Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 19

  Because it’s all very well saying now that London is perfect, but what if someone had done that in 1066? ‘I’m sorry, William, but you cannot build a tower on the Thames because it would spoil everyone’s view of the inner-city farm on Watling Street.’

  It’s like those morons who have decided that Britain’s countryside was absolutely perfect in about 1910 and that every effort must be made to keep the dry-stone walls and the hedges and the village idiots.

  Or, worse, the climate. The temperature has shifted dramatically over the millennia, so which crackpot has decided that it’s correct now? Because it absolutely isn’t if you live in Sudan.

  Then there’s the case of Scotland. It began life as part of America, although at the time this was down near the South Pole. Gradually it broke away from Iowa and began its move northwards, until around 400 million years ago, when it sank just off the equator.

  What if someone had decided then that the world should be preserved just as it was? We’d have no tarmac. No phones. No penicillin. No Highland bagpipes. No bolshie trade unionists. No Labour party. So, on balance, it wouldn’t have been all bad.

  Of course, at the other end of the scale, we have the problems of rampant development trampling all over the bedrock of history. Cape Town springs to mind here. From the sea, this used to be one of the world’s most attractive cities, but now your eye is drawn to the World Cup stadium that sits in the view like a giant laundry basket.

  Then there’s Birmingham. Such is the prominence of the Selfridges building that you no longer notice the tumbledown, smoke-stained old factories or the canals full of shopping trolleys.

  The history has been obliterated by something that appears to have come from the opening credits of Doomwatch.

  The man I met at the party wholeheartedly agrees that balance is everything. He knows that new buildings are necessary but has to temper that with various established views and sightlines that should be preserved for the good of our souls.

  For example, when you climb up Parliament Hill in the north of London and turn round, you don’t want to be presented with a city that looks like Manhattan. You want the London Eye but you also want to be able to see the things that your forefathers saw. Apparently, it is writ that visitors to Richmond Park in the south-west must be able to look down an avenue of trees and see St Paul’s Cathedral in the City. And it doesn’t matter how much wizardry developers deploy or how silly their handshakes, that’s that.

  Here’s a good one. As you may know, the Americans decided quite recently that it simply wasn’t possible to butcher Grosvenor Square any more and that it was time to move out of their current fortress to a new super-embassy on a five-acre site in Nine Elms, south of the Thames. Everyone was very supportive of this. It would provide many jobs and keep alive the special relationship in which they decide what they’d like to do and we run about wagging our tails, hoping that if we look sweet, they will give us a biscuit. Frankly, if they’d wanted to build their new embassy in the Queen’s knicker drawer, we’d all have said, ‘Oh yes, Mr Obama. And can we have some more Winalot?’

  Happily, however, we have a man in charge of ‘the look’, who pointed out that if you stood on Vauxhall Bridge, the new embassy would sit slap bang in the sort of view immortalized by Turner. He saw no problems with the building they were proposing but realized that it would undoubtedly have a flag on the roof. So right in the middle of this much-photographed all-English scene would be the Stars and Stripes.

  I’m sure the Americans find this objection very petty, and that Mr Cameron has been made to sit on the naughty step, but would they let us fly our flag in between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument? My guess is … probably not.

  That said, I do wish London were a bit more high-rise. Out in the east there are a few tall buildings shielding us like giant glass leylandii from the views of Essex. But there are nowhere near enough. And there won’t be any more because of London City airport and the problems of coming in to land between Barclays’ boardroom and the executive fourty-fifth-floor bogs at HSBC.

  We need to look elsewhere and find a site where designers and architects can run amok with their gigantic cathedrals to capitalism. A site where there are no snails and where there are no ancient views to worry about. A site where we don’t worry about what’s been lost, only about what we have gained. And I think I have just the spot: right on top of my ex-wife.

