Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 18
18 September 2011
Down, boy! Fido’s fallen in love with the vacuum cleaner
There are many reasons why people choose to own a pet. To stop a daughter’s endless nagging; for companionship; as an excuse to take the occasional walk; or because you won it at a fair and it seemed cruel to flush it down the waste disposal unit. Cruel, and difficult, especially if it was a horse.
However, according to a recent survey, 39 per cent of pet owners say they invested in their furry friend to replace a husband or wife. And I’m sorry, but I find this a bit alarming, because how can a pet possibly do that? It can’t cook, or iron, or clean the air filter on a 1973 Lotus Elan.
And if you try to use it for a spot of jiggy jiggy, you can be fairly sure the police will want a word.
The trouble is, of course, that we all love animals a lot more than we love people. And the animal we love most of all is the dog. Dogs make us soft in the head.
In the disaster movie 2012, thousands of Chinese people are killed by a tsunami. But that’s okay because we are treated to a close-up of the heroine’s King Charles spaniel boarding a rescue ship in the nick of time. Then you have Armageddon, in which giant meteorites wipe out half of New York. But this is no problem because when the destruction is over, we see that the dog that we thought had been killed is in fact perfectly all right. Phew. It was only people that got flattened and blown up.
Such is our love for the dog that there are now 1.2 million Pakistanis living in Britain, 154,000 Nigerians, about a million Poles and 7.3 million dogs. Many of them live in my house.
On the face of it, it’s an excellent idea to keep a pooch. It will bark at burglars and sit by the fire in the evenings, looking all sweet and cuddly. And all it demands in return for its sweetness and its Group 4 policy on security is a handful of biscuits and a bowlful of tinned meat from a company that did somehow work out how to push a horse through a waste disposal unit.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out like this in reality. Let’s take my West Highland terrier as a prime example of the problem. She is very cute and has fully jointed ears that swivel about when she is excited. On the downside, she is very violent. In the past two months alone she has eaten the lady who delivers the papers, the postman and the man who came round to mend my computer. She’s like Begbie from Trainspotting.
Then there’s a labradoodle, which is about the same size as an elephant. This means that no matter how high the shelf on which we put leftover chops and joints of lamb, he can get at them no problem at all. He also manages to look fantastically indignant when you tell him off.
There’s also an elderly Labrador, who is now blind, deaf, arthritic and bald. Technically, she isn’t really a dog any more. And then there’s a young Labrador, who recently had her first period. This drove the labradoodle stark staring mad. He became a sex-crazed elephant-wolf who spent his entire time trying to put his ridiculous dog lipstick into the back of the stricken Lab, until eventually we had to send her away to the kennels.
This made things worse because he was now cut off from the target of his lust. So he began to mount everything else. The dishwasher, the keyhole in the front door, me, my daughter’s friends and the exhaust pipe of my bloody car. At one point he attempted to rape the newspaper columnist Jane Moore’s dog and didn’t seem to realize that a) it was male and b) he’d accidentally climbed on to the damn thing’s face.
We locked him in a fenced-off part of the garden and he tried to eat a metal gate to get out. And then, with blood pouring from the wounds he’d inflicted on himself, he scampered off to the hen house. Nobody in human history has ever thought, ‘Hmmm. I fancy a go on that chicken.’ But he did.
Meanwhile, the housekeeper’s Lab had been similarly affected and had tried to mate with the cat, my wellington boots and the lawnmower. Six months from now I won’t be at all surprised if one of my donkeys gives birth to a dog. It’s been like living in an inter-species free-love commune. Only with added howling.
You don’t think of any of this when you are buying a puppy. You think the worst thing that could happen is that it will unravel the occasional loo roll. Nobody at Battersea Dogs Home ever tells a prospective customer that one day the scampering little mite in which they’re interested will try to have sex with the vacuum cleaner.
My wife suggested that we really ought to relieve the pressure by, ahem, giving the maniacal labradoodle a helping hand, but I’m sorry, no: that’s up there with morris dancing and incest. And so we took him to the kennels and brought the bitch home.
When she had finished filling the house with what to a doggy nose is Impulse body spray we brought him back and were looking forward to some peace. But no. Because while he was away, he had caught something called kennel cough. It doesn’t sound so bad, does it? You think you could live with a coughing dog. Well, you can’t, because a more accurate name for the disease would be ‘explosive vomiting’.
So now he helps himself to a leg of lamb that we’d stored on top of a pylon, and just a few minutes later it shoots back out of his mouth all over whatever it was he broke last week by trying to have sex with. This upsets the Westie, who decides to bite another visitor, and when you tell him off he has the cheek to look affronted.
This is the reality of dog ownership. Fluids. Mess. Stolen food. Expense. Savaged paper boys. No post. Vets’ bills. Broken vacuum cleaners. Ruined washing machines. Chewed shoes. Unravelled bog rolls. Endless barking, and then terrible, aching sadness when they die.
I can understand, therefore, why they make such an ideal substitute for a husband or a wife. There’s no real difference.
