Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 14
I have a hair-loss problem. It’s all fallen out at the back. And I know that for several thousand pounds I could have it fixed. But what would be the point? I’d still look like a telegraph pole that had eaten a space hopper. Fixing my hair hole would be like trying to improve the overall appearance of the Elephant Man by cutting his fingernails.
There’s no doubt that for some people cosmetic surgery is important. It can be used to boost self-confidence and it can certainly help if you’ve been trapped in the cockpit of a burning Hurricane. Plus, in the world of celebrity, where long lenses can pick out a spot of cellulite from half a mile away, it is handy, too.
My eldest daughter came into the world looking like the lion from Daktari. The poor little mite had to spend the first three years of her life staring at nothing but the ends of both her noses. So she had cosmetic surgery, the squint was corrected, and nobody would have denied her that.
For sure, I wouldn’t want a doctor to fill my lips with collagen because it’s made from the skin of a bison, but there’s no doubt that the full Steve Tyler does make a girl prettier. And I’m sure Botox is useful if you need to look impassive at all times; in a game of poker, perhaps, or when you are being tortured.
I’ve sometimes looked down at the vast stomach that hangs over my trousers and thought: ‘Well, I could get rid of that by skipping, not drinking anything more exciting than Ribena and eating like a mouse for a year.’ But wouldn’t it be easier to pop into a hospital and have all the fat hoovered out?
We are forever being told that we spend more in Britain on cosmetic surgery than we do on tea, and that this year more men will go into the vanity cabinet than will join the army.
So what? If you have a wart the size of a melon on your face, or a prolapsed bottom, or teeth that grow out of your forehead, then by all means have the problem sorted and feel not one jot of shame or guilt. These are sophisticated times and you should use whatever science has created to make yourself happy.
However, when it comes to hair, it’s best to let nature take its course. I’m not talking about women now. Nobody wants to see what looks like half a pound of Old Holborn poking out of your bikini bottoms. And ‘99 Red Balloons’ was a one-hit wonder for Nena because nobody wanted to see her back on Top of the Pops with what appeared to be two guinea pigs peeping out from her armpits. No. I’m talking about men, and specifically the head.
Some chaps think when they go bald that it would be a good idea to grow a beard. Why? It just looks like your face is on upside down.
Others go down the Rooney route and have a transplant, but in my, albeit limited, experience this doesn’t work either. Because you end up with hair that grows like conifers on a Scottish hillside. In rows.
Worst of all, though, are chaps who believe they can hold off the ageing process with dye. This is a mind-blowing waste of time. We have been able to determine this by examining Paul McCartney.
By all accounts he is a fairly wealthy man, so we can presume he uses the very best hair-colouring products that Boots can provide. And yet he still looks like a man walking around with a dead red kite on his head.
It’s much the same story with Mick Jagger. Does he really think as he flounces down the street with that luxuriant auburn barnet quivering slightly in the breeze that passers-by will mistake him for a seventeen-year-old? Crowning that wind-battered old face with that hair is like crowning York Minster with a heap of solar panels.
And, anyway, what’s the point? The only reason a man might choose to cover up his greying temples is to make himself more attractive to the opposite sex. But when you are nudging seventy, I really don’t see how this works. Because surely your hair will be writing cheques your gentleman sausage can’t cash.
I have a general rule in life, which so far has stood me in reasonably good stead. Never do business with a man who cares about his hair. This is even more important than avoiding a man who goes to the gym or who has a Rolex watch.
Any evidence of layering or product suggests that he is vain and therefore not to be trusted. Certainly do not buy a house from someone who spends more than £25 on a haircut because I can pretty much guarantee it will smell of sewage every time it rains and fall down after six months.
Look at it this way. When England recently drew 2–2 with Switzerland in a lacklustre performance at Wembley, there was one notable absentee from the stands. Wayne Rooney. He didn’t even bother to turn up and cheer his mates on, or his country, because he was across town, having his hair transplant.
12 June 2011
We demand our weekends back, Adolf Handlebar
Many thousands of people are not reading this today because they’re driving around an unfamiliar village ten miles from where they live, desperately looking for a pair of wilting balloons tied to a gatepost. This will indicate that they’ve found the right house at which to drop their six-year-old for a party.
Afterwards, they’ll have to drive at high speed to a railway station in the vague hope that their fifteen-year-old son has actually woken up on time and caught the train he said he’d catch.
Then, after discovering that he hasn’t, and isn’t answering his phone and is probably dead in a gutter somewhere, it’ll be time to pick up a third child from her sleepover and head back to the unfamiliar little village only to find the balloons have vanished along with the house at which the six-year-old was dropped.
A report out last week said that by the time a child is eighteen, parents will have spent a full year of their lives ferrying it about. An endless round of school trips, social events and sporting fixtures means that you will have driven 23,500 miles. Which is about the same as driving round the fattest part of the world. And you know what? I don’t believe it.
