How Hard Can It Be? Read online

  Furthermore, offering helpful hints at the top of your voice will irritate the ref, who may at some point come over and ask you to be quiet. This – and I’ve seen it happen twice – can end in a fight. And no one wants to see the divisional manager for a supermarket chain rolling around in the mud trying to punch his son’s history teacher in the face.

  You can always tell when people are likely to behave like this because they will be supporting the other team and will have taken a day off work and driven hundreds of miles to be there. This means the person in question is extremely enthusiastic – and that means he will suddenly lose track of what you are saying to him and start jumping up and down shouting ‘Man on’ and ‘Face the ball’ and other unintelligible things. And the next thing you know, he’ll be wrestling in an undignified middle-aged way with Mr Jenkins from IVb.

  If you find that someone has come from far away, walk off and talk to one of the women who turn up without a spouse in tow because they will be grateful for the company. I know this because any man who puts ‘supporting my son in rugby matches’ below the line of things he’s prepared to do in the way of parenting is plainly hopeless as a husband. And therefore his wife will want to have an affair with you. This is why almost all women on the touchline at rugby matches are dressed up to the nines.

  However, and this is critical, when you have become engaged in small talk with a pretty mother and you are arranging to meet for tea afterwards, do not get so distracted that you miss your child scoring a try. He doesn’t want you there. He doesn’t want you to make a noise. But trust me on this: he wants you to be watching at his moment of glory. So pay attention.

  Now for the tricky part. When it’s your own child who’s put the team in front, for Christ’s sake, keep calm. Do not shout, ‘That’s his eighteenth of the season so far,’ because everyone will hate you. What I do is claim that it’s his first-ever try and then, to hammer the point home, pretend to faint. One day I’m hoping this will make the pretty mother I’m invariably talking to give me the kiss of life.

  Of course, this might irritate your boy if he were to turn round and find his dad being snogged by Fortescue minor’s mum. But since just standing there will annoy him anyway, you may as well give it a try.

  Sunday 16 November 2008

  I’m a Tigger, he’s a Piglet, and you must be a Pooh

  Genetically speaking, you are almost completely identical to every other living thing on the planet. I mean this. If I could break into your house tonight and alter your DNA by just 2 per cent you would wake up in the morning as a cauliflower or a mighty Scotch pine or a worm.

  At one end of the human spectrum you have the Polynesians. At the other you have the Basques. And all of us, all 6 billion of us, fit in between. Which means we cannot all be different. There simply cannot be 6 billion permutations of human being, any more than there can be 6 billion permutations of a cocktail stick. We know there are not 6 billion, or even six dozen, ways of being a hunting dog.

  David Attenborough tells us this all the time. He says hunting dogs do this and hunting dogs do that. And then he goes under the Pacific Ocean to tell us that all salmon find the spot where they were born, and have sex and die. There is never a salmon swimming the other way, smoking a cheroot and wearing a big hat. Attenborough couldn’t generalize like this if he were to make nature programmes about humans. He couldn’t say: ‘All humans are German photocopier salesmen and they all have Audis.’ If he did, he’d get a letter from one of Sting’s mates in Brazil, saying: ‘I’ve got a dinner plate in my bottom lip. I do not have a photocopier and all I know about Germans is that they taste nice.’

  I have never met anyone who is like me. And you have never met anyone who is like you. But it’s a mathematical certainty that there are several of you out there and several of me. Scarily, that means there are several Piers Morgans as well.

  Astrologers such as Mystic Meg will tell you that they’ve known this all along. That the human race in actual fact breaks down into twelve distinct groups that have nothing to do with nature, nurture or DNA. Mrs Meg says the positioning of the stars is why all Pisceans will give themselves a Brazilian this evening and why all Sagittarians will fall down the stairs. Plainly, however, this is nonsense. The Italian actress Claudia Cardinale is an Aries, like me, but I have never been asked for her autograph. And no one has ever exclaimed to me: ‘How can you not be Elton John? You’re so alike.’

