Sunday 26 August, 2007
Binge drinking is good for you
Who are they? The people who decide how we should run our lives. The busybodies who say that we can’t smoke foxes or smack our children. The nitwits who say that we should have a new bank holiday to celebrate traffic wardens and social workers.
Where do they meet? Who pays their wages? And how do they get their hare-brained schemes onto the statute books?
Honestly? I haven’t a clue. But I do know this. It’s very obvious that their new target is people who drink alcohol – i.e., everyone over the age of eight.
Over the years we’ve been told that we can’t drive a car if we’ve had a wine and that we should avoid alcohol if we’re pregnant. But now they seem to be saying that all people must steer clear of all drinks always.
Having told young people that they must stop drinking while on a night out, in case they are stabbed or end up having sex with a pretty girl, they now say that older people, who think it’s acceptable to enjoy a bottle of wine with their supper, are clogging up hospital wards that could otherwise be used to treat injured foxes.
We are told that alcohol rots your liver, makes you impotent, gives you stomach ulcers and turns your skin into something that looks like a used condom’s handbag.
Only last week we were shown photographs of a stick-thin man with a massive stomach who had died at the age of 36 because he’d had too many sherry trifles.
The BBC says that if you drink too much your brain stem will break and you will die. The British government tells us that if a man drinks more than two small glasses of white wine a day he will catch chlamydia from the barmaid in the pub garden after closing time. Rubbish. If a man drinks two small glasses of white wine every day it’s the barman he needs to worry about.
Me? Well, what I love most of all is binge drinking. Really getting stuck in.
Hosing back the cocktails until the room begins to swim and my legs seem to be on backwards.
It’s not just the recklessness and freedom that result when massive quantities of alcohol unlock the shackles. It’s the promise that in the morning you can share your pain with a bunch of other similarly afflicted friends.
Normal pain, such as an eye disease or toothache, is a lonely and solitary pursuit, but a group hangover is a problem shared and that seems to bring out the best in us. Like the Blitz. Like when you’ve just stepped off a terrifying roller-coaster ride. Everyone’s in it together. And a problem shared is a problem pared.
Of course, the trouble these days is that the binge drinking that is necessary to produce collective hardship is a complete no-no.
They say that if you go out and get blasted you’ll die in a puddle of blood and vomit down a back alley long before you get the chance to catch chlamydia from the barman, and that no one will come to your funeral.
Happily, this is rubbish. I’ve just done a calculation and on holiday this year I drank 55 units of alcohol a day. I would start at 11 o’clock with a beer which, because it was hot, was like trying to irrigate East Anglia with a syringe. So I would have three more.
Then I would guzzle wine and mojitos throughout the afternoon, the evening and the night until I fell over somewhere and slept. Am I now dead? No. In fact, because I drank so much I was more relaxed, which means that I’m back at home now feeling fresher and more rested.
So there you have it. Serious binge drinking is not only a nice thing to do and jolly good fun, but also – and here’s something that you won’t get from the mongers of doom – it’s good for you too.
The point of binge drinking is that you drink and then you stop drinking. And this is the key. The real problem is when you drink – and you keep on drinking. This is known as alcoholism and that, so far as I can tell, is the worst thing in the world.
There is nothing quite so pitiable and wretched as an alcoholic. I know plenty of people who take drugs, drive too fast and kill foxes. And they’re all good company. But honestly, I would rather do time in a Turkish prison than spend time with a drinker.
They ramble, they fall over, they think they are 10 times more interesting than is actually the case – and if they get the slightest inkling that you disapprove or are bored a great many become aggressive.
These are the people whom the busybodies should be concentrating on. Not with stern words and dire warnings, neither of which will make the slightest bit of difference, but with help and understanding and patience.
Seriously, telling me that I’m an alcoholic because I binge drink on holiday and share a bottle of wine with my wife over supper every night is the same as persecuting everyone who breaks the speed limit.
We need to make a distinction between someone doing 32 mph and someone doing 175 mph.
And it’s the same story with child abuse. By telling me that I’m breaking the law every time I smack my children’s bottoms, you are taking the pressure off those who lock their kids in a broom cupboard and only let them out to go thieving.
My handy hint this morning, then, is simple. Leave the normal people who do normal things alone. Forget about the people who drink for fun and worry only about those who drink to live.
Sunday 2 September 2007
Public school is the hell we need
Over the years I have filled this column with many things. I’ve suggested Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon should have a fight in the Albert Hall. I’ve revealed that Mars once crashed into my chimney pots and I’ve explained that if you painted a picture using a sheep’s dingleberries instead of oils you could sell it to Walsall borough council for £150,000.
In other words, when it comes to subject matter I have plumbed the bottom of the barrel and then kept right on going. But I have never written about one of the most discussed topics in Britain today. Education.
There’s a very good reason for this. I don’t understand any of the debates.
I’ve talked to David Cameron about grammar schools, about how he doesn’t want any more but he doesn’t mind if councils build lots, and I’m afraid my eyes glazed over – partly because it all sounded like politico-gobbledegook and partly because, if I’m honest, I don’t actually know what a grammar school is.