Taking my youngest child to and from school clocks up seventy-two miles a day. That’s 13,824 miles a year. So that’s more than 110,000 miles by the time she is thirteen. And that’s before we get to the weekend, when my wife and I have to employ a team of women with long sticks in what we call the map room.
It’s their job to vector us in on the postcodes of parties, and to work out which of us is nearer to whichever child has finished one thing and needs taking to something else. We have learnt much from watching the Battle of Britain. Some days, we need the Big Wing.
Of course, occasionally we are too hungover to provide this vital role, in which case the kids will be expected to use public transport. They’re not very good at this. The eldest has developed an incredibly annoying tactic of volunteering to come home on the train but then ringing from far away to say her credit card is maxed out and that she can’t. The boy, meanwhile, reckons that there’s a bus stationed in our local town waiting for the rare moments when he has to use it. And he can’t understand why sometimes it’s not there. The youngest isn’t exactly sure what a bus is.
And I don’t want to sound like an old person, but it was never like this when I was a kid, because back then I didn’t choose friends on the basis that I liked them; I chose them on the basis that they lived within cycling distance.
I had a bicycle at home, which I would ride for fun whenever there was nothing on television, which was – let’s think now – almost constantly.
And I had a bicycle at school, which I would use for getting to and from the local girls’ school. Which was seventeen miles away. My bicycle was my passport to adulthood. My bike was freedom.
Not any more, of course. A bicycle now is seen as a portal to the Pearly Gates. There’s a sense that unless you are dressed up in a spinnaker of luminescence and your head is shrouded in what appear to be five cryogenic bananas, you will definitely be killed within seconds of climbing on board. This takes the fun out of riding.
But it’s nonsense. Yes, a friend of mine peeled his face off the other day after falling off, but cycling-related deaths are down by a third since the mid-1990s, and it’s probably fair to say there’s never been a safer time to go for a ride.
Sadly, though, there’s a problem. You s
ee, cycling is seen now not as something that might be exhilarating or even useful but as a frontline propaganda weapon in the war on capitalism, banking, freedom, McDonald’s, injustice, Swiss drug companies, rape and progress. Every morning London is chock-full of little individually wrapped Twiglets, their wizened faces contorted with hatred for all that they see. Fat people. Cars. Chain stores. It’s all fascism. Fascism, d’you hear?
From what they see as the moral high ground, they sneer at pedestrians, howl at buses, bang on cars, scream at taxi drivers and charge through every convention that defines society with their walnutty bottoms in the air and their stupid legs going nineteen to the dozen.
This sort of thing frightens a child in much the same way that little Norwegian children were frightened when jackbooted Nazis marched through their towns and villages, shouting and generally being scary. Little Olaf, cowering in the cellar, never once thought, ‘Ooh, I’d like to be like them when I grow up.’
To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted.
This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings. They will also be forced to abandon their crash helmets. Nobody in their right mind believes that a bit of yellow polystyrene could possibly keep a head intact should it be run over by the rear wheels of an articulated lorry. So get rid of them.
With the Nazi clobber gone, we shall start to insist that cyclists develop some manners. They should take a leaf out of the horse rider’s book, thanking other road users for slowing down rather than shaking their fists because they didn’t slow down enough. We need them to recognize that Bob the builder and Roary the racing car have just as much of a right to be out and about as they do.
This way, children will grow up to think that cycling is fun. And as a result of that, parents will be freed at weekends to do what they want, safe in the knowledge that their thin, healthy children are getting the social lives they need without being a bloody nuisance in the process.
19 June 2011
Houston, our spaceships are ugly
Next month the space shuttle Atlantis will blast off for the final time, and when it returns, that will be that. America will no longer be capable of getting a man into space. So what, then, will become of the International Space Station (ISS)? For now, the crew in their polo shirts and slacks can be ferried back and forth by the Russians while the Europeans – not us, obviously, or the Greeks – can be relied upon to pop up every now and again to empty their bins.
This is done by what the European Space Agency calls its fleet of space freighters. They take washing-up liquid and other vital supplies into space and are then loaded up with all the rubbish for the journey back to earth. The idea is, of course, that they burn up on re-entry but not every part is destroyed. Indeed, only last week, sailors in the South Pacific were advised to stay in their cabins in case they were hit on the head by bits of just such a ship. Called the ATV Johannes Kepler, it did mostly burn up but still dumped various components into the ocean in what can only be described as an act of government-sponsored littering.
There are only three Euro space freighters left, and because the governments that fund the programme are now having to give all their spare cash to Stavros and Mr O’Flaherty to keep them in beer and skittles, there won’t be any more.
That means the space station will have to be abandoned. And is that any great loss? We’re told that many useful experiments are being conducted up there, but what are they exactly? All the crew seems to do is grow mustard and take pretty pictures of earth. And has anyone thought what will happen to the ISS when the binmen stop coming and the Russians realize they only have a space programme to stop their scientists skipping off to Iran?