  Astrology is a hopeless way of subdividing our species. And so is the idea put forward by marketeers. They say that if you have a gigantic flatscreen television and like eating chips you are a C or a D, and if you are Nicholas Soames you are an A. It’s all very Huxleyesque, but I’m afraid it’s also rubbish because I have a massive telly and I eat chips, but I also shoot pheasants in the face and I enjoy driving quad bikes on the road. Perhaps this is why my junk mail invites me to buy tartan zip-up slippers and handmade English shotguns.

  Then you have those who split the human race into tribes, saying that there is such a thing as ‘the French’ or ‘the British’. No there isn’t. I have nothing in common with Valerie Singleton and even less with Shannon Matthews’s mum.

  So how do we break down the human race into groups? This has occupied the minds of some of the greatest thinkers throughout history. But actually I suspect the answer was found in the middle of the last century by A. A. Milne. Yup. I gave this some serious thought in the bath this morning and I have decided that we are all either Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, Wol, Rabbit or Eeyore.

  Let us take the example of my colleagues on Top Gear. James May is Wol. He thinks he is very serious and very clever, but actually he can’t even spell his name properly. Then there is Richard Hammond, who is Piglet. And though I have a big stomach and a fondness for elevenses whether it’s eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon, I am Tigger. Think of anyone you know and I guarantee that, while they may not be pigeonholeable by race, star sign or socioeconomic classification, they’ll slot neatly into one of the characters from Winnie-the-Pooh.

  Clement Freud? Eeyore. Lorraine Kelly? Kanga. Ant and Lard? They’re Roos.

  I believe the Winnie-the-Pooh stories are the funniest things ever committed to paper. Even today I cannot get through the tale of Richard Hammond taking Eeyore a balloon for his birthday present without collapsing on to the floor in helpless mirth. However, if you look beyond the tears and the life-threatening convulsions, you will find that all of human life is here.

  Knowing this will be of huge benefit to marketing people. Digitas, for instance, can target the Eeyores while the nation’s beekeepers can direct-mail the Poohs. It will also help the divorced. Instead of advertising for a Leo, which means you could end up with Alexandre Dumas or Alan Shearer, why not advertise for a Tigger? Then you’d know exactly what sort of person will be waiting for you at the Harvester with a red rose and a copy of the Financial Times.

  Employers too will be able to cut through all the lies and the nonsense on a CV. There is, for instance, no point taking on a children’s entertainer, no matter how well qualified he may be, if he is an Eeyore. And there is no point taking on a plasterer if he is a Tigger.

  Funny, isn’t it? If you laid out all the permutations for a Rubik’s Cube, the list would stretch for 261 light years. There are 519 quintillion alternatives for one of those cubes. And yet it turns out that for the human race there are just eight.

  Sunday 23 November 2008

  Sorry, worms, you won’t be getting a piece of me

  Being dead used to be ever so easy. They’d put you in a box, lower you gingerly into the ground and let you rot in peace. Or, if the ground in your town was full, they’d throw you on a fire and let you spend the rest of time in a vase, on your mother’s mantelpiece.

  Now, though, in the same way that you can get married underwater or during a parachute jump, you can choose how you wish to be disposed of when you have done dying. Just this week, for instance, a former navy diver called Derick Redfern
was attached to the nose of a torpedo, which was then detonated on the sea bed off Plymouth. This means that now, and for all time, Mr Redfern is a part of the Gulf Stream.

  Meanwhile, in Spain, officials at the Catalunya circuit near Barcelona announced on Monday that motor-racing fans can now be laid to rest at the track. Quite how this will work I don’t know. It’ll certainly be a big nuisance for Lewis Hamilton next year if he skids in the final corner on Geoff Simmons of Batley.

  Perhaps they mean that a dead person can be used as part of the tyre wall. Or maybe to soak up oil spills.

