How Hard Can It Be? Read online

  Sunday 14 December 2008

  Ambulance, quick – some idiot’s had a brainwave

  You must have noticed the change. You used to be able to get a good night’s sleep in a British city centre, but these days you are woken from your dreams every five minutes by the siren of a passing ambulance. And figures out last week show this is no illusion. In London, the number of calls received by the ambulance service has rocketed from 3,000 to 4,000 a day. And in the West Midlands it’s a similar picture, with 8,000 calls being received last weekend – a 30 per cent increase on the same weekend last year. So what’s going on? Obviously some people need an ambulance in these troubled times because they’ve been stabbed or shot or they’ve ingested a bit too much ketamine and are walking round the garden whinnying.

  There are many reasons why the number of calls has jumped so dramatically and so quickly and I’m sure the NHS will be having many meetings, with biscuits, to try to work out what they might be and what might be done to bring the situation under control. Doubtless, the Daily Mail will have a few ideas as well, probably to do with immigrants and Princess Diana. Or people attempting suicide because they’ve just read a story suggesting that cornflakes give you breast cancer.

  Happily, I have been giving the matter serious thought as well and I’ve come up with some ideas of my own. One of the reasons more people need the services of an ambulance driver is because of politically motivated weather forecasting.

  The Met Office, which claims to know what the weather will be like in a hundred years but cannot tell what it will do tomorrow morning, now seems to be incapable of saying what it was like yesterday either. It announced last week that thanks to patio heaters and Top Gear, the past decade has been the warmest on record even though temperatures have been falling since 1995 and Britain has been suffering from the coldest start to winter for thirty years. And because the weathermen tell us it’s warm outside and will get warmer still until we all burn in hell, people get dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and then die of hypothermia while scraping 6 ft of sheet ice from the windscreen of what the Met Office calls a polar bear-killing, Arctic-melting, carbon-emitting, greenhouse-creating star-destroyer but you and I know as a Ford Fiesta. That said, I don’t blame the Met Office for all of the ambulance service’s woes.

  No. I suspect the main reason there has been such a dramatic leap is that Britain is now fuller than ever of people who are technically stupid. In the olden days (i.e., before last week), it was a big story when someone dialled 999 in hysterics because they’d broken a fingernail. But now it happens so often, it’s no longer news. Just last night in my local supermarket a woman became so hysterical about a hair she’d found on the outside of a packet of bacon that she called the police. Had I been armed, I’m fairly sure I’d have shot her in the back of the head. Certainly, I thought quite seriously about clubbing her to death with my shopping basket.

  And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the West Country a woman called for an ambulance because her television remote control was out of reach. Then there was the young man who reckoned he needed emergency care because he’d sniffed some deodorant by accident. And on the very day the ambulance service made its announcement, it had a call from a twenty-two-year-old woman who’d squeezed a blackhead and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. One pensioner told an ambulance crew she’d summoned to wait for forty minutes because she was baking a cake. The crew gave her a stern warning about wasting their time and left, but the warning plainly wasn’t physical enough because exactly forty minutes later the daft old bat told a second crew that her cake had risen nicely and she was ready to go to hospital.

  The stories are endless. The people with shampoo in their eyes. The people who think they’ve caught a virus from their computer. The people whose brains are so tiny and so ineffectual that they cannot determine what is a nuisance and what is an amputation.

  From an early age, I’ve told my children that they may come rushing into the house wailing only if they can actually see bone poking out of their skin but, plainly, other parents are not so wise. Even when their child has nothing but a minor flesh wound, they mollycoddle it so that they end up rearing a pathetic imbecile.

  So, now that we have uncovered the problem, we must decide what to do. Many would call for better education but this is expensive, it won’t make an impact for fifteen years at least and I can hardly see where it would fit in the curriculum now that children have to spend so much time learning how to have oral sex and why the Range Rover is boiling Johnny polar bear.

  I have therefore decided that the carrot-and-stick approach is best. Only without the carrot. This works for dogs and so I see no reason why it should not work for life forms that have less intelligence, such as northerners.

  In short, ambulance crews summoned to the assistance of someone whose head is still attached to the body and who does not have gangrene or Ebola should be allowed, if they see fit, to burn the person’s house down. Or, if they are kindly souls, to take an item that has roughly the same value as the call-out, so that it can be sold by the NHS on eBay.

  In the meantime, perhaps the Met Office would be good enough to consult its supercomputer for the weather forecast instead of telling us what Jonathon Porritt thinks.

  Sunday 21 December 2008

  Save the high street – ditch bad service and ugly sales girls

  I fear I may have seen Vietnam for the last time. As the jet lifted off from Saigon in September, I looked out of the window and thought: ‘I’m forty-eight. I’ll probably never get the chance to come back here again.’ And it made me sad.

  I’m also sad that, in all probability, I shall never again fly in a jet fighter or ski down a black run or make fumbling lurve in the back seat of a car. In fact, the list of things I’ve already and unwittingly done for the last time is endless and, if various reports are to be believed, includes shopping.

