It gets worse. In America, scientists have spent $1.2 m (£750,000) of public money trying to prove that conservatives are nutty. In Canada, they’ve studied 2,000 Pisceans and determined they’re not all wetties who are still crying over Born Free. And in Holland, they’re examining a prehistoric slug that has no brain or sex organs to see if it’s some kind of evolutionary missing link. Unlikely, if it doesn’t have a penis or a womb.
For heaven’s sake people, where’s the next Concorde? Where’s the pill we can live on instead of food, and what about the dog in a space suit we were promised by Valerie Singleton? Put your ducks away and do something useful.
With this in mind, I went to see Professor Kevin Warwick in the cybernetics department of Reading University last week. He has built what looks like a radio-controlled car but in fact it’s a robot that has the intelligence, he says, of a wasp.
If you turn its power supply off, it will look for more, in the same way that a wasp will look for food. And it can be programmed to buzz around your head all day too.
Warwick is so obsessed with artificial intelligence he recently had a plug surgically implanted in his nervous system. Then he hooked himself up to a computer so, as he moved his handin NewYork, a robotic hand back home in Reading moved too.
And his point is? Well, I had no idea until he told me that he’d had his wife’s central nervous system hooked up to the web too. Now that… that boggles the mind. The possibilities of feeling what your wife feels, and vice versa, have to be one of the most exciting breakthroughs since… since… ever. And imagine being tapped into the brain of a computer at the same time. Working on the G-spot and a system to beat the gee-gees simultaneously.
My enthusiasm was curbed somewhat when Warwick explained that a man/machine hybrid might not be satisfied with the governorship of California and could, perhaps, decide one day to wreak a trail of destruction across the world. I suggested that machines are never scary because you can always turn them off but he smiled the smile of a brainbox and said, simply: ‘Really? How do you turn the internet off then?’
If he has a point then maybe a dearth of scientists over the coming years is no bad thing. Because it would only take one to put down his duck for five minutes and destroy the planet.
Sunday 14 September 2003
Why the Booker Shortlist Always Loses the Plot
A couple of months ago I wrote about books here. It was the time of the Hay Festival, which is like Glastonbury only quieter, more dusty and without Rolf Harris.
Jilly Cooper had hit out at the intellectual snobbery of it all. ‘There are two categories of writers,’ she said at the time, ‘Jeffrey Archer and me, who long and long for a kind word in the Guardian, and the others who get all the kind words and long to be able to do what Jeffrey and I do.’
Wise words. But not wise enough, it seems, for the panel of judges who selected this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist.
Joint favourite to win is a book called Brick Lane by Monica Ali, which is centred on the letters exchanged between two sisters, one of whom lives in Bangladesh and one who came to London for an arranged marriage.
Now I haven’t read it, and I never will, but I think we can be fairly sure that neither of the sisters will have a torrid affair with an unsuitable rogue called Rupert.
So what of the other joint favourite? That’s from Margaret Atwood, who has got her, I suspect, voluminous knickersina tangle over Monsanto and its GM food development. Oryx and Crake, her book, is unlikely to be a comedy.
It’s also worth mentioning Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor, which is about a young medic who finds himself posted to a tribal homeland in South Africa. Is he dive-bombed by F-15 fighters? Is the Nimitz sunk? Don’t hold your breath.
I have just finished a book by Philip Roth, one of the most revered highbrow authors, and it was astonishing. It’s about the owner of a glove factory in New Jersey whose daughter came off the rails a bit.
I ploughed on through page after page of undeniably beautiful prose dying to know if he’d get his daughter back. But all I got was more and more agonising until it just stopped.
It’s almost as though Roth rang the publishers and asked: ‘How long would you like my next novel to be?’ And when they said 250 pages, he said, ‘Oh good, I’ve finished.’
Before this, I read Gulag by Anne Applebaum, which was mainly a letter to other people who’ve written about the Soviet camps, saying they were all wrong. Wrong, do you hear.
But worst of all was Stupid White Men by the Stupid White Man himself, Michael Moore.
After the first chapter – an interesting account of how George Bush stole the presidency – it degenerated into an adolescent rant from a student bedsit, circa 1982. Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher. Big companies. Thatcher. Rainforests.
Governments would rather spend their money on another bomber than education, and why do we fear black men when every bit of suffering in our lives has a Caucasian face attached to it?
He droned on and on and I couldn’t take anything he said seriously because in the introduction, before the eco-friendly, power-to-the-people garbage really started to splash onto the page, he criticised the British for privatising ‘formerly well-run public entities’ – like the rail network.
What? British Rail? Well run? You stupid, fat, four-eyed, grinning, bearded imbecile. He even admitted that he dropped out of college because he couldn’t find anywhere to park. You should have gone on the train, if you love them so much.
I could heap scorn on Moore until hell freezes over – but back to my point. A book needs more than beautiful sentence construction, a left-wing take and wry observation. It needs, more than anything else, a story. With a story, you have the most powerful of emotions: hope.
You ‘hope’ Clint Thrust manages to abseil from his Apache gunship successfully and that the third world war is averted. You ‘hope’ that the heroine meets the hero on the bridge at midnight and they all live happily ever after. You ‘hope’ that the dream to live in Provence works out.
