Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 16

  No other sport does this. Even if we are not interested in football, we understand who has won when we are told that Manchester United have scored two and Chelsea have scored three. But in a golf report your car radio needs to have the decoding powers of Bletchley Park or you are left completely in the dark.

  Golf fever even spread to the traffic reports. Normally, these begin with Scotland and we all think: ‘Oh, do us a favour. They have no idea what a jam is.’ But last week they all began with news of hold-ups in Kent, caused, apparently, by people going to the golf match.

  That’s even more baffling than the leaderboard. I can, if I squint, understand why people play the sport – they don’t like their wives – but I cannot understand why anyone would want to watch it, because, so far as I can tell, you choose whether you want to watch a man you’ve never heard of hit the ball or whether you want to watch the ball land.

  Isn’t that like being forced in a football match to choose whether you want to watch the man take the penalty, or the other man try to save it? Imagine if the bowler and the batsman in cricket were made to stand three miles apart and you had to choose which one you’d like to see.

  Except there is no batsman in golf. A man hits a ball and all you can do if you’re at the other end is watch it land. Can you imagine anything in life quite so dreary?

  And it was raining. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That you would drive through severe traffic and stand in the rain for hours watching a selection of men in nasty trousers thwack a ball into the clouds. Or, worse, peering into the heavens in the hope that you’ve selected the right spot to watch it come back down to earth. And you have no idea who’s winning because reports of the scores don’t make sense.

  It’s almost like a secret code. Which it is, in a way, since in the early days golf was played almost exclusively by Freemasons. And Freemasons do not make a habit of speaking openly about their activities or their handshakes or their funny words.

  Today, of course, most Freemasons are to be found in the police, who don’t talk properly either.

  24 July 2011

  Get on your roof, everyone, and give Biggles an eyeful

  In my continuing quest to prove that airport check-in times are fraudulent nonsense, I arrived at Ronaldsway on the Isle of Man the other morning twenty-three minutes before the scheduled departure time.

  And made it on to the flight, easily.

  I was feeling extremely smug as I cast my eyes over the other passengers. ‘Ha,’ I thought, ‘while I was catching a few more zeds in bed this morning, all you slaves to convention were marooned in the departure lounge, having your hair redone by static electricity from the seats.’

  But then the plane took off, and I realized that, unlike everyone else, I hadn’t left myself enough time to buy a book or a newspaper.

  This meant I had to spend the entire flight looking out of the window. And as we began our descent into London City an hour or so later, I arrived at an interesting conclusion: from the air, England is much too dreary. I realize, of course, that we don’t have any Alps and there’s no desert – apart from a small one between Birmingham and Coventry – but we do have many towns, and from the air they’re all extremely similar and very horrid.

  Stoke-on-Trent looks exactly like Stafford. Milton Keynes looks like a retail park. Lichfield appears to serve no purpose at all. And every building you see looks like a prison. Except for all the actual prisons, which look like supermarkets.

  There’s a very good reason for this. It’s because the planning rules were drawn up when only the very tall had an aerial view of anything. Architects therefore concentrated hard on frontal aspects and put all the flotsam and jetsam and the air-conditioning plant on the roof where no one could see it. Now, though, thousands of us can – and do – see it every day.

  There’s more. Think how much effort is put into a town’s ground-level entry points these days. You get a little gate, and some flowerpots, a sign asking you to drive slowly and often a reminder that back in 1996 the Britain in Bloom judges had bestowed upon the council a special commendation. All this effort for a few people in cars.

  Whereas people flying overhead are given nothing. It’s just a big brown splodge that looks exactly the same as all the other big brown splodges.

  So what about a bit of civic advertising. ‘You are now flying over Rutland – the best little county by a dam site.’ Or ‘Mansfield – birthplace of Rebecca Adlington and Richard Bacon’. Or ‘Chipping Norton – nothing to see here’.

  From the air, there seems to be no point at all to Preston. You realize why it was the first town to be given a motorway bypass. There was simply no need to go there. But this was the first British town outside London to be lit by gas. So why not light it up by gas again?

  Think of all those eager little American faces, pressed to the windows of their planes, straining in the pre-dawn light to get a better look at Britain’s only town to be completely on fire.

  Companies, too, could get in on the act. They spend a fortune getting their message across to motorists who have better things to do than look at billboards.

  But they spend not a single penny pushing their slogans to the thousands of trapped businessmen who fly over the factories every day.

  We know of the story of a man in Wales who became so fed up with low-level RAF sorties that he put a message on his roof saying ‘Piss off Biggles’. Inevitably it backfired because when news broke of his stunt, everyone with a pilot’s licence flew over his gaff for a gawp.

  But you can see from this story that rooftop advertising has power. Pilots will fly hundreds of miles out of their way, just to be abused. That’s how boring Britain is from the air.

  As you come in to land at Heathrow, there are thousands of nondescript warehouses on either side of the final approach and I think I’m right in saying that only one owner has had the gumption to festoon his otherwise useless roof space with an advert. That’s madness.