  According to the men in braces who put our money somewhere and can’t quite remember where, up to fifteen big high-street retailers will disappear from town centres in the coming months. And if my local town is anything to go by, they will undoubtedly be joined by all those little boutiquey delicatessen bijou cubbyhole shops that smell of sun-dried tomatoes and potpourri. The ones run by stick-insect blonde women and paid for by their husbands to stop them running off with the gym instructor.

  Each town will be left with nothing but two giant retailing cathedrals in which you will be able to buy everything from smoked salmon to soil. The meat will be scarlet, the prices will be low and they won’t be shops as we know them.

  They’ll be filling stations for the stomach. They’ll be horrid. They’ll be American. I shall never set foot in one. I shall simply buy everything I need from the interweb.

  And that’s sad too.

  And so what I thought I’d do today is provide a handy cut-out-’n’-keep guide for the high-street moguls of this world, and the stick-insect women, explaining what they’ve been doing wrong, what might be done to stave off their demise and, with it, the demise of every town centre in the land.

  Because let’s face it, the pubs are going too, and the estate agents and the building societies.

  First of all, then, we must address the problem of the physical purchase. At the moment, when I buy something, a man in a nasty suit sits me down and asks all sorts of impudent questions about where I live and my telephone number. Wrong. I know that this has nothing to do with my guarantee and everything to do with you profiling your customers so you can get a man in India to call up at an antisocial hour in six months’ time to sell me a washing machine. Pack it in. Take my credit card. Give me the product. Get me out of there as quickly as possible and do not sell my details to anyone in India or I will come round in the middle of the night and burn your shop down.

  Next. Have everything in stock. I know this is expensive and complicated but I really don’t like going to all the bother of trying on a pair of shoes, only to have the silly girl emerge after ten minutes from
a non-existent storeroom to explain that she doesn’t have the style in my size and would I mind coming back in a week. Yes, I would mind very much.

  Retailers need to understand – and they really don’t – that while there are a great many people, usually those with bosoms, who enjoy mooching about in the shops because it’s safer and less complicated than shagging the gym instructor, the rest – those with zips down the front of their trousers – do not enjoy it much at all and would like the whole process to be over as fast as possible. Speed, then, is everything.

  Now we get to the question of price tags.

  And I’m talking to you now, Mr Tiffany.

  I walked into your Bond Street shop the other day, took one look at the counter full of jewellery, noticed that nothing had a price tag and promptly walked out again.

  This is because I knew exactly what would happen if I hung around. I’d point at a brooch. The sales assistant would get it out of the cabinet. I’d have to ask how much it cost and she’d say, through a loudhailer so everyone in the shop could hear, ‘£250,000.’ And I’d then have to shrug and try to look nonchalant, which is jolly difficult when your knees are knocking. I buy jewellery like wine, on price. It is the only thing I want to know. I don’t care about the setting or where the diamond came from. I just want to know whether it costs 5p or £800m. Knowing this speeds up the transaction and saves me from embarrassment, and any jeweller who doesn’t realize this has only himself to blame when the bailiffs drop round for tea and buns.

  Retailers should also know that men can only ever buy what they want ‘now’. It is why, whenever I’m sent to a supermarket to do the weekly shop, I only ever buy what I want at that precise moment. So instead of getting six bumper packs of bog roll and four trays of dog food, I come home with one tube of Smarties. I am allergic to buying a bumper pack of anything. When I need a shave I only need one razor. When I want lunch I want one pizza. So sell them singly, please. And while we’re at it, Dolmio, smaller pots, if you wouldn’t mind.

  Finally, and I hope this is helpful, pretty girls cost the same to employ as ugly ones.

  There’s a shop in St James’s Street, London, called Swaine Adeney Brigg that sells lilac riding crops for £900. I have no use for anything like that but I buy one a week because the assistant is so pretty. In short, nobody likes to be served by a boot-faced crow. Or, and this is for you, PC World, a man in a purple shirt.

  That is the end of my column and if retailers pay no attention to it, it will be the end of their shops as well. The rest of you have a happy new year and for heaven’s sake enjoy it. It might be your last.

  Sunday 28 December 2008

  Ring a ring o’ clipboards – we all fall down

  When I was a keen young reporter on a local newspaper, I was dispatched to the council house of a young woman who’d called and said her home had been overrun by cockroaches.

  Home turned out to be the wrong word. It was a structure of sorts containing nothing but upturned boxes and several children who looked like they’d walked straight off the set of Kes. As we tried to sort out a family picture, it transpired that the woman had absolutely no idea which kids were hers and which ones belonged to what I’d taken until that point to be a puddle of lard but was in fact her sister. Nor did she have the first clue what cockroaches were. ‘You know what they do?’ she said. ‘They burrow into kiddies’ heads, lay their eggs and the kiddies end up with a head full of spiders.’

