How Hard Can It Be? Read online

  Of course, I’m sure there are a great many people who think that if someone chooses one day to cook his best friend, he has demonstrated fairly clearly that he’s resigned from the human race and must be shot in the forehead immediately, like a useless horse. However, I do not agree with capital punishment. I wish I did. Discharging 4m volts through anyone who has murdered, butchered or driven too slowly up the A44 would solve a great many problems, especially if carbon-neutral energy from wind farms were used. But because I find the idea of state execution abhorrent, I’ve had to spend the whole week dreaming up new ways of ensuring that people who can’t behave properly are kept away from society for an appropriate length of time.

  The problem right now is that all our prisons are full; and while there are plans to increase the number of cells over the coming years, few imagine for a moment that the supply will even remotely keep up with demand.

  In Scotland, they are even talking of not putting anyone in jail for less than three months. This, say the Jocks, will free up space for those who really need to be there. It’s a nice idea if you are a wishy-washy liberal, but it does mean that young men in hooded tops who run about town centres at night stealing mobile phones and pushing old ladies over cannot be punished at all. You can’t fine them, because they have no money. You can’t confiscate their belongings because everything they have is stolen anyway. You can’t give them an electric ankle bracelet because that is seen as a mark of respect. And if you can’t send them to prison, society is completely stuck.

  The obvious solution is to build more prisons, but for a number of reasons, this isn’t possible. First, Alistair Darling has given all our money to Mr Barclay, Mr Lloyd and Mr Rock, so there’s none left. And second, the new prisons would have to be built somewhere. And everywhere is someone’s backyard.

  In the olden days, when I was rash, I dreamt up a plan that involved many more prisoners being housed in the jails we have already. The idea, in a nutshell, called for ‘massive overcrowding’. If there are currently four to a cell, shove in another thirty, and don’t worry about the cost of feeding them. Simply fit a window box and explain that they can eat only what they can grow. And if the harvest fails for any reason, well, they could take a leaf out of the cannibal’s book and eat each other. The lavatory would be a bucket, the central heating would be the bucket, too, and for entertainment, there would be bullying on a grand scale.

  I’m afraid, however, that I went off this idea because I actually know quite a few people who’ve done some time, and I don’t like the idea of them sitting around all day trying to stop someone from eating their thighs.

  Don’t worry, however, because now I’ve come up with another plan – and it’s brilliant. At present, the government is doing a great deal to ensure that people who are struggling to pay their mortgages are not evicted from their houses by the recently nationalized banks. This is very noble. But the idea that you can borrow money to buy a house and then not pay it all back undermines the very essence of capitalism. People must be made to understand that, if they have dug themselves into a financial hole, they have to earn their way out again. And so, I believe the government should pay these people a small rent each month, which can go towards covering their mortgage, if they agree to have a prisoner staying in the spare room.

  I admit this is a bit of a lottery. You could get a cannibal from Leeds who creeps into your bedroom every night with a knife and fork and some mango chutney. Or you could get Otis Ferry, who’s on remand only because he wants to chase foxes. I’m not sure, though, that this is any different from the chance you take when you hire an au pair. You could get a moose who wants to practise her drop-kicks on your children or you could get a raving nymphomaniac who has an allergy to underwear. And anyway, let’s be honest, it’s a lottery for the prisoner as well because he could end up at my house, chained to a radiator for twenty-six hours a day in the Terry Waite suite. Or he could end up staying with a woman who bakes him cakes, lets him out for walkies and on Sundays allows him to chew on her bingo wings.

  Plainly, an idea this radical needs to be tested before it’s rolled out on a national scale, and I’m happy to be a guinea pig. Simply send me the chap from AIG who took my money and gave it to Wayne Rooney and now won’t give it back, and I’ll be happy to see how he likes being a prisoner in my spare room for a year or two. I should imagine, after the savage beatings and the dog sick, he’ll be fully rehabilitated and able to go back into the world of international finance without feeling compelled to give any money to Wayne Rooney ever again.