Remember Skylab? NASA engineers decided that it could not be kept in orbit forever, so, with their slide rules and their side partings, they decided to bring it down into the sea off South Africa. Unfortunately, they got their sums a bit wrong and most of it crashed into Australia. That time, the American government was hit with a $400 fine for littering. Which it refused to pay.
Boffins, then, may well be reluctant to bring the ISS down in case there is a similar diplomatic incident. But it can’t very well be left in space either because of what’s called the Kessler syndrome.
At present, there are around 300 million bits of man-made debris orbiting earth at extremely high speed. Some are little flecks of paint or globules of unburnt rocket fuel. But there are also hammers and nuts and bolts. Should one of these things hit the abandoned space station at a closing speed of 35,000mph, there would be many more bits and pieces hurtling around up there, and what an egghead called Donald Kessler worked out is that each time one of these pieces hit another, more smaller bits would result until, eventually, earth would be surrounded by an impenetrable shield of rubbish. Trying to drive a spaceship through it would be like trying to drive a car through a thunderstorm without hitting any of the raindrops.
So here we are, trapped on our own planet by our own mess. We’ve filled space with junk and littered the oceans with broken-up space freighters and solid rocket boosters and the souls of many dead astronauts. We’ve spent trillions and all we have to show for it is a bit of useless moon rock and a profound understanding of how to grow mustard when there’s no gravity.
What happened to the spirit of the 1960s when John F. Kennedy made his big speech about why we choose to go to the moon and do the other things – what were the other things, by the way? What happened to our dreams? And why am I, a committed fan of the shuttle and the whole nerdy business of space exploration, starting to feel so jaded?
The problem, I think, is aesthetics. Back in the 1950s, futurists would predict what sort of cars we’d be driving in the twenty-first century. But the cars we actually have are better than those that filled their wildest dreams. It’s the same story with computers. They never saw the delicious iPad coming, did they? Or Concorde. Or the Gherkin.
But it was very different with space. The film director Stanley Kubrick dreamt up Discovery One, a gloriously slender craft with a ball on the front and six big engines at the back. Then we had Thunderbird 3. Orange. Jaggedy. Sexy. And the Eagle transporter from the television series Space 1999. It was very cool. And, while there are words you can use to describe the space shuttle, ‘cool’ isn’t one of them.
Then there’s the ISS, which a) is only as far away from earth as Preston is from London and b) looks like a skip full of discarded kitchen appliances.
Mind you, even that’s a lot better than the space freighter. In your mind you can probably see a jet-black Mack truck with rockets on the back but I’m afraid in real life it isn’t even slightly like that. In fact, it looks like a wheelie bin that’s got tangled up in a teenager’s crusty bed sheet.
Now, of course, I realize that when you are building a machine for use in space, you don’t have to worry about aerodynamics or sleekness. But that’s the problem. How many small boys dream of the day when they can go to space in a wheelie bin? How many people think that the freighter’s interior, which looks like a Blue Peter project, is a worthwhile way of blowing all those taxpayer billions?
To keep the space programme alive, the boffins, and the accountants that fund them, must understand that we don’t want practical, bare-minimum engineering. If you’re going to call something a space freighter, make it look like the Nostromo; make it look impressive. Give it a bit of wow. Equip it with space guns and, most importantly of all, make sure it has a big red self-destruct button so that when you’ve finished with it, you can vaporize it before it crashes into the Galapagos Islands.
26 June 2011
Look what that little DVD pirate is really doing
In the olden days when we watched movies on video rec
orders, we could fast-forward through all the legal and commercial claptrap to the start of the actual film.
Not any more.
Now we are forced by electronic trickery to sit through the endless roll call of production companies, disclaimers and suchlike, until eventually we are presented with a reminder that if we copy the film, we are committing an act of piracy and we will be keelhauled.
I have a deal of sympathy with this argument. Foreign television companies pay a fortune for episodes of Top Gear and then transmit them with much trumpeting and brouhaha, only to find that most of the audience is elsewhere, having already watched everything on the internet. A couple of years ago Top Gear was the most illegally downloaded show in the world.
Things are even worse for the producers of Hollywood blockbusters. They spend £100 million making an all-action spectacular in which cars are driven at high speed into actual helicopters. And absolutely no one pays to watch the finished result.
Just last week various film companies told the High Court that file-sharing sites on the internet are costing them hundreds of millions a year and that firms such as BT and Virgin Media must take action to block them. It’s all a total waste of judicial time, partly because if you close down one avenue of access, another will begin immediately somewhere else. But mainly because most of the people who steal films don’t really think what they’re doing is wrong.
Some argue that if you copy someone’s car, it’s not theft because the original is still with its rightful owner. But that’s legal doublespeak. Most people – and when I say ‘people’, what I mean is ‘teenagers’ – have grown up with an internet where everything is free. Phone calls. Facts. Pornography. Nothing costs anything at all.
They go to one site, and a song they want is available for nothing. So why would they go to iTunes and pay 79p? In their silly little heads it makes no sense.