Sleep was also impossible because one of my friends in the next cell had decided to run, noisily, through a list of battles in which the English had beaten the French. Sadly, we ran out of ideas after Quiberon and Agincourt and, anyway, my enormously swollen nose testified to the fact that in the only battle that mattered that night, we were losing badly.
At around seven in the morning – though because they had taken my watch as well, it might have been four – I decided to order breakfast. So I waded through the effluent and, through the small hole in the door, said I’d like toast, buttered to the edges, poached eggs, some fresh orange juice, a double espresso and my bloody lighter back. What I got instead was a burly French finger in my eye.
Eventually, though, the door was unlocked and, having been made to sign the visitors’ book, I scarpered, leaving my hosts to wonder if they really had had Donald Duck in the cells all night.
So did the painful and humiliating experience cure my occasional twentysomething need to binge drink? Well, exactly 12 months later I was in the back of a police car in Greece, planning another escape attempt. So you’d have to say no.
What did cure me is what will cure all the youngsters who binge drink today.
I grew up.
Sunday 6 February 2005
Custard, my wife’s worst swearword
Those of us who use the c-word need it to be socially risqué. Or it ceases to have a point.
Today there are bare naked ladies in the newspapers, homosexual men in the woods, homosexual bare naked transsexuals on the internet, and I’d like to bet you have no plans to visit church any time soon. Time moves on, habits change, and as a result what would once have shocked the nation to its core is now considered normal.
And yet, while you’re happy to watch a televised autopsy, you would be astonished and amazed if Michael Howard were to make a speech this afternoon in which he described Tony Blair as a ‘f***wit’.
Why? You use the f-word all the time, and so do your children. Buzz Aldrin used it on the moon, and we know it nestles in the vocabulary of both Prince Philip and Princess Anne. We think Alastair Campbell uses it, too, while addressing the Newsnight team, but we can’t be sure because journalists can’t use it in print.
Don’t you think that’s weird?
I can say a couple copulated, or that they had sexual intercourse. So obviously it isn’t the act itself that causes offence, just the word. And I can’t quite work out why.
We’re fast approaching the fortieth anniversary of the first time it was ever used on British television – by the critic Kenneth Tynan – and at the time four motions were tabled in the Commons, with one Tory MP suggesting the foul-mouthed perpetrator should be hanged.
Eleven years later Bill Grundy was suspended because some of his guests used it during his show; and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne was denied the editorship of the Daily Telegraph because on one of his television appearances he’d used it, too.
And things haven’t changed. According to the last set of BBC guidelines I saw, it is still more likely to cause offence than the word ‘nigger’.
Nigger is a good case in point. When I was growing up, it was no more shocking than ‘cauliflower’. You didn’t see Bill Grundy being escorted from the building, because you were watching Alf Garnett on the other side, roaring with laughter as he peppered the screen with his racist abuse.
And yet now, just 30 years later, it’s gone. In fact, it is just about the only word I simply would not let my children use. So why, if words move into and out of common parlance so quickly, has the f-word been a taboo since the dark, muddled dawn of the English language?
You may argue that this isn’t the case. People with pipes and bifocals will certainly claim that in the not too distant past, words of an anatomical or scatological nature were not frowned upon at all, and that the swearwords of the time were religious: Jesus Christ, goddammit and so on. So they would tell you that there has most definitely been a shift in the nation’s choice of profanity.
Really? Well, let’s take the worst word in the world as a case study. You know what I’m talking about, and you’ll know why I can’t even camouflage such a thing behind a mask of asterisks.
We know it was used, in various forms, since before the Norman Conquest, and we know it was in common parlance from the thirteenth century. But if it had been socially acceptable, then why, when Ophelia says Hamlet cannot lie in her lap, does Hamlet reply: ‘Do you think I meant country matters?’
By beating about the bush, so to speak, Shakespeare is getting a titter out of the worst word in the world, same as he does in Twelfth Night. And he couldn’t have done that if it wasn’t the worst word in the world back then, too.
Even earlier, Chaucer wouldn’t come out and write it, hedging the issue by saying ‘Pryvely he caught hir by the queynte’. Mind you, this might have something to do with the fact old Geoff couldn’t spell.
In 1961 it finally appeared in a dictionary, but, despite this, it’s still a massive no-no. In fact it’s probably fair to say that this one word is the most enduring taboo in the English-speaking world. When Johnny Rotten used it on I’m in the Jungle, Send Me a Big Cheque, there were 100 complaints – and that, speaking as someone who presents one of the most complained-about shows on television, is a lot. And who can forget the furore when the BBC recently screened Jerry Springer, the Opera.
This word, then, is Custer’s last stand for the morally upright and the tweedily decent. The Guardianistas and the foul-mouthed have crossed the moat, scaled the walls and traversed the bailey. But so long as the keep is held up by the c-word cornerstone, all is not lost.
Frankly, I’m delighted, because those of us who use it need it to be socially risqué. Or it ceases to have a point.
My wife is especially glad because it’s a word she uses all the time. She loves it. Sometimes, when the children are listening, she combines it with ‘bastard’ to create the word ‘custard’, but mostly it’s the full, uncensored version that’s hurled in the direction of anyone she doesn’t like. Local radio DJs cop for it a lot.
