There’s no real excuse either. On eBay there currently are 3,764 dining tables being sold, with prices starting at just £16 – less than three packets of fags. So buy one, turn the bloody polar bears off and let’s get this family Sunday lunch thing under way.
It all begins at the butcher, and what you need to know is that you will describe whoever you choose as the best butcher in the world. Out here in the Cotswolds it’s the next topic of conversation after schools.
‘We use the “little man” at the bottom of the town. He’s much better than the one at the top.’ ‘What? You don’t use our chap in Chuntsworthy? Everyone does. He’s the best butcher in the world.’
The marvellous thing is that nobody knows what they’re talking about. Beef is not like wine. Yes, those with a sensitive palate could tell the difference between the scarlet plonk-meat sold in supermarkets and the Chateauneuf-du-Pape meat sold by a proper butcher.
But could you really tell the difference between the butcher at the bottom of the town and the chap at the top? Not a hope in hell.
So you buy a joint of meat from whichever butcher has the fewest flies in the window and you put it in the oven and then you try to get your children to set your eBay table.
This will make them very angry because they’re busy watching that man on YouTube who tries to light his fart. And they won’t be jollied along by the thought of the whole family sitting down together because the only people in the world they hate more than their siblings are their parents.
Frankly, they’d much rather be sitting down in a bus shelter with their friends.
Cajoling them to break out the cutlery and put it on the table in something like the right order, without stabbing one another, takes so long that you forget about the broccoli, which is now in need of some culinary Viagra if it’s to become firm again.
No matter. An hour after the first ingredient is ready, the last will be vaguely edible as well, so it’s time to carve.
This, for reasons I don’t fully understand, is a man’s job. Perhaps it’s because he hasn’t done the cooking or argued with the kids and is therefore in a better frame of mind to deal with the carving knife which, somehow, after a week in a drawer, has become as sharp as Vanessa Feltz’s backside. Last weekend I would have been better off chopping up the pork with a rolling pin.
So after a while and a lot of swearing, I went to look for that electric sharpener thing that every couple are given when they get married.
Unfortunately, while foraging about in the bottom of the bottom drawer, among the juicers and the traditional scales and the £100 brushed screw-pull corkscrews, and all the other stuff we received on that happy day 13 years ago, I came across some old photographs.
And by the time I’d finished being distracted by these, the broccoli was stone cold and the gravy had become so congealed that it could have been used as a football.
My wife was very angry about this, and how the children had laid the table without mats, serving spoons, glasses or indeed anything you might need to actually eat a lunch. And I’d laid the fire with coal that smells of cancer rather than wood, which I think is naff.
Eventually, though, we were under way. The family all together. Eating good, wholesome, traditional nourishing food.
And talking about all sorts of things, such as the need to sit up straight, the need to eat with your mouth closed, the need to ask for seconds rather than just leaning across the table, and how it’s important to eat without your elbows taking on the shape of a Vulcan bomber’s wings.
That afternoon, feeling heavy and lethargic, I curled up in front of a drowned polar bear and thought about those 3,764 dining tables for sale on eBay.
I’m surprised there aren’t more.
Sunday 3 December 2006
Nice jet, shame about abroad
Air travel has done more for world peace than any other single entity in the history of mankind. The more countries you visit, the more you understand that people from other cultures and races and places are just like you – except America, obviously – so you’re less likely to want to shoot them.
The reason why there’s been peace in western Europe for more than 60 years has nothing to do with the European Union or NATO and everything to do with Ryanair.
I’d give the chairman the Nobel peace prize, frankly.
But somehow Gordon Brown has got it into his head that aeroplanes are hurting the sky through which they fly and that he must therefore double airport tax. This means the cost of your annual Christmas holiday in Barbados will rise from £9,482 to a staggering £9,487.
Anyway, to mark Mr Brown’s decision to save the world, I decided to go to Budapest. For lunch.
I’ve often said that if I came to power, the first thing I’d do is declare war on Hungary. This is because it’s the only country in western Europe I’ve never visited. And what you don’t know is scary. Hell. Malignant tumours. Strange noises in the house in the middle of the night. Hungary. They’ve always been the same in my book.
So when a friend rang and asked if I’d like to go Budapest, for the day, I said, ‘Er.’ Then he said we’d be going on a private jet so I said, ‘Yes.’
It belonged to a company called Gama Aviation, which charters its fleet out to the likes of Michael and Winner, and it was jolly lovely. But not half as lovely as the airport in Farnborough, Hampshire, where it’s based.
Check-in time is one minute before the scheduled departure. Or one hour afterwards, if you can’t be bothered to get up. It doesn’t really matter because all you have to do is show your passport to a man who, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, was wearing a high-visibility jacket. Perhaps he thought he might be knocked down by a vacuum cleaner.
Whatever, soon we were on board in a big swivelly seat, wondering whether to have our champagne neat or with a swan in it.
After we landed, a woman called Victor introduced us to our driver. He was called Victor too and he only had one word of English, which was ‘moment’. That, in the big scheme of things, was not terribly useful.
