Shortly after takeoff the entire cabin filled with steam, which meant the pilots were unable to see the large thunderstorm that lay ahead. So they flew right into it. And moments later we were upside down. I want you to think how that might feel for a moment … You didn’t think about the lavatories did you? When the plane is the wrong way up, they are too, and that means they empty their entire contents, including some home-made tampons, on to the roof.
Happily, I didn’t think about that because the other thing you might not have considered is the cooling system on a 1950s ex-Angolan air force aeroplane. What you get above each seat is a small Pifco fan, and because I was upside down, hanging by my seatbelt, the top of my head was actually in the blades. It was very uncomfy, having a haircut while the wrong way up, in a tropical thunderstorm and knowing that, if the pilot regained control, I’d be getting a brown shower.
I turned at one point to a colleague who was sitting in the next seat, having a lovely Oh Brother Nimmo monk cut, and asked, because he had a pilot’s licence, if we were in trouble. The white knuckled ‘yes’ was enough.
How did it feel? Pretty awful, if I’m honest. Because I didn’t know whether the impact was one minute or one second away, it was impossible to brace or get my breathing right. It’s like knowing you’re going to be punched but not when.
I do remember thinking, though, that it would be quite a cool way to go. Better, I thought, to scream through the pearly gates in a Russian plane over Cuba than with a tube up my nose and a grey face.
And then, obviously, the story has a boring ending because the pilot did regain control and we did land safely and I wasn’t killed. Or covered in shit.
Which brings me back to those poor souls on board the Air France jet that didn’t land safely. Last week, experts managed to work out that it did not break up in mid-air, which would have killed everyone instantly – one minute you’d have been snuggling into Russell Crowe with a glass of red and the next, you’d have been dead. Instead, it remained intact until it hit the sea. Which meant that those passengers had to sit there, for several minutes, knowing they were on a high-speed one-way ticket into oblivion. And what makes it even more poignant for me than that is that one of them was a friend of mine.
I imagine that being told by a doctor you have three months to live is scary. I imagine, too, that being burnt at the stake is bad. Or beheaded on the internet. But surely, the worst is being on a plane, over the middle of an ocean, pointing downwards and doing about 750 mph.
I know that I lived and I know that last week a twelve-year-old girl escaped almost unharmed from another Airbus tragedy in the Indian Ocean. But really, when a plane falls out of the sky, your chances are not even slim. And worst of all, you are jammed in a seat, unable to do a damn thing about it. With cancer, you think that if you only eat nuts and read the Bible a lot, you might pull through. In a car, you can take avoiding action as the lamppost looms. But in a plane, you are impotent.
And that’s what brings me on to this morning’s bright idea. At present, all passengers are given a life jacket even though they know they may as well have been given a piece of birthday cake or a pack of playing cards. I think I’m right in saying that in all of civil aviation history, not one life has ever been saved by the whistle, the torch or the toggles.
So why not give everyone a parachute instead? Of course, most passengers would be too paralysed with fear in a real emergency to put it on properly. Even if they had been listening to the safety briefing. But here’s the thing. As the plane screamed downwards, you would at least have something to do. Finding it, reading the instructions, making your way to the door, working out how it can be turned to manual and so on. This would give people hope. Which is so much better than the horrific alternative: despair.
Sunday 5 July 2009
Just one word and my T-shirt offends the whole of Japan
There comes a point in a man’s life when he is no longer able to wear a T-shirt. You have only to see an overweight American tourist wobbling around looking like Winnie-the-Pooh to know that I’m right; to know that T-shirts are fine for schoolboys on sports day. But not fine thereafter. As soon as the merest hint of a belly begins to emerge, nothing looks quite so idiotic as a T-shirt. And if, like me, you have what amounts to an overinflated space hopper down there, you know that, in a T-shirt, you couldn’t look more ridiculous even if you were going around in a scuba suit.
The only thing in the world worse than a middle-aged man in a T-shirt is a middle-aged man whose T-shirt is tucked into his trousers. And the only thing in the world worse than a middle-aged man whose T-shirt is tucked into his trousers is a middle-aged man whose T-shirt is black and tucked into his trousers. Black T-shirts are worn by roadies so that they cannot be seen as they move about the stage at concerts preparing the next guitar and sorting out the drummer who’s taken so much cocaine he’s fallen off his seat. This is fine. But there is another group of people who wear black T-shirts. They are known as ‘German paedophiles’, and that’s not fine at all. Oh, and Simon Cowell, come to think of it.
Then you have the pink T-shirt, worn predominantly to say you are so confident about your sexuality that you can get away with anything. Unfortunately, the problem with wearing a pink T-shirt is that I’m afraid you don’t look confident at all. You look like a cruising homosexual. Which is fine if you are. But annoying if you are just shopping.
I should also point out that T-shirts really, really don’t work if they didn’t cost very much money. Because after one wash they’ll look like a council-house nightie. And they don’t work on a biblical level if you walk around with a CND slogan on the front. Especially if your dad is president of the United States of America.
