Apparently, the hoteliers like the Germans very much. They say they’re very quiet.
Well, yes, they would be. They have to stay sober and be in bed by nine because, as we know, they do like to get up early…
Interestingly, the Americans come second in the poll, behind the Japanese. They’re billed as polite, interested in new cultures and good at tipping. I agree, but sharing a restaurant with a party of nasal septics with their two-stroke vowel sounds is like sharing a restaurant with a Flymo. And they do have the most annoying habit of talking to their friends as though they are 600 yards apart.
At the other end of the scale we find the French. Apparently, they are the worst holidaymakers. The pits. Except for one thing. Stop carefully and think: have you ever seen a French person on a foreign holiday? Italy is full of Germans. Spain is full of Brits. Greece is full of dust and homosexuals. The Dutch are everywhere. The Swedes are all dead, and is that someone with a strimmer? Oh no, hang on. It’s a party of Americans coming up the hill.
But the French? They don’t seem to do foreign holidays and with good reason. Does God leave heaven every August and take a vacation in hell? No. Well, why would anyone go abroad if they live in France?
The fact of the matter is that the French are nowhere to be seen and that means – no arguing please – the Russians are the worst tourists in the world. Of course, they spent most of their childhood eating concrete and trying not to be tortured so who can blame them for exploding onto the world’s beaches in a tizzy of frills, Versace sunglasses and extraordinarily tight Speedos.
The only problem is that they all look so sinister with their pastry complexions and their special-forces tattoos. You get the impression when they look at you that they’re imagining what you would look like with no head.
A lout from Liverpool may vomit on you and that’s nasty. But a Russian would happily garnish your pizza with a dash of polonium. And that’s so much worse.
Sunday 27 May 2007
Save the planet, eat a vegan
Good news. It seems that your car and your fondness for sunken light bulbs in every alcove are not warming up the planet after all.
In fact, according to new research, power stations and transport produce lots of carbon dioxide, but in addition they also produce lots of aerosols that, in the short term at least, help keep the planet as cool as a deodorant model’s armpits.
So who has come up with this new theory? Some half-crazed nitwit with a motoring show to protect? George Bush? A bloke in the pub? No. In fact, it comes from an organisation called EarthSave, which is run and funded, so far as I can tell, by the usual array of free-range communists and fair-trade hippies.
The facts it produces, however, are intriguing. Methane, which pours from a cow’s bottom on an industrial scale every few minutes, is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And as a result, farmed animals are doing more damage to the climate than all the world’s transport and power stations put together.
What’s more, demand for beef means more and more of the world’s forests are being chopped down, and more and more pressure is being put on our water supplies.
Plainly, then, EarthSave is encouraging us to go into the countryside at the first possible opportunity and lay waste to anything with more than one stomach. Maybe it wants me to shoot my donkeys. Happily, what it’s actually saying is that you can keep your car and your walk-in fridge, but you’ve got to stop eating meat.
In fact, you’ve got to stop eating all forms of animal products. No more milk. No more cheese. And if it can be proven that bees fart, then no more honey either. You’ve got to become a vegan.
Now, of course, if you don’t like the taste of meat, then it’s perfectly reasonable to become a vegetablist. It’s why people who don’t like, say, John Prescott become Conservatives. But becoming a vegan? Short of being paraded on the internet while wearing a fluffy pink tutu, I can think of nothing I’d like less.
Eating a plate of food that contains no animal product of any kind marks you down as a squirrel. Eating only vegetables is like deciding to talk using only consonants. You need vowels or you make no sense.
Of course, there are certain weeds I like very much. Cauliflower and leeks particularly. But these are an accompaniment to food, useful only for filling up the plate and absorbing the gravy. The idea of eating only a cauliflower, without even so much as a cheese sauce, fills me with dread.
There are wider implications too. Let us imagine that the world decided today to abandon its appetite for sausage rolls, joints of beef and meat-infused Mars bars.
What effect would this have on the countryside?
Where now you find fields full of grazing cows and trufliing pigs, there would be what exactly?
Hardcore vegetablists like to imagine that the land would be returned to the indigenous species, that you could go for a walk without a farmer shooting your dog, and that you’d see all manner of pretty flowers and lots of jolly new creatures. Wolves, for instance.
In fact, if animal farmers were driven away, the land would be divided up in two ways. Some would be given over to the growing of potatoes – the ugliest crop in Christendom – and the rest would be bought by rock stars. Either way, Janet Street-Porter and her ridiculous gaggle of ramblers in their noisy clothes and stupid hats would still get short shrift.
What’s more, there’d be no grassland because there’d be no animals to graze. And there’d be no woods either because without pheasants what’s the point? I’m sure EarthSave dreams of a land as pristine as nature intended but it’d be no such thing. Within about three weeks Britain would look like Saskatchewan.
So, plainly, the best thing we can do if we want to save the world, preserve the English countryside and keep on eating meat, is to work out a way that animals can be made to produce less methane.
Scientists in Germany are working on a pill that helps, but apparently this has a number of side effects. These are not itemised, but I can only assume that if you trap the gas inside the cow one of the drawbacks is that it might explode. Nasty.
