Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read online

  Let me give you an example of how a change in teaching methods has revolutionized life in my house. Ever since they were old enough to walk, my children have had music lessons. They’ve done their scales and learnt to play stupid bits of Bartok and as a result none of them can play an instrument.

  But yesterday I was sitting watching television when I heard my youngest daughter sit down at the piano and play ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay absolutely perfectly. I was so staggered that I went next door to find out how this had been possible.

  It turns out she had downloaded the score, which was displayed on an iPad like a Space Invaders game. I had no clue what was going on but, her being twelve, it all made perfect sense. This morning she bashed out the second movement of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ so beautifully I thought Beethoven had dropped in for breakfast.

  If schools can use technology like this and French pornography and get rid of Shakespeare, the nation will once again be full to the brim with educated people. Rather than people who have a lot of GSCEs.

  28 August 2011

  Oh, Berbatovs – I’ve got to learn footballspeak

  Back in the 1960s there were many things to occupy the mind of a small boy, many rivalries to be discussed in the playground. There was music, for starters; lots of it and all so very different. There were tunes for mods and rockers and hippies, and there was bubblegum pop for people with pigtails.

  Later we would discover Led Zep and the Who and the Stones and I would argue until well into the night about who were best. And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Was Crime of the Century better than Rumours? Was Mitch Mitchell a better drummer than Nick Mason? Who was better-looking, Christine McVie or Stevie Nicks?

  And when we tired of music, there was still a rich seam of debate to be explored. Ferrari versus Lotus. Chelsea versus Leeds. England versus Australia. Communism versus capitalism. America versus Vietnam. The nearest I ever came to an actual schoolboy fistfight was with an idiot who really and truly believed Wrangler made better jeans than Levi’s.

  Now, though, all this is gone, swept away by the rise and rise of Premier League football. Today, if you listen to children talking, it’s not about whether McDonald’s does a better fry than Burger King or whether the Taliban have more of a point than Obama. No. There’s an occasional discussion – usually among girls – about which X Factor contestant is most likely to end up back behind the counter at Asda that week, but mostly it’s football.

  In our house it’s constant. My fifteen-year-old boy is a fanatical Chelsea supporter and I like to play a game with him: starting the conversation as far away as possible from football and then seeing how long it takes him to get it back to Stamford Bridge. His record is pre-Byzantine architecture to John Terry in three moves.

  His fanaticism has even had an effect on me. Until quite recently I saw football as twenty-two overpaid young men with silly hair kicking an inflated sheep’s pancreas around a field. Yes, I was able to recite the Chelsea and Leeds teams that played in the 1970 FA Cup final but I only chose to do so, in my head, when I felt I needed to last a little longer in the bedroom department. I would even pray for England to get knocked out of tournaments so that television programming could return to normal and I could get back to discussing the Rubettes and the joy of a pleated Ben Sherman shirt.

  Not any more. Last year I flew all the way to South Africa – at my own expense – to watch Holland and Spain play in the World Cup final. Then, last weekend, I voluntarily sat down and watched Tottenham play Manchester City, two teams in which I have absolutely no interest. Because unless I know what’s going on these days, I’m useless to my son when I’m at home and in a conversational cul-de-sac when I’m out.

  I met a chap last week who drives a Toyota Prius and thinks it’s unkind to shoot a pheasant in the face. I was very much looking forward to talking to him about these and other things. But no. We started with football over the prawn cocktail and were still at it as we finished the Black Forest gateau.

  It’s not just a religion here, either. Premier League football is now screened in more than 200 countries around the world. And we’re not talking ‘screened’ in the same way that Piers Morgan’s chat show is ‘screened’. I mean watched. And not just casually, but fanatically.

  Because the big teams field players from all over the world, pretty well every country has a local hero for whom they can cheer.

