You have had visions of him, on stage, thanking the Nobel academy. But then, suddenly, along comes a report that says that, actually, he’s a bit thick.
Teachers, of course, are very good at softening the blow. They use words such as ‘pleasing’ and ‘encouraging’, no matter how many members of staff he has stabbed that term. ‘Johnny is becoming very adept with his knife. Perhaps he would do well if he were to think about a career in a slaughterhouse.’
My housemaster was brilliant at this. In my final report he said: ‘We like Jeremy very much. When he is sent to borstal, we hope it is not too far away so that we can come to visit him from time to time.’
The trouble is that no matter how hard they try to mask the truth, you can’t ignore it, in the same way that you’d find it hard to ignore a tiger if it were in your car. Praise is lost in the background clutter. You’re used to it. Everyone is always nice about your kids. They have been since they were in a pram.
But criticism; that’s a whole new area. That leaps off the page and hits you straight in the heart. ‘Annabel needs to concentrate more,’ is no different from saying ‘Annabel has a face like a duck’s arse’. It smarts.
Take Zidane, who was sent off while playing football for France: he was showered with sympathy when he explained that the Italian player had insulted his mother.
So why should you not headbutt your child’s teacher in the chest when he writes to say that Johnny daydreams too much in Latin?
God knows, I know what it’s like to get a poor review. I know how much it stings, and I’m 46. So imagine how much it must hurt when you get one aged 11.
No, really, imagine if your boss wrote a report on how you were doing at work… and then sent it to your children. ‘Peter has made pleasing progress in mergers and acquisitions this year and we’re encouraged with his efforts to stop looking up the secretaries’ skirts. But he must try to avoid selling stocks too early or he won’t be getting a promotion any time soon.’
My wife came downstairs the other night and asked what I thought of her new outfit. I was honest. I gave her a proper report and said it made her look mad. And was she pleased? Was she hell. As we got into the car to go out, the windows frosted over on the inside.
It’s not the done thing to present others with an honest appraisal of their performance. I know I’m useless on the tennis court but I don’t like my partner to say so.
And yet that’s exactly what a school report does.
The one I read this morning even went so far as to reveal the class average time for a 100-metre race, and how long, in hours, it took my daughter to cover the same distance. And the point of this is… what exactly? To make me feel guilty for breeding a mutant?
Well, it hasn’t worked because those who can run fast are, in my experience, apes.
I can, however, end with a crumb of comfort for those of you whose children received poor reports last week. Nobody who is successful in life ever had a good one.
Sunday 16 July 2006
How to make a man of a mummy’s boy
Last week, on a Radio 4 show called The Moral Maze, a woman said that all men are wife-beaters and warmongers, and that a boy brought up by women is bound to become a better balanced human being.
Maybe this is so. But he is also bound to spend too much time on the telephone talking about nothing in particular. What’s more, he will be late for the start of all TVfilms and will therefore have no clue what’s going on, he will read books in which nothing ever happens, he may well turn out to be a teensy bit gay, and worst of all he will grow up never having seen an F-15 fighter jet loop the loop at an air show.
He may well have seen a B-i bomber make a full-bore, combat-power take-off, but only through the fence at Greenham Common. And that means he won’t have been in the company of someone who agreed that, yes, it’s much prettier and far more amazing than anything from the dreary and pointless mind of Jane Austen.
Last weekend I took my boy-child to the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford. This is not something that would have happened if he’d been brought up by a heavily-breasted feminist with greasy hair.
Sadly, we didn’t quite make it in time for the Red Arrows, which meant we ended up watching their routine from the side of the road a few miles away. Strangely, it was much better.
Of course, the display is designed to look choreographed and excellent from one side of the airfield, where the audience is standing. It’s designed so you go ‘ooh’ and ‘wow’ at all the carefully rehearsed passing manoeuvres.
But if you look at it from three miles away, on the other side of the airfield, it’s like looking at the underside of a tapestry. It looks like a mess, like a selection of people with Parkinson’s disease have climbed into their jets after getting very, very drunk. You don’t go ‘ooh’ or ‘wow’. You find yourself shouting: ‘Jesus Christ. They’re going to f∗∗∗∗∗∗ hit each other.’ And diving for cover in the hedge. Or was that just me?
After that, the other team displays looked a bit weak, if I’m honest. Oh, except for the Swiss. Perhaps because they never have to train for any actual combat, their formation flying was as precise as their watches. The Jordanians weren’t bad either. Sadly, the Israelis couldn’t make it. They sent a note saying they were a bit busy.
I’d say the highlight of the day went to the Russians, who turned up with a Power Ranger fighter jet called the MiG-29, which can fly – and I’m not making this up – backwards and upside down at the same time. It can also stop, fall from the sky like a leaf and then tear over your head so low that it gives you a new parting at 500 mph, while making a noise so immense it very nearly undid the Duke of Kent’s tie.
It was an epic spectacle, as magical as anything you’ve ever seen in the West End and as loud as anything you ever heard at Knebworth. And what made it even more breathtaking is that there were no wires and no special effects. What you were watching was Johnny Russian spending 15 minutes idly tearing up the laws of physics.