And unnecessary. We all know that the activity of our bowels is governed by our diet. We know, for instance, that if we have an afternoon meeting with a bunch of top sommeliers in a small windowless room it’s best not to lunch on brussel sprouts and baked beans.
Recently, I spent eight days in a car with my co-host from Top Gear James May, who has a notoriously flatulent bottom. But because he was living on army rations – mashed-up Greenpeace leaflets to which you add water – the interior was always pine fresh and lemon zesty.
So if we know – and we do – that diet can be used to regulate the amount of methane coming out of the body, then surely it is not beyond the wit of man to change the diet of farmyard animals.
At the moment, largely, cows eat grass and silage, and as we’ve seen, this is melting the ice caps and killing us all. So they need a new foodstuff: something that is rich in iron, calcium and natural goodness.
Plainly, they can’t eat meat so here’s an idea to chew on. Why don’t we feed them vegetarians?
Sunday 3 June 2007
Stuff the tiger – long live extinction
As the population of China becomes more wealthy, demand for illegal tiger parts is booming. Up to 600 million Chinese people believe that tiger bones, claws and even penises will cure any number of ailments, including arthritis and impo-tency. And as a result we’ve just been told, for about the hundredth time, that if nothing is done extinction looms.
Well, not complete extinction. Obviously, tigers will continue to exist in Las Vegas for many years to come. And in Asia there are so many backstreet big-cat farms that they outnumber cows. But they will cease to exist in the wild.
Right. And what are we supposed to do, exactly? Send an international force tooled up with the latest night-vision gear and helicopter gunships to hunt down and kill the poachers?
Really? And what are these mercenaries supposed to say to the locals
? ‘Yes, I realise that you have no fresh water, no healthcare, little food and that your ox is broken, but we are not here to do anything about that. In fact, we’re going to put an end to the only industry you have.’
Yes, say the conservationists, who argue that unless this is done now our children will grow up never being able to see a tiger in the wild. And that this is very sad.
Is it? I have never seen a duck-billed platypus in the wild or a rattlesnake. I’ve never seen any number of creatures that I know to exist. So why should I care if my children never see a tiger?
In fact, come to think of it, if they’re on a gap year trekking through the jungles of Burma I fervently hope they don’t.
There’s an awful lot of sentimentality around the concept of extinction. We have a sense that when a species dies out we should all fall to our knees and spend some time wailing. But why? Apart from for a few impotent middle-class Chinamen, or if you want a nice rug, it makes not the slightest bit of difference if Johnny tiger dies out. It won’t upset our power supplies or heal the rift with Russia. It is as irrelevant as the death of a faraway star.
So far this century we’ve waved goodbye to the Pyrenean ibex – did you notice? – and the mouthful that is Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey. Undoubtedly, both extinctions were blamed on Shell, McDonald’s, the trade in illegal diamonds, Deutsche Bank or some other spurious shareholder-led attempt to turn all of the world into money and carbon dioxide.
But if we look back to a time before oil, steam and German bankers, we find that species were managing to die off all on their own. The brontosaurus, for example. And who honestly thinks it’s sad that their children will never get to see a tyranno-saurus rex in the wild?
In the nineteenth century 27 species went west, including the great auk, the thicktail chub, the quagga, the Cape lion and the Polish primitive horse. Apparently, the Poles tried their hardest but it was no good. It was just too primitive.
Eco-mentalists ignore the fact that between 1900 and 1919 we lost most of the young men in Europe and prattle on about the passing of the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the Tasmanian wolf.
Honestly, who cares, because there are quite literally millions more fish in the sea. Only last week we heard that scientists in the South American rainforest have found 24 previously unknown species including 12 dung beetles, a whole new ant, some fish and a rather fetching frog.
It may not be as cuddly as a baby tiger or as primitive as a Polish horse, but it is groovier since its purple fluorescent hoop markings appear to have been drawn by Steve Hillage himself.
So is the world rejoicing at the sensational news that we’ve been joined on earth by a hippie frog? Is it hell as like. What the world is doing instead is crying into its eco-handkerchief because of what’s going on in the Arctic.
We’re told that because of the Range Rover, HSBC and Prince Bandar all the ice at the North Pole is melting and that as a result the polar bear has nowhere to live. Apart, that is, for the 3 million square miles of northern Canada that are completely untouched by any form of human encroachment.
Anyway, ignoring that, we are told that the polar bear is now at risk and as a result we’re all supposed to kill ourselves.
Why? Contrary to what you may have been led to believe by Steiff’s cute and squishy cuddly toys, the polar bear is a big savage brute, the colour of nicotine, with a mean ugly pointy face and claws that, if they were to be found in Nottingham on a Saturday night, would be confiscated as offensive weapons.
If the polar bear dies out it will make not a jot of difference to you or anyone you’ve ever met. The only people who’ll even notice are the Inuits, and its passing will actually improve their lives because they’ll be able to go out fishing and clubbing without running the risk of being eaten to death.
