I worry about this in the same way that I worry about the loss of Concorde. It has not been in man’s nature to just give up on a project, but we really do seem to have given up when it comes to the cold.
Scientifically, it’s not that hard to beat. Back in 1999 British researchers worked out a way to stop the viruses infiltrating human cells in a test tube. But when it came to replicating the tests in the human nose, they all seem to have given up and gone off with Greenpeace to drive rubber boats at high speed round Icelandic whaling ships.
There is, however, some hope because apart from the Groucho Club, where people have colds in the summer, most people only catch a cold in the winter. So what we need to do is get rid of it and that, thanks to global warming, does seem to be happening.
In the last weekend of October I was sitting outside in the sunshine wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Only now that the wind is coming from the north have the viruses invaded my nostrils.
If, therefore, we can push the winter so far back that by the time it comes along we’re already into the spring, all should be well. To cure the common cold we simply need to get rid of its breeding season. This means producing as much carbon dioxide as possible. Yup. The cure for the common cold may well turn out to be the Range Rover.
Sunday 5 November 2006
Real men don’t go home at 7 p.m.
Speaking to an audience of wimmin in Glasgow last week, Mrs Blair revealed that back at the start of her husband’s career he was told by Labour party officials that he wouldn’t get very far if he kept going home at 7 p.m. to see his wife and children.
Cherie’s message was clear. Men should spend quality time with their family no matter how many wars they’ve inadvertently started and no matter how many constables are knocking on the door wanting to know about cash for ermine.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. If you were an Iron Age man and you came home from a hunting expedition empty-handed because you wanted to play with your children, you’d starve. If you were a penguin and you came back from a fishing trip with nothing but snow in your flippers, your baby would die and the following year Mrs Penguin would find a new mate.
This is the problem. I am designed to kill foxes, bend every woman I meet over the nearest piece of furniture and give her a damn good seeing-to.
But in an evolutionary nanosecond, it’s all changed. After several million years of programming we’ve been told that what women really want is a husband who leaves his colleagues in the lurch at 7 p.m. and comes home to make a delicious quiche.
That’s like telling your faithful family toaster after a lifetime spent making toast that you want it to become a washing machine. And it’s not just a bunch of baggy-breasted feminists making the point either. It’s every single girl from the age of puberty to the menopause.
Last weekend my colleague James May hurt his wrist while performing a stunt at the MPH show in London. Being male, mostly, he shrugged it off and kept going, which caused all the backstage women to treat him like a leper.
If he’d wanted to impress them he should have abandoned the show, gone home, sold his heartwarming story to OK! magazine, and spent the next six weeks watching Love Actually with his cat.
I pride myself on the fact I don’t cry over films – apart from Educating Rita, obviously. But apparently this is all wrong. I should sob hopelessly every time I watch the news.
No, really. Look at the film stars who melt the hearts of womankind these days: Johnny Depp, Judy Law, Orlando Bloom. Are they hunter-gatherers? Maybe they’d pass muster on a Saturday morning in Carluccio’s but in a jungle they’d be eaten within 10 minutes.
Back in the 1960s Paul Newman and Robert Redford were much loved as they trotted around Wyoming on their horses shooting people. But when they were reunited last week, women forgot all that and in a desperate bid to justify the stirring they felt 40 years ago, talked about how Paul has been married to the same woman for a million years and how he makes a lovely sauce.
I wonder sometimes if Steve McQueen would get a break if he appeared on the scene today. Back in the sixties he really did seem to have all the bases covered: silent but strong smouldering sexuality, the sort of man who could punch a horse to the ground while driving a Mustang sideways through the streets of San Francisco. He even managed to get Faye Dunaway’s knickers off just by playing chess.
Who’s his modern-day equivalent? There’s nobody. Stallone has disappeared. Schwarzenegger is in politics. Gibson is setting fire to synagogues. And now we’re expected to believe that a dwarf like Tom Cruise could knock someone out with a single blow from his hair product.
It’s the same story in music. Robert Plant used to send women wild with that lion’s mane hairdo and half a mile of hosepipe down the front of his loons. But now everyone in music is a doe-eyed pretty boy with a Ken and Barbie androgeno-crotch and nothing up his nose except moisturiser.
I work with Richard Hammond, who is about as manly as Graham Norton’s knicker drawer. But girls say he has bunny-rabbit eyes and that he looks like he needs to be mothered. Pah. He looks like a Smurf.
In sport, women seem to love overpaid nancy-boy footballers who fall over all the time and cry, whereas proper men who play rugby and keep going even when their head has fallen off are largely ignored.
I’ll tell you this, though, Mrs Blair. If you were a penguin looking for a mate, you’d go for Steve Thompson in front of Colin Firth any day.
All of which gets me back to the case in point; that after a million years of not coming home until you actually have an impala to eat, men are now being told by the prime minister’s wife that, no matter what, we should up sticks at seven and go home with a box of tissues and something gooey from Belgium.
