I should also explain to those who have no allergies that the four most terrifying words in the English language, if you suffer from hay fever, are ‘shall’, ‘we’, ‘eat’ and ‘outside’.
Then there’s the food itself, which, if you’re outdoors, will have come from a barbecue. So, it will be nuked on one side and wriggling with salmonella on the other. And covered all over in a thin film of ash because, at some point in the cooking process, it will have fallen through the bars and into the charcoal.
Being invited to someone’s house for a barbecue fills me with the same sort of horror and dread as being invited to someone’s house for a fancy dress party.
Especially if they have a patio heater, because then the guests end up like the food. Heated up on one side to the point where their flesh is starting to melt, and frozen solid on the other.
Greenpeace tells us that it’s ridiculous to try to heat the outdoors and that if we’re a bit nippy we should wear a jumper. But, as usual, I have a much better idea. Go inside and eat food that has been cooked in an oven. It’ll taste better, you won’t be eaten by a mosquito, you won’t die of food poisoning, it’s good for the economy and, if you turn the central heating up a notch or two and eat British tomatoes, you’ll annoy Greenpeace even more than sheltering under a hot tin umbrella.
Sunday 17 July 2005
Multicultural? I just don’t see it
Over the past couple of weeks Ken Livingstone has explained over and over again that Britain is now a multicultural, multi-ethnic society. He paints a picture of Polish plumbers helping Nigerian witches to learn the art of welding, and Greek lady-men teaching disabled Iranian dentists how to play the bouzouki.
Of course I’m sure that Ken’s mayoral headquarters in London are a veritable pick’n’mix of ethnical diversity, a rainbow of skin tones and religion. I bet there are a hundred different cultures in there, all working together in right-on perfect harmony.
And naturally, when you work in an environment like this, it’s easy to convince yourself that school playgrounds up and down the land are full of little Jewish boys playing football with little Muslim girls. And that every social gathering looks like the crowd scene from a British Airways commercial.
But in my world things are rather different. Because, with the exception of A. A. Gill, who claims to be Indian, pretty well all my friends are white and well off.
They live either in agreeable Georgian piles or in big, Victorian town houses, and most have two or more blond-haired children at private schools.
Only last week I was at my children’s sports day and, as I lay in the long grass by the river drinking pink champagne and chatting with other media parents, I remember thinking: ‘God, I love being middle class.’
You may call this sort of existence boring and you may have a point. But what am I supposed to do about it? I live in a town which, according to the most recent census, is 98.6 per cent white. Some 75 per cent of the population is Christian, with the remainder made up of those who say they have no religion at all, or they don’t know, and one Jedi knight. That’d be me.
So when I go to a dinner party, the guests are always white. All my friends have white spouses. And the only diversity in the office where I work is that three of the staff are left-handed. As a result I never meet any black or Asian people. So, in this country at least, I have no black or Asian friends. Not one.
Ken would be amazed by this, I’m sure. I was slightly amazed, too, the other day, when a Jewish friend asked how many other Jews I could count as mates. ‘Oh, loads,’ I said without thinking. But then, when I actually looked in my address book, the correct answer was in fact ‘two’.
Last week in this newspaper Michael Portillo said: ‘Our signature national quality of tolerance has been strengthened, not diminished, by successive rounds of immigration.’ This sounds very noble and very wise. But it’s simply not true. In my case, and I suspect I’m far from unusual, my quality of tolerance has been completely unaffected by immigration, because it has made not the slightest bit of difference.
What I think of Albanians now is exactly the same as what I thought of Albanians when they lived in Albania. Nothing, because I don’t know any.
I’m told things are different in London, and certainly when you look at the photographs of those killed in the bombings two weeks ago it’s an absolute smorgasbord of colour and creed. But, away from the public transport system most ethnic groups tend to stick together just as firmly as we do out here in the sticks. Southall High Street, for instance, is almost exclusively Indian. Brixton is predominantly black. Golders Green is Jewish. And so on.
Only the other day I was looking round a large and well-known public school, and I couldn’t help noticing that the black kids all sat next to one another in chapel.
And, what’s more, we never get mixed ethnic groups in the Top Gear studio. Asians come with other Asians. Black kids come with other black kids. Golfers come with other golfers.
In Harrow there’s to be a school for Hindus in the same way that in Yorkshire there’s one for Catholics. And it’s the same story on the internet. There are chat rooms for Muslims, chat rooms for Hindus, chat rooms for Poles. The whole country is full of people carving out a little enclave for themselves. In much the same way that British people living in France tend to eat and socialise with other British people.
Ken Livingstone may have engineered a multicultural environment, but I suspect that Britain isn’t multicultural at all. It’s simply a land mass on which an unknown number of immigrants and indigenous people happen to live.
We co-exist like birds. You don’t find sparrows joining in with a flock of starlings. You don’t see yellowhammers swooping down on a cherry tree with a pack of fieldfares. But, crucially, you don’t see them fighting either.
This, I think, is the lesson we should learn in these difficult times. Instead of forcing a Pakistani teenager to swear allegiance to the flag and learn English and get some crummy certificate of Britishness from the local mayor, why not let him be a Pakistani who happens to live in Bradford?