I do not believe that we should deliberately kill stuff because we find it ugly or offensive. Unless it’s a virus or a mosquito. But I do wish the world’s conservationists would learn a lesson from some of the more enlightened species in the animal kingdom: that when push comes to shove, the only creatures that really matter are those in our social group. And our children.
Sunday 10 June 2007
I went to London and it had gone
Yesterday I saw something unusual. While sitting in a jam near London’s Parliament Square I noticed a huge queue for one of those old-fashioned phone boxes. The complicated red jobbies that take some poor chap six years to paint.
Why, I thought, are people queueing to use a phone box? Everyone has a mobile these days. And why is the woman who’s actually using it not using it at all? She’s half in and half out, with one leg in the air and a silly grin on her face.
It turned out she was a tourist posing for a photograph in the only slice of olde England she could find. And what’s more, all the people behind her were also tourists queueing to have their pictures taken with it as well. This made me rather sad.
How far have they travelled, I wondered? And how much have they spent on this once in a lifetime trip to the former capital of the free world?
And this – this crummy old phone box – is the only evidence that they’ve landed in the right place.
The policemen have replaced their Dixon of Dock Green helmets and cheery demeanour with body armour and sub-machine guns, the home county turds in the river are now otters, no one is allowed to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and the absolute last language you will hear spoken on any street is English.
There’s more too. Today the beefeaters are women, the Cutty Sark has melted, Greenwich is a dome, the Queen has become Helen Mirren and the old double-decker buses are gone, purged by the maniac Livingstone, who sees everything from yesterday as an example of the global corporations’ love affair with money, slaves and carbon dioxide.
You get the impression that if some City chap actually walked across Waterloo Bridge wearing a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella he’d be mobbed by a grateful Sony-toting horde.
On my trip to London last week I did a river trip, saw the Eye, tootled about near Tower Bridge for a bit and went to Piccadilly Circus. And after a while I began to think I might be in a strange place, the result of an unusual sexual liaison between Geneva in 2027 and Moscow in 1974.
Hanging from every single lamp post in the West End – and that’s a lot of lamp posts – there’s a big sign saying ‘DIY Planet Repairs’. I have no idea what this means, any more than the workers in the People’s Tractor Factory No. 47 knew what the politburo’s encouraging slogans meant.
I guess it’s a sort of diktat from the commissariat, urging us to take exercise, work harder and gain strength through joy. Certainly, in every bus shelter there’s a poster from the mayor that says, ‘London was made for cycling’.
No it wasn’t. London was made for people to come and do business. There was a gap of several hundred years between the invention of Londinium and the day when some idiot invented the pedal and handlebar.
To take refuge from the constant political bombardment, I sought shelter in a well-known restaurant where a pot of tea for four and some cake cost me £78. That is not a misprint.
Then there’s the river. Oooh, the banks these days are a funfair of funk and groove with lots of smoked glass and teak decking. But you can see all the Korean ladies on the cruise ships not knowing what the bloody hell to take a picture of.
There’s absolutely nothing that says to the folks back home ‘I’ve been to London’.
Rather, it looks like they’ve been to a retirement home for people whose silly architect specs were so thin and so fashionable they couldn’t actually see what they were designing.
Of course, despite the idiotic prices and Ken’s best efforts to ruin everything, London is a better place to live now than it was 20 years ago. But in the drive to make it ‘modern’ and ‘edgy’, the period features, the things that make people want to come here, have been thrown out. No, really. How many people sit down with the travel brochures every y
ear and think, ‘This year, for our summer holidays, let’s go somewhere really multicultural and green’?
None. What people want when they come to London is pomp and circumstance. And this brings me on to the Union Jack. I know it’s offensive to certain portions of the Muslim community and I know it got a bit hijacked by the British National party.
But do you think it might be possible to fly it somewhere? You won’t even find it on Tower Bridge.
Helen Mirren does a good job. All the way from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, the DIY Planet Repairs nonsense has been replaced with a lot of big flags.
And as a result the Mall is a seething mass of relieved tourists happily filling up their memory chips with something other than the lone red phone box.
But the truth of the matter is this: London is now further away from its image than any other city in the world. The postcards still paint a picture of the day when Rules ruled, but the reality is a city where tourists are greeted at reception by a Latvian and shown to their room by someone from Poland. They eat arugula from titanium plates and are reminded every time they go outside that the mayor thinks he’s Stalin. They want steak and kidney, and we give them Tate Modern with a hint of the Baltic.
Coming to London now is a bit like tuning in to an episode of The Ascent of Man to find it’s being hosted by Pamela Anderson. In a lime-green thong.
It’s not wrong. It’s just not what anyone was expecting.
Sunday 17 June 2007
Playing the fool at Glastonbury
On Friday morning my wife got dressed up like Worzel Gummidge, put some bog roll in a bag and roared off in her Aston Martin to watch a bunch of useless teenagers singing in the rain at Glastonbury.
I think she may have gone mad.
And she’s not alone. Helicopter companies all over the south-west have reported a booming demand for charters. Everyone in the de luxe tenting business is now on a beach in Barbados and all last week Brixton was doubtless awash with hedge-fund managers and BBC programme controllers trying to buy drugs.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 18
