‘Oor’s huh diffence?’ I tried to say.
‘Well,’ he replied with a sneer, ‘if you have it done privately, the fillings will match your teeth. And if you have it done on Mrs Thatcher, they won’t.’
I had seen Mrs T’s teeth so, poor as I was, I went private.
For the next fifteen years I didn’t go to the dentist at all and it made not the slightest bit of difference. I was not visited by the Itosis family and their troublesome son, Hal. On the rare occasions when I managed to get girls back to my flat, they did not keel over and die when I moved in for the first kiss. Some didn’t faint.
Then along came my wife, who spends 60 per cent of the family’s GDP on electric toothbrushes and 40 per cent of her morning sawing away with floss. Also, she sends me off for a dental check-up every six months.
Why do I need to have a man poke about in my mouth with a sharpened screwdriver when I know that my teeth will last about 50,000 years longer than the rest of me?
Nobody dies of tooth decay. It’s always some other part of the body that gives up, but despite this we don’t go to the doctor twice a year demanding a full service. Come on, doc, there’s nothing obviously wrong but I want you to examine every single bit of me minutely. I want X-rays and then I want to see your hygienist, who will spray jets of ice-cold grit up my backside.
No, we go to the doctor only when something is wrong and that’s how it should be at the dentist.
Vanity is the problem. Nobody will be able to see if your spleen has a growth on it the size of a cabbage, but when your molars go brown and gingivitis takes your gums, that’s a woman’s idea of hell on earth.
There are four different types of teeth. There are canines which are used for tearing off lumps of meat. There are incisors which are used for cutting it. There are premolars for crushing it. And there are American teeth which are used for appearing in Hello! magazine.
You do not achieve American teeth with toothpaste and regular flossing. Nor will you have the full Victoria Beckham after a course of bleaching at the dentist. No, to achieve teeth which are way better than anything nature ever intended, what you need is millions of pounds.
Small wonder that in a football wall these days, the vain and effeminate players put their hands over their mouths rather than their testicles.
There are other drawbacks, too. I’m told that you will emerge from the operation not only looking different but sounding like a different person as well. And there’s no way of knowing before the dentist starts work with his chisel whether you’ll emerge from the ordeal as Stephen Hawking or Sue Ellen.
All we do know is that people with American gnashers all look exactly the same. If you are horribly injured in an accident, they won’t be able to identify you from your teeth because they will have come from the same box in Beverly Hills as everyone else’s. Think about the consequences: you may spend the rest of time lying beneath a gravestone which tells passers-by that you were Victoria Beckham.
Sunday 23 September 2001
Sea Duel with the Fastest Migrants in the West
I’ve often thought as I’ve watched the police prise yet another frightened little brown man with a moustache from the underside of a Eurostar train: ‘How bad must life have been at home for that to have been better?’
According to the union that represents the immigration service, the ISU, there are now 1.2 million illegal immigrants living in Britain, and we know full well, of course, how they got here. They were ushered into the tunnel and into the backs of trucks by the French police.
However, what I’ve always wanted to know is: how the hell are they getting into Europe in the first place? Where’s the leak?
Well, last week, I found it. Every month, thousands of immigrants are being brought by the Albanian mafia in fast boats across the 50-mile-wide Strait of Otranto from Albania into southern Italy.
And what are the Italian police doing to stop them? Well, I had a good look round and, so far as I can tell, the most important thing they have done so far is buy themselves some really cool sunglasses. It’s like a Cutler and Gross convention.
And you should see their patrol boats. Forget superyacht alley in Antibes. Forget the Class One racers. The fastest, sleekest machines I’ve ever seen are backed up to the harbour wall in Otranto, rocking as the mighty diesels are revved.
So, the police look good and they can go really fast. But unfortunately they can’t go fast enough.
You see, the profits from smuggling people are simply mind-boggling. The going rate for the one-way trip is $800 (£540) per person, and with 40 people to a boat, that works out at $32,000 (about £21,600) a go. And a few $32,000 trips buys you an awful lot of horsepower.
To combat this, the police are now allowed to keep the boats they catch and use them against the smugglers. Which means the mafia have to build, or steal, faster boats to stay ahead.
Welcome, then, to the biggest aquatic race track the world has ever seen. A race track where the victors win the chance to spend the rest of their days above a chip shop in Bradford, and the losers end up dead.
Here’s the problem. As soon as a mafia boat sets off from Albania it is picked up by Italian radar stations, which direct police boats towards the target. But even if they can go fast enough to catch up, then what?
You can’t simply ask the driver to pull over, because he won’t. He’s going hell for leather and won’t stop even when he reaches the beach. You might be able to block him but then – and this happens a lot – he’ll lob the cargo of Kurds over the side, and once they’ve drowned turn and run for the lawlessness of home.
There’s only one solution and that’s to point your 80-mph boat at the mafia’s 90-mph boat, and do what your forefathers did when they were Romans. Ram it.