The worst thing you can have on your T-shirt, however, is a place name, particularly if it’s the exotic-sounding place name of somewhere far, far away from where you are at the time. You must have noticed this. If you are in Barbados, you will note that absolutely nobody wears Barbados slogans on their chest. It’s always somewhere else. Which is why, when I’m on holiday, I’m often to be found lying on the beach in a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Wakefield’.
And that brings me to a new development in the world of the T-shirt. The humorous slogan. I saw a big chap wobbling towards me in the street only last week. He was wearing a brown T-shirt, which, as we know, is usually reserved for fans of Formula One. If you know what I mean. So, naturally, I was tutting away, until I saw what the writing on it said: ‘Fat men are harder to kidnap’. That made me laugh. And that made him smile, and for a moment the world was a lovelier place.
I mentioned this to my family and now they buy me lots of ‘funny’ T-shirts. I have one that blends the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ single cover with the Jilted John classic. So it says, ‘Gordon is a moron’. And I have another that says, ‘I love animals. They’re delicious’. Though I have to be careful about that one because often it doesn’t make the world a lovelier place. It makes thin-lipped women launch into a tirade about meat and animals, and after a while, inevitably, why the penis is fundamentally evil.
However, both of these pale into insignificance alongside the T-shirt my wife brought back as a present from her three-day and three-night lost weekend at Glastonbury. It’s grey, which is an acceptable colour, and it says, in huge letters, ‘****’. Actually, it doesn’t say that at all. But I can’t say here what it does say because what it says is the worst word in the world.
I liked my new T-shirt very much. I liked it so much that last week I wore it to the rehearsals of a Top Gear show, where everyone else liked it very much as well. But after a while, as is the way with these things, everyone had seen it, everyone had had their giggle and everyone had asked where they might get one. So, soon, the joke has been lost in a desert of familiarity. And that’s why, later in the day, when I was approached by a group of Japanese people, I never gave my slogan a second thought.
It turned out they were there from the company that makes the
incredible Gran Turismo computer racing game, and they were in England to map out and chart the Top Gear test track for inclusion in the next, even more realistic version. Of course, it was very important that I met the boss.
Naturally, there was much bowing, and a lot of accepting and presenting business cards with two hands. Obviously, I didn’t give him my business card because I don’t actually have a business. Or a card. But I found one in my pocket – from David Linley, the furniture maker, strangely – and gave him that. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t speak English. None of them could. Which is why they weren’t offended by my shirt.
But then, equally inevitably, out came the cameras. Many hand signals suggested they wanted me to pose with their head honcho and, of course, I obliged. It would have been rude to say no. But not, as it turns out, half as rude as appearing in the firm’s promotional material in a T-shirt bearing the worst word in the world. Which is what’s happened.
I would like, therefore, to take this opportunity to apologize to the man, the company he runs, all of the children in the world who’ve been offended and the people of Japan. I am so very, very solly.
Sunday 12 July 2009
Stop, you’re digging an early grave with that garden trowel
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is plainly a bit stuck for something to do now there’s plenty to eat, the environment’s knackered and the Labour party thinks a rural affair is something that happens in Jilly Cooper’s head. So it’s filled its time compiling a report that indicates by next year almost 2.2m homes in Britain will not have a private garden. This is because developers are building lots of flats and – I never would have guessed – ‘the likelihood of having a garden is greater for larger detached dwellings than flats’.
There are, however, some interesting nuggets in the forest of truisms. Apparently, two-thirds of all London’s front gardens are now largely covered with concrete, paving or gravel rather than vegetation. Many back gardens have been sold to developers, who find it much easier to get planning permission for these infill sites than they do out in the sticks.
Naturally, all sorts of busybodies will now be running around demanding that brownfield developments must stop and that everyone must replace their gravel drives with lavender or carrots.
I believe there is another way of looking at this. If people are paving over their front lawns and selling their back gardens to Messrs Bryant and Barratt, it must mean they value a car-parking space and an extra bit of dosh more than they value spending half their weekend huffing and puffing behind a lawnmower.
Did you know that 27 per cent of adult male heart-attack victims are struck down while cutting the grass? You didn’t? That’s because it’s not true. But I bet the real figure is huge.
Whatever, the fact is that huge numbers of people plainly don’t like having a garden, and I can understand why. It’s because once you start gardening, there is no end, no point at which you can say, ‘It’s finished.’ Because it never is.
First of all, there’s the bothersome business of choosing from a vast array of plants, all of which have Latin names so people in garden centres can laugh in your face when you get it wrong. Flustered, you will make a panic purchase of something that is pink and won’t grow in your particular garden because it’s not north-facing, or the soil is too acidic, or the wind’s too strong. And even if it does grow, it will turn out to be either a twig or something so rapacious that within five months it will have eaten your lawn, your shed, your house and most of your children.
First, though, it will eat your satellite dish. All plants do this. No matter how hard you encourage them to grow in one direction, they will make a beeline for the dish, so that in the middle of your favourite show you suddenly get a notice saying no signal is being received. Which means you have to go outside, in the wind and the rain, with a pair of secateurs and some dynamite to try to get your clematis out of Bruce Forsyth’s ear. I have a rose that, in its desperation to get at my satellite dish, actually murdered three trees that lay in its path. It used them as a launch pad, until the poor things couldn’t cope with the weight and snapped. Gravel does not do this.