She’s even developed it into a test at parties, using it as soon as practicably possible, whenever she’s introduced to someone. Her argument is that those who fall into a dead faint and need to be brought round with smelling salts weren’t worth talking to anyway.
I think she has a point, because many years ago my grandfather told me that those who swear are simply demonstrating they have a limited vocabulary. That can’t be so because when Tony Blair comes on the news you feel naked and underequipped if you don’t have some choice profanities in your quiver. Sometimes only the c-word will do.
Sunday 13 February 2005
Go ahead, lad, be a gay astronaut
So, would you wipe someone’s backside for £5 an hour? This was the question posed by an angry woman to Mr Blair last week on a politics show on Five.
The simple answer, of course, is no. Because if the backside is sufficiently dirty to need a whole hour’s cleaning, we’d all need a damn sight more than a fiver. But actually there’s a much better retort.
Not that long ago, the unskilled school-leaver faced a stark choice. Become a nurse and spend the rest of your life wiping bottoms, or become one of those people who’ve chosen not to wipe other people’s bottoms by going down the mine.
Actually, it wasn’t just the unskilled who were given limited options. I’ve just remembered that the careers form I was given at school asked me to tick one of the following options: solicitor, accountant, estate agent, or ‘other’. I ticked ‘other’ and, when asked to give details, displayed the pre-pubescent wit that has stood me in such good stead over the years by writing: ‘I want to be the world’s first homosexual astronaut.’
After I came out of detention, I explained to the careers master that I didn’t care what I did, just so long as it didn’t involve wearing a suit.
He was amazed. ‘Look, boy. You either wear a suit and become an estate agent, or you’d bet
ter get practising with the Andrex.’ And this was only 1978.
Now let’s spool forward to 2005, when it’s possible to make a decent living putting pine cones in paper doilies and flogging them to bored blonde stick-insect women as firelighters for £11 a pop.
I’m not joking. Someone has convinced the owners of my local farm shop that what they really need to stock are pine cones in paper bun-holders. Isn’t that fantastic?
These days it’s even possible to be an author, even if you have no real idea for a book, no literary skills whatsoever, and you are due at a coffee morning in two hours’ time.
Right next to the pine cone firelighters, I found a small tome called… wait for it… The Incomplete List of Cat Names.
Now look. You can call a cat anything. Gravel. Honda. Stereo. Wardrobe. Cauliflower. Hitler.
Which means that this book is just a list of some words. So, if you’re the woman on Five who doesn’t want to wipe other people’s bottoms for £5 an hour, why not write The Incomplete List of Food Names? Just write ‘beans, meat and arugula’, and you’re the next J. K. Rowling.
If you can’t think of an incomplete list that needs writing, or your chosen topic has already been the subject of a Channel 4 list programme, which is likely, don’t despair. Simply count the number of broken windows there are in your street and sell the information to one of the government’s 529 quangos.
A man called Charles Landry was quoted in the newspapers last week. So what’s he done, you may ask: cloned a mosquito, solved climate change? No. He has counted how many times the phrase ‘at risk’ appeared in the papers in 2003 and compared it with the number of times it appeared in 1994.
I don’t know anything about Mr Landry’s financial circumstances or how much he’s paid to count words in newspapers. But even if it’s not much, it is better than wiping miners’ backsides. Or inseminating turkeys. Or sliding food and household products over a bar code reader.
And it’s certainly better than getting an outreach counselling job through the Guardian.
Michael Howard tells us that, for every 1,000 people in this country, two will be doctors, three will be police officers and nine will be civil servants. This is why the civil service now employs more people than the total population of Sheffield. And it’s why the Tories want to blow it apart.
Of course, those on the Left wonder what all those people from the British Potato Council and the Wine Standards Board will do when the machine-gun fire starts.
Well, look. If someone is daft enough to think that monitoring British wine is a worthwhile way of passing the time, then anything is possible. I once met a man who sexes the Queen’s ducks, for instance.
What is more, we read last week of a man who was paid to run around a shopping centre pretending to be a racing car. If the arts appeal, then why not be a ventriloquist? There are only seven left in the whole of Britain. Or you could eat food, and then get paid for saying whether you like it or not. Or you could stuff a heron. I’d pay £200 for such a thing.
And finally there’s this business of being a homosexual astronaut. Just 25 years ago, the mere suggestion that I might like to do this for a living earned me a spell in detention, but now there’s a lobby group in America called the Organization of Gay and Self-Loving Men in Orbit.
It reckons that homosexual men have better visual-spatial and dexterity skills than straight chaps and that they display a greater number of hyper-masculine characteristics. Plus. They’re unlikely to get women crew members pregnant on long journeys to Mars.
I hope His Tonyness finds this information useful. Because the next time he’s asked about the alternatives for Britain’s bottom wipers, instead of sitting there, looking like a complete custard, he can say: ‘Go and be a gay spaceman instead.’