For instance, when he parked outside a big hotel in the middle of a rather boring square, and we asked why, he said: ‘Moment.’ Plainly, he was KGB and we were all going to be killed.
But no. After 20 minutes, another Victor arrived and told us to go shopping.
Budapest, it turns out, is the worst shopping city in the whole of the world. Walking down the pedestrianised main street is exactly like walking through the centre of Croydon 40 years ago, except that all the men are sweeping leaves and all the girls are wearing knee-length shorts with turn-ups. This is not a good look at the best of times, but it’s even worse when you have an arse like a championship pumpkin.
We took a trip down memory lane by going into C&A. Other than this, the only shops were Vision Express and Hungarian trinketry emporiums that sold a wide variety of 3-foot-tall motorised gnomes.
Eventually, we came across a market where two burly-looking Victors were hitting lumps of red-hot metal with hammers, and you could buy hats.
They were not like any hats I’d ever seen. Fashioned from what was undoubtedly carpet underlay, they were shaped like tubas and were 3 foot tall.
Obviously, I had to have one, which meant trying to work out how much they cost. I don’t know what currency they use in Hungary – pigs, I think – and nor could I work out how many sucklings you get to the euro. This is because Victor, the hat seller, only had one word of English, which was ‘moment’.
After the shopping trip we had a look round. And here’s what you need to know.
There is a bridge that links Buda with Pest. There are some green statues of people you’ve never heard of, there’s a long thin building and everything is grey. The shops are grey. The river is grey. The cars are grey.
And the sky is as grey as the shorts with turn-ups.
So we went for lunch where a man called Victor brought us pate, and goulash and duck and it only cost four pigs. ‘Do you want Hungarian wine?’ he as
ked. Not really.
After our feast, we couldn’t think of anything to do so we rekindled the lost art of having a food fight and then went back to the airport, got on our Falcon, and came home.
Conclusions? Well, as I sat in my apartment block in London that night, trying to get half a ton of paprika out of my hair, I decided that I’m sold on private jets and that I no longer want to declare war on Hungary. It would be like waging war on a mental institution.
But there’s something else I thought of too. My noodle delivery man was French, the girl in the coffee shop downstairs is Polish, the lift is always full of Americans speaking two-stroke and the girl on the till in my local supermarket is proof positive that Mars is definitely capable of spawning life.
So, actually, we don’t need air, or even space, travel any more. Because these days, the best way of meeting other people is to stay at home.
Sunday 10 December 2006
It’s English as a foreign language
As you know, it is impossible to speak French because everything over there has a sex. Tables. Ships. Birthday cakes. Throat lozenges, even. Everything is either a boy or a girl and they snigger when you get it wrong.
I’m told, however, that English is even harder to learn because although we recognised many years ago that tables are essentially asexual and invented the word ‘it’, there are several million alternatives for every object, subject or emotion.
This makes life very difficult for those to whom English is a second language.
George Bush, for instance.
When those ‘trrists’ flew their planes into the World Trade Center he went on television and referred to them as ‘folks’. That’s not right. ‘Folks’ are people who line-dance. ‘Folks’ are dim-witted but essentially quite likeable souls, whereas people who use Stanley knives to hijack planes and then fly them into tall buildings are ‘bastards’.
I understand his dilemma. Because ‘men’ can also be called lads, blokes, chaps, geezers, guys and so on. And you try explaining to a foreigner which word to use and when.
I’ve just spent the week in Moscow with a Russian publisher whose English was so perfect he’d started to delve into the furthest reaches of Roget’s Thesaurus. This was a mistake. It meant he kept referring to Russian secret-service agents as ‘lads’.
I wanted to pull him up on it, but you try explaining to a Russian why someone who puts polonium in a chap’s lunch is not a ‘lad’ or even a ‘bloke’. And while he may be a ‘chap’ to his senior officer, to the rest of us, and to his girlfriend, he’s a ‘guy’.
Worse, one of the girls I met over there had a book called Cockney Rhyming Slang.
You cannot even begin to imagine how wonky this made her sound.
Even if English is your first language, it’s easy to get in a bit of a muddle.
I, for instance, think that the word ‘whatever’ as in ‘I heard what you just said and I can’t be bothered to even think of a response’ is one of the greatest additions to the English language since ‘it’.
But I’ve been asked by my 12-year-old daughter to stop using it. Not because she finds it irritating but because she says it sounds wrong coming from a balding, fat, middle-aged man. ‘Whatever’ is a word solely for the pre-teens, and I’m jealous of them because all I had at that age was the almost completely useless ‘groovy’.
It’s not just a question of age, either. It’s also region. Pete Townshend, for example, can say ‘geezer’ and just about get away with it because he’s a sixty-something Londoner. In the same way that a plump postmistress from Derby can call you ‘duck’ and I cannot.
The worst example of getting it wrong, however, comes from Americans who, having lived in Britain for a while, think they can start talking English. Every time Christian Slater calls me ‘mate’ I’m filled with a sudden desire to shave his face off with a cheese knife. Americans cannot say ‘mate’ any more than Germans can say ‘squirrel’.