  Some may argue that if you are used as a crash barrier or detonated on the sea bed, some of death’s dignity is lost. I’m not sure this is so, because I don’t see much dignity in lying in a box with your eyes leaking out of your face either. Far better, surely, to use your liquefying body as a soft landing for racing drivers. And if you wind up in the Atlantic conveyor, at least you get to see the Caribbean once in a while – something that’s not possible if you are lying under 6 ft of Surrey.

  I’ve always said that when I die I want to be buried, because if it turns out there is a heaven, it’ll be hard to enjoy its bountiful magnificence if I’ve been cremated. Seriously, you’re never going to pull an angel if you look like the contents of a Hoover bag. It’s for this reason I’m nervous about donor cards. I don’t think it’d be much fun in the land of milk and honey with no liver.

  However, now that it’s possible to make all sorts of odd requests, I’m reconsidering my post-Reaper strategy. This needs serious thought. I know this because I have watched people try to scatter the remains of their loved ones near my holiday cottage on the Isle of Man. It sounds lovely, but because it’s always windy, the bereaved family normally ends up going home with bits of their dearly departed dad in their hair. This means that, far from ending up on a lonely rocky outcrop, he winds up being washed down the plughole amid much sobbing.

  I see the same sort of problem with those who scatter the ashes of loved ones in their back garden. Schoolboy error, this, because one day it won’t be a back garden any more. It’ll be a branch of Tesco or a Travis Perkins depot. And that means your dad could end up as a breeze block. Or in the sandwiches of someone he disliked.

  Space is tempting because there’s no wind, and it doesn’t change, and I’m delighted to report there is indeed a company that will blast your ashes into orbit for just £250. A word of warning, though. While the company managed to get bits of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, into orbit, it made a bit of a hash of things when it came to getting the Enterprise’s chief engineer up there. The first time it tried, the rocket crashed and Scotty ended up not in the Andromeda Galaxy but just outside Santa Fe, in New Mexico. Happily he was found, and earlier this year he was launched again from a Pacific atoll. But that went wrong too when the rocket exploded, sending the Canadian actor into the sea, where, one day, he will probably crash head-on into Derick Redfern. Almost certainly, this is not what either man would have wanted.

  I should also explain that, if you do manage to get your husband into low orbit, he will be a hazard to navigation in the years to come. So don’t come crying to me when what used to be your spouse’s left leg punches a bloody great hole in the side of a space shuttle, killing everyone on board.

  Let me therefore give you some other ideas. Your dust could be mixed with paint and used to create a piece of art. This means you could spend the rest of time as Angelina Jolie’s left breast. Or the front bogie wheel of a steam locomotive. Or whatever subject you choose. I know I’m preaching to the converted here, as a recent study found that only 5 per cent of British people want to be laid to rest in a churchyard. You could become part of a football pitch or a bit of the M1. Or you could be turned into a diamond. This is surprisingly easy. You simply heat your ex-husband to 1500°C and keep him at this temperature for several weeks until everything that isn’t carbon has oxidized. Then you mix him with a bit of metal and a diamond seed crystal and then apply a pressure of 800,000 lb per square inch. After a period of several years, your husband can be cut and placed in a ring of your choosing. You may even opt to wear him as a stud in your navel or, dare I say it, lower down. He’d like that, I’m sure. But remember to remove him if you get remarried.

  Me? Well, I’ve decided exactly what I want my family to do with my body when it’s become meat. I want them to take it round to Peter Mandelson’s house and leave it in his front room. This is my wish, and, as my servant, Lord Mandelson is forced to oblige.

  Sunday 7 December 2008

  The BBC’s letting loonies gag me with mink knickers

  Last week Nigella Lawson went on the television and said she’d like to shoot a bear and turn it into a coat. Nothing wrong with that. We hear all the time from people who would never wear a fur coat, so why should we not occasionally hear from someone who would? Unfortunately, however, in the current climate it is no longer possible to express an opinion on TV because you are bound to upset a pressure group that then runs around waving its arms in the air and calling for you to be sacked or shot or turned into a hat. Nigella, for instance, has enraged an organization called Viva!, which stands for Vegetarians International Voice for Animals. And another called Peta, which stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Neither is very big or very important. I’d guess they have even fewer members than the Church of England. But they have websites, and they have spokeswomen, and they are always prepared to come up with a quote when contacted by reporters.

