degree devalues Brookes, Oxford and the planet.’ Others have been less polite, calling me a ‘git’ and an ‘idiot’.
For a full rundown of my crimes, you need to consult the BBC’s internet news service, which, pretty much every week, runs a story charting my sins against left-thinking, Guardian-reading, fox-loving people.
It seems I once crashed a car into a tree, damaging the bark. Also, I drove up a mountain, hurting the heather. If that wasn’t bad enough, I had the temerity to tear up literature from the pressure group Transport 2000 on television. And do you know what I did last week? To protest about enormous gas-guzzling vehicles clogging up city centres, I chained myself to a bus.
Well, now I’m going to give them something else to write about, because I’m going to explain why I think engineering is more important than environmentalism.
God made the world in seven days, but it was a fairly bleak and hopeless place, full of volcanoes and sharks. On the eighth day, however, man got cracking and, as home improvements go, did a monumentally good job. He created light, warmth, the potato crisp and the dishwasher. And every single one of these things – everything that makes your life pleasant, comfortable, safe and exciting – is down to engineering.
Environmentalists make out that the planet is some kind of wondrous, self-sustaining entity, and engineering has ruined it. They look at the gun, the car and the jet engine as instruments of Satan, but the mosquito has killed more than all three put together. And don’t forget that the Boxing Day tsunami killed more than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
What’s more, it’ll be engineering that creates the satellites to make sure that no tsunami ever has such dire consequences again.
There’s more. Thanks to the last Ice Age, which was not man’s fault, anyone wishing to travel between Denmark and Sweden had, until recently, to drive round the Baltic or use a plane. Neither of which would go down well with the environmentalists. Now, though, God’s oversight has been corrected by engineers who have built a massive and staggeringly beautiful 10-mile double-decker bridge for trains and cars.
The thing is, they couldn’t just go ahead and build it. They had to make sure the construction project in no way affected the local avocet population. How mad is that? How far do you think Brunel, Stephenson and Watt would have got if they’d had Greenpeace sticking its nose into every single thing they did?
And what about the future? It will be engineers who bring an air-powered jet to fruition, not Stephen Joseph from Transport 2000. And it will be engineers who predict the next volcanic eruption, not Simmons from Oxford Council.
I feel for engineering students these days. When they get a job the pay is derisory. There’s no respect. They have to operate with the anvil of environmentalism permanently attached to their left leg. And when they nominate someone other than Bill Oddie for an honorary degree, they’re made to look like murderers.
If I’m turned down for the award, it won’t make any material difference to my life. But I refuse to remove my name because that would be yet another victory for environmentalism, which has given the world nothing, over engineering, which has given us everything.
Sunday 22 May 2005
Small BBC strike, not many stirred
For most of the people who walked out of the BBC last week, striking was a new and exciting experience. A chance to be part of the ‘us’ in the never-ending class war with ‘them’. A moment when they could be a righteous blend of Che Guevara and William Wallace. For me, however, it was just a wearisome trudge down memory lane.
In my youth, everyone was on strike. Car workers. Tanker drivers. Dustbinmen. Even the sound recordists charged with the not too onerous job of putting microphones in the bras and knickers of the 1979 Miss World contestants decided they’d rather stand outside round a brazier and promptly walked out, forcing the show to be cancelled halfway through.
It was a hopeless time. I’d just started work on the Rotherham Advertiser, with high hopes of exposing corruption in the council and industrial nepotism in the steelworks. I was going to be Clark Kent, William Boot and Bob Woodward all rolled into one, fighting injustice and standing up for what was right.
But even before I’d found the space bar on my Remington, I was back on the street, caught up in the seven-week local newspaper dispute over… well, it had something to do with Nottingham. But I was never very sure what.
The reasons for last week’s BBC walkout were similarly unclear. Apparently, the unions want the latest round of redundancies to be voluntary rather than compulsory, but that just means the best people leave and those who couldn’t even get a job selling televisions in Dixons hang on. The unions, I should explain to younger readers, are a bit like Britain. They still strut about, thinking everyone’s listening and that they’re a big player. But if push came to shove, they’d barely have enough muscle to overthrow Marks & Spencer.
Anyway, back to the story. So far as I can tell, most of the proposed BBC cuts will be in the health and safety department – whoopee �
�� and in human resources, which should make the redundancy notices interesting. ‘Dear Me. I know I have three kids to feed but I’m afraid I’m letting me go…’
I might have got this all wrong, of course; but, whatever the reasons, BBC premises up and down the land were immediately ringed with people who really hadn’t got the hang of picketing at all. Instead of throwing concrete slabs at the scabs and threatening to eat their children, they sipped a lot of skinny lattes and made their feelings known by tutting. Jeremy Vine was sufficiently frightened by this to stay at home.
There didn’t seem to be much public sympathy, either. But then, if you work on a turkey farm, spending five days a week up to your knees in guano and up to your elbow in a bald bird’s backside, you aren’t going to be all that impressed by a bunch of Prada people who are facing a new life working for a lively independent production company in Soho where the coffee’s great and the receptionist is drop-dead gorgeous.
Certainly, none of the passing motorists honked to show support, probably because they were all so wrapped up in the rather good music show that had been cobbled together to replace Jeremy Vine.
Meanwhile, staff in the Top Gear office all turned up for work as normal, partly because they didn’t know what the strike was about and partly because the net result of staying away would have been a) the loss of a day’s pay and b) twice as much work to do the next day.
Of course, all of us feel very sorry for those faced with the sack but this is not 1979. The Guardian is chock-full of job adverts, so all of those affected could be highly paid human safety outreach co-ordinators by this time next week.
And therein lies the problem of striking today. It’s an axe in a digital world, a completely outdated weapon that doesn’t even have an army to wield it any more.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 18