Sure, I got plenty of hope from Philip Roth. I spent the entire time hoping the glove maker would get his daughter back, but it was dashed by the sudden appearance of the ISBN number.
In Stupid White Men I hoped the author would fall out of a tall building, but that never happened either.
My wife reads books the size of Agas about women in beekeeper hats who spend 50 years in Peru looking for a lost bracelet. Man Booker books, in other words.
Sometimes I snatch them away and ask: ‘What do you hope happens next?’ and I always get the same answer: ‘Nothing really.’
She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life than life itself.
When I was in the middle of Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy – which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist – you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn’t have noticed.
Which brings me to Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis. It’s awful, apparently. Reading it, said Tibor Fischer, the novelist, who reviewed it in the Daily Telegraph, was like your favourite uncle being caught masturbating in the school playground.
His views were shared by the Man Booker judges who have left it out of ‘the final six’. I bet it’s fabulous.
Sunday 28 September 2003
Look in the Souvenir Shop and Weep for England
Picture the scene. We were in France having lunch at Club 55 on the beach in St Tropez and I was explaining to my children just how good the French are at cheese and wine.
And then it happened. Having tried the Brie and declared it to be delicious, my nine-year-old daughter looked up and, out of nowhere, asked the most impossible question I’ve ever faced. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘what are the English good at?’
Now I’ve been ready for some time for her to say: ‘I know I came out of Mummy’s tummy but how did I get in there in the first place?’ I’ve been preparing for that one. But: ‘What are the English good at?’
It took me so completely by surprise that I suddenly felt the need to shove a fish’s head into her mouth.
‘Well,’ I stammered. ‘We, er… we’re good at…’ For some extraordinary reason Harold Shipman’s name came into my head. ‘Murdering people,’ I suggested. Well we are. We’ve even started exporting our murderers. But I think that in a world murdering league, sinister Belgium is still at No. 1.
I had a quick canter round all the usual suspects: football, cricket, tennis, motor racing and so on, and could come up with nothing. So I moved into the world of innovation and again drew a blank. Our big polythene balloon tore. Our Eurofighter doesn’t work if it’s chilly. Our trains are not quite as fast as they were before the Second World War when they were named after ducks such as the mallard.
I’m having a crisis about being English at the moment. I was in Berlin last week, the day after Mr Blair had been to see Schroder and Chirac about Iraq, and it was strange walking around the Fatherland apologising to everyone for my country’s conduct in the war.
Speaking of which, did you know that HMS Invincible has to limp around the world on one engine because the Royal Navy cannot afford the fuel for two? How frightening is that?
But this is symptomatic of a serious problem. Beneath the surface, everything is half cocked. Have you, for instance, inadvertently walked through a staff-only door into some back staircase in any public building? It’s unbelievable. Miles of institutional paint dragging plaster off the walls. Huge puddles on the floor, some of which smell of rain and some of which don’t. Unshaded light bulbs smeared with melted moths from the 1940s. Broken hinges. Notice boards bearing news of retirement parties. Tick if you want to go. No one has.
On Thursday night I watched a fabulous programme about the building of London’s sewers. They were constructed in 1856 and have been almost unmaintained ever since. There are, apparently, 186,000 miles of sewers in Britain and in 2002 only 241 miles were mended or replaced.
British Airways is run by an Australian and the English football team is managed by a Swede. Vodafone, Lloyds TSB and the British bid to run the Olympics are now all being run by Yanks. And according to my friends in the City that’s now almost exclusively American too.
To get an idea of the scale of the problem, next time you’re passing through Terminal 1 at Heathrow check out the souvenir shop, the last chance visitors have to take home a taste of England.
Every airport has one of these. In Detroit, Ford, GM and Motown all run gift shops where you can buy toy cars and posters of Martha Reeves. In Iceland you can buy a nice jumper or a book about waterfalls. In Barbados they do a selection of hot sauces. In Canada they’ll sell you a cute dead seal. ‘Squeeze its tummy and real blood spurts out of the wound on its head.’
In New York I bought a limited-edition plastic statue of a fireman carrying a buddy through what looks like some chips and ketchup but is in fact bits of the Trade Center. It’s called Red Hats of Courage.
But at Heathrow all you can get is a flavour of what Britain used to be. The reality is that today’s bobby wears a flak jacket and doesn’t venture onto the beat without a belt full of mustard gas. But at the airport shop you’re offered a teddy bear dressed like Dixon of Dock Green.
Can you imagine the gift shop at Charles de Gaulle offering visitors dolls in berets with onions round their necks? Or the Australians selling bears in convict suits with chains round their feet?
Here, you half expect to find Winston Churchill dressed up as a beefeater and a talking Sir Walter Raleigh doll in a London taxi. ‘Awight guv. ’Ave a fag. Cor lummy.’
Then there’s the Queen. How many other countries try to sell tourists crockery featuring a picture of their head of state? A Berlusconi bowl? A Putin plate? I don’t think so.
