How Hard Can It Be? Page 15

  First of all, they are going to reduce the amount of meat and dairy products on offer on their menus. They say this will reduce a hospital’s carbon emissions but, because that makes quite literally no sense to me at all, I can only imagine the real reason is that they want every patient to be cured of their animal-killing, right-wing hunting bastard past.

  It gets worse. They say that if the NHS were a country it would be the eighty-first biggest polluter in the world, between Estonia and Bahrain in the league tables, and that as a result people will be discouraged from going to hospital in a car.

  Right, you pig-ignorant tossers. I’m at home. I think my boy has meningitis. Do you think I’m going to take him there on the bus to help protect the plankton? Or do you think I’m going to wait for an ambulance that you’ve converted to run on melted-down Tories? Well I’m not. And if you turn all the car parks into allotments, I shall simply drive my Range Rover through the plate-glass windows and park in the foyer.

  They also want hospitals to get their power from wind turbines, which will be a great comfort on quiet, still days to those who rely for their next breath on a life-support machine. And they say that patients should drink less bottled water, presumably so that they have no option but to drink from the MRSA-infested sinks.

  You think this is all nonsense? Well, you’re right, but sadly they haven’t even got started yet. They want equipment to be reused. What equipment? Needles? Nappies? Rubber gloves? And get this. They also say hospital staff should be encouraged to work from home. I’m sorry, but what good is a nurse when you need some more painkillers and she’s at her place, feet up and watching Countdown for all you know? The problem here is that the government announced recently it wished to cut the output of carbon dioxide in Britain by 80 per cent by 2050. That cannot be done, but of course it has to be seen to be trying, which is why the NHS now has a Sustainable Development Unit – the department behind all these idiotic ideas.

  Its quite frankly deluded boss, Dr David Pencheon, says that in a low-carbon future, healthcare will not look anything like it does today. You’re damn right, sunshine. The hospitals will be full to overflowing with people who are dead.

  Sunday 1 February 2009

  I dare you to visit Johannesburg, the city for softies

  Every city needs a snappy one-word handle to pull in the tourists and the investors. So, when you think of Paris, you think of love; when you think of New York, you think of shopping; and when you think of London – despite the best efforts of New Labour to steer you in the direction of Darcus Howe – you think of beefeaters and Mrs Queen. Rome has its architecture. Sydney has its bridge. Venice has its sewage, and Johannesburg has its crime. Yup, Jo’burg – the subject of this morning’s missive – is where you go if you want to be carjacked, shot, stabbed, killed and eaten.

  You could tell your mother you were going on a package holiday to Kabul, with a stopover in Haiti and Detroit, and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But tell her you’re going to Jo’burg and she’ll be absolutely convinced that you’ll come home with no wallet, no watch and no head. Jo’burg has a fearsome global reputation for being utterly terrifying, a lawless Wild West frontier town paralysed by corruption and disease. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time there over the past three years and I can reveal that it’s all nonsense.

  If crime is so bad then how come, the other day, the front-page lead in the city’s main newspaper concerned the theft of a computer from one of the local schools? I’m not joking. The paper even ran a massive picture of the desk where the computer used to sit. It was the least interesting picture I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. But then it would be, because this was one of the least interesting crimes.

  ‘Pah,’ said the armed guard who’d been charged with escorting me each day from my hotel to the Coca-Cola dome, where I was performing a stage version of Top Gear.

  Quite why he was armed I have absolutely no idea, because all we passed was garden centres and shops selling tropical fish tanks. Now I’m sorry, but if it’s true that the streets are a war zone, and you run the risk of being shot every time you set foot outside your front door, then, yes, I can see you might risk a trip to the shops for some food. But a fish tank? An ornamental pot for your garden? It doesn’t ring true.

  Look Jo’burg up on Wikipedia and it tells you it’s now one of the most violent cities in the world … but it adds in brackets ‘citation needed’. That’s like saying Gordon Brown is a two-eyed British genius (citation needed). Honestly? Johannesburg is Milton Keynes with thunderstorms. You go out. You have a lovely ostrich. You drink some delicious wine and you walk back to your hotel, all warm and comfy. It’s the least frightening place on earth. So why does every single person there wrap themselves up in razor wire and fit their cars with flame-throwers and speak of how many times they’ve been killed that day? What are they trying to prove?