Next up were the Americans, who have nothing in their armoury that can even get close to the lunacy of the MiG. It was like giving Paul Daniels a white rabbit and putting him on stage after the Cirque du Soleil.
Can this have been deliberate on the part of the show’s organisers? To bring the Americans on after the main event. To humiliate them a little bit. I do like to think so.
It turned out, however, that the Americans are quite capable of humiliating themselves. While the F-15 was whizzing about, a USAF staff sergeant came on the public-address system to tell us all what was going on. Unfortunately, he’d brought exactly the same script he uses back at home…
‘You are watching with pride,’ he began and was wrong immediately. I wasn’t watching with pride. I was watching with a Pimm’s.
The rest of his spiel was like listening to the fingernail express screeching to a halt on a blackboard the size of Alaska. The F-15, he said, has patrolled the skies for 30 years, protecting ‘this great nation’s way of life from the tyranny of terrorism, blah blah blah’. It was even accompanied by that swelling one-cal soft rock music that causes visitors at American air shows to rise to their feet and weep.
I looked around at the RAF bigwigs with whom I was sitting and, amazingly, none of them was openly vomiting. Mostly, they were smiling the smile you might give your boss if you’ve got him round for dinner and he’s just made an inappropriate remark about your wife’s panty line.
My boy-child wasn’t. He was beaming the beam of someone for whom the meaning of life had just become clear. He spends most of his life with two sisters, a mother, a granny, a nanny and a housekeeper. Even our dogs are girls. And yet here he was watching an F-15 climb with its burners lit from ground level to 17,000 feet in 11 seconds. With his dad. And he loved it.
So here’s a tip. It’s the Farnborough air show this weekend. If you’ve got a son, go. If you haven’t, go upstairs and make one.
Sunday 23 July 2006
My near-death toilet
experience
When we heard recently that Syd Barrett, the reclusive former member of Pink Floyd, had died at his semi-detached home in Cambridge, many things intrigued those who remember his music. Why did he choose to live alone? Why did he shun the money? What was he doing in such a small house?
But for me only one thing was truly shocking. He had died at the age of just 60.
Now I know that if you’re 17 years old, 60 is as far away as the moons of Jupiter.
But for me, living in the accelerated space–time continuum of middle age, 60 is tomorrow morning.
Scientists say the smallest measurement of time is a femtosecond. A million-billionth of a second. But when you’re older than 45, the smallest measurement of time, actually, is one year. And if I live to 60, I only have 14 left. That’s 5,000 days. And that’s only 120,000 hours.
I think often about how I shall die and when. I find myself looking at really old people and wondering what it must feel like; to know that you’ve reached a point where your life expectancy is measurable in minutes. Why aren’t they all running around waving their arms in the air panicking; because they must surely know that soon everything that they hold dear – everything – will be replaced by the utter blackness of eternity?
I get a lot of practice at thinking these things because in my life every lump, bump, cough, ache and pain is the onset of some terrible killer disease. I catch ebola three times a week, and back in June, having discovered a nodule of something unpleasant near my left elbow, became fairly convinced I’d become the first person in human history to catch arm cancer. A few days earlier, I had managed –just – to shake off a nasty bout of ear TB.
Of course, most of my ailments are designed so that I can lie on a sofa while my wife brings me poached eggs on toast. I’ve never really thought I had cancer, so I’ve never really known what it must be like to stare the Grim Reaper in the face and know that time’s up. Last weekend, however, all that changed…
Now I want to make it absolutely plain before I go any further that I do not find bottoms or anything which comes out of them even remotely funny. I am not seven years old and I am not German. But there’s no way of saying what I’m about to say without being lavatorial. I’m sorry for that.
What happened, you see, is that after my usual morning’s number twos, I noticed that the water in the bowl was red. Which meant, of course, that I had, without feeling any pain, passed a small amount of blood. Plainly, I had prostate cancer.
I am aware of this disease. I know that it is the most common form of cancer among men and it is likely to strike when the victim nears 50. I even know what colour wristband you should wear to show you support it (blue).
I knew, too, that I needed, urgently, to check mine out and so, armed with nothing but a well-oiled finger, went ahead and violated what for 46 years has been a strictly enforced one-way street.
I shall spare you the pain and the humiliation of this hideous potholing expedition, but I feel duty-bound to explain that once I was in there, ferreting about, I realised that I didn’t know what a prostate is, or what it feels like or where it is exactly.
It’s much the same story with the endless requests we get from doctors to check out our testicles for early signs of cancer. I’m sure this is jolly good fun, but unless you tell us what we’re looking for, how will we know when we’ve found it?
And skin cancer too. How can you tell the difference between a mole and a melanoma? I’m sure it’s possible if you’ve spent seven years studying medicine, but what if you’re a fork-lift truck driver? I’ve examined thousands of photographs of malignant skin growths and they all look like every freckle on my body.
After a bit of research on the internet I discovered that a prostate is about the size of a walnut, that it’s used to make fluid in which sperm is transported and that it lives ‘near’ the rectum.