25 September 2011
Street lights and binmen? Luxuries we just can’t afford
So let’s see if I’ve got this straight. If Italy goes belly up, any bank that has lent Mr Berlusconi money will go belly up, too. So will the people whose savings were held there. And all the shops where they used to buy provisions. And the airlines they used to fly with. And the banks from which the airlines had borrowed money. And their customers. And their local shops. If Italy goes, we all go. Plainly, that would be bad.
The experts are sitting around in huddles with their political masters, and the general consensus seems to be that no one has the first clue how to stop this happening. Well, unless I’m being thick, I do.
At present, various bits of British government expenditure are being ring-fenced because, it’s claimed, no civilized country can do without them. The National Health Service is an obvious example, but the fact is, we may have been able to afford healthcare for everyone when the most expensive drug on offer was an aspirin and teeth were removed with a hammer; now that we have complex operations and lasers and colonoscopies and people with exotic diseases such as AIDS, we cannot afford it any more.
Nor can we afford an aircraft carrier. Or bypasses. In August alone this country had to borrow £16 billion to meet the gap between what it spent and what it earned. Obviously that’s unsustainable.
The problem goes way beyond the big stuff. Because of global warming, or intensive farming, or possibly the satellite that crashed into Canada recently, Britain’s waterways are being overrun with blue-green algae that make them extremely pretty. Unfortunately, if you choose to swim in an affected waterway, your skin will itch and you could end up with a poorly tummy.
You can see what’s going to happen next. A small boy with freckles and a cute nose is going to end up on a BBC regional news programme all covered in diarrhoea, and his sobbing mum is going to say that someone should have done something about it. To prevent this public relations disaster from unfurling, water companies are being forced to spend millions of pounds clearing it up. That’s millions we don’t have being spent on some algae. Just so some kid doesn’t end up with an itchy botty.
It’s absolutely insane. Over the years, my kids have trodden on venomous stonefish and been attacked by jellyfish and battered to pieces by storm-tossed coral. And I don’t complain to the authorities in Bar
bados. It’s one of those things. But now, here, it’s somehow become a government’s job to prevent it from happening. And to provide lavatories for dogs.
In fact we’ve become used in recent years to the government providing us with everything. We expect it to protect us from algae and take away our rubbish and educate our kids and look after us when we are poorly and have a bobby on the street corner and fight Johnny Taliban and put up park benches and keep the libraries open and stop planes blowing up and build roads and send round an appliance when we’ve caught fire and make sure the food we eat is delicious and nutritious and lock up vagabonds and house the poor.
Fine, but have you noticed something? All the countries that share this view are now in a complete pickle while countries such as India and China, where shoes are considered a luxury, are doing rather well.
Last weekend the Labour party said that it would solve all our problems by cutting university tuition fees to £6,000. But that’s like Dawn French cutting her fingernails to save weight. It’s a pointless, meaningless, futile gesture and demonstrates clearly that Ed Miliband must be an imbecile.
We read all the time about people who borrow vast sums to fund their sports cars and speedboats, and we tut and think that they must be very tragic people with many complex problems. The government is behaving in exactly the same way, fearful that if it actually makes the necessary cuts, the country will be cast into poverty and the chance of a second term will be lost. Well, let me make a suggestion. Screw the second term and ask a question instead: what exactly is poverty?
An Eton schoolboy was once asked to write on the subject, and he began thus: ‘There was once a very poor family. The father was poor. The mother was poor. The children were poor. Even the butler was poor …’
In the olden days you could tell at a glance if someone was existing below the poverty line because they were eight years old and sitting in a gutter with a dirty face, eating a turnip. Now it’s more difficult. People claim to be poverty-stricken even when they have mobile phones and a television set and an internet connection. And when you’ve seen a woman on a Bolivian rubbish tip having a tug-of-war with a dog over an empty crisp packet, it’s hard to stop yourself punching people such as this in the middle of their face.
The European Union defines poverty as any household that exists on an income that is less than 60 per cent of the national average. In Monte Carlo that sort of guideline would put Elton John on income support.
Here the average household income is about £35,000 a year and it’s said that in the region of one in five exists on less than 60 per cent of this figure. But it’s confusing because many pensioners fall way below the threshold in terms of income but own the house in which they are starving to death.
I read one report recently that says poverty should be measured on how poor you ‘feel’. Well, I was at a charity fundraiser the other night and, trust me, among all the Russian oligarchs I felt very poverty-stricken indeed.
The solution is that we all need to be recalibrated. Not just us, but the whole stupid Western world. We all think that street lights and having the bins emptied are essential. We must start to understand that, actually, they’re luxuries. And we can’t afford them any more.
2 October 2011
Ker-ching! I’ve got a plan to turn India’s pollution into pounds
Over breakfast at a 700-year-old Indian fort that had been lovingly converted into a wonkily wired, no-smoking youth hostel, I met an Englishman who was planning to drive all the way across the subcontinent in an electric Reva G-Wiz. This seemed an especially pointless thing to do.