Here, though, they were obviously so desperate to fill the shelves with something – anything – that they will even sell you a plastic Union Jack. How desperate is that? Even Luxembourg doesn’t have to resort to selling you a flag.
But of course if the gift shop wanted to represent England today accurately, it’d be tough. Everyone would be going home with a Harold Shipman mug.
Sunday 5 October 2003
Eton – It’s Worse than an Inner-City Comprehensive
Oliver Letwin announced last week that he would rather beg on the streets than send his children to an inner-city state school. He is an old Etonian.
Predictably, every whining, thin-lipped, pasty-faced, shapeless socialist from one end of Haringey to the other is on the radio moaning and groaning and generally having angst. ‘Oh, it’s not fair,’ they wail. Damn right. It’s not fair either that you’ve got a face like a slapped spaniel. But that’s life, loser. Get used to it.
Actually, I don’t think old Etonian Oliver went far enough. There is no end to the things I would do to keep my children out of an inner-city state school. I’d rent my car to a minicab firm, my bottom to an internet downloader and my spare room to a family of Azerbaijanis.
Nothing, nothing annoys me more than people who sacrifice their children on the altar of political ideals. The notion that you would send your kids to a drug-addled, bullet-ridden comp to be taught by a lout in a bomber jacket because you ‘like, you know, don’t believe in private education’ makes my liver fizz.
I’m not alone either. Every day the M40 is chock-full of families, their meagre possessions strapped to the roofs of their cars, fleeing from the horror of state education in London. I even have one of them staying in my house right now.
She’s not looking for a house here in the Cotswolds. That’ll come in time. What she’s looking for first is a school where her son can learn to add and subtract in the old-fashioned way with cakes and sweets. Rather than: ‘If you stab Johnnie and he loses three pints of blood, how many pints will he have left?’
The problem is that the debate on education cannot be taken seriously when it is opened by an OE like Letwin. Did you see him at the conference last week? Iain Duncan Smith was on the stage, fumbling for his autocue, some berk in a suit three sizes too big was trying to get the osteoporotic audience to its gouty feet every fifteen seconds and there, in the front row, was Eton-educated Letwin, who appeared to be sitting on an electrical socket of some kind.
His face had gone a funny shade of purple and his whole head was rocking about so wildly that at one point I really thought it was in danger of coming off.
Letwin is a funny sort of cove. I sat next to him at dinner once and found him charming, amusing and about 9 inches tall. Also, he is so clever that you get the impression that he’s teetering all the time on the edge of slipping into Latin.
Certainly we know by his appearance on News night before the last general election that he has a fondness for togas.
None of this matters, though. He could decide to address the National Allotments Society in Aramaic. He could decide to go everywhere for a week on one leg. But everything he does is overshadowed by where he went to school. You just know how his obituary is going to read:
‘Mr Oliver Letwin, who was educated at Eton, exploded today. Onlookers described how his head became so full of knowledge that his face turned purple and burst.
‘“Stephen Fry told him a little-known fact about Homer and it was the final straw. There simply wasn’t enough storage space for any more information in his brain,” an Eton-educated doctor said later.
‘Mr Boris Johnson, another old Etonian, was devastated. “Ego sum gutted,” he said.’
Say someone went to Eton and everyone assumes you’re dealing with a sneering man with floppy hair whose elder brother is in the army.
And while we were at school learning about John Donne, the boys at Eton, of course, learnt how to run over members of the working class and how, by speaking very loudly, there is no need for French.
There was also a famous essay written on the subject of poverty by an Eton pupil: ‘The father was poor. The mother was poor. The children were poor. The butler was poor. The cook was poor. The projec
tionist was poor. The chauffeur was poor.’ Real world? It stops just outside Windsor and starts again in Slough.
But this caricature isn’t true. You can no longer walk through the door simply because your surname is longer than the average chemical symbol.
You need to be very, very bright. And what’s more, two of my bestest friends went there in the 1970s. And they’ve turned out all right(ish).
But the stigma is still there.
We’re never told that ‘Newsnight is presented by Jeremy Paxman, who went to Malvern.’ And nor does the announcer ever say: ‘And now Jonathan Ross, who went to some godforsaken hellhole in Leytonstone.’
My wife has put my son down to go to Eton but this will happen over my dead body and all the bits I’ve rented out to keep him away from the state schools in Lambeth. I know that he would have a great education for five years but he’d have to spend the next 50 being an old Etonian.
At a comprehensive school he’d be better off because it would be the other way round: five years of being knifed followed by 50 great years of being able to get a dart out of his eye without blubbing.
Sunday 12 October 2003
A Giant Leap Back for Mankind
Like most middle-aged people, I don’t know where I was when John F. Kennedy was shot. But I do know where I was when the Air France Concorde crashed into a Paris hotel. And I know where I’ll be next Friday: on board the world’s only supersonic airliner as it makes its final scheduled flight from New York to London.
As I step off, the temptation will be strong to say: ‘That was one small step for a man. But one giant leap backwards for mankind.’
It’s hard to think of past examples where human beings had the technology to progress but held back. Maybe AD410, when the Romans pulled out of Britain, but not since. It’s not in our nature to snuff out the fire.
The World According to Clarkson Page 21