  At present, escort girls ply for trade by leaving cards in telephone boxes. Why? The only people who use a telephone box these days are people who are desperate for a wee. So why not put a photograph of yourself, a phone number and a brief list of the services you offer on the roof of a warehouse in Hammersmith? One Korean jet and you’d be rushed off your feet, literally, for a month.

  It’s the same story with Windsor Castle, over which you descend when the wind’s blowing from the east. I’m pretty sure that most airline passengers haven’t a clue what it is, so why not use a banner to tell them of opening times and ticket prices? Mrs Queen would have enough for a new royal yacht in weeks. And airline passengers would have something to read.

  But it’s farmers with whom I have the biggest gripe. Who says that crops have to be planted in squares? What’s the matter with a good old-fashioned cock and balls?

  In Oxfordshire there’s an estate on which all the woods were planted in the precise formations of various troops at some battle in the Crimea. The old buffer who did this could not possibly have known that one day people would be able to enjoy the fruits of his imagination. But today, every time I leave Heathrow, I do.

  And certainly, if my farm were on a flight path, I’d be doing all sorts of things that would be invisible to arbiters of good taste on the ground but clear as day from 30,000ft in the sky. Some of the things I have in my mind would involve messages, perhaps about Gordon Brown. And if I had some land in Sussex, I’d plant a wood in such a way that Lufthansa’s passengers would know that I shared their view of the Greeks.

  My plans are good news for everyone. They are good for business, good for tourism, good for civic pride and good for those airline passengers who see the airport as a glorified bus stop. And not a two-hour compulsory shopping trip.

  31 July 2011

  That’s it – one fluffed backhand and I’m broken as a father

  As we know, it is much better to lose than to win. First of all, losing requires much less physical exertion. If you want to win a gam
e of tennis or squash, you have to try very hard, which involves a great deal of running and sweat. Whereas if you really couldn’t care less, you can spend an enjoyable hour sauntering about, hitting the ball only if it happens to be passing close by.

  It’s the same story with chess. If you set out to win, you really have to concentrate hard on what you are doing, anticipating all of the moves your opponent could make and deciding how you might respond.

  Whereas if you don’t mind losing, you can spend the time when it’s not your turn drinking martinis and flicking through powerboat magazines. This is much more enjoyable than doing mental maths.

  There’s another big advantage to being the plucky Brit who comes home second. It’s this: if you win, it is almost impossible to get your face right. You have to look pleased but not smug. And you have to walk that tightrope while making magnanimous noises to your opponent. This is tricky.

  Whereas if you lose, you can shrug your shoulders and make all sorts of jokes about how useless you are at everything. There is comedy to be had from being a loser, and none at all from being a winner.

  That’s why I have spent all of my life ensuring that I am no good at anything.

  However, there is an exception to all of this. A time when you must risk a heart attack and a seizure to ensure that you wipe your opponent off the board, or the court or the pitch or wherever you might be. This is when your opponent is one of your own children.

  I spent some time yesterday with a fifty-three-year-old man who was absolutely charming, until the conversation turned to his fondness for running half marathons, and how he is driven every year on the Great North Run not to just beat, but to humiliate his twenty-seven-year-old son. I understand this very well.

  One of the sports at which I don’t excel is table tennis. That said, I’m not a complete numpty. Obviously, I won’t spend the game standing fifteen yards from the net making stupid spin shots and sweating like an Egyptian burglar. And you can be assured that if you’ve moved me to the left side of the table and then suddenly sent a shot to the right, I’m not going to risk a coronary running for it. That would be undignified.

  However, while playing my son the other day, all of this changed. It was 8-1 to him. A score that was not possible. It’s my job as a dad to be better than him and better than all the other dads, too. It’s my job to win.

  And then it was 10-1. And then 11-1. At this point, I’m ashamed to say, I changed into a pair of training shoes. Then I went outside, took some deep breaths and came back a new man. I may have even been growling a bit.

  I sent my serve deep into the bottom corner. It skimmed the very edge of the table, and whooshed under his armpit. ‘Yes!!!’ I cried, punching the air, my face contorted with determination and rage.

  And so it went on until the score was 21-20. To him. He was serving. He took his time. Wondering, perhaps, what the snarling, sweat-soaked monster at the other end of the table had done with his dad. He pulled his hand back, and this was it.

  My life hung in the balance. If I messed up, I would have lost to my own son. I focused. The ball came, I sent it back, with some side. He whipped a fast one hard into the left court but I was ready with a chip. Which he reached, sending a short ball back. I smashed a backhand at it. And knew the instant I made the move, it wouldn’t work. I was right. The ball sailed into the pile of boxes at the far end of the room and was lost. So was I.

  The boy was very kind and said all the right things. He had been lucky. I hadn’t been concentrating properly at the beginning. It had been a good game. And so on.

  But I knew that what had just passed between us was not a fluffed backhand in a game of table tennis. It was the moment when the line of his ascent to adulthood passed my line of descent into an old people’s home.

