Sunday 9 January 2005
Wild weather warnings
Well, as Britain’s pop stars predicted, there was no snow in Africa this Christmas, but, strangely, there was quite a lot of it in Texas, and Saudi Arabia.
Last year gave Australia its driest summer since records started in 1859, there were wasps in the Yukon, huge swarms of rain-fed locusts in the Sahara and temperatures in Iceland hit 76.6°F.
Closer to home, big chunks of Cornwall were washed away, Carlisle sank and Scotland was blown clean off the top of Britain. Meanwhile, my cottage in the Isle of Man, which has braved the elements without a scratch for 150 years, was deprived of its roof.
As a result, a great many earnest young men have been cropping up on Channel 4 News, wearing an ‘I told you so’ expression and explaining that we’ve got to stop driving cars and eating strawberries out of season. They say that man-made global warming is driving the weather nuts and that if we don’t radically change our ways everyone on earth will be boiled.
Well, let’s just say we all part-exchange our cars for horses and eat only what happened to have been in the garden that afternoon. And let’s imagine the world’s governments and multinationals sink billions into finding new ways of propelling aircraft and heating our houses.
Let’s imagine we do everything the greens want… and the temperature keeps on rising. Then what?
This is the problem. The earnest-faced young men want us to have carbon credit cards and nut-fuelled boilers. They want radical change to combat something over which we might have no control. You see, none of the recent weird weather events is weird. There was a flood in Boscastle 400 years ago. Texas had a white Christmas in 1922. And last year the average global temperatures were only as high as those in 1649, which was long before the invention of the Yorkshire Electricity Board, the Airbus A320 and the Ford Fiesta.
Man’s total contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions is just 3 per cent, which might be enough to kill the world. But it might not. Nobody knows. And it seems rather silly to spend billions developing cauliflower-powered cars when they might not make any difference, and half the world is starving.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Nboto. We’d love to build a well in your village, but unfortunately Mr Porritt is spending all our money on a new type of possibly unnecessary engine that runs on saliva.’
Of course, there is no doubt that the world is warming up, but let’s just stop and think for a moment what the consequences might be. Switzerland loses its skiing resorts? The beach in Miami is washed away? North Carolina gets knocked over by a hurricane? Anything bothering you yet?
We keep being told that in just 20 years there will be no snow in the Atlas Mountains, but honestly: who cares? And so what if the sea level rises by five inches? I can appreciate that this would be a nuisance if you were Dutch. But you’re not, so relax.
Finding out that global warming will change the landscape in a part of the world where we don’t live is as relevant as finding out that the lesser mottled Tasmanian butterfly is on the verge of extinction. It isn’t even worthy of a shrug.
In fact, in Britain more ferocious and turbulent weather would be a good thing because it was 57°F and drizzling yesterday, and it’ll be 57°F and drizzling tomorrow. And yet, despite the sameness, we are the only people on earth who use prevailing conditions as an ice breaker at parties.
‘Ici qu’il fait frais pendant cette période d’anneée,’ is not something you will hear at French social events. And nor have I ever heard a German say, ‘Es ist ausgefallenes nettes.’
Last week, every news channel in Britain cut live every 15 minutes to some dizzy bird in wellies, standing in a puddle, saying the wind was very strong and the sea was very rough. No other nation would do that – not just two weeks after the definition of a rough sea had been rewritten by that tsunami.
An Englishman’s home is not his castle. An Englishman’s home is, as Bill Bryson once pointed out, a large, grey, Tupperware box. A constant, year-round sea of endless misty greyness. So I would therefore welcome some proper storms and heatwaves and swarms of locusts sweeping down from the heavens every afternoon.
Imagine the joy, when conversation begins to flag, of being able to substitute ‘it’s turned out nice’ for ‘I was sucked into space by a tornado this morning’.
And imagine being told on the weather forecast that a glacier had buried Birmingham. Big British weather. Bring it on.