  Next year South Africa will play host to the football World Cup. The opening and closing matches will be played in Jo’burg, and no one’s going to go if they think they will be stabbed. The locals even seem to accept this, as at the new airport terminal only six passport booths have been set aside for non-South African residents. At first it’s baffling. Why ruin the reputation of your city and risk the success of the footballing World Cup to fuel a story that plainly isn’t true? There is no litter and no graffiti. I’ve sauntered through Soweto on a number of occasions now, swinging a Nikon round my head, with no effect. You stand more chance of being mugged in Monte Carlo. Time and again I was told I could buy an AK-47 for 100 rand – about £7. But when I said, ‘Okay, let’s go and get one’, no one had the first idea where to start looking. And they were even more clueless when I asked about bullets.

  As I bought yet another agreeable carved doll from yet another agreeable black person, I wanted to ring up those idiots who compile surveys of the best and worst places to live and say: ‘Why do you keep banging on about Vancouver, you idiots? Jo’burg’s way better.’ Instead, however, I sat down and tried to work out why the locals paint their city as the eighth circle of hell. And I think I have an answer. It’s because they want to save the lions in the Kruger National Park. I promise I am not making this up. Every night, people in Mozambique pack up their possessions and set off on foot through the Kruger for a new life in the quiet, bougainvillea-lined streets of Jo’burg. And very often these poor unfortunate souls are eaten by the big cats.

  That, you may imagine, is bad news for the families of those who’ve been devoured. But actually it’s even worse for Johnny Lion. You see, a great many people in Mozambique have Aids, and the fact is this: if you can catch HIV from someone’s blood or saliva during a bout of tender love-making, you can be assured you will catch it if you wolf the person down whole. Even if you are called Clarence and you have a mane. At present, it’s estimated that there are 2,000 lions in the Kruger National Park and studies suggest 90 per cent have feline Aids. Some vets suggest the epidemic was started by lions eating the lungs of diseased buffalos. But there are growing claims from experts in the field that, actually, refugees are the biggest problem.

  That’s clearly the answer, then. Johannesburgians are telling the world they live in a shit-hole to save their lions. That’s the sort of people they are. And so, if you are thinking about going to the World Cup next year, don’t hesitate. The exchange rate’s good, the food is superb, the weather’s lovely and, thanks to some serious economic self-sacrifice, Kruger is still full of animals. The word, then, I’d choose to describe Jo’burg is ‘tranquil’.

  Sunday 1 March 2009

  Class-A cocoa, the powder of choice on my crock’n’roll tour

  Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve wanted to be a rock star. I used to look at the pictures in Melody Maker of Paul Rodgers getting on to Bad Company’s personal Boeing 737 and think: ‘What in the name of all that’s holy will be going on in that thing after it takes off?’ None of it, I suspected, would involve accountancy or mineral water.

  I’d hear tal
es of Keith Moon fire-axeing his way into Peter Frampton’s bathroom so that he could cut old Goldilocks’s hair with a pair of garden shears. Or of Joe Walsh buying an electric chainsaw so that no one would know he was coming until he arrived through their bedroom wall. Or of one notable drummer snorting cocaine off a famous guitarist’s dog. And then I’d stop daydreaming and find my careers master was still droning on about the joys of estate agency.

  However, standing like a swollen river between me and my dreams was an unfortunate fact of life. I could not play a musical instrument. And when I sang, it sounded like I’d been kicked in the testicles. I realize that this never stopped the Bee Gees, but they had lovely hair by way of compensation. Mine looked like Brian May’s in a spaceship.

  Last year, however, someone came up with the bright idea of making a Top Gear stage show and taking it round the world. We’d have to charter 747s for all the props. There would be roadies. Special effects. An endless parade of hotel rooms. Maybe even some groupies. It would be rock’n’roll, except I didn’t need any talent. I signed up like a shot.