This is spectacularly dangerous. Last year, fourteen immigrants were killed when they were hit by a police boat, and earlier this year, when the mafia used similar tactics to evade capture, three policemen died.
And really, is the risk worth it? I mean, the poor passengers on these boats sold everything they had for their one shot at freedom, so what chance do they have when they’re sent back after 30 days in a holding station? They’ll be penniless and homeless in a country where, according to the Italian police, there simply is no sense of right and wrong. Just rich and poor.
And besides, the mafia is now running a marketing campaign pinched, I think, from Ryanair. If you get caught on your first trip, they give you two more rides. But there are strings attached – well, chains, actually. If you make it, you’ll owe them a debt; a debt that will never be repaid by hanging around on Regent Street washing windscreens.
You’re going to have to get into some serious stealing and robbing to keep your benefactors happy.
They’re going to put your sister on the streets and your daughters are going to be burnt with cigarettes, whipped and put on the internet.
So what’s to be done? We can’t let them all in, but by the same token it goes beyond the bounds of human decency to keep them all out.
David Blunkett spoke last week about relaxing the laws on immigrants, allowing people with a special skill to get a work permit in Britain. Great, but the people coming over on those boats are not teachers and computer programmers. All they can do is strip down an AK47 and milk a goat.
The danger is all they’re going to learn while they’re over here is how to remove a Panasonic stereo from the dashboard of a Ford Orion.
To stop this happening, we must go after the people who put these poor souls in debt even before they get here. We must go after the mafia. Of course, 4,500 British troops have been in Macedonia for months, trying to do just that. But last week, as Tony Blair spoke about his dream of waging an international war against terror and injustice, the soldiers packed their bags and came home.
And now the mafia will be rubbing its hands with glee, knowing that pretty soon half of Afghanistan is going to roll up at the Albanian seaside…
Sunday 7 Octob
er 2001
My Verdict? Juries are As Guilty As Hell…
This week various civil-liberty types have been running around as though they’re on fire because new government proposals would strip a defendant of his or her automatic right to trial by jury. The plans say that if you’re charged with a medium-level offence such as theft or assault or doing 41 mph, then you would be tried by a judge and two magistrates.
What’s wrong with that? Whenever I meet someone new I take in the little details, the hair, the shoes, the eyes, and within five seconds have decided whether I like them or not. In normal everyday life it doesn’t matter that nine times out of ten I’m wrong. But it would matter a very great deal if I were to make one of these lightning decisions while serving on a jury.
The defence team could argue until they were blue in the face that their client was in Morocco on the day of the crime. They could show me tickets proving that he was and wheel out David Attenborough and Michael Palin as character witnesses. But I’m sorry, if I didn’t like the look of the defendant’s trousers then he’d better get used to the idea of communal showers for a while.
I know people, people with bright eyes and clean hair, who have done exactly the same sort of thing while on jury service. They’ve told me afterwards that they didn’t listen to a word that was said because it was obvious, from the moment the defendant walked in, that he was as guilty as sin: ‘You could tell just by looking at him. He had a beard and everything.’
Furthermore, I know people who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a courtroom because, quite frankly, the inkwells would be more capable of making a rational decision.
I heard a woman on a radio quiz the other day say the two counties that border Devon are ‘Yorkshire and the Falkland Islands’. And the country is full of people who regularly, and quite deliberately, watch soap operas. I once met a girl who thought there were two moons and that mosquitoes could burrow through walls. As the law stands, she could have been selected to try Ernest Saunders.
John Wadham, director of Liberty, the civil-liberties group, said the abolition of juries amounted to an attack on fairness in the criminal justice system. But what, pray, is fair about being tried by someone who thinks that insects can operate Black & Decker two-speed hammer drills?
And what’s fair about asking me to sit on one of those fraud trials that go on for twelve months? Well, it won’t happen. If I’m asked, I shall simply misbehave in front of the judge on the first day because, believe me, doing a month in clink for contempt beats the hell out of sitting on a school bench for a year listening to men in wigs arguing about tax in a language I don’t understand.
Unless a fraud case is clear-cut, by which I mean the white male defendant tried to cash a cheque in the name of Mrs Nbongo, then no normal person on earth could possibly be expected to reach a fair and reasonable decision.
Think about it. A Cambridge-educated genius spends fifteen years perpetrating a stunning piece of tax avoidance. Then some of the best legal brains in the country conclude that it was, in fact, evasion. And who decides which side is right? A bunch of people from McDonald’s and Kwik-Fit. You may as well roll the dice.
Surely, therefore, it must be a good idea to let judges decide for themselves whether a jury, even in the crown court, would necessarily be a good thing.
For sure there are some judges who can’t get through the day without dropping a clanger. Just this week, someone who had been sent to jail by magistrates for three months was released by a judge who said, and I’m quoting now: ‘Prison doesn’t do anyone any good.’ But even a buffoon as idiotic as this would know how many moons there are.
Let’s be honest. To qualify as a judge you must have displayed, at some point in your life, an above-average level of staying power. Whereas I couldn’t get even halfway through my libel lectures at journalism college before I was filled with an uncontrollable urge to fall asleep.