Sunday 16 January 2005
Jumbo, a brilliant white elephant
At a lavish, laser-speckled launch party in France last week, Tony Blair said that the new Airbus was ‘a symbol of confidence that we can compete and win in the global market’.
Nearly right, you big-eared thicko. Actually, it is a symbol of confidence that we can compete and win in the global market despite the utter stupidity of your government.
The gigantic wings for this plane are built by British Aerospace in north Wales.
But each one is far too large to be taken to Toulouse by road and far too heavy to be taken there by air. So they are loaded on to barges in the port of Mostyn and floated down the Irish Sea, across the Channel and then through France’s canal network.
Plainly, this is idiotic. It would be much easier and cheaper to build them in France, but politically this would be no good at all because the Airbus is intended to show how European co-operation can work. We do the wings and the engines, the French put everything together, the Germans finish everything off and the Spanish… actually, I don’t know what the Spanish do, apart from gatecrash the launch party and lisp.
You would imagine, then, that Tony’s government would be doing everything in its power to make sure that Britain’s contribution was smooth and effortless. But no.
Those wings can be loaded on to the barges only at high tide because the monumentally daft Environment Agency won’t let anyone dredge the harbour at Mostyn.
Why ever not? Well, there’s the European Union Habitats Directive, you see, that was drawn up to protect worms and slugs from the perils of profit. Elsewhere on the Continent they don’t apply it to navigational routes, but in Britain we do. So, thanks to the green-eyed madness of our men in parkas, building the most advanced plane in the skies is governed by the needs of an invertebrate and the orbit of the moon.
I have another problem with Tony’s launch speech, too, because he described the A380 as ‘the most exciting new aircraft in the world’. Even if we ignore the fact that he can’t possibly know since it hasn’t actually left the ground yet, I am not sure that he’s right.
Technically, of course, we must doff our caps to the engineers who have built a cross-Channel ferry that can fly. It is far from the prettiest machine ever made, but we should marvel at the quietness of its engines, its 8,000-mile range, its ability to take off on conventional runways and its parsimonious drinking habits. It uses less fuel per passenger than a Ford Fiesta.
Yes, at the moment, despite much plastic and carbon fibre in its construction, the A380 is four tons overweight, but when the 747 was rolled out in the 1960s, that was 50 tons overweight. So let’s not get too worried. They could save four tons by simply removing one American passenger.
Plainly, the weight issue has not worried Virgin, Emirates and the other carriers that have placed orders. Even British Airways would do the same, except that its long-haul fleet is fairly new and it hasn’t got any money.
So the message is clear. For the airlines and their shareholders this enormous plane is marvellous. But I am not sure that it is quite so rosy for you and me.
Certainly life will be worse at airports because, to accommodate these giants, the gates have to be further apart. Walk past four A380s to reach your plane and you will have walked the length of four football pitches.
That is presuming you got past the check-in. I guess you have all experienced the ludicrous queues that build up now. Well, imagine how long they are going to be when there are half a dozen A380s scheduled to depart within
15 minutes of one another. With seating for 550 on each one, that is 3,300 people to be interrogated, 3,300 suitcases to be loaded, 3,300 pieces of hand luggage to be X-rayed, and 3,300 pairs of shoes to be examined.
Do you think that Virgin or Emirates will spend the money that they have saved on fuel by employing more check-in staff? I doubt it. As a result, you will need to arrive at the terminal 3,300 hours before take-off. Then there is the flight itself to worry about.
Airbus made sure that its launch video featured on-board gyms and bars. There were big, squidgy double beds and probably a polo lawn or two. But the reality is that airlines will fill the entire fuselage with seats they’ve nicked from a primary school to wedge the passengers in like veal.
In other words, being on board the A380 will be exactly the same as being on board any other jetliner. Exciting? I don’t think so, Tony.