And it’s even worse when they stop using the word ‘pounds’ and, in a Californian drawl, say ‘quid’. I’m told – and you should be aware of this – that we sound similarly idiotic when, in America, we use ‘bucks’ instead of ‘dollars’.
It must be particularly difficult for foreigners if they are ever exposed to British advertising, because here we find all sorts of words that work well in a commercial break but nowhere else. ‘Tasty’, for example. Or ‘nourishing’. Or my least favourite: ‘refreshing’.
My point this morning is that English is indeed a very hard language to master.
It’s full of nuances and subtleties that take a lifetime to understand. But, and this is important, it does mean that for people who were born and raised here there is never an excuse for getting it wrong. Our wonderful mother tongue is always able to produce the ‘bon mot’.
So why, then, is official Britain so monochromatic? Why do the police close roads because of an ‘incident’? Why is every fight, from a pub brawl to a fully fledged riot, a ‘disturbance’? And why is the shipping forecast so bland? Why instead of ‘stormy’ don’t they say the sea’s ‘a frothing maelstrom of terror and hopelessness’?
And most important of all, why can’t doctors be a bit more elaborate with their choice of words when describing the condition of a patient?
Last week, for instance, we heard about a young chap who had been using his mobile phone on the third storey of an office block when the lift doors opened. Without looking, he stepped through the gap only to find the lift wasn’t actually there.
In the resultant fall he broke his back in two places, punctured a lung and snapped several ribs. But even so, doctors later described his condition as ‘comfortable’.
Now look. Someone lying on a squidgy daybed under the whispery shade of a Caribbean palm tree is ‘comfortable’. Someone lying in an NHS hospital with a broken back and a shattered rib poking through one of his lungs just isn’t.
‘Crumpled’ would have been better. As would ‘miserable’, ‘broken’, or ‘cross’. They could even have said: ‘Well, he won’t be playing on his Wii console for a while.’ Even my Russian friend could have come up with something better than ‘comfortable’.
He’d have said ‘the lad’s a bit bent’. And it would have taken about two years to explain why that’s wrong as well.
Sunday 17 December 2006
I didn’t drop the dead donkey
I’m finding it rather difficult to get into the spirit of Christmas this year, because Geoffrey, one of my much-loved donkeys, has just died.
Other than the fact he had a bit of a long face last Saturday afternoon – which is fairly normal – he seemed to be fine. But then on Sunday morning he was on his side in the bottom paddock, as dead as I don’t know what.
I always assumed that the expression ‘donkey’s years’ meant an unspecified, but very long time. However, it evidently means ‘eight years’. Because that’s all Geoff was when he smothered our Christmas preparations with a big sad blanket and went off to that great nativity scene in the sky.
There was, as you can imagine, a great deal of wailing from the children and, if I’m honest, a lump in my throat too. I liked Geoff. He was, as I said in this column only very recently, a straightforward antidote to the silly media world in which I live. Put simply, he had absolutely nothing in common with Janet Street-Porter. Apart from the teeth, obviously.
Anyway, after an hour or two we’d all dried our eyes and were trying to bring some normality to our shattered Sunday. Except, of course, it wasn’t normal, because right in the middle of the bottom paddock was a dead donkey. And what are you supposed to do about that?
Recently, I told you about the problems I had with a dead seal that washed up on the beach outside our holiday cottage. Getting rid of that took several gallons of petrol, a tractor, a strong stomach and, eventually, quite a lot of explosive. But we weren’t dealing with a seal here. We were dealing with Geoff, and I’m sorry, blowing his body to pieces simply wasn’t an option.
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Bury him? ‘Fraid not. You aren’t allowed to bury a donkey because someone has decided that his rotting carcass will poison the water table.
So, the knackers’ yard, then? Well, yes, but this would cost £250 and anyway, when we explained that Geoff would come out on the other side as two tubs of Evo-Stick and a few tins of Kennomeat, the children started crying again.
Happily, I was told by friends that it’s possible these days to have your horse or donkey cremated and, at face value, this seemed to be the best and most dignified course of action.
But despite the solemn promises made by these companies that your pet will be incinerated with respect, and that they’ll light a candle in their chapel of remembrance, and that you’ll get its ashes back in a mahogany sculpture of the animal itself, I’m afraid I was sceptical.
If I ran one of these places I’d tell the bereaved family that their animal had gone through the curtains to the accompaniment of Robbie Williams singing ‘Angels’.
And then after I’d got their cheque I’d give them a box full of whatever I could find in the vacuum-cleaner bag.
I spoke to one girl who’d got half her dead horse back in a box not much smaller than a garden shed. Apparently, the burners hadn’t been able to cremate him properly so they’d thrown half the skeleton away and finished the job with hammers.
I decided that Geoffrey would not be going this way and, anyway, my chief concern as the afternoon wore on was that he’d been murdered. No, really. What if yobs had shot him with an air rifle? I became so obsessed with the notion that by the evening I was making up ‘reward’ posters and cleaning my shotgun.
My wife, more worried that he’d caught some terrible equine disease that he might have passed on to her horses, decided that before I started running round the town shooting anyone in a baseball cap, it’d be best to call the vet and ask for a post-mortem.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 13