  I tripped over a similar bunch of loonies recently when I made a throwaway line on TV about lorry drivers murdering prostitutes. This was branded a sick joke by something called the English Collective of Prostitutes, whose job is to be angry when contacted by a member of Her Majesty’s press looking for a story.

  You could give me any subject matter: paving stones, cabbages, your next-door neighbour, dogs – anything that took your fancy – and I bet that after half an hour on the phone I could come up with someone who was prepared to be cross about it. If it got their name in the papers.

  It’s not just weirdos in attics either. Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse were hauled over Ofcom’s coals in October for showing a scene in which a man tried to mate his pet northerner with someone’s Filipina maid. Somehow this managed to infuriate the government of the Philippines, which made all sorts of agreeing noises when asked if it wanted Harry and Paul to be killed and eaten.

  The problem is simple. If you say, in public, that you would not shoot a bear or you would not support an attack on Iraq or you would not buy a Range Rover because of climate change, you are offending nobody. Because you are saying, ‘I will not do something.’ But if you say you would do something, like shoot a bear, then someone in an attic with a website and a silly acronym for their micro-organization (membership: three) will jump on your case and not let go.

  The situation has become worse in the wake of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s telephone call to Andrew Sachs’s answering machine. Everyone is after petrol and kindling to keep that fire going until Ross returns to the airwaves in January. That’s why poor old Chris Moyles was splashed across the papers recently for talking about prostitution and then talking about Poles. ‘Aha,’ said someone in a loft. ‘You see. You see! The BBC is out of control. They are employing a man who thinks all Polish people are hookers.’ And it’s why I had to get legal on various newspapers that were trying to suggest I’d given the finger to an American policeman in a recent edition of Top Gear. I hadn’t, but it looked that way, and that’s a big enough stick for those who are professionally angry.

  It’s now reached the point where the BBC has drawn up a new procedure to make sure no one in its employ ever says anything that could possibly offend anyone. This is an enormous undertaking. With four television channels broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, along with five national radio stations, and forty local stations in England alone, it amounts to 8,232 hours of broadcasting a week. That means 89m words every se
ven days, not one of which can offend anyone.

  Impossible? Well it’s not like they’re not trying. News reports featuring mildly grisly scenes have to come with health warnings. And I have to tell two people what I’m planning on saying. If I don’t, I am summarily dismissed. And if either thinks there’s someone out there with a website and an acronym who might find the remark offensive, it has to go. The procedure, scarily, is called ‘compliance’. Sounds like something a Dalek might say to some captives: ‘Comply. Comply.’ It has to stop. Because what the BBC is doing is pandering to the wishes of extremists. I mean it. There is no difference in my book between the spokesman for Viva! and suicide bombers who fly planes into tall buildings. Both believe they are right and, crucially, neither wants the other point of view to be heard.

  It is their right to eat weeds rather than food. I support them in that. I wish them well and I would gladly give them a platform on TV to express their views, no matter how pallid and drawn their badly malnourished faces may be. So how can they possibly object to someone saying: ‘I like a chop’? And how can we have reached a point where we castigate Harry and Paul for their extremely funny sketch? I even saw some hopeless MP on TV saying we should go back to the days of proper comedy like Fawlty Towers … in which I seem to recall Basil pretended to be Hitler and made some Germans cry. I promise you this: that scene today would not be broadcast because out there somewhere is a Kraut in an attic with a bad temper and a big mouth.

  To sum up, then. We all know you can’t use the f-word before nine, the n-word unless you’re Quentin Tarantino and the c-word ever. We sort of know what’s funny and what’s sick. We know something is offensive only if offence is meant. We know the rules and we really cannot have them redrawn by the English Collective of Prostitutes, the government of the Philippines, the Daily Mail and a bunch of people who don’t reckon it might be fun, just occasionally, to go out at night in a pair of mink knickers.