  Sunday 26 October 2008

  Wake up and smell the coffee – tea is for morons

  I quite understand why people choose to be communists or Australians or tattooed. I may not share your opinions, but I know why you have them and I would fight for you to be able to express them in public. Obviously not to the death, though. There’s no way I am going to die so that a green person can climb up a chimney and write ‘Gordon’ on it, for instance. However, while I understand why people want to drive an electric car or cut the Queen’s head off, and even why some people decide to emigrate to Spain, I do not understand why people continue to drink tea.

  Recent figures show tea consumption is shrinking, especially among young people, yet Britain is still by far the largest consumer in the world per capita, with each person in the land drinking, on average, four cups a day. This is baffling. I quite like a cup at around 5 p.m. because this is ‘tea time’, but the figures suggest that many people are drinking it at ‘coffee time’ as well. Some, since there is such a thing as ‘breakfast tea’, must also be drinking it first thing in the morning. This is as mad as starting the day with a prawn cocktail – and it all has to stop.

  First of all, asking for tea in someone’s house is extremely antisocial because, if you take it with milk and sugar, this is a complicated, four-ingredient request. It’s exactly the same as being offered a biscuit and saying, ‘Ooh, thanks, but actually I’d prefer a Sunday roast.’ Seriously. That means meat, potatoes and two veg. And there is no difference between this and tea, milk, sugar and boiled water. In fact, it’s worse, because your host will have to find a teapot that hasn’t been used since their wedding day and is at the back of a cupboard behind the equally dusty fondue set. In fact, the only thing I hate more than people asking for tea is people who ask for a gin and tonic. Why can’t you just have a beer like everyone else? Because now I’ve got to hunt down not just the gin and the tonic, but also the lemon and some ice. At least with coffee most people have a machine that can deliver a refreshing and invigorating brew at the touch of a button. Furthermore, coffee drinkers, being more travelled and therefore intelligent, will take it in the European style. Black with nothing added.

  Of course, you may say that coffee causes your teeth to go brown and your heart to explode. But tea, if we’re honest, is as healthy as sucking on the pointy end of a machinegun. Eight per cent of a tea leaf is toxic, around 25 per cent is irrelevant, 2 per cent is nutritious caffeine and most of the rest is acids, arsenic, chlorophyll, salts and tannins – which are useful only if you want to give your stomach lining the texture of a horse’s saddle. If I were to use the model dreamt up by environmentalists when discussing climate change, I could very easily argue that tea will cause you to lose control of your limbs and that you will have to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. Which could happen, for all I know.

  Herbal varieties, however, are even more dangerous because if you come round to my house and ask for peppermint tea I will punch you in the mouth. Herbal tea is for nonces. At best, it is pointless. At worst, it is an affected piece of Hyacinth Bucket snobbery designed for the sort of people who spend half an hour deciding whether the wine they’ve been given is all right. And chai tea? Have you tried that? Well, don’t – because you can achieve exactly the same effect, for a lot less, by drinking your own urine.

  Of course, I dare say that some of you at this point are wondering why I am writing about te
a in these troubled times. And thinking that, surely, with Peter Mantelpiece back on the front line and the financial markets in disarray, there are more important things to worry about. Not so. Because when you stop and think about it, how many French or Italian banks have gone bust? And while we wobble, Spain’s Santander bank is stalking the globe like one of the country’s gigantic trawlers, sucking up the broken minnows.

  This is because they are all coffee drinkers. They wake up, have an espresso; then, invigorated, they go to work quite literally full of beans. We, on the other hand, expect to be able to operate on a stomach full of wet leaves. Tea, in actual fact, caused our banking crisis. And before you point out that America is in a mess and they drink coffee, I should explain that they don’t. They put half a granule in a Styrofoam bucket and call it coffee. But it’s not. It’s just a cup of warm water, and you can’t operate on that either.

