How Hard Can It Be? Page 14

  I have a similar problem with backgammon. So far as my wife is aware, dice have six faces all of which feature six dots. I, on the other hand, have only ever thrown a two and a one. Even without a player coming the other way, it would take me about eighteen months to get all my pieces to the other side of the board.

  To eliminate the element of luck, I always suggest chess but this doesn’t work either because the only person who knows how to play in my family is my son, who’s twelve and consequently charges around the board on a wave of testosterone, endlessly leaving his queen in silly places and then mocking when, out of kindness, I pretend I haven’t seen the danger it’s in. Or that he’s just moved his castle diagonally or that, for the past two hours, he’s been one move away from checkmate.

  In fact, playing any game with children is hopeless. Charades, for example. They sulk when you give them ‘The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B’ or ‘Versailles: The View from Sweden’ and you, in turn, get cheesed off when they endlessly mime their way through a film which has two words and sounds like Carry Hotter.

  Even Tri-Tactics – the only board game I really enjoy – is ruined when your opponent is under sixteen. Because you sit there thinking: ‘Oh, for God’s sake. How are you able to text a friend, talk to half the world on Facebook and watch some American drivel on television, all at the same time, when you cannot remember that the piece you attacked thirty seconds ago with your puny little destroyer is still my aircraft carrier?’ Board games, then, do not bring a family closer together. They rip out its heart in a seething cauldron of rage, hysteria, accusations and hate. And I fear they have a similar effect on world peace.

  To understand this new and interesting theory, we need to look at the world since Pong. This was the first commercially available video game; it featured two bats, a square ball and lots of irritating noises, it came along in 1972 and since then the western world has, for the most part, been at peace. We can therefore conclude that Pong and other games of its ilk ended the Cold War because, for the first time in history, leaders had something better to do than rush about threatening to bash one another’s heads in.

  I realize, of course, that this doesn’t apply to Tony Blair or George W. Bush but that’s because they were too busy reading the Bible to play Space Invaders. I, on the other hand, played a lot of Space Invaders and I’ve never wanted to invade anywhere.

  When we look at the world’s trouble spots today – the Gaza Strip, Somalia, Sri Lanka and so on – we find large chunks of the population which have no possibility of playing Grand Theft Auto. This means they are bored. They could play Dover Patrol or Mousetrap but choose instead to hold up oil tankers or cut off their neighbour’s arms.

  The board game was invented about 5,000 years ago and it didn’t quench anyone’s thirst for activity. People continued to invent stupid new religions and have wars because they knew that getting an axe in a face was better, by miles, than a game of Cluedo. Look at Hitler. He could have played Risk but because it can only ever be won by the person charged with the task of conquering Australia and North America, he decided to make up his own rules and play them out for real. Would he have done so if he’d been given a PlayStation and a copy of Call of Duty V? I seriously doubt it.

  The fact is this. Since science harnessed the electron and turned it into a Cylon or a Nazi paratrooper with a realistic machine pistol, the world has unquestionably been a better place. And so, too, is life for the family.

  I’m writing this at our seaside cottage where there is no PlayStation and no Wii. As a result the children get up in the morning, play something old-fashioned and then bicker about it till bedtime. Tomorrow we will be back at home, which is full of gruesome, vicious, bloodthirsty electronic games. Peace, contrary to the teachings of those in tweed, will be restored.

  Sunday 11 January 2009

  Run for cover – Pooh the Dark Knight is coming

  I’ve just watched the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, and it is very far removed from the original television show I used to watch as a boy. For instance, instead of biffing and kapowing his way through the tracing-paper plot in a body-hugging supersuit, our hero is a brooding and complicated character, tortured by inner demons, a sense of his own worthlessness and perhaps a touch of shame about what he and Robin used to get up to in the bath together back in the sixties. In short, Batman has become what film marketing people call ‘dark’ or ‘gritty’, and we see a similar problem with today’s James Bond, who has lost the one-liners and the gadgets and become ‘brooding’ and ‘complicated’.