Right. So when the director says that he needs a few more shots and I say, ‘Tough,’ and drive off, that’s okay, is it? It’s okay that the BBC spends thousands of pounds of your money getting everyone back the next day because Jeremy wanted to get home and read his children a Winnie-the-Pooh story?
Cherie says my attitude is macho and she’s right.
It is.
It might not be very attractive in this day and age. But that’s because I’m a man.
I know this because I much prefer Uma Thurman, who’s all woman, to Kate Moss, who, from behind, could well be a boy.
Sunday 12 November 2006
Schools are trying to break children
All of us wrap up our children when it’s cold. We put them on booster seats in the car and make them wear helmets when they’re on a bicycle. We strive constantly to keep them out of harm’s way, and then we send them off to school so they can be tortured and killed.
I suppose we all think, rather naively, that school today is exactly the same as school back in the sixties, apart from the fact that children are now allowed calculators. And get hit by the teachers rather less often.
‘Fraid not. School today is completely different. There’s very little bullying, and no smoking behind the bike sheds because there’s no time; not when you need to be fluent in 17 languages by four and you’ve got those pesky quadratic cosines to finish off by break.
I’m not kidding. I do not understand any of my son’s maths homework.
And what’s more, I bet he knows more about advanced mathematics now, at the age of 10, than most of the NASA scientists did when they put Armstrong on the moon.
People say Gordon Ramsay works very hard, what with his restaurants, his autobiography and his swearing empire to manage on television.
But he’s a work-shy benefits dodger compared with the average 12-year-old these days.
My daughter, who already speaks Latin better than Julius Caesar, comes home from school at 6 p.m. every night, bleary eyed and drunk from the pressure. But before she can collapse into bed she has to do four half-hour homeworks. Supper? MSN? A bit of light texting? Forget it.
And on the basis that a parent can only be as happy as their least happy child, this makes me pretty damn mis
erable.
She’s not alone, either. I read the other day that a four-year-old child had been diagnosed with ‘stress’ and I’m not surprised. Chances are she’d been made to miss her playtime and lunch so she could finish her paper on how the gross domestic product of Iceland was affected by EU fish quotas.
When I was at school I remember being told that if I spelt my name properly on my common entrance paper I’d be halfway there.
Exams were a hiccup in the day; not the be-all and end-all of absolutely everything.
What’s changed is simple. We now have bloody league tables, a handy cut out ‘n’ keep guide to how well the school performs. Well, forgive the expletive, but that’s bollocks.
Printing a list of ‘best schools’ purely on the grounds of academic achievement is as idiotic as printing a list of ‘best foods’ purely on the grounds of calorie content. It tells you nothing.
A couple of years ago a sixth-form student I know wanted to study for a science A level so she could pursue a noble career in engineering. The school campaigned vigorously for her to do something useless instead, like media studies or knitting. But she and her parents were adamant.
So she sat the science A level and got a D. And because of that single failure the school fell 50 places in the league tables. One child. One exam result. And a 50-place fall. Still think league tables make sense?
There’s more. Another child I know was sent home recently from her school with a note saying that by the age of 10 she really should have a rudimentary grasp of quantum physics and that because she didn’t she must have some extra tuition.
Unfortunately, on the back of this hurriedly written note the teacher had been doing some sums. There was a list of every child who was having extra lessons, how much each parent was paying and at the end, under the total – which was £16,000 by the way – he’d written ‘Yippee’.
Now I’m sorry, but people pay an eye-watering fortune to have their children educated privately, and to be honest we do not want to end up with an emaciated wreck simply so the school can maintain its place in some pointless national academic championship.
Recently, I made a decision on which secondary school my children will attend. I won’t tell you what it is but I will tell you that I have no idea where it came in last year’s league tables. I have not looked. I absolutely couldn’t care less. I chose it because I know several people who’ve been there, and they loved it. I chose it because I liked the cut of the housemaster’s jib. I chose it because the children I saw mooching from lesson to lesson were mostly smiling. I chose it because it ‘felt’ right.
Of course, I want my children to leave there with a basic academic foundation; enough to get them to £32,000 on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, say. But more than that I want them to learn social skills so they can interact properly with other human beings. I want them to learn to play the guitar, and how to smoke without being caught.
I want them to enjoy it, to have fun. I can’t bear the thought of paying a small fortune every year so they can be put on a treadmill and emotionally flogged until they’re bulimic, suicidal and riddled with tics and angst. School is supposed to prepare a person for life, not wear them out.
This is what we all seem to have forgotten. Yes, we must do everything we can to keep our children safe. But we should also do everything we can to make them happy as well.
Sunday 19 November 2006
That Henry II, he was dead right
I joke often about how, if I were in power, I’d employ police marksmen to sit on motorway bridges picking off people who drive too slowly. But actually I’ve never thought that the death penalty is a good idea.
When a state calmly and coolly, and in sound mind, decides that it’s going to kill someone, that’s actually premeditated murder. And when they administer the lethal injection in front of an invited audience of priests and officials on a sort of stage, well, that’s just bizarre.