  30 October 2011

  Oh, the vita is dolce. But the music? Shaddap you face

  Perfection varies. One man’s dream is another man’s gangrenous knee. For some, perfection is a Riva Aquarama and Kristin Scott Thomas and getting ready to go to a party on a warm night with friends. For others, it’s a damp hillside and a tent. There is, however, one constant. Everybody is in agreement that while the actors and the scenes and the plot may vary, the location is always the same. The location has to be Italy.

  Nearly all my favourite places in the world are in Italy. Lake Como. Capri. Siena. And last week I found another.

  It’s a little restaurant called Volo in the southern city of Lecce, where you can sit outside in the evening, even in early November, and startle yourself with the swordfish carpaccio and the cheese and the local wine. The owner’s almond cakes were the nicest thing I’d ever put in my mouth.

  The couples that walked by were dazzlingly beautiful. It was impossibly perfect.

  It’s in a back street, far from the main squares, but even here the lighting is as carefully considered as if it had been designed for Pink Floyd. Where the narrow street went round a corner, someone had lit a candle. Why? Just to bring a bit of warmth and interest to a small place that would otherwise be lost to the night. That’s the Italian way.

  I think it’s true to say that everyone I’ve ever met has at some point harboured a secret little dream that one day they will have a house in Umbria, where they will sit under the wisteria eating olives they have bought in the local market that morning. It’s one of the things that makes us British: wanting to be Italian. They’re everything we’re not. And they’re everything we want to be. Stylish, unconcerned with petty rules, expressive and well-endowed.

  Once, I said that to be born Italian and male was to win first prize in the lottery of life. Nobody argued. Nobody wrote to say: ‘No. I wish I were Swedish and gay.’

  However, while Italy has many things that we can admire and envy and dream of, there is one big thing wrong with it. It has the worst soundtrack in the world. And I’m not talking about the barking dogs that wake you up every morning. Or the idiot with the strimmer in the next valley, or even the swarms of two-stroke motor scooters. No. I’m talking about the radio stations.

  Just as it is everywhere else in the world these days, the dial is rammed full of choice. But actually there is no choice at all because, as with the menu in a TGI Friday’s, you don’t want any of it.

  Music snobs have sneered for years about the awfulness of Europop – and with good reason. It’s shocking. Things I’d rather listen to than a Belgian Eurovision wannabe include the sound of my own firing squad. Pop radio is just as bad in France and Spain and Germany – home of the Scorpions – but it reaches the fourteenth circle of hell when you arrive in Rome. I heard one tune on the car radio that was so bad, I felt compelled to find the man who’d written it and cut his head off. So imagine my surprise when the next thirty-six songs were even worse.

  How can a country that has given the world so much art and literature and electricity possibly think it is acceptable to drive along listening to home-grown synthpop?

  How can a country capable of making an engine sing like the best tenor of all time say that Gabriella Ferri sounds like Janis Joplin? The only way you could have made Ms Joplin sound remotely similar would have been to plug her into the mains.

  You think Italian television is bad, and you’re right: it is very bad. But it is a haven of highbrow peace and summer’s-afternoon tranquillity compared with the non-stop barrage of electroni
c trash that the radio pumps out. All of the shows are hosted by two people – usually a man and a woman – who argue furiously for a few minutes and then play a noise that sounds like a flock of tomcats being killed with a buzz saw.

  And then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, someone starts to sing. And the problem with that is: they are singing in Italian. And while Italian is good when you are making love or ordering lunch or even shouting at another motorist, it really doesn’t work in a pop song.

  ‘Yes, sir, I can boogie’ becomes ‘Si, signor, posso boogie’. Which doesn’t sound quite right, somehow. And neither does ‘Bambina, puoi guidare la mia macchina’, which is Italian for ‘Baby, you can drive my car’. Singing anything other than opera in Italian is like mixing cement in a tutu or swimming in a ballgown. Messy and wrong.