I think they are places for pupils who can tie up their own shoelaces, as opposed to comprehensive schools, which are big ugly buildings on the outskirts of town for pupils who wish to be stabbed.
Then you have assisted schools. Again, I’m afraid I’m not your man for guidance.
All I can say for sure is that you should avoid them like the plague because, having read Alastair Campbell’s book – Why I Am Brilliant – it seems they are entirely filled with the children of new Labour ministers.
What does interest me are public schools. I went to one. My mother went to one. And I’ve always sort of known that my children would go to one as well.
Of course, you may well sneer at that. You may say it is entirely unfair that some children are given a better start in life than others. And I would absolutely have to agree with you. In the same way that it’s entirely unfair that some people are born fat or ugly or dyslexic or disabled or ginger or small or Welsh. Life, I’m afraid, is tragic.
And besides, I use exactly the same argument with private schools that I use with private medicine. People who can afford it should be required to indulge because it stops rich bastards clogging up the system for everyone else.
Why should my kids take a place at our local comp – which is excellent, I hear – when it could go to someone whose parents can’t afford the alternative? Answer me that, Mr Lenin.
And no. Please don’t say that you’ve read somewhere that state schools now provide a better education than those in the private sector. I’ve read the stories too and never, in all my years, have I seen so many mangled statistics. In essence, they find one state school that has (just) outperformed one private school and whoopee-do. It’s a red-letter day in the Guardian.
Well, I’m sorry, but that’s like watching Doncaster Ro
vers beat Derby County in an FA Cup match and then arguing that all League One clubs are better than all clubs in the Barclays Premiership.
Here’s something to chew on. In order to be the school lad at Repton, all I had to do was rub a gallon of creosote into the housemaster’s cormorant. Had I wished to be the school lad at my local comp, I would have had to burn it down.
That’s why I laugh at all those stories about misbehaving public-school kids wreaking havoc in Cornwall every summer. Oh do me a favour. What sort of havoc are we talking about here?
Smoking joints on the beach? Vomiting Pimm’s into your hydrangeas? Did one of them debag the vicar? And is that so bad? Or would you rather your village was taken over each year by a gang of yobs from Croxteth with their sub-machine guns?
Again, you might say you can’t bear spoilt rich kids with their trusts and their floppy Boden hair. Fine. But if you are going to use extremes then I hope you don’t mind if I respond in kind. I can’t bear gormless louts who hang around in shopping centres, shoplifting and catching venereal diseases.
But let’s stop the insults. I’ve always felt that sending a child away to boarding school helps them learn, very quickly, that if they upset others, there’s no running home afterwards. They have to deal with it. This means they are more likely, in later life, to be ‘good in a room’.
Then there is the range of opportunities. The state system, we keep being told, struggles to find an inflated football, let alone somewhere it can be kicked, while most public schools have their own underwater hang-glider display team.
And, of course, gone are the days when you packed your boy off at 13 saying: ‘See you when you’re 18. And try not to get buggered too much.’ Nowadays, almost everyone employed by the main public schools isn’t a predatory homosexual.
As you can see, I am entirely blinkered and useless when it comes to schools. I’ve always been the biggest fan of private education, the boarding-school system, and I have to be physically restrained when it’s criticised.
Right up to the point last week when I dropped my eldest off at her new boarding school. After the death of my father, it was, without doubt, the most painful experience of my life. Leaving my daughter in a strange place, in the hands of a group of people I barely know. And then just driving away.
It’s a barbaric and hateful thing to do. And what makes it worse is that she’s going to absolutely love it.
Sunday 9 September 2007
Dial M for a mobile I can actually work
There are a great many mobile telephones on the market these days. All are made by companies with preposterous mission statements, all have idiotic names and all are full of ridiculous features that you neither need nor want. So where do you go for some no-nonsense advice?
Films are reviewed in all the major newspapers so that you can avoid the expense and embarrassment of accidentally seeing one with Vin Diesel in it. And it’s the same story with books. You want to know what’s worth reading and what’s not, you tune into Richard and Judy.
Everything is reviewed. Cars. Restaurants. Holidays. You name it. But the only place you’re going to find advice on mobile phones is on the internet.
On paper this is a good idea. We’re not being regaled by people who we suspect have been bribed with a press junket to Bali. We’re reading the words of real people who’ve spent real money on a product. Their experiences, then, should be worthwhile.
They’re not. The page always starts with one post that says the product is excellent value for money, well designed and sold as standard with a battery that lasts for a thousand years. This, you know, has come from the marketing department of the manufacturer in question.
So you skip it and get to the meat. As a general rule each phone has about i million reviews, all of which fall into two distinct camps. When presented with the opportunity to be a reviewer, people think they have to either gush or damn.
Hand them a choice of giving a rating of anything from one to 10 and all you get are ones and 10s. Six, in the world of amateur reviewing, does not exist.
So the phone you’re reading about is either better than Uma Thurman’s bottom or the worst use of plastic since Leslie Ash asked for a lip job.