All things considered, I think the use of judges and magistrates will make these new district courts fairer, faster and cheaper. But there are some aspects to the proposals that must have been dreamt up by one of the more stupid audiences on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
I can’t see the point of mix ‘n’ matching the tone of the judge’s skin to that of the defendant, and I really can’t understand the new ideas on so-called plea bargaining. The proposal is that the sooner you plead guilty the more lenient your sentence will be. Come running out of the jeweller’s shouting ‘It was me, it was me’ and they’ll let you off with a light birching. But plead not guilty to a judge who thinks you are and you’ll be showering with other men for the rest of time.
Still, all this is likely to become law, so on that basis I’d like to say that I’m going to London tomorrow morning and will be driving on the M40, between junctions eight and one, at speeds in excess of 95 mph.
Sunday 14 October 2001
The More We’re Told the Less We Know
Every day we are bombarded with surveys that tell us what the nation is thinking. These help shape government and corporate policy. Yet the people who are being questioned – you and me – have no clue what we’re talking about.
We drown these days under the weight of information coming into our homes. We have the internet and rolling television news. We in Britain read more papers than any other European country. But the more we’re told, the less we know.
Think about it. When you are twenty you know everything. But the more you travel, and the more you learn and the more you read, the more you realise that, actually, the more you know, the more you know nothing.
Take the war in Kosovo. As far as I could tell, it was an absurd venture. A whole bunch of tribes had been knocking eight bells out of one another since time began, when all of a sudden, NATO decided, for no obvious reason, that the Serbs needed a damn good bombing.
Confident that I’d got it all worked out, I voiced this opinion to an American called James Rubin. He’d actually worked with Madeleine Albright in the Balkans and very probably had Slobodan’s number programmed into his mobile. But what the hell, I’d had a few wines and I was ready for a scrap.
And what a scrap it turned out to be. He may have had all the information but I’d had all the Chablis. So he destroyed me. He peeled my argument like an orange. In boxing terms, it was like Lennox Lewis going head to head with Charlotte Church.
Now we spool forward a few weeks to another dinner party where I used Rubin’s argument on the man to my left. Unfortunately, he was an American banker who, it turned out, had brokered some sort of deal between the telephone system in Serbia and the Pope. Once again I found myself in the Charlotte Church role, reeling from the twin hammer blows of reason and knowledge.
So, if you walk up to me in the street now and ask whether I think the current campaign in Afghanistan is a good or a bad thing, I shall have to say that I don’t know.
My gut feeling is that America should divert its considerable resources to setting up a Palestinian state, but since these views coincide almost exactly with those that are expressed in the Guardian every day, it’s almost certain I’m wrong.
How will I ever know, when all we get are soundbites and speculation and surveys that tell us that 107 per cent of the world think Tony Blair is God? And 0 per cent think he’s a buffoon on a massive and dangerous ego trip. But then did you know that 72 per cent of all statistics are made up on the spur of the moment? Including that one.
So, on that basis, what do we think about the euro? The surveys suggest that 80 per cent or so are against, with about 18 per cent in favour. Which means that only 2 per cent of the population are clever enough to realise they simply don’t know.
Last year I thought it was as stupid as trying to build the roof of the house before you’d built the walls. Then I spent the entire summer travelling around Europe from the Polish border with Germany to the northwestern tip of Spain; from Brest in Brittany to the tip of Italy. And I decided that we have a lot more to learn from our European nei
ghbours than they do from us. Good coffee, for instance. And better pornography in hotel bedrooms.
‘So,’ said a girl I had dinner with last weekend, ‘you’d let Poland in?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’d let all the eastern European states in?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Including Albania?’ ‘Well, all of them except Albania,’ I said. ‘And Macedonia?’ ‘And Macedonia,’ I conceded, realising that after six months on a fact-finding tour of the Continent, absorbing knowledge like a sponge, I’d come home with a half-formed thought.
It turns out, however, that before a state can join the union, it must comply with a set of rules and terms so complicated that they run to seventeen volumes. And now I know that what I know is that I know nothing at all.
Someone out there knows, but he’s only ever given three seconds on the evening news to explain. So he comes up with a soundbite that nourishes our quest for knowledge with the effectiveness of a McNugget.
I have a similar problem with the environment. I read more scientific studies than most and I’ve always thought it’s just a bunch of anticapitalist nonsense to suggest that we’re all going to suffocate by next Wednesday. But last week I sat in that thick brown smog that has turned the south of France from the Côte d’Azur into the Côte de Brun and thought: hang on a minute. This has not been created by all the sailing boats.
By doing some research and giving it some thought, I’d turned a firmly held conviction into one side of an intercranial debate.
The inescapable conclusion to all this is that if you have all the facts to hand, you will see there are two sides to every argument and that both sides are right. So, you can only have an opinion if you do not have all the facts to hand. This certainly explains the Guardian.
The World According to Clarkson Page 10