  It’s the same story with the plot. In Quantum of Solace I was left utterly bewildered by what on earth he was up to half the time. Was Mathis a goodie or a baddie? I have no idea, and if I have no idea, what chance is there for the small boys whose fascination with 007 has kept the brand alive for so long? Even the car chase was impossible to follow. It was designed to be the longest, and best, in all of movie history, but what we actually saw in the cinema was a savagely edited facsimile. Why was it cut down? Presumably so they could shoehorn in more shots of Daniel Craig smouldering.

  And deeper insights into his inner being.

  In the olden days, Bond would get some orders from M and then embark on a series of fights, interspersed with some light sexual intercourse, until eventually the baddie and his entire operation exploded. It was as easy to understand as a boiled egg. But today, we’re told, 007 is more in keeping with the character from the original books. We have to be told this, of course, because no one has ever actually read one.

  Frankly I wish he’d just get back to the days when he headbutted Curt Jürgens in the face, blew up Donald Pleasence’s volcano and went to bed with Barbara Bach.

  It’s easy to see what’s going on here. After a character has been around for forty years, the people who created him become bored with blowing up Pinewood every two years. So they start to employ directors and actors who want to explore the hero’s roots and his motivation. Which means that, instead of getting Superman to fly about and make the world go backwards, they ask what being a superhero does to a man’s soul. Can he ever love someone? Can he ever be at peace? Does he ever develop a deity complex because there is simply no answer to the eternal question: why me? Oh, for God’s sake. Just kick Lex Luthor in the wedding veg and let’s have another explosion.

  Depth of character is fine in a film such as Shadowlands, but it is emphatically not fine in Die Hard or Bond or Batman, which have endured precisely because, in an action film, lead characters have to be shallow. We don’t want to know why they never go out without a machinegun, just so long as they use it as often as possible.

  Taking a cartoon character seriously is going to kill the golden goose in much the same way that the appeal of a real goose would be lost if you looked at the life it led, and the goslings it reared, before it was shot in the head and buried in gravy. And that’s why I am extremely alarmed to hear that after an eighty-year pause Winnie-the-Pooh is making a comeback. Yup. The people who manage the estate of the author A. A. Milne and the artist E. H. Shepard have allowed a publisher to commission a new book called Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, and while I’m sure it will sell jolly well and make lots of money, I fear that it will be impossible to rekindle the magic.

  First of all, A. A. Milne – unlike most people who shorten their byline this way – was an exceptional writer: of that there can be no doubt. And while I don’t doubt for a moment that the new author, David Benedictus, is an exceptional writer as well, it would be impossible to expect that he’d get the tone exactly right. And a Pooh story that’s off by even 5 per cent may as well be Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  What makes Pooh engage even today – apart from the genius of the writing and the joy of the illustrations – is that the stories are so exquisitely simple. It was Eeyore’s birthday. Pooh felt he should have a present. Piglet – surely the most unpleasant character in fiction since Judas Iscariot – decided to get there first so he’d be credited wit
h the idea. He fell over. The present exploded. He got his comeuppance. The end.

  And there’s the second problem. It is hard nowadays to get away with something so elemental. We’d have to know why Eeyore was so miserable all the time, and inevitably that would lead us to his upbringing on a sink beach in Blackpool. Then we’d be invited to explore why Piglet is such a nasty piece of work. Perhaps it has something to do with his height. Maybe he’s bitter and nasty because he has SPS – short pig syndrome. Maybe there could be a lesson here, as there seems to be in all children’s literature, about the effects of bullying.

  Speaking of which: Christopher Robin. Way, way too white. He’d have to be Somalian and the forest to which he escapes with his friends would have to be a park full of dog dirt in Hackney. I bet there are meetings going on today in which someone at the publisher is wondering whether Winnie-the-Pooh ought really to be a black bear called Winston-the-Pooh. Maybe the next book could be called Pooh: Dark Knight of Solace.