  And so we arrived on Waiheke Island midway through the tour. We’d done ten sell-out shows in South Africa and narrowly avoided being fried in Australia. Next on the tour of countries we used to own would be Hong Kong, but for now we were taking a couple of days off in a rented house.

  There were four guys and three girls. There was a pool. There was a beach. There was a 65 ft cruiser tied up to the jetty, a Range Rover Sport on the lawn and two helicopters in the garden. We only needed one, the Twin Squirrel, but I’d decided to act like a rock star and had insisted on my own personal Hughes 500 – the best, fastest, most agile chopper in the world. We had, therefore, all the ingredients you need for a bit of serious rock’n’rollery, even though this was New Zealand, where, if you ask someone for drugs, you get a packet of Disprin. No matter. There was beer. There was champagne. And I’d brought my own personal cutlery made from giraffe bone.

  Unfortunately, because we’d already done twenty shows, I was a bit tired. And since there were seventeen more to go, I didn’t want to get too wasted, so we decided to play Risk. We tore that house apart looking for the box – well, when I say we tore it apart, we looked carefully in all the cupboards, because we didn’t want to make a mess. But to no avail. So one of the pilots was ordered to fire up his Squirrel and go to Auckland to get it.

  I’d love to say this gave me a thrill, a sense that we’d marched up to the fringes of extreme and kept right on going. But all the while, I had this horrible feeling that someone was paying for that chopper – and that it might be me. To take my mind off the cost, we decided to see who could throw a girl the furthest down the swimming pool. I picked the lightest but sadly, on my first attempt, I felt my back go. So I left the others to it and went to bed with some class-A cocoa.

  The next day I was stung by a wasp. When my arm became thicker than my thigh, I decided that I was almost certainly going to die and that it was a rather hopeless way for a rock’n’roll star to go. Most career through the pearly gates on a burning motorcycle with half a gallon of heroin coursing round their arterial route map. Not from an insect sting.

  I tried, as the tour thundered onwards, to act like a rock star. In Hong Kong I thought seriously about having a wee from the helipad on top of the Peninsula hotel – to see if I could finish before the first bit hit the ground. But I thought I might get into trouble.

  Then, later in the day, I decided to drive a 50 ft powerboat through the harbour at full tilt to see if the wash might roll over a Star ferry. But there’s an 11-knot speed limit. Which seemed sensible, so I stuck to it, vigorously.

  Girls? Yes, there were loads, but when you have the British tabloids breathing down your neck, it was better, I figured, to ignore them.

  On the last night we had a party. A big one. And I decided to make it through to the dawn. But I had three shows to do the next day and a long flight home in the evening. And I was pretty tired, so at two I called it a day.

  And therein lies the problem. When you are forty-eight you just don’t have the stamina to push the outside of the envelope. And your moral compass is sufficiently well developed to keep you, and your car, out of the hotel swimming pool.

  Make no mistake, I loved every minute of the whole exercise – but I would have loved it so much more if I’d been eighteen. So listen up, children. Forget about getting a job. There aren’t any. And forget your Facebook too. Just do your piano practice. Get good quickly – there isn’t a moment to lose.

  Sunday 8 March 2009

  I’m starting divorce proceedings in this special relationship

  Back in the eighties, a French industrialist described Britain as an American aircraft carrier off the coast of Europe. And then last week Jacques Myard, a member of the French assembly, mocked the special relationship we claim to have with the US, hinting, with a rather cruel smile, that when it comes to foreign policy, they are the masters and we are the lapdogs, wagging our tails whenever they throw us a biscuit. Which isn’t very often.

  It would be easy to scoff at this Gallic arrogance, arguing that, while Monsieur Myard can sit under his wisteria enjoying some lovely cheese, his country’s antipathy towards America means that all the pop music on French radio is rubbish and that his government cannot afford a new aircraft carrier. However, if you look at Gordon Brown’s recent trip to Washington, Johnny Frenchman would appear to have a point.