And eventually I did discover something in my bottom that fitted the description.
But with knowledge gleaned solely from the BBC website – which almost certainly will blame the rise in popularity for prostate cancer on either the Israelis or global warming – and with nothing to hand except a soapy index finger, I’m afraid I wasn’t able to say whether whatever I’d found had cancer or was in rude good health.
The only evidence I had was the blood, and that really was enough.
I was finished. I wasn’t even going to last as long as Syd Barrett.
I heard the other day that 80 per cent of patients, when told by a doctor that their tests for cancer had been positive, make a joke of some sort. Wearily, I went downstairs wondering what mine might be. Something about getting the spare room painted, perhaps…
And there in the kitchen was my wife. ‘Morning,’ she said cheerily. ‘Have you been to the loo yet, because that beetroot we’ve been eating doesn’t half make it red.’
I’ve never felt so happy in all my life.
Sunday 30 July 2006
When I am the Mayor of London
It seems that while I wasn’t paying attention someone publicly suggested that I stand against Ken Livingstone as the official Tory candidate in the forthcoming elections to find a London mayor.
My initial reaction was predictable. Why should I give up a handsomely paid job which involves driving round corners in a selection of Ferraris and Lamborghinis so that I can earn £134,000 a year doing something I don’t want to do, for a party I’m not sure about, in a city where I don’t live?
However, since that initial moment of shock and awe, I’ve given the matter some serious thought and I’ve decided that, actually, I’d rather like to give it a shot. I mean, how hard can it be?
Sure, the white paper drawn up to create the post was the largest parliamentary document since the Government of India Act in 1935, but so far as I can tell, the job of running the capital is no harder than being a lift attendant.
For starters, the original white paper stated that the Greater London Authority should have up to 250 staff, at a cost of£20 million. But Uncle Ken has blasted through this and employed 630 people at a cost of£60 million. And with that lot running around, crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s, what’s left for me to do?
On the first day I’d instruct my people to go out into the capital and get rid of all the bus lanes. And then I’d sell off all the bendy buses to somewhere like Los Angeles, which has big enough roads to handle their vast bulk.
Then I’d go to the Ivy for lunch.
On Tuesday I’d look out of the window for a bit and marvel at how the traffic was moving freely. And then I’d go to the Caprice.
And in the afternoon I’d have a nap. Then, in the evening, I’d put the mayoral eco-car on eBay and buy a Range Rover.
Wednesday is when we record Top Gear, so I’d pop down to Surrey and drive round some corners in a Lamborghini. And then I’d go back to London in the Range Rover and maybe take in a show.
You think I’m joking here. But I’m not. Uncle Ken is plainly so bored that he spends his day thumbing through The Observer’s Book of Despots, seeing which swivel-eyed lunatic he can have round for dinner that night. So far he’s had Islamic cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who spends his free time urging people to beat up their wives and throw stones at homosexuals.
And then, of course, he played host to the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, who after just six months in office has even managed to upset the Swedes. They’re so cross with him they’ve refused to sell him any more Saabs, which must have shaken him to the core.
I’m not sure who I’d have round. Probably one of those porn stars that keep being elected to non-jobs in Italy. But, whatever, on Thursday I’d reintroduce fox-hunting to the boroughs of Islington and Hackney. You might think this provocative, encouraging men in hunting pinks to gallop around Tofu central, but it’s no more offensive than Ken’s obsession with ‘ethnic inclusivity’ in places like Kensington and Chelsea. And there’d be fewer upturned wheelie bins for the bin men to worry about.
I su
ppose I should have a look at the congestion charge too. I’ve thought about this and I’ve decided there’d be a charge of £50 a day for all cars, which would keep tatty rubbish out of the city, and £500 a day for bicycles.
Anyone who’s too mean to buy a car is too mean to spend anything in the shops, so there’s no point having them. They can go to Dunstable instead, or Bedford, and not spend anything there.
Implementing this would take, what, 15 minutes. Which means that by Friday I’d be a bit stumped for something to do. Maybe I’d call the police, who would be under my command, and tell them to catch some burglars.
Oh no, wait. I know. I’d get someone to replace the statue of that woman with no arms and legs in Trafalgar Square with a full-size bronze model of a Spitfire.
Of course, this life of leisure presumes that I’d get elected in the first place, but I can’t see this presents too much of a problem. I mean, Ken has a pool of 381,790 voters on whom he can call – this being the current circulation of the Guardian. That means there are 5.6 million Londoners who don’t want their town hall full of marketing assistants and equality advisers.
I’d therefore replace them with a team who’d look into ways of changing the Notting Hill carnival into an annual drag race for monster trucks. And I’d pass a law banning people from entering the London marathon in diving suits or chicken outfits. This kind of thing is acceptable at provincial fancy-dress parties, but if your outfit prevents you from finishing the race within six hours, don’t come crying to me if you’re mowed down by a stockbroker in a BMW.
In the second week I’d sell the mayoral offices to a property developer, sack the 630 staff and, after turning out the lights, sack myself. Because when you actually stop and think about it, a London authority is a tier of government we can’t afford and don’t need.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 8