  Pooh, Batman and Bond have endured because they were brilliant ideas. And what I wish is that the custodians of these good ideas would refrain from meddling. Where possible, stick to the original concept. And where it isn’t possible because, say, the author was everything and the author is dead, move on and come up with a new brilliant idea.

  Sunday 18 January 2009

  Get another round in, lads – we’ve got some pubs to save

  Bad news from the tap room. It seems that in the past two years 3,382 pubs have closed, and so far this year they have been shutting at the rate of one every four hours.

  Now I should make it plain from the outset that I dislike very much what is usually called the traditional pub. I hate the low beams, the horse brasses, the V-necked jumpers, the jovial back-slapping freemasonry of the regulars, the tankards, the unfunny hunting cartoons in the bogs, the peer pressure to drink a pint of Old Fuddlecome’s Bottom, the urine-spattered peanuts, the patterned carpets, the wheel-back chairs and the overpowering sense that absolutely everyone around you is there mainly because they hate their wife and children. I also hate theme pubs because the theme, no matter what it says on the door, is almost always ‘fighting’. And I really hate gastropubs because of the way they always make fans out of their paper napkins.

  However, as I’m well aware that everyone else enjoys pubs a lot, I feel duty-bound to address what might be done to stop the anvil of death coming down with increasing velocity on what people in The Archers like to call the beating heart of the village.

  Obviously, the drinks industry is quick to blame the economy for the problems but, plainly, this is nonsense. I have absolutely no idea what beer costs, but I bet you can buy two pints and a packet of pork itchings for less than the price of a parking ticket.

  Plainly, then, it’s not money that’s keeping people away, which leads us directly to the fact that the one thing you cannot do in a smoking room is smoke. There’s no doubt that this has had a profound effect on the licensing trade, and David Cameron must make it a top priority to overturn the ban the moment he takes office. In the meantime, however, publicans must stop whining and carefully study the anti-smoking rulebook to find a loophole. There will be one. I guarantee it. This is a government document, remember, so it’s bound to be festooned with mistakes big enough to drive through in a pantechnicon.

  I’ve given the matter only a moment’s thought and already I’ve come up with some proposals. You could claim your ‘lounge’ is a theatre and that all the customers are actors. Then they can light up. Or you could make your pub an embassy. Or, best of all, sell fine cigars, which makes you a tobacco specialist. And then the ban doesn’t apply.

  Next, we must address the problem of food. I appreciate of course that there is extra cash to be earned from serving meals, but unless you know what you’re doing, and, let’s be honest, if your chef is a school-leaver from Darlington, he does not, I wouldn’t bother. He’ll only end up making a shepherd’s pie from actual shepherds.

  Once you have ditched the menu, fired the gormless oaf you employed to murder the chips, done away with the fancy napkins and edged craftily through the smoking ban, you must then turn your attention to the most important point of all, the main reason pubs are shutting down so fast: the idiotic notion that you should be encouraging your customers to drink ‘responsibly’. So, instead of displaying a sign that says you will not serve anyone who appears to be intoxicated, accept the age-old business practice that you will serve absolutely anyone, even if they’ve crawled to the bar on their hands and knees, leaving a trail of sick in their wake. You are in business to make money; not to send your customers home with the liver of a foetus.

  The government says the average adult male should not drink more than three to four units of alcohol a day. And to judge by the ‘drink responsibly’ slogans that now appear as part of a gentlemen’s agreement on all alcohol products and advertisements, the booze industry agrees. Small wonder they’re in a mess and all the pubs are closing down. How can you possibly expect to make a profit if you are displaying a sign asking customers to buy less? It’s madness. Think about it. Three units is one large glass of wine, and for all the effect this has on a 16-stone man like me, I may as well suck the moisture from a clump of moss. I drink at least a bottle of wine a night. And before going to bed I have a small tumbler of vodka enlivened by the addition of some sloes I found last year growing by a railway line.

