My seven-year-old daughter, on the other hand, turned out to be quite an expert.
Having found several beads and some potted shrapnel, she uncovered what turned out to be a human leg bone. Quite how our guide worked this one out I have no idea, because to me it just looked like a long thin stone.
And quite why it mattered I don’t know either. Over the years many people have died, so it stands to reason that there are many bones out there. Finding one in the ground is like finding a star in the night sky or an idiot in local politics.
It’s the same deal with pots. People have always made them. And people have always dropped them on the floor. So finding the pieces today is of no moment.
I watch Time Team on television occasionally and every time one of those earnest young men pops out of his hole with a bit of crockery I just want to say: ‘Oh why don’t you just go to the pub.’ Archaeology, as we all know, is simply a tool that enables very stupid people to get into university. Fuse it with media studies and you end up with Tony Robinson.
Desperate to enliven my morning of walking around with my hands in my pockets, I planted my iPod under the crust of the salt and then called over my family to show them what I’d found.
‘Look,’ I exclaimed to the assembled group. ‘These Iron Age Johnnies were more advanced than we thought.’
It fell rather flat, if I’m honest. The rest of my family were genuinely captivated by our find and the history it represented.
They didn’t think it even slightly odd that our guide logged the location on his portable GPS system, saying he’d return as soon as possible with a team of experts from America.
Can you believe that? That people are prepared to fly halfway round the world to poke about in the ground looking for pots, for no financial gain.
No, really. They will simply donate their finds to a museum so they can be looked at by daytrippers who are only in there because outside it’s raining.
Sunday 10 September 2006
If you’re homeless find a hedgerow
Last week the government announced the latest figures showing the number of homeless people in Britain. And they don’t make any sense.
No, really. The report says that from April to June of this year 19,430 households applied to their local councils and were accepted as being homeless. I don’t understand. How can you be a ‘householder’ and be homeless?
To find out I turned to Shelter, the housing charity, which says there are 130,000 homeless children in Britain. No there aren’t. I travel a great deal, often to the north, and I’ve never once seen a homeless child.
The only homeless people I ever see are rather frightening-looking Scottish men who prowl the streets of Soho with their angry dogs begging for money. ‘Eat the dog. Then we’ll talk,’ is what I always say.
I don’t want to belittle homelessness. I understand that it must be very scary to find yourself with no friends, no family and nowhere to stay. I think often about how terrible that moment must be when you realise, for the first time, that you really have no bed that night. It sends a shudder down my spine.
Think about it. Slipping into a pair of cardboard pyjamas and being serenaded to sleep by passing trains, knowing that the price you pay for a mug of soup is a half-hour lecture on God’s infinite wisdom.
In fact, it’s because I care so much about homeless people that I have some advice for anyone whose life has gone so far down the crapper that he’s only reading this newspaper because he’s sleeping in it. And here it is. Move out of London and into the countryside.
If you hole up for the night in a shop doorway in London, those street-cleaner men will come along and squirt you with powerful jets of icy water.
And then, when you’re all soggy and cold, you’ll be moved on to another doorway where a drunken late-night reveller will be sick over you. Then your dog will be stolen by a Romanian woman in a shawl, and then someone will make you take so much heroin that you technically become an Afghan.
And to make matters worse you’ll spend your days scouring the city streets for out-of-date sandwiches, while stinking, and all the while you’ll be surrounded by Jade Moss and Judy Law, who will be popping out to the shops because there’s no more room in their houses for any more of their money.
Genuinely, I don’t understand why people who’ve lost their homes think that all will be well if they stow away on a train to London. And nor do I understand why people who were in London to start with don’t move out the moment they realise that it’s 10.30 p.m. and that they don’t have anywhere to stay.
London, when you have money, and a job and friends, is truly one of the greatest places on earth. But the capital, when you have nothing, must be more depressing than listening to Leonard Cohen from the wrong side of a cocaine high.
In the countryside things are a lot more cheery. For a kick-off the chances of being turned into a rent boy are smaller. There is also less heroin, and if you sleep in a field the chances of a late-night reveller being sick all over you are very small indeed.
What’s more, food simply isn’t an issue. I spent most of last week working in a rural part of Warwickshire and couldn’t believe how much there was to eat in the hedgerows. Blackberries, elderberries and what I thought was a tomato. It wasn’t.
In fact, if you do move to the countryside, avoid any small red plant that grows in hedgerows and looks like a tomato because it’s disgusting; instead, try truffling in the fields.
In one I found several thousand potatoes, and in another, right outside someone’s kitchen window, I found carrots and marrows. There were even some nearby cows that could easily be killed and eaten.
Then there’s the question of clothing. In a big city like London it matters what you wear because people are looking. You have to steal the right kind of Nike trainer, for instance. Whereas in the countryside there isn’t anyone around for miles, so you can keep warm in fertiliser bags, which can be held together with baler twine.