  That was thirty years ago, and you might imagine things on the sink estates of grim northern towns were much better these days. But no. Over the Christmas holidays we read about the Mansfield couple who went on a seven-hour drinking binge with their sick-encrusted baby. The father was an extraordinary-looking creature who appeared to be part mouse, part pipe cleaner, and the mother had six previous drunk-and-disorderly convictions. Plainly, then, they are entirely unsuitable parents, and unless the social services continue to keep a close eye, their poor child will wake up one day in a box under a bed and it’ll be Shannon Matthews all over again.

  I was therefore delighted to read last week that the government is going to take action to make life that little bit better for the children of this great nation. However, it is not talking about increasing its vigilance on children who are made to eat only what they can find in the heroin-laced stairwells of the tower blocks in which they live, or those who are sent out to exchange stolen car radios for six-packs of Rohypnol. Instead, it will be employing a vast army of men and women with clipboards who will come round to your house when your child is two to make sure it can speak properly. This is bound to be a worry if you are Glaswegian or the love child of Ant and Dec.

  The initiative is being developed in response to a report that found some two-year-olds were unaware they had a name, let alone what it was. And that one in ten of all children in deprived areas didn’t know a single nursery rhyme.

  Hmmm. I’ve given this some thought, and I can’t see the problem. Nursery rhymes are cruel and terrible things full of stories about dismembered sheep and the bubonic plague. You have Simple Simon, who was obviously a retard, Hickory Dickory Dock, which is just rubbish, and Wee Willie Winkie, who ran through the town in his nightclothes, peering through the windows of children to see if they were in bed. Clearly, the man was a paedophile, and the less two-year-olds know about such things, the better.

  In fact, I applaud any parent who hides these sordid and frightening stories and encourages their children to play Grand Theft Auto instead. But I very much doubt the parka army with its clipboards will share my views. Nor do I expect it will concentrate its efforts in areas where children are in real need of help. In the same way that airport security people blunderbuss their anti-terrorism efforts across the board, which means they are just as likely to jab a digit in the back of Harry Potter as they are a sweating Afghan with wires poking out of his shoes, social workers are just as likely to target the local vicarage as they are the sink estate.

  Indeed, they’ve already said as much. Someone called Jean Gross, who is spearheading the government’s drive to make children learn nursery rhymes by the time the umbilical cord is cut, says that such problems also affect middle-class families, especially if their under-twos spend long periods in mediocre childcare while both parents work hard to pay off a big mortgage.

  I find this a bit terrifying because I remember, when my children were young, having them examined by someone who didn’t know them, didn’t know us and could summon, with the stroke of a ballpoint, a government machine that could at worst take them away and at best give them a problem with a Latin name that they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to overcome. And all because they didn’t know Humpty Dumpty was not an egg, or a fatty, but a civil war cannon. I actually know one couple who, quite wrongly, had their child taken away. And could have it back only if they lived in secure accommodation with twenty-four-hour surveillance. It remains the most barbaric example of a useless and dangerous system that now is set to get even worse.

  When it comes to the rearing of a child, there is no definitive right and wrong. Social workers – whom I admire for the most part – will continue to be too cautious in some cases and too heavy-handed in others. Mistakes will continue to be made, which is fine if you are a shelf-stacker or you pick vegetables for a living. But when your mistake devastates a family, it is absolutely not fine at all.

  If we go back to the children I encountered thirty years ago in that cockroach-infested house, it’s entirely possible they are all now in jail for selling ketamine to toddlers. But it’s also possible (just) that they are university professors.

  And let’s finish with the example of a young girl whose father was an abusive alcoholic and whose mother became so fed up that she shot him dead in front of the child. Every rulebook in the world would say she should be taken into care. She wasn’t. And she grew up to be Charlize Theron.

  Sunday 4 January 2009

  The world will never be safe until Scrabble is banne
d

  News from the dusty bit at the back of the toy shop. In the past twelve months, sales of Trivial Pursuit have tripled, Monopoly is 13 per cent up and Scrabble is twenty-three times more popular than it was in 2007. Naturally, the sort of people who like long walks in the fresh air see this as an indicator that Britain is reverting to traditional family values and that instead of going out at night to sniff glue and stab a policeman, the nation’s children are all at home in pinafore dresses, whittling chess pieces round the fire with Mum and Dad. They see the resurgence of the board game as a good thing.

  I’m not so sure, though. Take Monopoly as an example. To begin with it’s good fun but, like the banking and property system on which it is based, there is a flaw. It never ends. You go bankrupt so you borrow money from your mum, who has loads. Then you go bankrupt again. So you borrow more money from the bank. And then, when there is no more money left in the box, you write out an IOU and keep on borrowing by which time it is Thursday, everyone is bankrupt and you have realized that unchecked capitalism doesn’t work whether it comes in a stock market or in a box. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not, there will be a ‘bad loser’ around the table who will land on your hotel in Northumberland Avenue and in a hysterical rage will burst into tears and throw the board, his dog, your iron and all your dad’s houses into the fire.

  In theory Scrabble is much better and yet it, too, is flawed. Well, it is for me because I always end up with seven vowels. So while my opponent is writing ‘underpass’ across two triple word scores and claiming it’s a game of skill, I’m getting five for ‘eerie’. Again. And they are looking at me as though I might be a simpleton.