Sunday 20 February 2005
Sticking one on the gum summit
Thanks to the weather and Mrs Queen’s problems with Charles and Camilla’s wedding plans, you probably didn’t notice that last week Britain played host to its first ever ‘gum summit’.
Councillors from all over Britain trimmed their beards and dug out their finest jumpers for an all-expenses-paid trip to London, where they sat around, deciding what should be done about people who spit out their chewing gum.
Meanwhile, in the Commons, business was taken up by the Cleaner Neighbourhoods and Environment Bill, which will see £75 on-the-spot fines being handed out to chewing gum offenders. Well, come on. With foxhunting dealt with and all the terrorists under house arrest, what else is there for them to do?
Quite who will issue these fines I don’t know. Obviously the police no longer have the time, since they’re all running around the countryside, looking for wounded foxes, so it’s been suggested that the job is given to council employees like bin men and street sweepers. I’m not sure this is a good idea because, if a fat man in a hi-vis jacket ordered me to cough up £75 for chewing gum, I might just set fire to his ears.
It looks, then, like being yet another law that can’t be enforced, so we’ll now go back to the council summit and ask ourselves a simple question. If you were asked to list the biggest eyesores in most towns today, I bet it’d be a long time before you got to the small, dark, lichen-like splotches on the paving stones caused by discarded chewing gum.
In most urban landscapes you tend to notice the hideous buildings, the nasty municipal flowerbeds, the ludicrous array of signs, the fatness of the shoppers, their statically charged synthetic clothes, the drizzle, the abundance of estate agents, the polystyrene litter, the pavement pizzas, the graffiti, the lime-green ‘Win’, ‘Free’, ‘Save’ poster adverts in all the shop windows and the diesel smoke from the buses, long before your eye is caught by the mild and patchy discoloration of the chipped, cracked, Third World paving slabs.
Apparently, though, the problem is huge. In the borough of Westminster there are 20 pieces of discarded gum per square metre of paving, and on Oxford Street alone there are 300,000 splotches. Around Sir Alex Ferguson’s chair in the Old Trafford dugout the gum mountain is said to be taller than K2.
The cost of cleaning up this mess is £150 million a year, so at the gum summit several ideas were mooted. First of all, one bright spark came up with the idea of biodegradable chewing gum, something that Wrigley has already spent £5 million trying to develop. Why? Even I could have told them that this is an impossible dream, because if gum can withstand two hours in Sir Alex’s mouth it seems unlikely it’ll simply evaporate when exposed to a light shower. I mean, the human jawbone can exert 7 tons of pressure per square inch.
Sure, we could go back to the days when gum was made from natural products, rather than latex, but since Britain alone consumes 935 million packets a year, this would mean uprooting every tree from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande. And I doubt this would go down well with some of the summit’s more communistic representatives who suggested that Wrigley, which has a 90 per cent share of Britain’s £300 million gum industry, should be made to share the clean-up costs.
Others reckoned that shops should be made to display notices advising Britain’s gum-chewers of their responsibilities. Nice idea, but as a general rule gum tends to be chewed by people who can’t read.
And me. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t always dispose of it in what you might call a socially responsible fashion. This is disgusting, I know. I’ve had two pairs of trousers ruined by other people’s gum and I realise I should know better, but I’m being realistic. It happens.
I’m therefore in a good position to work out what might be done to mend the error of my ways. Obviously, if a refuse collector sees me jettison some gum from the window of my speeding car, I doubt he’ll be able to catch up in his dustbin lorry, so that won’t work. And I already know that I shouldn’t litter the pavement, so point-of-sale literature will be no good either.
Until last year the Singapore authorities gave people who smuggled gum into the country a year in jail. But this seems harsh. And anyway, the jails will soon be fu
ll of people whose dogs were nasty to foxes. So what can be done?
Well, I think I have a solution. And even by my own high standards it’s brilliant.
Gum trees.
Councils would erect poles at strategic points along the street on to which Sir Alex Ferguson and I can stick our discarded gum. They could even be sponsored, like ring-road roundabouts. And when the pole is full it could be removed and replaced with a new one.
What’s more, these gum trees could be placed on Underground trains and in shopping centres. Enterprising companies could even offer stick-on miniature versions that could be affixed to a car’s dashboard.
So there you are. At no cost to the taxpayer I find a solution. Sometimes I wonder what our government is actually for.
Sunday 27 February 2005
It’s freezing, so go get your sun cream
Every week, another high street retailer tells us that it’s in a perilous financial state. Debenhams. Bhs. Dorothy Perkins. Marks & Spencer. Boots. WHSmith. They’re all in trouble, and I know why. They don’t sell things that people want to buy.
Last week, for instance, I had a nasty cold, but, of course, being a man, it wasn’t a cold at all. It was cancer: well, when I say cancer it was a sort of cancerous leprosy. In fact, what I actually had was bird flu of the cancer of the leprosy, with a light dusting of ebola. Had Norris McWhirter been alive, he would have verified that I was the illest person in the world who wasn’t actually dead.
To make matters worse, a cruel Arctic wind was blowing and the police were advising motorists to stay at home unless their journey was absolutely necessary. Well, my journey was very necessary because I needed a coat.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 15