  This is my business, and the drinks industry, if it had half a brain, would be encouraging me to keep it up. The government, meanwhile, should ask what on earth it’s doing telling the people it claims to represent how much of what they should put in their mouths. Genuinely, it staggers me that with all the problems facing the nation right now, some of my tax money is being used to work out how much wine I should drink before supper. What next? An enormous Prora-style holiday camp on the east coast where smiling families in lederhosen will be ordered to do star jumps from dawn till dusk? Drinking to excess is what separates us from the Greeks. Being drunk is what separates us from the beasts. And what’s more, drinking makes me happy. Not drinking makes me unhappy. Which means if I do as I’m told by Gordon Brown, I’ll be sad all the time.

  Publicans must fight this ‘nanny knows best’ interference. Yes, there is alcoholism and, yes, its effects on people are catastrophic. I know this only too well, sadly. But why should the many be made to cut down on one of life’s greatest pleasures because of the few? Speaking of which …

  My final suggestion for the pub trade is this. If you suspect that one of your customers may be boring, ask him, using a blowtorch if necessary, to be quiet.

  Sunday 25 January 2009

  Come quick, Nurse – the NHS is going frightfully green

  Last Saturday started off very normally. I had a hangover and was staggering around the house in loose robes, trying to find some restorative tomato juice. My wife, meanwhile, was picking one child up from a sleepover and taking another to some form of cello-based horse-riding activity. And then my son came in from the garden, where he’d been playing football with his mates, to say he had a headache.

  ‘Pah,’ I said huffily. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word. They’re hosting the Glaswegian round of the world pile-driver competition on my forehead as we speak, son, so go back outside and stop complaining.’ The thing is, though, he really did look dreadful. He was hot too. And what’s more, he said he couldn’t stand the crack of light coming through the blind I’d drawn to stave off the hammering in my own head. And then he was explosively sick.

  I put him to bed, wobbled down the stairs again and began to read the newspapers, where my eye alighted on a story about meningitis. Cases are up a whopping 25 per cent this year and it mostly affects young boys – especially those who, like my son, have recently had flu. Helpfully, the journalist had included a number of symptoms every parent should know about and I read them with a growing sense of unease. One stood out. The sufferer often has a stiff neck. Hurriedly, I sought out the
boy and asked if he could put his chin on his chest. ‘Ow,’ he said pitifully. ‘My neck hurts.’ Being a modern sort of person, I went on the NHS Direct internet site, keyed in the symptoms and was told, in the blink of an electron, to dial 999 immediately.

  I didn’t. Fearful of being labelled one of those people who call the emergency services because they have broken a nail, I rang the doctor’s surgery and was directed to a helpline number where, after a few minutes, a man came on the line, listened to the boy’s problems and said: ‘Call for an ambulance straight away.’ I still didn’t. An ambulance would have to come 20 miles to my house and then go 20 miles to the nearest hospital. That’s an hour at best and with meningitis you often don’t have that long. So despite the hangover and the possibility I was in no legal state to drive, I bundled him in the car and, twenty minutes later, we were skidding to a halt at A&E.

  Four hours later, after he’d been poked, prodded and hit on the knees with hammers by what felt like everyone in all of Oxfordshire, and I’d read all the My First Alphabet books in the waiting room and built a rather good Lego jet fighter, we were given the good news. It had been a migraine.

  So, now that I’ve experienced the NHS first hand, I’m well placed to make some helpful suggestions on how the service might be improved. And you know what? I’m a bit stumped. Yes, it would have been nice if some of the books in the waiting room had been more adult in nature; and in the same vein, I do think that some of the prettier nurses could have been wearing stockings. But that’s about it.

  If I were running the NHS, frankly, I’d give everyone a hearty slap on the back, fire a few managers and tell everyone to carry on. Sadly, though, I’m not in charge. Some lunatics have that job and their suggestions for the future of healthcare are extremely alarming.