I’m sure it’s possible to untangle a rose from a tree but it’s even more difficult and time-consuming than untangling the cable for your iPod. It’s more bloody as well. And anyway, once you embark on a project such as this, there is no end. Next thing you know, you’ll be in a greenhouse, making potions with a pestle and mortar, and not sleeping at night because of greenfly. Nobody ever loses sleep over their decking.
The worst thing about gardening, though, is the pruning. We’re told that for a plant to become strong and tall so it may hide the block of flats your neighbour built on his vegetable patch, you must cut it back every year. You only have to look at the Brazilian rainforest to know this is rubbish.
Here we have an area the size of Wales, or is it the Albert Hall? Either way, it’s the most beautiful garden in the world. And every time someone comes along to prune it a bit, so they may grow some cows, nature lovers get all cross.
Gardening is like doing a jigsaw. A pointless way of passing the time until you die. Pruning is like putting the completed picture back in the box so that you can start again. And the net effect is that the tree you planted to shield the neighbours’ new skyscraper is now only 2 in tall and looks stupid.
But I haven’t finished yet. About twelve years ago a friend and I both planted yew hedges. Mine has been pruned vigorously every year and is now about 6 ft tall and extremely boring. Hers was never pruned and, consequently, is a mass of topiary giraffes and farmyard animals. The only thing I could sculpt mine into is a mouse.
Let’s just say you do like a garden, that you don’t mind dragging your lawnmower through the house every weekend, and that you like digging. Fine. But because you are an amateur and your garden is likely to be fairly small, and because you are British and you therefore think pansies are pretty, you will end up with something that looks like a sponsored roundabout in Milton Keynes.
There are some great gardens in this country. But yours isn’t one of them. Yours looks like it was planted and maintained by Ardman’s Double Glazing. And it’s not somewhere you can ever sit and relax, because every time you try, you will notice a bit of moss that needs removing or a beetle that needs spraying or a flower that needs deadheading. So you’ll be up and down like a pair of whore’s drawers, until one day, while doing a bit of hedge trimming, you will cut through the cord and be killed. Or you will have a heart attack. You will not be there when your grandchildren get married. And you would have been if only you’d sold the damn garden to Bryant Homes and spent the money on a decent holiday every year instead.
Sunday 19 July 2009
The conquerors are coming, Pierre – we Brits need more land
Last week, we heard about two neighbours fighting over a bit of lawn with a bush on it. And, at a cost of God knows how much, the case has ended up in the High Court in London. A court case. Over a shrub. It beggars belief.
Except it doesn’t any more. A friend told me yesterday about the dispute she’s having. ‘The deeds to my house say people can drive cattle down the lane past my house but now my neighbour’s son has passed his driving test and he’s driving his car down there. So I’ve rebuilt the wall, which means his car won’t fit any more. Ha.’
Then we have Griff Rhys Jones, who, last Wednesday, urged the nation’s canoeists – all four of them, I should imagine – to ‘disturb as many anglers as possible’. He claims that many stretches of river have been bought by private fishing clubs and are therefore out of bounds to exponents of the eskimo roll.
I’m not immune either. All week, my wife has been at a public inquiry, started because some militant dog walkers in the Isle of Man wish to ramble through my kitchen and take YouTube footage of me on the lavatory.
And then there’s my mother, who moved house last year because the builder doing up the house next door took down a tree, or planted o
ne. I can’t remember which, but I remember it being a big deal. And, worse, it makes me wonder: are we perhaps starting to run out of space? When you look at the figures, it’s hard to see why everyone is at one another’s throat. At present, only around 19 per cent of the United Kingdom’s 95,000 square miles is built up, which doesn’t sound so bad. Certainly, if you look at the country on Google Earth, it appears to be a patchwork of nothing but fields with a smallish grey bit near the Thames estuary.
But plainly there is a problem. When you have Griff Rhys Jones and Jeremy Paxman actively wrestling with each other on the banks of the Kennet and Avon canal, and neighbours fighting in the High Court over a bloody bush, it’s very obvious the country is not just full. It’s actually starting to burst.
Plainly, the planning regulations are to blame. You aren’t allowed to build anything on Farmer Giles’s cabbages unless you join the freemasons. And since most people don’t wish to have their tongues pulled out for blabbing about the stupid handshake, developers are being forced to erect new dwellings in urban back yards. Which causes even more friction with the neighbours whose view is about to be ruined.
So what’s to be done? Well, obviously, it would be stupid to relax the green-belt rules, partly because this would ruin the point of Britain and partly because we need all the space we can get for Ed Miliband’s plans to carpet-bomb every hillside in the land with his stupid and useless bird-mincing windmills. And anyway, as the global population grows and farmland is built on, there will come a time when we all have somewhere to live. But bugger all to eat.
The obvious solution is to spread out a bit. At present, the south-east of England has a greater population density than Puerto Rico. And it’s getting worse. Recent figures suggest that even a town such as Guildford in Surrey will need an extra 18,000 houses by 2050 to help to accommodate the national increase of 350,000 people a year.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 20