Absolutely none the wiser, you will go to a shop and seek advice from the nine-year-old boy at the counter. ‘Which mobile is best for me?’ you’ll say in a language that marks you out as being English. A point he plainly doesn’t notice because, and I guarantee this, he will reply in a tongue you simply will not understand.
He will tell you how many ‘pixels’ the camera has. How many ‘gigs’ the music player contains. He will talk about ‘Waps’, ‘browsers’, ‘USB connectivity’, ‘Bluetooth’ and, unless you are quick with your fists, ‘Eee-zee finance deals’ that his company happen to be offering at the moment.
What I want is a mobile phone with a battery that lasts for more than six seconds.
This means no colour screen. A colour screen uses more electricity than the Pentagon. I do not want it to take photographs. I do not want it to play music. I do not want to receive emails. I want it to be a telephone.
No such device is offered. Can you believe that? Seriously. Not one single mobile-phone company in this vast and glorious world is offering a phone that is just that. A phone. A device that enables you to speak with someone a long way away.
Why? When I go to my local off-licence to buy a bottle of wine, I am not told that the bottle also contains a packet of Werther’s Originals, a typewriter, some insect repellent, the throttle cable from a 1974 Moto Guzzi and a million other things that will simply impair my enjoyment of the wine. I am very angry about this.
My previous telephone was made by Motorola (mission statement – Web. Email. Music. Blade thin. Experience it – along with a picture of a stupid-looking black man).
It was called a Razr (not so much a name as a spelling mistake) and it was great if you wanted to download pornographic images from cyberspace into your pocket.
But, unfortunately, if you tried to make a telephone call it would let you say ‘Hello’ and then the battery would be exhausted.
My wife suggested I buy a RaspBerry, but I dislike these phones with the passion I normally reserve for ramblers and John Prescott. This is because people who have RaspBerries do nothing all day but fiddle with them. Since my wife got hers all she has said to anyone is ‘Mmm?’
Nokia was high on my list as a replacement possibility. Its mission statement – ‘Connecting people’ – gave me hope that it might do just that. But no. It should be ‘Connecting people, photographing them and annoying them with a vast range of mindless ringtones’.
And it was the same story with LG – ‘Life’s good’, Samsung – ‘Where imagination becomes reality’, and Sony Ericsson, which claims to sell simple talk and text phones, but that’s like claiming the Bible is a book about a man.
It’s ridiculous. They’re making phones only for 12-year-old girls who want something cool, or businessmen who want something enormous so they look impressive in departure lounges. There’s nothing for normal people. Nothing with a screen you can read. Nothing for people whose fingers are finger-sized. And nothing for people who don’t do e-speak.
But, despite this, it’s important that you buy now because soon you will be able to use your phone to bet on the horses and watch television.
It will become a device of such mind-boggling complexity that you will be lost and its battery will be flat anyway.
I ended up buying the nicest looking. It’s called the V8 and, in the best traditions of phone reviewing, I’d give it one.
Sunday 16 September 2007
Biggles, you’re a crashing bore
Last weekend, a friend of mine was killed when his helicopter crashed in Scotland.
And then, just hours later, another friend was lucky to walk away when his chopper flipped onto its side while making an emergency landing in Essex.
Strangely, however, it’s not a fear of dying that puts me
off the idea of private aviation. It’s the sure-fire knowledge that nothing in all the world is likely to be quite so boring and pointless.
The idea of piloting your own helicopter or light aircraft, among the clouds and the linnets, far above the jams and the pressure, is an appealing prospect for anyone who doesn’t know what to do with his money.
Better still, you might imagine that you could enliven your journey by swooping underneath low bridges, dive-bombing fields of cattle, looping the loop over friends’ houses and landing for the hell of it in beauty spots and bird sanctuaries.
Only last month I flew down the Okavango River in Botswana in a twin-engined light aircraft, following the waterway’s endless twists and turns just 6 feet up, at 150 mph. It was a joyous and brilliant thing to do. But, unfortunately, if you tried that at home, skimming the Don in Sheffield, for instance, a man with adenoids and a clipboard would come round and take your licence away.
In fact, the whole process of learning to fly, it seems to me, is designed specifically to weed out those who might want a plane or a helicopter for fun.
When you want a driving licence, all you have to do is demonstrate to a man in beige trousers that you can reverse round a corner. But when you want a licence to fly, you must demonstrate to the entire Civil Aviation Authority that you are prepared to spend several months with your nose in various text books on meteorology and aerodynamics. Plainly, it only wants pedants up there.
Then you have to spend more months learning how to use a radio. Why? I know already. You just stab away at various buttons until someone comes over the speaker. Then you tell him what you want.
Oh no, you don’t. You have to talk in a stupid code, saying ‘over’ when you’ve finished speaking for the moment and ‘out’ when you’ve finished altogether. Why? When I ring the plumber or the local Indian restaurant, I am able to convey the nature of my request perfectly well using English. So why, when I’m in a plane, do I have to talk in gibberish?
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 21
