But secretly, deep down, you think that there have been 17 million furniture makers over the years and that no matter how wise the dealer looks, occasionally he’s going to make a mistake. And accidentally sell you the Ark of the Covenant for £3 50.
Honestly, I always think this. I always think as I leave an antiques shop that I have done the deal of the century.
You only have to watch the Antiques Roadshow to know I’m right. All those old biddies with their surgical stockings and their crinkled-up mouths imagine their carriage clock was made by King Herod himself. But the expert, backed by a team of researchers, the internet and the British Library invariably finds some tiny little detail that proves it was actually made by an unemployed train driver who had the shakes – in 1964. And is therefore worth only 40p.
Oh they all try to look pleased with the valuation. But they’re not. Inside, every single one of them is seething.
And that’s because those of us who buy antiques do so for all the wrong reasons.
In our minds we are not spending money. We are investing in the well-being of our children. We always think that the umbrella stand we’ve just bought will turn out to have been made by Florence Nightingale, out of Lord Lucan’s tongue. It never occurs to us that it’s plywood and we were ripped off.
I am not suggesting that the antiques market is crooked. I’m sure that by and large it isn’t. But the prices aren’t based on fact. They’re based, like British speed limits, on guesswork, on a vague assumption of what the market will stand.
I have therefore decided to burn all my old stuff, which is better than having eBay people coming round to my house with their smelly bottoms and their Nigerian banker’s drafts, and I’m going to start buying modern.
This is only right and proper. The Victorians did not buy Georgian. The Edwardians did not buy Victorian. And the Heathites did not buy anything unless it was purple. I’m therefore going to get with it. I’m going to buy Brown.
Actually, it is all brown. And unbelievably expensive. I spent a morning touring the shops in Notting Hill and every single thing is £2,500. A kitchen chair that was covered with a peeled cow was £2,500. A coffee table, which was no such thing – it was a log – was £2,500. A rug, which came with the head of an animal still attached, was £2,500.
The sofas, however, were not £2,500. They were much more. And they all came with delivery dates some time in the middle of the next century. Why? A sofa is some nails, some wood, a bit of foam rubber and a sheet of brown Alcantara. Which, according to Wikipedia, is a composite material developed in Japan in the seventies. So that means it isn’t, and it wasn’t.
Whatever. Give me a hammer and some scissors and I could knock you up a sofa in an afternoon. Any size you like. Oh it wouldn’t be very good, but I suspect the sofas I saw, behind the urban surfer, new edge design, aren’t very good either.
Certainly, in a hundred years I doubt we will be seeing too many of them cropping up on the Antiques Roadshow.
The trouble is that all this stuff looks very good. It’ll break the bank and it’ll break your back, and because it’s all designed by men in polo-neck jumpers, with needle-thin glasses, it’ll be out of fashion long before you take delivery, but at least you know you’re not buying an heirloom.
When it’s valued at some point in the future and you’re told it’s worth less than a used carrier bag you won’t be disappointed. Whereas if you buy an antique I can pretty much guarantee you will be.
This is important. Going to your grave broke is fine. Going to your grave disappointed – I can think of nothing so heart-breakingly sad.
Sunday 9 December 2007
Our poor bloody backroom boys
Well, that went well. Saddam Hussein has been executed with much dignity, the weapons of mass destruction have been made safe and Iraq is now in the hands of a well-organised government such as you would find in Sweden. So, seeing as everything is tickety-boo in downtown Basra, we can now turn our attention to Afghanistan.
To be honest, this isn’t going very well at all. In fact, in the past 15 months our boys have fired 2.7 million bullets. That’s 250 an hour. And still the Taliban keep coming in their flip-flops and Toyotas.
I popped over there for a couple of days last weekend and sadly I didn’t get to the front line. Partly this was due to logistics. Mainly, though, it’s because I am an extreme coward.
I suspect, however, that if I had gone the chaps would have been fine. Obviously, if I were in the army, I would volunteer for postal duties – in Scotland, preferably. But real army people like fighting. It’s what they’re trained to do, and loosing off 6,000 rounds a day, to them, is just a job.
My heart goes out instead to the thousands of backroom boys I met. Their life, far from the fighting, behind the blast-proof walls and the razor wire and the guard dogs and the sentries, is about as horrible as it’s possible to imagine. Unless you work in the Nigerian sewers.
Some are based at Camp Bastion, in the middle of the desert. The view is grey. You look over a vast grey camp with grey buildings to the grey concrete walls and beyond to the grey desert that blends into the dust-choked grey sky. There is no green. There is no yellow. There is no relief.
And of course, this being the army, everything has to be done at o’crikey o’clock. You never hear anyone in the forces say: ‘I thought we’d leave at nish.’ Everything happens at three in the morning.
And at night it’s cold. Bitterly, numbingly cold. So cold that even the Geordies roll their sleeves down.
Happily, the tents have heaters, which sounds lovely. But, annoyingly, the heaters in question have only two settings: ‘off’ and so ‘on’ you could bake a bloody potato in there.