It turned out that he worked for the British government and was setting up a team to advise the emerging economic superpower on how best to cut its carbon emissions. As you can imagine, I had many questions for him on the matter.
Starting with: right, so you walk into a meeting with Mr Patel and you say … what exactly? ‘Hello. I come from a country where everyone has musical loo-roll dispensers and patio heaters and enormous televisions, and we recognize you’d like some of that action too. But we feel it would be better for the polar bear and the Amazonian tree frog if you stayed in the Dark Ages.’
I imagine that Mr Patel might not be very sympathetic to this argument. Especially if his next meeting was with a representative from the German government who was going to say exactly the same thing. And doubly especially if he had hosted similar meetings the previous day with the Americans, the Canadians, the French, the Italians and so on.
The idea that Western governments should lecture India on how to conduct itself is absurd. It’s like Simon Cowell popping into the terraced home of a lottery winner and telling them it would be better for the planet and their soul if they gave the jackpot to charity.
There’s more, too. As we know, the government in Britain is cutting many services as it desperately tries to reduce the nation’s debt. The streets are packed with homeless ex-librarians whose places of work have been boarded up in the never-ending quest to save cash. We have the prime minister on the Tube and the mayor of London on a bicycle, the lights are out at Buckingham Palace and BBC2 is showing pretty much what it showed in 1972. We understand that there is a need for all this. It makes sense. And we like to think that, day and night, every single government minister is sitting in a candlelit office, in mittens, desperately thinking up new ways of getting the debt down.
So what in the name of all that’s holy are we doing funding a team of people whose job it is to tell the Indians to stick with their oxen? No, really, I mean it. How can we be turning off our street lights and planning to kick-start the Olympics with a pigeon and a box of sparklers when we are running a climate change department in Delhi?
What is Chris Huhne thinking of? I realize that the energy secretary is jolly busy dealing with his speeding ticket and the recent World School Milk Day but I urge him to have a long, hard look at the team in India and think: ‘How can I be responsible for putting a million people out of work in Middlesbrough while funding this claptrap on the other side of the world?’
Of course, there are those who think that global warming is the greatest threat to humanity and that if any spending is going to be ring-fenced over the next few years, it must be money used in the war on carbon dioxide. They would abolish the army, the National Health Service, the north and those who live in it if they thought it would keep the polar ice intact. They would even seek to make it a crime to disagree with them. But that hasn’t happened yet, so …
For sure, the air quality in India is extremely poor. When you come in to land at Delhi airport, it’s like descending into a big airborne cloud of HP Sauce. At ground level, life’s better – the air is like a consommé – but after a day it still feels as though you’ve been sucking furiously on a lozenge made from crude oil.
Sadly, though, air you can eat has nothing whatsoever to do with carbon dioxide. If you want to make it go away, you don’t send climate change experts. You send mechanics to service the buses properly.
I also recognize that India is committed to reducing its emissions – well, that’s what it says in meetings – and that there may be a couple of businesses here that could make a bob or two from popping over there and helping out. But India is a country on the move. And if we in Britain want to make a few quid out of its growth, isn’t it better to sell it our jet fighters and our diggers and our bladeless Dyson fans? We should be milking its growth, not trying to stifle it with pious words and Uriah Heep hand-wringing.
It’s rare that I actually get cross about something. But I am cross about this. The high commission in India has an important function. It is there to help British nationals who have lost their passports or who have become so incapacitated by diarrhoea that they’ve just excreted their own spleen.
It is there, too, to promote British business and, most of all, it is there to foster good relations between India and Britain. How are any of these things helped by a team of mean-spirited eco-ists who want to stand on th
e hose that’s fuelling India’s growth?
I don’t mind that my taxes are used for schools I don’t use, street lighting that doesn’t shine on my house, hospitals I don’t need and a police force that most of the time is a bloody nuisance. I understand that this is how the world works. I pay for a system in which I play no part.
But I really can’t get to sleep at night knowing that some of the tax I pay is being used to fund a climate changist to drive across India in a G-Wiz. The only good thing is that it will take him several years, during which time India can choose life, choose a career, choose washing machines, cars, compact-disc players, electrical tin openers, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance and a nice set of matching luggage.
23 October 2011
Look out, dear, a carbuncle is heading your way
As I’m sure you know, it is very difficult to get planning permission these days. Unless, of course, you are a Freemason. Even if you want to add a small side extension to your kitchen, the council’s inspector will raise all sorts of issues about the neighbour’s right to light, the need to protect the original style of the house and what provisions you intend to make for off-street parking.
And even if you cover all these bases, he will usually find a bat in the attic, and that’ll be pretty much that.
So imagine how hard life must be if you are a developer and you want to build a 1,000ft skyscraper in the middle of a big city such as London. You’d need to be the Duke of Kent, or at the very least a grand wizard, to stand even half a chance.
And even if you manage to convince the local council your design is sound, that the foundations won’t impede progress on the District line and that no bat will need to be rehoused, you will still have to get past the man I met at a dinner last week. The man whose job is to protect ‘the look’ of London. This must be the hardest job … in the world.