Naturally enough, the trade unions say the global crash happened because BA recently outsourced its entire computer setup to a small industrial unit at 4b Queen Victoria Way, Calcutta. Whereas BA says it was because of an electricity surge.
I’m not sure quite what’s meant by this. Does the power supply suddenly come in a big lump? Do all your lightbulbs start to glow very brightly and does your washing machine swell up to the size of a chest freezer?
I thought it all sounded a bit far-fetched. Until I went to my little cottage in the country last weekend. Seemingly, there’d been what news reporters who want jobs on American television call a power ‘outage’, caused, according to Scottish and Southern Electricity, by ‘trees coming into contact with our network’. A snappy line, that.
Now, in the olden days, when we had three-day weeks and I had to watch Top of the Pops on a small black-and-white TV powered by the battery from my dad’s Ford Cortina, the power would start flowing again after a while and everything that had gone off would start to work once more.
Not any more. The power ‘cut’, as I shall call it, because I already have a job with a US broadcaster, had caused all the digital sensors that govern our lives to become confused, and as a result I was cast back into the fourteenth century.
Obviously, the wi-fi had gone. Even at the best of times, wi-fi routers are less reliable than an Austin Allegro, so after a power cut they sit there flashing their meaningless lights as you say to a man on the other end of the phone that you’ve already turned it off and on again. Three times.
No matter, I thought: I can do without my Instagram fix for one evening and catch up on a box set instead. Nope. The television could provide me with only terrestrial stations, which at four in the afternoon meant a selection of shows featuring men with silly moustaches going round auction houses with some uncomfortable-looking old people who thought that after they had sold their chintzy teapot they would have enough in the bank for a world cruise.
Quickly, I became stupefied by this, so I decided to have a shower. At first things went well. I was able to get a good lather going in my barnet, but then the water just stopped. Unlike your water, mine is pumped from a stream at the bottom of the garden and into a purification plant that is located in what is officially the dustiest, dirtiest barn in the world.
And that is where I found myself, squelching through guano and decomposing rodents, to find out what had gone wrong. And when I finally found the circuit board, I couldn’t see it because of all the soap in my eyes, so I fumbled about with all the switches and levers until the dust and the dirt had mixed with the shampoo to turn my entire hair into a massive breeze block.
Unable to hold my head up properly, I stumbled back through the lake of pigeon crap to the cottage, where I used a hammer to free my head from the concrete. And there I sat, with rubble in my hair, watching another man with another moustache explaining to an old dear that her teapot had fetched £2.75 and she wouldn’t be going on a cruise.
Now, this is a small house in the Cotswolds and it was plunged into the Middle Ages because – in English – some branches had been blown by the wind into power cables. So it’s entirely plausible BA was crippled by some kind of disruption to its power supply.
I like BA, as a rule. I like being welcomed on board by a homosexual in grey flannel trousers. I like the soothing, confident tones of its pilots. And I really like Terminal 5, especially the check-in facilities for gold-card members.
That one of the windmills it is undoubtedly forced to use to offset its carbon emissions had a hissy fit and wrecked all its computers is just plain bad luck. And that’s no reason to give it the same rating as an airline where you get beaten up, or where you get slapped for not putting your seatbelt on (that happened to me recently), or where you have about as much chance of surviving the flight as a prisoner in one of General Augusto Pinochet’s detention centres.
11 June 2017
You young people were jolly naughty on 8 June. Go to your rooms with no vote
So that’s two elections on the trot that have been messed up by Britain’s young people. They couldn’t be bothered to vote in the European Union referendum and we ended up with Brexit. And then, having realized the error of their ways, they decided they would vote for that arse Jeremy Corbyn in the general election, so now we’ve ended up with a hung parliament. Which won’t be able to deal with the mess their bone-idleness created in the first place.
Frankly, I’d smack their bottoms and send them all to their rooms for the day, and then I’d raise the voting age to forty-six. Actually, I’d go further. I’d make people sit an IQ test before being allowed to cast a vote, because I’m sorry, but anyone who plumped for Corbyn is so daft they really need to be on medication.
Britain’s national debt is more than £1.7 trillion and it’s growing at the rate of almost £1 billion a week. Which is about £100,000 a minute. And the weird-beard Islingtonite thinks that this can be tackled by making Starbucks pay a bit more tax. He’s deluded and should be in prison. The problem is he has a soft voice and kind eyes and he sounds genuine when he says that if Sir Elton John and Lord Bamford would only pay a little bit more to the government each week, it would end all poverty, hunger, crime, terrorism and war. I’m sitting there screaming, ‘The man collects manhole covers. He’s a lunatic.’ But young and stupid people are turning to their fat friends and saying, ‘Well, that makes sense.’ In a northern accent.
We see this problem not just in Britain but all round the world. In America the people elected a man who has nylon hair because he said he’d build a wall along the border with Mexico. In France they elected a man who married his teacher because he has a nice face. In Russia they fawn over a president – who has at some point in his life at the KGB pushed another man’s eyes into the back of his head – because he wants to reinstate the Soviet Union. And so it goes on.