If you’re stationed at Kandahar you get a proper prefab building and the bedrooms have proper fan heaters that suck dust from the outside and shoot it into the room with such vigour that soon it sets off the smoke alarm.
Yup. Even though this is a full-on war, with Apache helicopter gunships and everything, you are not allowed to smoke indoors because it’s bad for your health. Also, no vehicle is permitted to enter the battlefield – and I’m not joking – unless it meets EU emissions regulations.
I should mention at this point the lavatory doors, which someone erected four inches from the bowl. This is fine if you are Douglas Bader, but everyone else has to leave the door open. And, I’m sorry, but doing your number twos in plain view of everyone is only all right if you are a beast of the field.
Then you step into the showers, which are great. Except for one tiny detail. Water is in short supply so your allowance wouldn’t be enough even to baptise a baby. It isn’t anywhere near enough to wash a suicide bomber’s spleen out of your hair.
At night there is nothing to do. There is no gym, no cinema, no bar, no pool, no tennis court. There is, however, a shop where you can buy orange juice and coffee. Beer? Nope. It’s dry, even on Christmas Day.
So a typical day for the soldiers who keep the frontline troops fed, watered and armed is: get up. Chisel ice from your nose. Defecate in front of your mates. Shower your left foot. Walk to office. Do work. Walk to cookhouse. Walk to tent when tired. Repeat seven days a week.
And it’s bloody hard work. Every day the planes and the trucks are bringing in kit and you’ve got to sort it while trying not to wonder why someone back in Britain has sent 200 office desks with no drawers, 20,000 pairs of chef’s trousers and – get this – 2,000 jars of cockles. Any guns today? No. Just cockles.
The Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, meanwhile, spend their days scurrying into the badlands to retrieve trucks and tanks that have been blown to smithereens by bombs. To judge by the sheer volume of wrecked machinery in their yard, they do this a lot, and it’s not easy hauling stuff that weighs more than the moon over a desert while Johnny Taliban is taking pot shots all the time. Still, there’s always the promise of some lovely cockles if you get back.
And it’s not as if you’re out there for a coup
le of weeks. The tour of duty is six months, broken only by 14 days’ leave in Britain… theoretically. Sadly, the RAF has only three Tristars and they all date from the time of Montgolfier, which means they break down often.
That means you can spend the first five days of your leave sitting on the tarmac in Kandahar and then five hours at the baggage reclaim in Brize Norton waiting for someone to open the door to the hold. Which has got stuck. Again.
Still, there was some cheery news from Gordon Brown when he dropped in for a 40-minute pat on the back the other day. He said simply that the forces would be in Afghanistan for another 10 years. And then he got on a plane and went home.
Ooh they were pleased. Six months a year for 10 years. That’s five years of their young lives in an alcohol-free sea of grey. This Christmas, then, spare them a thought.
Sunday 23 December 2007
Unhand my patio heater, archbishop
The Archbishop of Canterbury told the faithful on Christmas Day that unless human beings abandon our greed, we will be responsible for the death of the planet.
Hmmm. I’m not sure that I can take a lecture on greed from a man who heads one of the western world’s richest institutions. As we huddle under a patio heater to stay warm while having a cigarette in the rain, his bishops are living in palatial splendour with banqueting halls, wondering where to invest the next billion.
And are the churches open at night as shelter for the homeless and the weak? No, they are locked lest someone should decide to redress the inequalities of western society by half-inching a candelabra and fencing it to buy Christmas presents for his kiddies.
Then we must ask how much old Rowan really understands about the implications and causes of global warming. He thinks that taking a holiday in Florida and driving a Range Rover caused the flooding in Tewkesbury this summer. But then he also believes it’s possible for a man to walk on water and feed a crowd of 5,000 with nothing more than a couple of sardines.
Hmmm. Well, here are some facts that Rowan might like to chew on over his fair-trade breakfast cereal. The Alps are enjoying good snowfalls this year, in much the same way that the Alps in New South Wales enjoyed healthy snowfalls last summer.
The hurricane season finished a couple of weeks ago and, contrary to all the scaremongering from Al Gore’s mates, the number of severe storms, for the second year in a row, was slightly below average.
Closer to home, Britain did not, as was predicted by the BBC’s hysterical internet news site, bake this summer under record-breaking temperatures. It was wet and soggy, much like in all the summers of my youth. And the only reason Tewkesbury flooded is because we’ve all paved our drives and built houses on the flood plains so the rainwater had nowhere else to go apart from Mrs Miggins’s front room.
In the light of all this, I would like Rowan Williams to come out from behind his eyebrows and tell us how many people have been killed by greed-induced global warming. Because even the most swivel-eyed lunatic would be hard pressed to claim it’s more than a few dozen.
Meanwhile, I reckon the number of people killed over the years by religious wars is around 809 million. I tell you this, beardie. Many, many more people have died in the name of God than were killed in the name of Hitler.