  The most popular tea in Britain is the sort favoured by workmen. They like it because it takes an age to make and is far too hot to drink when it’s ready. It is, in short, nothing more than an excuse for not doing any actual work. That’s why it was so popular with empire-builders. They needed something time-consuming to fill the long, yawning hours. For the same reason, they played endless games of cricket.

  Today, tea drinkers are clinging on to a way of life that’s gone. Tea break. Tea time. Tea clippers. It’s got to stop. Tea should be viewed in the same way as we view coal. Something from the past. Something that is no longer relevant. Something for those who see the world in monochrome, through the eyes of Terry and June.

  In an espresso MTV world, tea no longer has any place.

  Sunday 2 November 2008

  Into the breach, normal people, and sod the polar bears

  Greetings from the bunker. As I write, the MP for Ipswich is running around the country calling through his beard for me to be sacked. And the English Collective of Prostitutes is out for blood as well.

  But let’s be honest, shall we? There are more important things to worry about than what some balding and irrelevant middle-aged man might have said on a crappy BBC2 motoring show. Such as the war in Congo, the dramatic interest rate cut, the second coming in America and – most important of all – the gradual transformation of Scotland from a country full of deer and inventors into an enormous golf course.

  Just last week an idiotic-looking American man whose hair is on back to front was given permission by cash-strapped Scottish politicians to build what sounds like the single most ghastly development the world has ever seen on top of what appears to be all of Aberdeenshire. Donald Trump, owner of the Miss World pageant and believed – by me – to be the world’s largest consumer of onyx, says it will be the greatest golf course in the world. Can you even begin to imagine the depths to which he will sink in pursuit of this billion-dollar goal? How many pillars will there be? How many giant stone dogs will guard the entrance? It’ll be McLexus Central.

  And, really and truly, is it necessary? There are already, by my calculations, nearly 600 golf courses in Scotland. And since most of the residents live in Westminster these days, that works out at one for every two people. I simply cannot see why there’s any need for another.

  As far as I’m concerned, a golf course, with its random splashes of unnatural emerald green and its Rupert Bear trimmings, is more of a blot on the landscape than a pig farm or a power station. Scotland is properly beautiful, but already – if you look at it on Google Earth – it appears to have been dribbled on by a radioactive dragon. When Trump has finished it’ll look even more stupid than his hair.

  Unfortunately, if you wanted to try to stop Trump making things worse, you had to join forces with either the Rambling Association – which couldn’t concoct a sensible thought if you gave every member a typewriter and a million years – or the environmentalists, who seemed bothered about only the possible effect on the area’s sand dunes. Oh, and then the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds piped up and said the new course would damage a warbler, which seemed a bit far-fetched.

  This, almost certainly, is why the hateful proposals have been passed. Because sensible people who recognize Trump as a man who probably has bath taps in the shape of swan’s wings couldn’t possibly side with Mr Porritt, Mr Oddie and a bunch of purse-lipped, ramble-crazed mental cases.

  At the moment, as far as I can see, all commercial planning applications are considered on just two issues: the economic benefit versus the man in the dirty trousers who’s found a rare snail on the site and wants it to be protected. The Newbury bypass was a classic case in point. On the one hand you had the government, which wanted to free up the log jam of traffic, thus improving transport links between the Midlands and the south coast. And on the other you had that part-man, part-ape called Swampy who kept chaining himself to diggers and pointing at all the butterflies that were going to be squashed. You never heard from the people of Newbury who just thought: ‘Yes. Build the damn thing because then I’ll waste less of my life in a bloody traffic jam.’ In other words, you never heard from anyone who was not motivated by greed or rage.

  We see this problem all over the world. The American election came down to a two-way choice: a white man or a black man. There are only two arguments on climate change: you think you’re to blame or you don’t. You think Jonathan Ross is brilliant. Or you think he should be sacked. No weight or platform is given to the silent majority, for whom the third way is rather more than some Blairite vision that existed only in a New Labour speechwriter’s wet dream.