  Nigerians can support Chelsea because they have John Obi Mikel. Bulgarians can support Manchester United because they have Dimitar Berbatov. Scandinavians have a fondness for Liverpool because the Reds once employed a Nor called John Arne Riise.

  This means that wherever we go in the world my son is always first to make friends with the locals. I caught him in earnest conversation with a known Caribbean drug dealer the other day and was very angry, until I realized that they were actually discussing Arsenal’s chances this season.

  And while it’s undoubtedly sad that football now sits in humankind’s conversation pit like a gigantic elephant, it’s good news that Britain gets to sit in the spotlight every weekend.

  There is, however, a problem. According to all the experts, the league will be dominated this year by just two teams: Manchester City and Manchester United. That’s not good, because what makes the Premier League so much better than any other in the world is the sheer number of teams that start every season with half a chance. If it’s a two-horse race, between the teams from just one city, new boys like me are going to struggle to stay interested.

  Which brings me on to an idea suggested by John Timpson, the shoe-repairs magnate, whom I met on holiday last month. He reckons that the Football Association should work out a formula based on a club’s finances to determine how big the goalmouths should be.

  This is inspired. It would mean that when a rich side such as Manchester City plays a less well-off side such as Norwich, the East Anglians would be aiming at a goal that’s about the same size as their home county, while the Mancs would be trying to get the ball through what was basically a letter box.

  Obviously it needn’t be that pronounced. A few inches either way should be enough to level the playing field. Rich owners could then continue to field great teams playing great football. But the result? Deliciously, it could go either way.

  Then – and this is my little twist – if it’s 0-0 at half-time, the second half should be played with two balls on the pitch at the same time.

  Oh, and finally, this is from my son: anyone appearing for a team with Manchester in the title must play while wearing a bag on his head.

  4 September 2011

  My daughter and I stepped over the body and into a brothel

  There is a terrible famine in East Africa, which is great news if you’re a celebrity.

  Because it means you can head off to Ethiopia for some nice PR and a spot of late-summer sunshine.

  It’s a great gig.

  All you have to do is walk about on a rubbish tip, looking despondent, and then cuddle a baby with flies in its eyes while pulling your best kid-in-a-wheelchair charity face.

  Bang in a couple of shots of you pretending to listen to a starving mum, plaster the finished film with a veneer of ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM and it’s back to the hotel for a few beers and a sixth-form debate with the charity bigwigs on the injustices of the World Bank, Swiss drug companies, General Motors, climate change, McDonald’s and the bloody Tories.

  Meanwhile, back at home, everyone is bored to tears. Legend has it that Bonio once told an audience who’d come to hear him sing ‘Wiv or Wivout You’ that every time he clapped his hands a child in Africa died, prompting one wag in the crowd to shout out: ‘Well, stop clapping your hands then.’

  Deep down we all feel very sorry for the starving masses but the compassion is buried under the blanket of certainty that Africa is basically screwed. Russell Brand can walk about on a rubbish tip till the cows come home but it’ll make no difference to the fact that the leaders are corrupt, violence is a
way of life, the Sahara is getting bigger and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about any of it. It’s just a question of what wipes them out first: starvation or AIDS.

  I’ve always felt this way. Bob Geldof may have it in his head that I went to Live Aid so that others, less fortunate than me, might have a happier life. Well, I didn’t. I went because I wanted to see the Who. And despite constant denials, I’ve always harboured a deep-down belief that the money I paid for the ticket was used to provide the Ethiopian president’s personal bodyguard with a new Kalashnikov.

  Anyway, moving on, I have a strict policy with my children about their holidays. They can do their snogging and drinking in the Easter break but in the summer they have to go somewhere a bit more educational. Which is why, last weekend, my eldest daughter and I set off for a mini-break in Uganda.