Let him go to a Muslim school. Let him support Pakistan when they play England at cricket. Let him be what he wants to be.
If you say that this is Britain and we’ve all got to be British, that’s going to annoy those whose roots lie elsewhere. But it’s worse if you tell us that we’ve got to be multicultural. Because that’s going to annoy everyone.
Sunday 24 July 2005
Children really don’t want toys
Worrying news from Hamleys. According to the world’s largest toyshop, parents had better start saving because the must-have children’s presents this Christmas are going to cost three hundred and eleventy million pounds.
Boys are going to want a 2-foot Robosapien V2 that can bark orders, lie down and chase a beam of laser light. This will sell for about £200 and be broken before the turkey’s ready.
Girls, apparently, are going to lie on the floor and thrash their legs around unless they are given a pink doll that looks a bit like Jade Goody and has a hissy fit unless you brush its hair. It’s called Amazing Amanda and it will cost about the same as a new kitchen.
It all sounds very frightening, but I’d like to bet that in real terms these toys are no more expensive than the stuff my dad was given as a boy. And that, as he liked to remind me, was always an orange and a piece of string. What’s more, I bet they are no more pricey than the toys that filled my sack as a boy.
I mean Spirograph. A big box set used to be phenomenally expensive, and could it respond to orders? Did it like having its hair brushed? No; and it was always just as broken just as quickly as the interactive computer toys we’re told our kids want today.
In 1965 a small Corgi toy was six shillings, which in today’s money is about what the space shuttle costs. And what did it do? Well, it sat in a sandpit for a few years and then it oxidised. And then there’s Paddington Bear. In 1978 you would have paid £25 for one of these, which in real terms i
s about the same as a Robosapien. Toys are more expensive? I don’t think so.
What’s changed dramatically, however, is the frequency with which children receive them. As a boy, and my upbringing was far from deprived, I was given presents on my birthday and at Christmas. Today, my children get a present from someone or other once every 24 seconds.
I still own and cherish the first wristwatch I was given, whereas parents nowadays give watches away as throwaway, ‘going home’ presents. My kids have lost more fountain pens in three years than I’ve owned in 45.
They’re not unusual, either. I watch kids at their birthday parties gleefully ripping the paper off a gift and then completely ignoring it. As a result, every child’s bedroom is now stuffed with board games that are still in their cellophane, car parks that are still in their boxes, and a million unopened farmyard animals.
Lego, however, is always opened and then left lying around so adults have something to tread on when they are prowling around the house at two in the morning, in bare feet, looking for the source of a noise.
We actually have enough primary-coloured bricks in our playroom to build a whole new house. And enough dolls, bears and action figures to repopulate the whole of East Germany. My youngest gets through Barbies faster than I get through cigarettes.
Once, my son expressed a vague interest in building a small Airfix aeroplane. What he meant, of course, was that he’d like to spend a few moments watching me trying to build such a thing before returning to the PlayStation; but that was enough.
Now, all his relations, friends and godparents have taken to buying him model planes. The result: he has more aeronautical components than British Aerospace.
The problem is simple. We talk all the time about how kids are growing up so fast these days. At five they are using the f-word. At 10 they are putting it into practice. Do you know what your 12-year-old is doing on the MSN network at night? Well, for crying out loud, don’t go and look because you’d die of fright. And she wouldn’t even notice, because chances are she will be off her face on speedballs.
And yet, on Christmas morning, you are going to give her an Amazing Amanda. That’d be like buying Pete Doherty a train set.
Just because you wanted a model Spitfire at the age of nine doesn’t mean your nine-year-old will be similarly inclined. It’s more likely, in fact, he’ll want a digital camera, or an iPod or a gram of cocaine. Or a webcam so he can watch his fiancée getting ready for bed at night.
Today’s children have outgrown what you and I would classify as a toy by the time they are five. And before that, as you know, they’d be quite happy to receive an empty cardboard box just so long as it was covered in pretty paper.
It’s not worrying news from Hamleys, then. It’s worrying news for Hamleys.
Because it is only nostalgic parents who are keeping the toy market alive, endlessly buying their kids stuff they don’t want.
My eldest breezed into the kitchen the other day and momentarily removed her iPod from her ears to announce that she’d saved up £15. ‘Is that enough to buy a car?’ she asked.
‘Of course not,’ I replied scornfully.
But you know what? If all she wants is an old banger, it is.
So there we are. We bought a house with a paddock so our children could have a pony. Instead of which, they are going to tear round it in an old Mini. We wanted Jenny Agutter from The Railway Children and we’ve ended up with the Lotto Lout.
So here’s my tip for bringing up children. Stop buying them toys they don’t want every five minutes. And buy them stuff they do want very occasionally. On that basis, this Christmas, forget Hamleys. Think more in terms of Bang & Olufsen.
Sunday 31 July 2005
The Catch 22 of taking exercise
I was slightly alarmed last week when an appointment card from my osteopath arrived, suggesting it might be a good idea to turn up with a T-shirt, training shoes and some tracksuit bottoms.