This brings me to the final point. You see, the cruising speed of the A380 is Mach 0.85 (647 mph), which is pretty good for something with the aerodynamic properties of a wheelie bin and engines that run on mineral water. But the 747 cruises at Mach 0.855 (651 mph). This means that the 747 gets you there faster and you spend less time with your face wedged in an American’s armpit.
On that basis, you can marvel at how Airbus has jumped through political hoops and climbed technical mountains to bring the world its shareholder-friendly A380. But you are better off going in a Boeing.
Sunday 23 January 2005
Jackboots rule the countryside
Walking is something that I will gladly do when the car breaks down. In London I have been known to pop out for the papers and not stop until I get to Dartford in Kent. But the notion of treating the exercise as a noun, of going for ‘a walk’: that has always seemed faintly preposterous.
Still, last weekend the children wanted to play Monopoly, so on the basis that anything is better than that, I went for a proper post-roast Sunday afternoon stride through the rolling vastness of England’s achingly beautiful green heart. And, of course, I arrived back where I’d started from with mild exhaustion and a hint of hypothermia.
Each of my wellingtons weighed 200 tons, I had mud in my navel, my lips were royal blue, my face was fuchsia pink and my hair looked as if it had been through a jet engine.
More than that, though, I was angry, riddled with guilt and astonished at what has been done to the countryside while nobody was looking.
You may recall from your childhood those long, lazy summer adventures when you could climb trees, go where you wanted and fall in stuff. It was pretty much a free-for-all, providing you stuck to the ‘Country Code’.
Published in 1951, this was a simple set of rules, designed to explain to the working classes what they should do when faced with bits of the world that were not cobbled. In essence, it said that you must not pull faces at the sheep and you must remember to shut all the gates.
Last year, however, the code was rewritten as the ‘Countryside Code’ by representatives from half a dozen government agencies who, plainly, have never set foot outside Hoxton in east London. It’s like the instruction manual for the space shuttle.
Then there’s the countryside itself, which now looks like Camp X-Ray. You’re marshalled by signposts telling you where the footpath goes and, just to make sure that you stay on it, you’re fenced in by miles of electrified razor wire.
Every few hundred yards you are reminded of your responsibilities by slogans that would not look out of place in a Soviet tractor factory. ‘Kill nothing. Only time’, said one.
There was another which said ‘No dogs’. But before I turned to my faithful Labrador and said, ‘For you ze valk is over,’ I took a moment to reflect and thought, why not? If dogs are such a menace, why are these same government agencies so keen to look after foxy-woxy?
Well, I’ve had a look at the new code, and it seems that the problem isn’t dogs.
It’s what comes out of their bottoms. Now, I know that in the parks around Islington, north London, dog dirt is a menace; but the countryside is almost entirely carpeted with excrement. We are ankle-deep in, er, produce from sheep, cows, horses, foxes, chickens, organic llamas and pigs, so why should your household pooch be expected to put a cork in his backside until he gets home?
And why are there so many hills? Why is there a stile every 2½ feet, over which you have to haul your six-year-old, whose hair is standing on end because she keeps bumping into the electric fencing?
I could sue for this, and I would win. I know this because my tree surgeon told me the other day that if some town boys fall off one of the sycamores in my paddock, I can’t just hose their broken bodies into the soakaway. I would have to compensate their parents and pay for a proper funeral.
Legal action, however, was the last thing on my mind as I strode onwards and into what was plainly the front garden of someone’s very nice private house.
Now, one of the pillars of the new ‘Countryside Code’ is that we should consider other people: ‘Don’t openly laugh at the beardy’s purple cagoule. Wait until he’s passed and then crap yourself.’ Fine, so why not move the footpath round the man’s garden, rather than through it? It wouldn’t be difficult.
But no. The sign steering me right past his sitting-room window had been knocked in with special vigour by someone who, you just knew, had absolutely relished the way that it would direct all his communist mates from the Ramblers’ Association straight on to the rich bastard’s lawn.