  A few facts. Half the population of this landlocked East African country is fourteen or younger and the gross domestic product is £11 billion or, to put it another way, about a tenth of what Britain spends on the National Health Service alone. It’s very poor, but in Entebbe, which is used by the United Nations as a hub, the whole place looks like Surrey. Except for the shops, most of which are named after the baby Jesus. You have the Blessed Lord butchery and the Praise Be to the Almighty banana emporium. You also have a lot of roadside stalls selling double beds. No idea why.

  The capital, though, Kampala? That’s a different story. I’ve seen poverty in my travels. I once saw a woman in Bolivia having a tug-of-war with a dog over an empty crisp packet and in Cambodia you get the impression that pretty well everyone has had their legs blown off by landmines. But nothing prepares you for the jaw-dropping horror of a Ugandan slum.

  We stepped out of the car, over the body of a man, and moments later we were surrounded by solid proof that Dante completely miscalculated the number of circles in hell. We’ll start with sanitation.

  There isn’t any. Well, there are a couple of public bogs, but since they cost 200 shillings to use, everyone simply uses what passes for the street. At one point we were taken to a 10ft x 10ft brothel, which in the rainy season floods to a depth of 2ft with raw sewage. This means customers have the opportunity to catch cholera and AIDS in one hit.

  You may wonder why anyone goes there. Well, it’s simple. In a two-hour walk I didn’t see a single girl under the age of eighteen. ‘They don’t survive,’ said our guide. Which, when translated, means they are either raped and then murdered to shut them up or they are beheaded by witch doctors in the daily child sacrifice ceremonies.

  Not that most of the boys seem to care very much since almost all of them are completely off their heads on solvents.

  They lie there – some of them just three years old – entirely unaware of the fact they’re in a puddle of someone else’s piss.

  You know the cupboard under your stairs? In a Kampala slum this would be considered a luxury house and at night it would sleep seven people. I could not see how this would be possible unless they all stood up. Which, when the rains come, is necessary anyway.

  On the upside, we did find a lovely place for lunch. A few miles away from the slum, in the shadow of an amazing new hotel complex owned by the president’s wife, was a Belgian restaurant where we had a Nile beer and an excellent beef stew. It cost more than most people in Uganda will earn in a lifetime.

  Over coffee, which is delicious in this part of the world, we talked about the Lord’s Resistance Army, which runs about in the north of Uganda torturing, mutilating, murdering and raping pretty much anything that hasn’t already died of starvation.

  Over the obligatory corporate greed and climate change debate on what’s to be done, we concluded that Live Aid didn’t work. Live 8 didn’t work. Nothing’s worked. And, yes, while it’s good that David Cameron has pledged to keep Britain’s foreign aid at similar levels, we shouldn’t forget that last year the Ministry of Defence spent £1.7 million on body armour and helmets for the Ugandan army which, honestly, isn’t really what most people think of as ‘aid’.

  All I know is that when you’ve been there, you feel compelled to do something. Appear in a charity video, walking about on a rubbish tip, wearing a compassionate face? Yup. Count me in.

  11 September 2011

  Own up, we all had a vile streak long before going online

  Every week we are presented with supposedly conclusive proof that Britain is broken. The summer was marked by riots; you get five minutes in jail for murdering a baby; our education system is worse than Slovenia’s; and we’re told that it’s perfectly natural and traditional for travelling people to keep a handful of slaves in the shed. Meanwhile, register offices are full of people who’ve never met; your village bobby can neither read nor write; your MP is an imbecile; burglaries aren’t investigated; the banks are back in cloud cuckoo land; and the rivers are all full of excrement.

  Swim down the Thames these days and you really will be ‘going through the motions’.

  Those who seek to make gloom and doom from all of this say that Britain was much better when everything was in black and white and we had the reassuring spectacle of Dixon of Dock Green on the television every week. But this is rubbish. Because back then everyone died of pneumoconiosis when they were twelve, immigrants were routinely poked with sticks, tea was considered exotic and Ronnie and Reggie Kray were running amok in the capital, nailing people’s heads to the floor.