Frankly, in any chart of ‘things you don’t want to hear’, being told to turn up to a doctor’s surgery with sports kit ranks alongside your girlfriend peering at a swab and saying, ‘Ooh, it’s gone all blue.’
Of course, not being a Mancunian drug dealer, I don’t actually own any tracksuit bottoms, so I went to Selfridges, which, this being the height of summer, was rammed full of big, thick coats. Happily, these gave me something to hide behind as I approached the sports department.
I grabbed the first tracksuit I saw and was asked by a salesman what sort of sport I’d be doing. ‘I won’t,’ I said loudly. ‘I shall be selling cocaine to schoolchildren in it.’ This seemed better, somehow. And no, I didn’t want to try it on because I would never wear such a thing in a public place, so it didn’t matter if it was the wrong size.
Later, the osteopath showed me down several flights of stairs into a basement where there were many implements of torture on the walls and a chap called Mr Wong in the middle of it all. Mr Wong, it turned out, was a ‘corrective exercise’ specialist. And he had some bad news.
To make my slipped discs better I must wear tracksuit bottoms every day and move about even if I didn’t want to go anywhere.
And so we began. He made me lie on the floor with a pressure pad under my back and told me to raise my legs while keeping the pressure in the pad level and even. It was impossible. Each time I began to raise even one leg, the dial dropped immediately to nought. Mr Wong said my stomach was ‘unbelievably weak’.
This, of course, is rubbish. I fill it each day with a great deal of food and wine, and it has never split once. But before I had a chance to tell him all this, I was on all fours. Except I wasn’t.
My left arm was not capable of supporting the weight of my unbelievably weak stomach, so the front left quarter of my body was being supported by my face.
Even I was surprised by this.
But having made the discovery, it softened the disappointment of not being able to do a single press-up.
Then I was standing in front of a mirror looking at my tracksuit bottoms, while Mr Wong asked me to gyrate my hips. Now I’ve seen elderly people in Florida doing this, so I know it’s humanly possible. But I couldn’t do it at all.
This gave Mr Wong all the information he needed to prepare an exercise programme, which I must follow rigidly twice a day for the rest of my life. And then he began to assault my posture.
Apparently, I must learn to stand like a Coldstream guardsman. Chest out, stomach in, head back. And I’ve got to stop locking my knees. I must bend them slightly, like you do when you’re skiing. I tried this for five seconds and my thighs felt like they’d caught fire. Mr Wong made another note.
It turns out that there’s not even to be any respite when sitting down. I must make sure my ears, shoulders and hips are all in a straight line, something that’s not physically possible because I have too many chins. Also, I must ensure that the screen on my computer is level with my eyes so I don’t have to look down while typing.
Fine, but I use a laptop, and if I get the screen high enough I can’t see any of the keys. There are two possible solutions to this. Either I get my co-presenter Richard Hammond to write Top Gear from now on or I buy a new computer.
But how can I make enough money to do that if I’m having to spend half the day lying on my back with my legs in the air?
Actually, the main problem with my new exercise regime is the sheer complicatedness of it all. In one routine I must stand in front of a mirror and, while not laughing at my trousers, breathe in while holding my shoulders back. Then I hold my breath while pulling my tummy towards my spine, and then I must bend my knees until my thighs are parallel with the floor. And then I breathe out while standing up straight again.
It is in no way physically taxing, not even for someone whose muscle structure is made up of pure fat.
But the brain power required to remember what comes next is huge. I’ve flown an F-15 fighter jet, and that, believe me, is easier.
What staggered me abo
ut the process most of all, though, is the mind-numbing boredom and the slow rate of improvement brought about by each held breath and stretched limb. So, as you lie there in your silly trousers, stultified by the tedium of it all, you start to intellectualise the process.
And I’ve arrived at an alarming conclusion. If I fail to spend 27 hours a day lifting things up and putting them down again, I’ll be back in a world of pain and misery. And if I do spend 27 hours a day lifting things up and putting them down again, nothing will happen.
In other words, I must spend the rest of time making a massive amount of effort for no reward at all.
Sunday 7 August 2005
A shady person’s holiday guide
When I tell people I went to Iceland for my summer holidays this year, everyone says the same thing: ‘Ooh. I’ve always wanted to go there.’
Well, it’s not difficult. If you want to spend a week basking in sulphur and riding around on horses with hair like Toyah Willcox, and you’ve always wanted to know what guillemot tastes like, you just go to an airport and get on an aeroplane.
The fact is, however, that actually you don’t want to go to Iceland at all because you’ve guessed that you’ll come home without a suntan. And then your friends and neighbours will think you haven’t been away at all. This might lead them to suspect you’re poor, which, if you’ve bought some wine in Reykjavik, you will be.
So instead, you went to Stansted at four in the morning, where you were herded on to some godforsaken charter jet that whisked you to the Med, where you spent a couple of weeks bathing in turds, drinking wine made from old shoes and dining in restaurants that have plastic chairs.
But it didn’t matter because you came home with what you think was a tan but actually was a series of pink and red stripes.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 21