The news is good too when the sun sinks because you don’t have to hole up under a railway bridge. There are countless stables full of straw and, I’m told, it’s still –just – possible to find a barn that hasn’t yet been converted into an agreeable home by someone called Nigel.
Not only would living rough in the countryside be infinitely better than living rough in London but I’d go so far as to suggest it might even be fun.
Not as much fun as, say, being the Queen, but certainly not bad. You could make traps and watch birds and make dens and it’d be like being nine.
In fact, come to think of it, I’m rather surprised that the countryside isn’t awash with tramps, but in the 12 years I’ve lived out here, I haven’t seen one. There’s a bloke who sells The Big Issue in a nearby town. But I think I saw him the other day in a BMW, and sleeping in that doesn’t count.
Sunday 17 September 2006
There’s a literary future in the iLav
I like magazines. I like looking at the houses in Country Life, and I like looking at the pictures of people who’ve been eaten by sharks in Nuts and Zoo. I even like looking at what horrible trinketry is on the mantelpieces of the rich and orange in Hello!.
For you, a trip to the dentist is a hideous brush with the concept of torture, pain and despair. But me? I’m there two hours early so I can spend some time lost in a world of The Lady and Dogs Today. I even like to bury my nose in the spine of a magazine and take in some of the glue.
I love that smell, and it certainly helps at the dentist’s because by the time I actually get to the chair I’m so off my face there’s no need for those savage Novocaine injections. He could actually cut my whole head off with a bread knife and I wouldn’t feel a thing.
But it seems I’m alone on this one because magazine sales are beginning to stall.
What Car?, for instance, has sold 150,000 copies a month since the Druids used their newfangled ‘wheel’ to build Stone-henge. But in the past year or so sales have tumbled to just 120,000. And they’re
still going down.
Of course, it’s easy to see why. If you want to find out about your next car, why spend £4.25 at the newsagent’s when you can simply go online and get all the information you want, from the people at What Car? themselves, for nothing?
And why buy Zoo to see what someone looks like when they’ve been bitten by a shark when the web is full to overflowing of people being run over and catching fire and eating their own arms?
This, of course, is great for you and me but it does raise some interesting questions. Like, for instance, how can these websites support themselves? I mean, you don’t pay to see them, and the operators can’t rely on advertising revenue because nobody has yet figured out what the rates might be, or even if advertising on the net actually works.
This means a teenager in his bedroom, putting up happy-slapping video clips for a laugh, now has the power to completely unpick the fabric of the world’s publishing empires.
‘Pah,’ said a colleague of mine, in a meeting to discuss this very issue last week. ‘Men will always need to take a dump, and that means the magazine is here to stay.’
It’s an interesting point. The notion of going to the lavatory without taking something to read is simply incomprehensible. The joy of being in there, on your own, lost in a world of idyllic country houses and Private Eye and shark attacks, away from the phone, and away from the demands of the kids, is even more wondrous than being invited to spend the whole afternoon with ajar of honey and Kristin Scott Thomas.
But then, the day after we discussed the reading habits of men, came news from Sony of a new electronic book which, it’s said, will do for reading what the iPod did for listening to music.
It’s the size of a wallet and can store a library of up to 70 books in its memory chip. What’s more, the screen has no flicker and no backlight so you can read for hours without hurting your eyes. And judging from the pictures it appears to be easy to use, with just one button for ‘turning the page’.
Critics say it’ll never catch on because, as a general rule, people only ever have one book on the go at a time. And they go on to ask why, when you’ve read it, you might want to store it electronically rather than on your shelves, by the fireplace.
Fair enough, but they’re missing something. When we go on holiday, my wife needs one suitcase for her books about women in beekeeper hats doing bugger all for 650 pages, and I need another for all my speedboat and Nazi gold thrillers. An electronic reader would solve all that.
But it’s the applications beyond novels that really fire my imagination. Those of you who watch the epic TVshow 24 know that Jack Bauer is forever arriving outside a building full of terrorists and then having the schematics of the building in question sent to his PDA. Now I don’t know what schematics are, and nor, if I’m honest, am I fully wised up on what a PDA might be, but it seems he gets the plans of the building with all the staircases and the points of egress. Sometimes there are little red blobs showing him where the baddies are too.
Now if it’s possible to do this, surely it is also possible to download a copy of Shark Attack Weekly or Country Life directly from the editorial offices via my wireless internet connection into my khazi.
That doesn’t solve the problem of how publishers might generate ad revenue but if you work out how much could be saved by not having to buy the paper, and do the printing and put the magazine on lorries to the Isle of Skye, then who knows, maybe they won’t actually need advertising at all.
That’s not good, of course, for those who have printing-press companies or those with thin glasses who work in advertising. But even here, I have a suggestion.
Start a company making a selection of exciting new haemor-rhoid creams.
Because if the nation’s men can relieve themselves with, ooh, five or six hundred magazines at the time, the only thing that’ll ever get them out again is their piles.