Between 1096 and 1270, the Crusades killed about 1.5 million. Way more than have been killed by patio heaters and Range Rovers combined. Then there was the 30 years’ war, which reduced Europe’s population by about 7.5 million. And the slaughter is still going on today in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine and Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto was killed by a religious nut, not a homeless polar bear.
We have been told by those of a communist disposition that if we return to a life of sackcloth and potato soup (bishops excepted) and if we meet all the targets laid down by the great scientist John Prescott at Kyoto, then Britain will be a shining beacon to the world. Others will see what we have done and immediately lay down their 4x4s.
Rubbish. America and China and India will ignore our lunacy and our economic suicide and continue to embody the human spirit for self-improvement (or greed, as Rowan calls it).
No matter. Old Rowan will doubtless applaud the move. This is a man who was arrested in the anti-nuclear protests of the 1980s. Who refused to call the 9/11 terrorists evil and said they had serious moral goals. Who thinks that every single thing bought and sold is ‘an act of aggression’ on the developing world. Who campaigns for gay rights but wouldn’t actually appoint a homosexual as a bishop. And who recently said in an interview that America was the bad guy and that Muslims in Britain were like the good Samaritans.
In other words, he’s a full-on, five-star, paid-up member of the loony left, so anything that prevents the middle classes from having a Range Rover and a patio heater is bound to get his vote.
If, however, he really wants to bring peace and stability to the world, if he really believes Britain can be a force for good and a shining beacon in troubled times, then I urge him to close the Church of England.
If we can demonstrate that we can survive without a church – and when you note 750,000 more people went online shopping on Christmas Day than went to church, you could argue we already do – then, who knows, maybe the mullahs and the left-footers will follow suit.
Daft? Not as daft as expecting the government in Beijing to renounce electricity because everyone in Britain has swapped their Range Rover for a mangle.
But better? Well, yes. I genuinely believe we are born with a moral compass and we don’t need it reset every Sunday morning by some weird-beard communist in a dress. I am, as you may have gathered, completely irreligious, but it doesn’t stop me trying to be kind to others, and I’m never completely overwhelmed with a need to murder madmen in pulpits. Slightly overwhelmed sometimes, but never completely.
Morally, the world would be no worse if religion were abolished. Practically, it would be much, much better. And so, given the choice of which we should give up, God or the patio heater, the choice is simple.
Sunday 30 December 2007
Table of Contents
Mother knows all the best games
On your marks for a village Olympics
We’re all going on a celebrity holiday
The worst word in the language
McEton, a clever English franchise
Rock school sees off drone school
Flogging absolute rubbish is a gift
My kingdom for a horse hitman
Where all the TV viewers went
It takes immense skill to waste time
An Oscar-winning village hall bash
The secret life of handbags
Bad-hair days on the local news
The lost people of outer Britain
Cut me in on the hedge fund, boys
Flying with the baby from hell
With the gypsies in junk heaven
Listen to me, I’m the drought buster
Trust me, work is more fun than fun
Pot-Porritt wants me eliminated
Simon Cowell ate our strawberries
The united states of total paranoia
Arrested just for looking weird
School reports are agony for parents
How to make a man of a mummy’s boy
My near-death toilet experience
When I am the Mayor of London
How to blow up a dead seal
The Royals, a soap made in heaven
I’m calling time on silly watches
Amazing what you can dig up in Africa
If you’re homeless find a hedgerow
There’s a literary future in the iLav
Life’s ultimate short straw
My new career as a rock god
My designer dog is a hellhound
The ideal pet? Here, nice ratty
The conspiracy not to cure the cold
Real men don’t go home at 7 p.m.
Schools are trying to break children
That Henry II, he was dead right
Making a meal of Sunday lunch
Nice jet, shame about abroad
It’s English as a foreign language
I didn’t drop the dead donkey
Let’s all stay with Lord Manilow
Brought down by bouncing bangers
TV heaven is an upside-down skier
No pain no gain (and no point)
The end is nigh, see it on YouTube
Robbie and I know about pills
Drip-drip-drip of a revolution
Fear and loathing in Las Manchester
Bullseye! The pub is dying
You can’t kill me, I’m the drummer
What the hell are we saying here?
Hell is a tent zip in the snow
If you’re ugly you’ve got to be funny
Why Brits make the best tourists
Save the planet, eat a vegan
Stuff the tiger – long live extinction
I went to London and it had gone
Playing the fool at Glastonbury
Kick the fans out of Wimbledon
Hands off 007 or I’ll shoot you
Get back in your stockings, girls
Save rural Britain – sell it to the rich
Dunked by dippy floating voters
The hell of being a British expat
Binge drinking is good for you
Public school is the hell we need
Dial M for a mobile I can actually work
Biggles, you’re a crashing bore
The kids are all right with lousy TV
It’s a man’s game being a rugby ref
Feed the world – eat blue whales
It’s lies that make TV interesting
A Met Office severe bossiness warning
Make my day, sir, shoot a hoodie
Enough, I’m gonna torch my antiques
Our poor bloody backroom boys
Unhand my patio heater, archbishop
page 148
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 24