In Canada they were offered a choice between a normal politician and a two-year-old. And they decided to give the toddler a chance because he has a huge tattoo of a weird raven on his left arm.
It’s not hard to see what’s going on. People are bored with politicians and politics and they want something new. Anything. Just so long as it doesn’t sound like Tony Blair or David Cameron or any of the others.
At one point in the run-up to the election Theresa May took her campaign to Plymouth, or it may have been Portsmouth – somewhere with a lot of ships, anyway. There she was quizzed on camera by someone from the local newspaper, and she answered all his questions with the conviction and sincerity of a regional radio DJ. You could see she didn’t mean a single word she was saying. She therefore said a lot of words without saying anything at all. And people are bored with that.
Remember Ed Miliband? The one who lost an election after he failed to eat a bacon sandwich? He’d plainly been told by his spin doctors that the news crew that had been sent to interview him would use only one soundbite and that, no matter how tricky or varied the questions might be, he should just say the same thing over and over again. So he did. And then, when the whole unedited interview ended up on YouTube, we could see him sitting there, repeating himself like a Dalek.
Blair was an actor, so he made a much better fist of looking as if he knew what he was talking about. But he wasn’t a very good actor, which is why we all knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We could see it in his eyes. But still the politicians keep on believing that a smile, a soundbite and a nice suit are all that’s needed to keep them in a job. Well, they aren’t. Not any more.
There’s talk, as I write, that May won’t be able to keep her job, but, seriously, when you look at the replacements whose names are being bandied about: Philip Hammond, David Davis, the other one? They’re like milk bottles. It’s impossible to say which you prefer.
Which is why we are drawn to the weirdos, the odd ones out. There’s a theory in America that presidential elections are always won by the candidate you’d most like to have over for
a barbecue on a Sunday afternoon. That’s why John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, and it’s why Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
I think there’s a kernel of truth in that in Britain too. It’s probably why we have a hung parliament, because who would you prefer to have over for Sunday lunch, a woman who goes on walking holidays or a man who collects manhole covers? The answer is: ‘Er …’
This is what the Conservative Party must understand in the coming months. If it gets rid of May – and it should, really, because she’s a dead duck – it must remember that in Britain there are millions and millions of people who are stupid or young or both. And who thus won’t really grasp the complexities of Brexit and austerity, and so on.
That doesn’t matter. Any Conservative is going to make a better job of pulling us out of Europe and balancing the books than Corbyn would. That’s the main goal. To keep him at bay. So the Tories must choose someone who’s odd and funny and different from all the others. Someone who the voters would like to have over for a few beers on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
The only problem with this idea is that there’s only one name from all of the three hundred or so contenders that springs to mind. It’s Boris Johnson. Which means we’ve had it.
18 June 2017
Wish you were being drizzled on: last week’s sun ruined my Riviera holiday
Well, as weeks go, that really should have been as close to perfect as it’s possible to imagine. It began with a giant party in Siena at one of those houses that I thought only really existed in advertisements for Cinzano. Even Kate Moss was there.
Then I pottered up the Riviera to stay with friends in Portofino before heading on down, for no particular reason, to St Tropez. After that I did a bit of summer glacier skiing in Les Deux Alpes and then drove a Bugatti into Turin for a bowl of kidneys and much too much wine.
There wasn’t a single view on the entire trip that was anything less than magical. There wasn’t one person I met whom I didn’t like. There was no unpleasantness of any kind. And yet the whole thing was spoiled just a tiny bit by constant reports that Britain was basking under the sort of summer skies it hasn’t seen for more than forty years.
‘Bugger,’ I thought, when I consulted my Instagram feed every morning and saw everyone I knew at home frolicking about in ponds. And lots of shots of hot dogs. ‘Bugger and blast.’
The weather on my trip was cloudless. The skies were constantly blue. And the thermometer was hovering in what those of us who can remember the summer of 1976 call ‘the mid-eighties’. But it’s hard to enjoy weather such as this when you know that the people back home are enjoying it too. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
When we come back from a holiday, radiating wellness, we like people to say, ‘Ooh, have you been away?’ We don’t want to come back, after spending thousands of pounds, to find that they are browner than we are.
This troubles me. God enthusiasts are forever telling us that the human being is fundamentally good and charitable and kind. But how can this be so if we are saddened to hear that other people are enjoying a bit of luck with the weather?
I wonder. Do very rich people resent those who win the lottery and become very rich themselves? Were we all a bit happy last week to hear Boris Becker has money troubles? And do we rejoice silently when the Mail Online brings news of a former supermodel’s cellulite?
I recently ran into some people at an airport who said they were friendly with a chap I’d been at school with. Back then he was captain of everything, had a triangular torso and always went off with the girl I’d spent all night dazzling with my wit. ‘How is he?’ I asked. ‘He’s fat,’ they said. ‘How fat?’ I asked with a hint of glee in my voice. ‘Well, he weighs eighteen stone,’ they said. And I’m sorry but that made me happy for a month.