Sunday I October 2006
Life’s ultimate short straw
My local petrol station has employed an elderly chap to run the pumps, no doubt to satisfy the recent European diktat that bars age discrimination.
Good. I’m pleased as punch that the old boy can now fill his days. However, I do wish the owners of the garage had explained to him how the computerised petrol pumps work, that the cash till is electronic, and how best to operate the chip and pin system while wearing bifocals.
By the time you walk out of there with a receipt, and your Smarties, all the fuel you bought has evaporated.
In a world that worked, petrol stations would all be run by spotty young men from Poland or Pakistan. But that simple dream can now be undone by four separate pieces of legislation. Age, sex, race and disability.
This means that if British Nuclear Fuels wants a person to monitor the reactors at Sellafield, it is duty-bound to at least consider someone whose CVreveals them to be a hormonal Afghan school leaver with a keen interest in Middle East politics, a degree in chemistry and epilepsy.
Of course, at this point you’d expect me to work myself into a state of righteous indignation and say: ‘Idealism? Pah. It’s a lovely thing to have, but God, it’s a dangerous thing to use.’
My wife has said on many occasions that she’d like to have Jamie Lee Curtis’s body. And I agree. I’d very much like to have Jamie Lee Curtis’s body. But it cannot happen because life is not fair. Some people win the lottery. And some don’t.
If you are born to a wealthy, intelligent family, then you will go to Eton, get a brilliant education and end up, having expended almost no effort at all, in a hedge fund, wealthy and contented.
If you are born ugly and with ginger hair, to a stupid family, things are likely to be a little more difficult.
However, here’s the thing. I absolutely support legislation that forces employers to consider people from all walks of life, no matter how much they dribble, or how many times a day they need to pray.
Sure, for every idiotic Stan who wants to become Loretta and have babies, there’s a Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of his legs to get back in a Spitfire, or a Michael Bolton who overcame that astonishing haircut to become a pop star. Ian Dury. Franklin D. Roosevelt. David Blunkett. Admiral Nelson. History is littered with disabled people who have not just got by, but got on.
Andrew Lloyd Webber made it even though at some point in his teenage years his face melted. And every year 200,000 people have to overcome the massive problem of being born American.
So, if I were an employer and wanted a footballer, I’d get someone who was good at football and wouldn’t care where they were from, what shape they were or even if they were a horse. If I wanted a secretary, I’d get someone who could type, and wouldn’t care how long her legs were or if she had sumptuous breasts. Much.
In fact, there’s only one type of person I wouldn’t employ under any circumstances. A small man.
Smallness trumps everything. It transcends national characteristics and traits written by the stars. I’ve said before that to be born Italian and male is to win the first prize in the lottery of life, but that isn’t so if you’re the height of a normal person’s navel.
It doesn’t matter if fate deals the short-arse a hand stuffed with aces, or what new laws the government imposes to smooth his way into normal human life, he simply won’t be able to achieve a state of happiness if he has to go through life banging his head on coffee tables.
If you’re small, it doesn’t matter whether you’re rich, poor, Aries, Leo or ginger, you will be consumed with a sense that people aren’t just physically looking down on you, but mentally as well. This will make you permanently angry, and equipped with a chip so deep you need to wear a tie to stop yourself falling in half.
I’ve never once met a small man who is balanced. They misinterpret every kind word and treat every gesture as the opening salvo in a full-on war.
It’s true, of course, that each generation is taller than the one that went before. I recently had a look round the restored SS Great Britain and the b
eds on this ocean liner were not even big enough for a twenty-first-century child of six.
It is, therefore, true to say that taller people are at the cutting edge of civilisation. Those of, let’s say, 6 foot 5 are bound to be the brightest and cleverest and most advanced humans the world has ever seen, and those under 5 foot 5 are somewhere between the amoeba and the ape, and there’s plenty of evidence to bear this out. An American man who is 6 foot 2 tall is 3 per cent more likely to be an executive and 2 per cent more likely to be a professional than is a man who stands 5 foot 10.
It’s often been said that Randy Newman’s song ‘Short People Got No Reason to Live’ is actually a metaphor for the stupidity of racism. I’m not so sure.
And nor, it seems, is the EU. Because while it’s now illegal to discriminate on the grounds of age, race, sex or disability, it is perfectly legal to push small people over in supermarkets and steal their milk in the playground.
Sunday 8 October 2006
My new career as a rock god
I’ve spent the past 20 years or so driving round corners while shouting, but then one day Richard Hammond turned upside down and the treadmill just stopped.
There I was with a big six-month hole in my diary. There’d be no show. No driving round corners. No shouting. For the first time in my adult life I had nothing to do.
So rather than waste the time eating cold sausages and looking out of the window I decided I’d learn to play the drums.
At this point I should explain that I’ve taken up many hobbies in the past and am something of an expert on the matter. And what I know most of all is that when you decide to do something you must rush out in a blizzard of ignorance and hope and spend a fortune on all the toys.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 10