  If you developed cancer in 1956, you’d had it and would welcome death’s cold embrace with open arms because it was a ticket out of the grime and the misery and the unfunny television shows and the soot and the socialism.

  The fact, then, is this: life’s better now than it has been at any point in human history. It’s better than it was ten years ago. It’s better than it was yesterday morning. Except for one thing.

  You may have read last week about a young man called Sean Duffy, who took it upon himself to post revoltingly unkind internet messages about teenagers who had died. He superimposed the face of one, who had committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train, on to a video of Thomas the Tank Engine. And he put up pictures of the site where another had lost her life in a road smash with the caption: ‘Used car for sale, one useless owner.’

  It’s impossible to conceive how much anguish this caused the families, and that’s why you were no doubt delighted to hear that Duffy was given the maximum jail sentence of eighteen weeks.

  But hang on a minute: is he so very different from everyone else? Last week one newspaper ran on its website some photos of an actress who had been knocked down by a car. People in their droves left unbelievably unkind comments about her face and her children. There was even worse abuse for Jade Jagger, who had been photographed topless on a beach. She was described as ‘ugly’, ‘fat’ and a ‘spoilt rude cow’. Elsewhere, Elton John was ‘greedy’, the Duchess of Cornwall was ‘lazy’ and Simon Cowell’s legs were ‘too short’.

  If you plunge even more deeply into the darkest corners of cyberspace, you will find websites that show people with severed arms searching for the heads of their loved ones on the hard shoulder. People being eaten by tigers. People after they’ve jumped from the top of a skyscraper. And each is accompanied by amusing observations from the folks at home. If you die now, you’d better make sure no one has a camera, because if they do, the event is almost certain to end up on the web.

  The internet is now just a receptacle for vitriol. It’s malice in wonderland. And that’s before we get to Facebook – which, let’s not forget, was set up as a place where men could go online to make judgements about a girl’s appearance – or Twitter.

  You may say this is a new phenomenon – another example of the sick society we’ve created – and that it’s caused by the anonymity of the internet. But is it? Long before you had a domain and an email address, you would sit in the safety of your car, muttering abuse at other drivers. Which amounts to exactly the same as muttering cyberspace abuse at Cheryl Cole’s hair from the safety of your
home or office.

  And even before people had windscreens to hide behind they would go home after a hard day down the pit and mumble about the shortcomings of their neighbours, their colleagues, their bosses, the government. This is the way we are. It’s just that now the internet lets us grumble in public.

  Time and again a mother has presented me with her newborn and I’ve wanted to say: ‘Holy cow. It looks like a smashed ape.’ But I’ve been forced by my frontal lobes to um and ah until I can find a compliment of some kind. It’s usually about the pram.

  Once, I was taken backstage after an appalling play to meet the actress who had been simply dreadful in the lead. But, instead of saying she was dire, I cracked my face into a beam and said she’d been ‘amazing’. Which was also true. She had.

  Then there was the time I interviewed Chuck Yeager, the sound-barrier-breaking former test pilot. I wanted to say afterwards that he had been, without a doubt, the most unpleasant man in the entire world and that he was living, breathing proof that you should never meet your heroes. But instead I thanked him for his time and drove away.

  In her latter years my grandmother lost the brake on her brain and would spend her days in the local dress shop, howling with derisive laughter at everyone who came out of the changing rooms. Secretly, I’ve always wanted to do the same. I bet you have, too.

  Well, now the internet lets you. No longer do you have to sit in a fog of impotence during a television show that you dislike. You can get on your phone or computer and let the world know. Last week, for instance, Lily Allen saw a picture of me in the paper and tweeted one word: ‘vomit’.

  The internet hasn’t caused any of this. It isn’t, as some would have you believe, another example of Broken Britain and a fractured society. No, the internet is just a tool, which has demonstrated that behind our smiles and our cleverness, human beings, actually, are fairly terrible.