  Plainly, Silvio Berlusconi knows this, which is why he has chosen to release a CD of love songs. I’m not making that up. He really has. Mr Bunga-Bunga used to be the singer on a cruise ship and … oh God, I’ve just thought of something. What if it was the one that employed John Prescott as a steward? It’s hard to think of anything worse than being on a cruise ship, but being stuck out there with a million old people, and two million desperate divorcees, being served by Mr Bolshie and crooned at by Silvio? Honestly, I’d rather fire a nail gun into my testicles.

  Anyway, Berlusconi fancies himself as a singer and lyricist, and he has a mate who used to be a traffic warden who fancies himself as a guitarist, and the two of them have battled their way through Italy’s increasingly difficult financial problems by staying up late into the night writing a selection of smoochy love songs.

  I can give you a taste of the lyrics: ‘Listen to these songs. They are for you. Listen to them when you have a thirst for caresses; sing them when you are hungry for tenderness …’ And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to be sick.

  Sadly, the album’s release date has been put back because of the eurozone problems, but we are assured it will be out in time for Christmas. It will be the ideal gift for someone you don’t like very much.

  6 November 2011

  Down periscope! I’ve found an airtight way to quit smoking

  Over the years, I’ve done pretty well all the 100 things you’re supposed to do before you die.

  I’ve vomited in a fast jet, met Nelson Mandela.

  Broken a bone, been arrested and driven a pick-up truck across the English Channel.

  However, there is one piece of the jigsaw missing: I’ve never been on a nuclear-powered hunter-killer attack submarine.

  Most people say that subs are their idea of hell.

  Living in a narrow tube, hundreds of feet below the churning sea, pooing in plain view, sharing a bunk that’s a bit too small with another man and knowing that your wife is at home porking the postman and that you won’t have anything remotely interesting to do until your family and everyone you know has been turned into a whiff of irradiated dust.

  Pah! If the balloon were to go up tomorrow, I’d break out my white polo neck and join the submarine service in a heartbeat. I know the Royal Navy once dismissed subs as ‘underhand and ungentlemanly’ but that’s precisely why I like them. You sneak up on an enemy, in big, atomic, softly-softly slippers, flick his ear and then run off and hide. He simply won’t know you are there until he has exploded.

  And have you ever seen a bad submarine film? Crimson Tide. Morning Departure. Das Boot. It is impossible to make an underwater movie dreary. Unless you are the Beatles, of course.

  As a result of all this, I was very excited when I was invited recently to spend some time aboard the brand-new HMS Astute. I knew that early in its life it had crashed into Scotland and then been hit by the tug that came to rescue it. Really it should have been called HMS Vulnerable. But I didn’t care. I wanted to spend time on a vessel that is as long as a football pitch but which can barrel along, in reverential silence, at more than thirty knots.

  Sadly, the trip was cancelled because of what the navy called a ‘technical problem’. This turned out, I think, to be a crew member who had run into the control room and opened fire with an SA80 assault rifle. Maybe a better name would have been HMS Unlucky.

  No matter. I did not hesitate when another opportunity presented itself. This time, I would join Astute as it sailed past Key West in Florida to conduct a test-firing of its missiles. Can you honestly imagine anything you’d like to do more than that? Well, Anne Diamond probably could. And those people on Loose Women. But I couldn’t and so I packed my little bag and last weekend headed over to Miami.

  Unfortunately, by the time I arrived, HMS Unreliable had had another ‘technical problem’. It had flooded, apparently, and was limping north for repairs. So I spent the night in an airport hotel, watched The Hunt for Red October and, with a little tear in my eye, came home again.

  It wasn’t just the disappointment that made me sad, or the wasted trip to Florida.

  No, I was looking forward to spending three days in an environment where smoking is banned and you can’t just pop outside when you’re desperate.

  That trip around the Gulf of Mexico was going to be my cold turkey.

  Yes, I admit that the multi-billion-pound HMS Unlucky is not the best place for a sixty-a-day man to kick the habit of a lifetime. Not with that nuclear reactor humming away in its bowels and all those cruise missiles in its nose. Perhaps this is why other people choose less extreme methods to give up.