All of which brings me to a new residential development not far from where I live in west London. Designed to be a place where thrusting City boys can spend evenings watching pornography and eating takeaway food, it’s ‘That’ll do’ architecture at its most uninspiring.
But last week it became a lifeboat. The City of London Corporation has done some kind of deal with the developer and ended up with sixty-eight flats that can be used, for ever, by those who lost everything in the Grenfell Tower blaze.
On the face of it, this is perfect. Those poor families have a brand-new place to call home and it’s just a spit away from where their children go to school. The developer has apparently sold the flats at cost, but you can be assured that its next application to put up a ho-hum block will be passed very quickly by planners. So it’s happy too. And Kensington and Chelsea Council is delighted because it’s a one-fell-swoop solution to a problem that two weeks ago seemed insurmountable. So that’s all lovely.
Or is it? Because in the past few months, people have been moving into that development. I see their expensive light fittings and curtains as I drive by. They’ve obviously coughed up God knows how many millions to live in a place that they thought would be filled with peace and quiet. And now it turns out they’re going to be sharing it with people – many of whom have been refugees twice – from the other side of the tracks. Yup, the American Psycho will be living cheek by jowl with Mohamed from Somalia.
One day soon, and I can pretty much guarantee this, one of the City boys will complain. He’ll say he doesn’t like his new neighbour’s cooking smells or that he found a used hypodermic needle on the landing. And when he does, he is going to have about twenty-five tons of brown stuff emptied on his head for being a callous, Tory-voting, selfish, thoughtless, heartless man-bastard.
We will all nod, of course, and gnash our teeth and say, ‘Yes. He is all of those things.’ But actually he’s only doing exactly what I did as I sat in a harbour café in Portofino and read that Britain had just enjoyed its hottest summer’s day since whenever the last one was.
The fact is that the God enthusiasts are wrong. Human beings are not fundamentally nice. We are fundamentally horrible. Put a video of a cat having a nice snooze on YouTube and no one will watch it. Put up a video of a cat falling off a washing machine and it’ll get 8 trillion views.
The Grenfell Tower fire brought out the best in us. We rallied round and donated our trousers. It’s the same story when we hear about children drowning in the Mediterranean or dying of starvation in Africa. We buy the charity records and we pull the right faces.
But then we go back to our ordinary, bitter lives, where we resent the success, the wealth, the beauty or even the good fortune of others.
Don’t agree? Well, just remember that when you read earlier about my week in Italy and France, you thought – and don’t deny it – ‘You lucky sod.’
25 June 2017
School’s out of touch – kids must learn to wire a plug and embrace nepotism
My elder daughter has written a funny book and I’m very proud. It’s called Can I Speak to Someone in Charge? and it’s a bit like the old television series Grumpy Old Men. Except it’s a book and it’s written by a grumpy young woman.
Young people today tend not to express themselves in print. They communicate on the Dark Web, where no grown-up can go, or they use their breasts as a placard on a march. It’s unusual, therefore, to hear from a young person who’s used ink and paper to let us know what her generation is thinking.
And what she’s thinking is that she’s cross. She’s cross with Topshop for labelling all its clothes the wrong sizes, cross with internet trolls and cross with boys for thinking periods might attract bears (her words, not mine). She’s cross with those who get between her and her Prosecco, and she’s cross with all food. Mostly, though, she’s cross about school.
As I’m her father, I found this particular chapter extremely hard to read, because I simply had no idea how unhappy she’d been as a boarder, how alien it all was to her, and how cruel. Mostly she explains that it was a complete and utter waste of time. I fear she may have a point.
Round about
now, thousands of children will be leaving school for good, fairly confident they’ve learned all they need to know and are ready for whatever the world may throw their way. But as Emily points out, she had no idea about the difference between a credit card and a debit card, and while she was pretty well versed in the periodic table and what inferences can be drawn from the gap in the Wife of Bath’s teeth, she had no clue what council tax was.
I’ve long held the belief that schools exist now solely to maintain their position in the league tables. Children are just meat. They’re taught how to pass exams in the easiest possible subjects so that, when they do well, other parents will send their young fresh meat to that school, rather than to a rival establishment.
To maintain the illusion that it’s all for the benefit of the children and not just about league tables, kids are told they have no time for frivolous pastimes such as reading newspapers or socializing because they must get to university, for which they will need four A*s. And a disabled parent, in a council house. University is held aloft as the be all and end all. The portal through which you must pass if you want to avoid a front-of-house career in fast food.
But that simply isn’t true. I employ quite a few young people these days and, I’m sorry, but an upper second from Exeter is always going to be trumped by a spot of nepotism. If I know your mum and dad, you stand a pretty good chance. If I don’t, you’re just another name on a mile-high stack of CVs.
If You'd Just Let Me Finish Page 22