And if the rich bastard complained? Well, he could be told that these footpaths are ancient thoroughfares and cannot be moved just like that. You can’t just change the practices of the countryside, you know… unless you’re waging class war, of course.
Out there, in the quiet of the twenty-first-century Cotswolds, you’re only as free as a bird if the bird you have in mind is a budgerigar. You’re as marshalled and governed, and as unable to go your own way, as a piece of Great Western rolling stock.
However, I think I have worked out a solution.
If you must go for a walk, forget the green bits that have been colonised and sanitised by Tony Blair’s urban army; do it in the middle of your local city.
There is no mud, there are more visual diversions, you can go where you want without fear of electrocution, your dog is welcome, and you won’t come home covered from head to foot in shit.
Sunday 30 January 2005
Found: a cure for binge drinking
On the eve of the 1982 Monaco Grand Prix I was dining with friends at a small restaurant called the Potato of Love in La Napoule when I found a slug crawling through my lettuce. ‘Regardez,’ I said to the proprietor. ‘J’ai trouvez une er… um, une escargot sans une maison dans mon salade.’
He was horrified and whisked the plate away, saying that by way of recompense we could drink as much wine as we liked. On the house.
Now, I should explain at this point that I’ve never been a big drinker. That said, every once in a while I would be happy to indulge in what’s now known as a binge-drinking session.
The next thing I knew, I was being dragged from the back of a car by several armed and very angry French policemen, who handcuffed my arms behind my back and then threw me to the ground. ‘Aargh,’ I exclaimed, as I plunged, nose first, into the road.
It became apparent that, because we’d been in a right-hand-drive car, the policemen couldn’t remember who’d been at the wheel. So they decided to punch the information out of us.
Obviously, being completely spineless, I’d have grassed on the offender straight away, but I was also completely drunk and as a result had no clue who it might have been. So I was hit. ‘Aargh,’ I said again.
In fact, I said ‘Aargh’ quite a lot in the course of the next few hours – mostly, though, when my escape attempt went all wrong.
For some reason that never did become clear, we were taken to a hospital where the cunning plan was hatched. Having no spoons to hand, I ruled out the tunnelling option and began to wonder if it might be pos
sible to go to the attic and build a glider while no one was looking. And then the idea hit me. I decided that, this being a hospital, the window in the lavatory would not be fitted with bars.
I was right, and so – with the policeman waiting outside the cubicle – I made lots of, I thought, rather convincing being-sick noises and eased it open. It was not a big window but I was almost completely out when I felt the policeman’s burly hands on my ankles.
Have you ever been dragged backwards through a small window, while wearing handcuffs? Well, don’t try it, because it hurts. It hurts nearly as much as being thrown to the floor again.
Perhaps this is why they’d taken us to the hospital. Because, by the time they’d finished with us, it’s almost certainly where we’d end up anyway.
But no. We were bundled back in the van, taken to the police station and ordered to strip. Oh, how they all laughed when they saw my sunburn. ‘Le rouge Rosbif,’ said one. At this point, I was thinking about effing Frogs, but I fear I may have said it out loud, which is why they punched me again. And because my trousers were round my ankles, I fell to the floor again. And because I was still wearing handcuffs, I landed on my nose again.
The cells in the Cannes Can are like… well, to begin with, it was hard to say what they were like since the only light came through a 1-inch peephole in the door.
For all I knew, there were Laura Ashley curtains in there and an elegant ottoman at the end of the bed.
Sadly, as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, it became apparent that this wasn’t so. In fact, there was nothing but a bed made from stone, a mattress made from wood and a hole in the floor near which several previous occupants had relieved themselves.
Boredom set in within about five minutes. I couldn’t even pass the time by trying to hang myself because they’d taken my shoelaces and belt. And cruelly, they’d taken my lighter, too, leaving me only with the cigarettes. The solution was sleep, but this was impossible because if I used my jacket as a pillow it was freezing, and if I kept it on I got a cricked neck.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 14