  I wish it were different because then the bright and the informed, the people who couldn’t really give a stuff about warblers or sand dunes and have no desire to trample around in other people’s gardens just to keep alive the spirit of Lenin, might conceivably have been able to convince the Scotch government that Trump should be kept in America, where his chintz and his patterned carpets go down well.

  Certainly I believe there should be a third way when it comes to all planning matters of this type. I believe we should be incentivized enough to get off our bottoms and fight the good fight – not because of a butterfly or a polar bear or because we stand to make billions, but because golf courses are awful and anything Donald Trump does sits like a golden bogey on the unsullied face of a newborn child.

  I want this to be a movement. A movement for normal people. And I even have a leader in mind. Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs on Channel 4. He should be forced by law to appear in all planning committees where large projects are being considered, so that he can argue the case from the point of view of you and me.

  For now, I suppose there is some good news to be gleaned from the sorry saga of Trump’s plans to turn Scotland into Benidorm-by-the-Noo. One day he’ll come over on his hideous private jet and open his terrible new golf course. And I cannot wait to see what the notorious winds in Aberdeenshire do to his barnet.

  Sunday 9 November 2008

  The daddy of all idiots at your child’s school sports day

  If I felt inclined, and I don’t because I don’t want to be robbed every night and stabbed over the breakfast table every morning, I think I’d make a rather good foster parent. Unfortunately, despite my fondness for reading Winnie-the-Pooh stories and having big coal fires to keep everyone warm at night, I would not be deemed suitable, because various well-meaning councils have determined that it’s bad to place a child in the care of someone who is fat and who smokes. Sorry then, Lee. No Pooh and tickets to Top Gear for you, my lad.

  This spotlights an interesting new development: that the government we elect to build street lamps and erect park benches now has a view on what makes a good parent and what makes a bad one. Fat’s bad. Smoke’s bad. Predatory vegetablism, though, is fine. And so is keeping the house at −42°C for environmental reasons.

  Certainly, any parent who turns up to watch their kid play in a school sports match would be deemed ‘extremely good’, even though I’ve just returned from watching my son play rugby and it seems that absol
utely no dad in Britain can do this properly. I do not know what it is that causes normal, bright and funny people to lose their grip on reality as soon as they find themselves standing alongside a school sports pitch. But since everyone does, what I’ve done for you is to prepare a handy cut-out-’n’-keep guide to what’s acceptable and what’s not.

  First, parents must remember that they are an embarrassment to their children.

  Mick Jagger is an embarrassment to his kids. I am an embarrassment to mine. You are an embarrassment to yours. Everything you do. Everything you say. Everything you wear. It’s all completely wrong. So here’s a tip when on the touchline. Be normal.

  If your child’s team scores a try, you may applaud but do not – and this is something I witnessed just two hours ago – run on to the pitch, bellowing like a wounded animal, with a red face, a jugular vein standing 6 in proud of your neck and your arms held aloft like a triumphant boxer. Because after you have reached the middle of the pitch and sunk to your knees in a puddle of gratitude and happiness, you will realize you are the financial director of a leading advertising agency and you have just made yourself look like an idiot. Massive demonstrations of pride are acceptable if you are a Chelsea supporter and Didier Drogba has just slotted his eighth of the afternoon past Liverpool. But when you are watching a bunch of muddy twelve-year-olds running about like starlings, they are not.

  Also, no matter how knowledgeable you might be about the sport you’re watching, do not feel free at any point to offer loud and hectoring advice. This will make everyone on the team want to kick you in the head and, since it’s against school rules to attack visiting fathers, they will simply wait until they are in the showers after the game and kick your child instead. You may not smoke around your children to protect their lungs. You may feed them only brown rice to keep the cancer away. And you may give them only warm and fuzzy video games to preserve their minds. But if you shout on the touchlines you will end up breaking their noses by proxy. I guarantee it.