  Gordon gave Obama Barrack a penholder carved from the timbers of an anti-slavery ship. The sister ship, in fact, of the one that was broken up and turned into the desk in the Oval Office. Barrack, meanwhile, gave Brown The Graduate on DVD. Which smacks of an ‘Oh, Christ. What shall we get him?’ moment at the local petrol station.

  Then we have the issue with crime. The British authorities have to present a robust prima-facie case to the American courts before we can extradite someone to the UK. Whereas an American cop can drag you across the Atlantic if he even so much as thinks your beard is a bit dodgy.

  Trade? Well, I spoke over dinner the other day with the boss of a large British engineering company about the benefits of the special relationship when you are doing business in America. He snorted so explosively that large chunks of lamb and mashed potato shot out of his nose. ‘Special relationship!’ he chortled. ‘There isn’t one.’ Certainly this was true during the Suez crisis, when America sat on its hands. It was also true when Harold Wilson refused to get involved with Vietnam.

  And let’s not forget John Major either, who got all cross when Bill Clinton had Gerry Adams round to the White House for tea and buns.

  Or how Bill got the hump with Major after details of his time at Oxford University were leaked to the press. Special relationship? Sounds more like a session at Relate to me.

  Sure, Tony Blair was close to George Bush, but this, I fear, had nothing to do with Churchill’s dream and much to do with America’s need to claim its efforts in Iraq were ‘international’. A claim that was helped enormously by Blair’s wonky grasp of history. ‘My father’s generation went through the Blitz. There was one country and one people which stood by us at that time. America and the American people.’ Er. No they didn’t, Tony. They were too busy bankrupting the empire by charging £8 billion for two clapped-out First World War destroyers: the USS Weak and the USS Colander.

  On a personal note, I find no evidence of a special relationship when I go to America. There is no fast-track lane through immigration for visiting Brits. The customs man always looks at me as if I’ve just chucked his tea into Boston harbour. And we have to answer questions about whether we’ve ever done genocide, just like everyone else.

  Of course, it is hard for a civvie to say whether the special relationship exists in military circles. But certainly the troops I speak to tend to suggest not. When they’re asked what US forces are like in theatre, the answer is mostly unprintable, apart from a liberal use of the word ‘useless’.

  To be fair, I can’t imagine that t
he Americans find us much cop as allies either. I mean, I can hardly see them queuing up to borrow our snatch Land Rovers or our Nimrods or our lumbering Sea Kings or indeed any of our hardware at all. They probably think they are going into battle with a bunch of keen and well-trained soldiers … from the Stone Age.

  As further evidence, consider this. How many British bases are to be found on American soil? It’s, er, um, hang on … none. And how many US ones are to be found over here? To get an idea, try driving through Suffolk one day, past Mildenhall and Lakenheath. There are so many American cars on the road, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Iowa.

  Maybe we don’t help ourselves. Maybe we come across as a bit arrogant. According to Rowland White’s amazing new book Phoenix Squadron, when the first four Brits were sent to the new Top Gun academy in California, they didn’t much care for the ‘Maverick’ and ‘Iceman’ style of call sign adopted by their American counterparts. But their hosts insisted, so they came up with ‘Cholmondley’, ‘Dogbreath’, ‘Alien’ and ‘Spastic’.

  Interestingly, however, when I went to a US air force base in North Carolina a few years ago, I was shown the spec sheets for the F-15 fighter. Alongside each component was a box explaining which countries could know its secrets. And there was only one country that was entitled to see the details of all of them. Not Israel. Not Saudi Arabia. It was us. Even though – or perhaps because – the RAF doesn’t actually have any F-15s.

  The best way, I think, of understanding how the special relationship works is to answer this question. When a visiting American actor comes here and makes nice noises about Britain, do you feel all warm, gooey and proud? I bet you do. Now think how it works the other way round. When a British actor goes over there and makes nice noises about America, do you think they even notice? Honestly? I believe it’s time we stopped deluding ourselves about our relationship with America, which since the late 1940s has produced virtually nothing. And tried to make friends with the French. Because the last time we did that, the world got Concorde.