  For fifteen years, I have encouraged my son and taught him things. I have watched him grow and learn, safe in the knowledge that, of course, I will always be faster and cleverer and stronger. And then comes the moment when you are forced to face up to the fact that this just isn’t so.

  The fluffed backhand was that moment, that pinprick of time when I realized he is now faster and stronger than me, and that one day soon, he will be cleaning up my faeces and holding my hand when I cross the road.

  The only good thing, of course, is that despite his new-found strength and agility, he would never have the same level of wisdom. The young bull knows that he can charge into a field of cows and have a couple. The old bull knows that it’s better to stroll into the field and have the lot.

  So, even when my son is having to wipe my bottom, I will still be able to offer him advice on the ways of the world – because I will always be thirty-six years older. He will always have thirty-six fewer years to have experienced things. As a result, I will always have the ability to think more strategically than him.

  That’s why, after I’d smashed my table tennis bat into a million pieces and fed the remains into a wood-chipping machine, I agreed to sit down and play him at chess.

  I poured myself a glass of Ribena so that I would go into the match sober. I turned off my telephone. We began.

  And he won that, too. I’m now thinking of killing myself.

  7 August 2011

  French porn and a little software can save our schools

  As you are no doubt aware, every single young person in Britain discovered last week that they had passed fifteen GSCE exams with A* grades. This means they are now able to sit their A levels, which they will also pass with flying colours, and pretty soon they will be at university studying, oh, I don’t know, ‘dance and waste management’ or ‘Third World development with pop music’. Both of which are real courses, incidentally.

  When they have achieved first-class degrees, they will emerge into the workplace fully formed and educated to a higher standard than any other young people in history. Or will they?

  Because if you look carefully at the results you will note that many of the successful children passed in subjects such as ceramics, or needlework, or PE. So while the child may be capable of making a flowerpot and doing a forward somersault, he or she may not be able to go to Paris without ending up in Rio de Janeiro.

  Some lay the blame for this fairly and squarely at the door of league tables. They argue that to get a tick in the box from the government, each school must ensure that as many kids as possible get as many passes as possible. This means pupils are discouraged from taking an exam in physics, which is hard, and encouraged instead to sit papers on dusting, or using a urinal.

  This is undoubtedly true. I know of one girl who insisted on taking various science subjects for her A levels. Her head teacher argued strongly that she should not but she was adamant and scored a C and two Ds. As a result of this – just one pupil – the school fell fifty places in the league tables.

  However, league tables are not the only reason for the shift. There’s another which comes to light when you note that this year the number of pupils sitting a geography GCSE fell by a whopping 13,800.

  When I was at school, geography was a doddle. We learnt about capital cities and American states and then occasionally we were taken on a field trip to the Peak District so we could stand behind millstone grit outcrops, smoking Player’s No. 6s. I loved geography and still do.

  However, today the geography syllabus has changed beyond all recognition. Instead of learning which countries are next door to Libya, which is interesting and useful, the subject has been hijacked by eco-mentalists.

  Yes, there’s a bit of interesting stuff on tectonic plates, but mostly it’s a non-stop orgy of weird-beard nonsense about man’s impact on the ecosystem and why snails are more important than bypasses. Kids are taught to ‘appreciate the ways in which people and environments interact and the need to make developments sustainable’. It sounds like a local council pamphlet.

  They’re also taught about climate change and hazard management, which is another way of saying health and safety. And then, if they are still awake, they
are made to sit through hour after interminable hour of the teacher droning on about the green revolution, globalization and how best to manage the world’s resources. This isn’t education, it’s propaganda. And, worse still, it’s boring.

  We have the same problem with English literature. Instead of getting children to study books such as Matterhorn or Birdsong, which are exciting and well written, they are still made to read Shakespeare. If I were running the education system, Shakespeare would be banned. His plots are simplistic. His characters are unfathomable. He is only of use to postgraduate dweebs interested in what was going on with the language in the sixteenth century. He should be removed from the curriculum and take Chaucer and bloody Milton with him.

  Then there’s maths. What in God’s name is the point of learning algebra and cosines and long division? Maths is not necessary once you are past the age of four because anything more complicated than adding two and two can be done on a telephone.

  To make matters worse, maths is compulsory. Which is almost certainly why so many children choose to spend their days sitting around in an Arndale centre frightening old ladies.

  As a country we need a rethink on not only what we teach our children but also how we teach it. Take French. Like geography, it, too, is less popular now than PE and ironing but I know how to reverse that trend. I know how you could make every single child in the land fluent by the time they are fourteen. It’s simple. Instead of teaching them that a table is female and how to conjugate verbs, simply play them French – ahem – ‘art’ films with the subtitles turned off. They’d get the gist pretty quickly.

  What’s more, when they are in France they will find it much more beneficial if they can say ‘My dear, your thighs are exquisite’ than if they can only say ‘The pen of my aunt’. Just one word of warning. It’s probably best not to let children see German ‘art’ films. Not unless they want to take a GSCE in moustaches.