  Hypnotism, for example. Well, I tried that and it didn’t work because when the man with the half-hunter and the husky voice said, ‘Right, you’re under now,’ I put my hand up and said: ‘Er, actually I’m not.’ This turned into a heated debate that ended when I tried to leave and he said he needed to bring me round first. I let him go through the motions, then I slipped away.

  An alternative is nicotine patches. They work for many people – a point proved by the massive private jet owned by the man who invented them – but they make me itch. And gum is equally ineffective, because it makes you look slovenly and possibly American.

  Willpower is obviously the best solution but I have the backbone of a worm and the resolve of a field mouse. The idea of striding purposefully past a newsagent with nothing but my head to stop me going inside and buying a glistening pack of Marlboro is as idiotic as setting a lamb chop in front of a Labrador and asking it not to eat.

  However, the fact is that I can do without fags. At the moment, I’m spending about twenty hours a week in aeroplanes and at no point have I ever felt the need to attack the stewardess or murder the fat man in the seat next to me. When I can’t smoke, I can cope.

  Which is why I was so looking forward to breaking the habit on that sub. However, I do think there is another alternative.

  Almost every week, Country Life is full of islands off the coast of Scotland that are for sale and it strikes me that these would make ideal getaway hostels for weak-willed, unhypnotizable people like me who want to give up smoking but can’t. There would be no handy branch of WH Smith. No nicotine at all between the shoreline and Glasgow. And the only visitors would come from out-of-control submarines that have crashed into the beach. And they wouldn’t have any tabs either.

  We could therefore head north and have our withdrawal tantrums away from our families and loved ones. Furniture could be provided for us to smash. And Wi-Fi so that we could do a bit of work.

  I even believe the government should fund this idea. We are forever being told that smoking costs the country £5 billion a year: well, for half that ministers could turn Scotland from what it is now – a handy storage base for submarines – into a health farm.

  13 November 2011

  No more benefits: I’m putting the idle on the bread and sherry line

  Put your hand on your heart and answer this question honestly. Do you have the faintest idea what’s going on in the eurozone? We are told there’s a terrible crisis that has mutated and gone airborne, but it’s like the worst kind of bad dream, the sort where y
ou can’t actually see what’s in the shadows. You’re running and you’re terrified and now you’re on an escalator and, aaaargh, it’s going the other way!

  Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, likened it last week to the Second World War but I think she’s wrong. People knew at the time what caused that and they knew what had to be done to solve it.

  The current problems facing Europe are more like the First World War.

  There are many historians who have spent their lives trying to work out why millions of young men were forced to die in a bloody, muddy French trench, and the upshot is: no one has a clue. The Serbs wanted a port in Turkey. This enraged the Austrians. And they were enraged even more when a Serbian gang shot one of their royal family. They were so cross in fact that Germany decided to attack Russia.

  Then, like your big mate in the playground, it declared war on France and, for no reason at all, thought Belgium ought to be roughed up as well. What the Belgians had to do with a dispute between Serbia and Austria, God only knows, but this was the trigger that brought Britain into the war. And for reasons that are as transparent as concrete, that brought Japan in as well.

  Of course, they said it would all be over by Christmas. In the same way as they said the financial crisis was solved when the US insurance giant AIG was rescued. But it wasn’t. Millions and millions of people were being killed and this caused the Americans to think: ‘You know what? We should send some of our young men over to Europe so they can be killed as well.’

  People must have sat about back then thinking, ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ in much the way that people are sitting around now trying to get a handle on the eurozone crisis. It is unfathomable, a big potpourri of vested interests, national stereotypes, market reactions, furious students, gormless politicians, petrol bombs, trillion-euro debt and unbelievably complex economics. Trying to sort it out is like trying to untangle the headphone lead to your iPod while blindfold, wearing mittens and being attacked by a bear.