There are two ways a truly civilised and advanced nation can be defined. One, it has a fleet of nuclear submarines, and two, it does not have the death penalty. That leaves you with France and Britain. And that’s about right.
Think about it. When you empower the judiciary to kill someone, you are not even hoping that the person will be rehabilitated. It is pure punishment. But who’s the punishment aimed at? Sure, it can’t be very pleasant sitting in your cell dreaming up some ludicrous last-meal request that will stump the jailhouse chef, but actually, after the poison has done its dirty work, you’re dead and that’s sort of that.
The people who actually suffer most are your parents and your children.
And they weren’t the ones who did the crime.
I’m not saying we should be soft on vagabonds and thieves. I’d like very much to lock them up in a cell and tell them they can eat only what they can cultivate in their body hair. And I wouldn’t heat the jail either, or provide plumbing. But I absolutely couldn’t support a state that declares murder is wrong and then hammers the point home by publicly and openly murdering people.
That said, a state that waits for people who are a bloody nuisance to order dim sum, then silently pokes them in the buttocks with a nuclear-tipped umbrella seems somehow less revolting.
I can think of many people who could and should be removed from the scene in such a way that no one can really explain what happened. George Monbiot. Ken Livingstone. Various hard-line Muslim fanatics. Most human-rights lawyers. Anyone with a rally jacket. People in Babyshambles. People with beards. Anyone with a sign on their desk that says ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here’, anyone in a jungle in Australia, anyone who claps along to the oompah music at the Horse of the Year Show, and everyone at the Ideal Home exhibition.
This Henry II attitude to good governance – ‘who will rid me of this turbulent priest’ – is not premeditated murder. It’s more like a crime of passion, and that’s understandable. You feel sorry for the leader as he sits there thinking: ‘I’m trying to run a country here and how can I do that if I’ve got this infernal priest nicking all my churches and making everything worse? So can someone go out there and stick a sword in his gizzard.
‘And then on the way home can someone please pop into the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show and mess with the Earls Court boilers…’
That’s pretty much the same as a husband trying to run a family and finding that every time he comes home from a hard day at the office his wife is in bed with the paper boy. Eventually, he’s going to snap and shoot them both. And not even the Americans would electrocute him for that.
Of course, once the state gets a taste for the quiet assassination of troublemakers, there’s always a danger that you end up with Uday Hussein feeding hookers to his pet tigers and making old men dance after they’ve had the soles of their feet beaten to a pulp.
That’s bad, obviously. But what you do to solve this is have him quietly killed as well.
There’s a scene in an eighties film called Defence of the Realm where a journalist is blindfolded and dragged to a grand-looking room in Whitehall where three old-school-tie types grill him a bit. And then after he refuses to play ball they attach a small bomb to the record player in his flat and blow him to pieces.
He was going to print a story that would have resulted in the American forces leaving Britain in the middle of the cold war. So what do they do? He couldn’t be arrested and tried because he hadn’t committed a crime. And he couldn’t be allowed to run the story. So he had to explode.
I sort of like the idea that this Ludlum stuff is going on, behind our backs. But I fear it doesn’t any more.
Thatcher, yes. There’s no doubt in my mind that she might not have lost too much sleep if her security services had taken out the odd person threatening national security in a Geneva railway station. But Blair? Hmmm. I doubt he’d have the balls, because he’d be worried about what he could say if Cherie found out.
Then there’s David Cameron. Did you see those pictures of him in Darfur last week? He
was wearing cords and a short-sleeved shirt, and I’m sorry, but Boden Man is never, in a million years, going to order the quiet assassination of a turbulent cleric.
If he had a full packet in his underpants he might surely be tempted to lose it with his minions and shout at them to put a dollop of killer lead in Polly Toynbee’s tofu. Instead of which he’s now going to let her shape his party’s stance on social justice.
It won’t work. My Henry II plan will.
Sunday 26 November 2006
Making a meal of Sunday lunch
Most nights, like most people, I shovel food into my mouth with one hand while using the other to stab away at the remote control, desperately trying to find something on television that isn’t about penguins and polar bears.
But on Sundays the television is turned off, a big fire is lit in the dining room and the whole family gathers round to gorge on a feast of roast meat, gravy and what country pubs call ‘all the trimmings’.
This is the traditional Sunday lunch, but actually it’s traditional in the same way as going to work in a bowler hat. It’s a perceived cornerstone of the British way of life but in fact few people actually do it.
Recent figures show that only 29 per cent of families eat together more than once a week and that of this minority, 77 per cent do so while watching penguins falling over. A quarter of households in Britain don’t even have a table.
This, I think, should be a new measure of poverty. We in Britain like to think we’re rich because we have aspirin and, for some of the year at least, access to clean drinking water.
We like to think we’re advanced because you can’t join the army at nine, and civilised because people don’t die in the streets of diphtheria.
But, I’m sorry, even the poorest African families have a table. And here, 25 per cent of us don’t.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 12
