Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read online

  They go to gadget shows in Las Vegas, get completely carried away and then come to Europe to install systems that no one over here can understand. We’ve only just got over drawbridges, for Christ’s sake. Then they disappear and the people who made the various bits and pieces go bust. Which means you’re left in a house that has everything – and nothing at all.

  In a desperate attempt to turn everything off, I thought I’d find the fuse box. Fuse box? To an American gadgeteer, a fuse box is as Victorian as a horse and carriage. So, in my new flat, the fuse box is a fuse room. And it’s not hard to find, because you can hear the circuitry humming from a hundred yards away. Or you could if you weren’t being deafened by ‘Even in the Quietest Moments’.

  Then you open the door and, Holy Mother of God, it’s like stepping on to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. I am not joking. There are rows and rows of switches and thousands of tiny blinking green lights. Thousands? Yes. Thousands.

  I have been on the flight deck of a modern Airbus jetliner and I assure you there are fewer switches and lights up there than there are in the bowels of my three-bedroom flat. It’s so scary that you don’t dare touch anything in case, when you come out again, you are in Chicago.

  Apparently this is not unusual. Many modern properties have rooms such as this, full of warp cores and modems and circuit breakers. The fans needed to keep it all cool would propel a military hovercraft; the power needed just to power itself would light Leeds; and it’s all for no purpose whatsoever because no one in the real world understands any of it.

  As I sat on the floor, then, with no heating, no kettle, no freezer, no television, no broadband, no light and no hope any time soon of turning the situation around, a profound thought wafted into my head. Our endless pursuit of a high-tech future seems to have taken us back to the Stone Age.

  2 May 2010

  Traffic storm troopers won’t let me buy a bra

  Now that the general election is over, we can turn our attention to one of the most important issues in our lives today: my local cobbler has closed down. I can’t say that I ever used it because that would be a lie; I didn’t, but I liked having it there. A genial old man in a brown coat, stitching up battered clogs, reminded me of a time when we didn’t simply throw our training shoes away because they went out of fashion or because our football team signed a sponsorship deal with Puma. Waste Not. Want Not. It wasn’t called that, but it should have been.

  The florist has gone, too. I can’t say I ever used that, either, mainly because the girl who runs the rival business on the high street is much prettier. But, again, I liked having it there. I liked living in a town that had two florists and now I don’t any more.

  Other shops that have closed down in the past couple of years include the hi-fi shop, the bra shop, the children’s clothing shop, both off-licences and the delicatessen. Now, I should explain at this point that I did use the deli. Once. I bought some cheese there and it was very nice. Not so nice, sadly, that I actually bought more, but I liked the idea, should I be in town buying some stamps or getting my shoes mended, that if I were overcome by a need for a spot of Wensleydale, I could sally forth etc. and get some. And now, I can’t.

  Obviously, I am writing about Chipping Norton, and this news, you may think, would be of some interest in the Chipping Norton Gazette. But we have no such thing. And, anyway, I bet exactly the same thing is going on in your town; that it’s now just a bland, featureless desert of estate agents, fast-food joints and charity shops.

  I know that charity shops perform a vital service. I am aware of this and I wish them all the very best as they leach into the premises once occupied by butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. The trouble is, I hate them.

  I never want to buy a Victorian teapot. And I don’t like to be reminded when I go into town that it’s still possible. A Victorian teapot is no good when you want cheese or a romper suit. A Victorian teapot is no good even if you want a cup of tea. So I don’t want one, even if it’s only 3d – as it usually says on the label in these places.

  I suppose, if push came to shove, I’d rather have a charity shop than a set of whitewashed windows that sit like broken teeth in the gums of the high street, reminding their former owners of their failure. However, what I really want is the cobbler back. And the bra shop and the florist and at least one of the offies.

  They won’t be back, though. They’re gone for good. And it’s a worry because when you take away a town centre’s independent retailers, you take away its soul. You also take away the reason for going there. And then what? Why live cheek by jowl in the flabby doughnut when there’s no jam in the centre?

  I do not intend to dwell on the consequences here because I’m more interested in stopping the rot. And to do that, we need to work out why, all of a sudden, so many small shops are shutting up for good.

  Some, of course, blame the recession. But many of these places had signs above the door saying they were established in 1890. That means they’d survived recessions in the past, and wars and diphtheria.

  The most common scapegoat is the supermarket or the out-of-town retail park. People say that it is much cheaper to buy cheese from Asda than it is to buy it from a chap in an apron in your local deli. This is true. But if it’s cheapness you want, then surely it’d be best to make the cheese yourself. All you need is some milk, some rennet and the bassist from Blur.

  No. I suspect the reason we choose to visit a supermarket rather than flog around a town that was designed by King Alfred is that it’s so much more convenient.

  And that, I think, is where a solution to the problem of urban decay can be found. Realistically, we can never do anything to reverse the spread of supermarkets, but we can level the playing field. We just have to make town-centre shopping easier. And that can be achieved by getting rid of traffic wardens. Or civil enforcement officers, as they are now called. And how Russian is that?

  Whatever they’re called, I’m not suggesting they should be put in a vat and melted down, but if this were necessary, then so be it. The fact is, they have to go. All of them.

  Every single time I go into my local town, I get a parking ticket. I’m driving along, I am suddenly consumed by a need for a bra, I park in a perfectly sensible place that causes no inconvenience to anyone, pop into the shop, find it’s selling only Victorian teapots, come out again … and blam. I’ve been done. If they put that much effort into catching terrorists, nothing would ever explode ever again.

  In Oxford I work on the basis that I’m going to be done anyway, so I just park right outside where I want to be. The last time I went there, I parked in a bus lane and went to watch a film. The fine was the same as if I’d made an effort.

  It’s as though towns don’t want people to stop and shop. And, of course, many don’t – those run by people who still cling to the outdated and now completely discredited theory that man causes global warming, for example. They would rather the locals stayed at home and beat themselves with twigs. But even enlightened boroughs continue to employ civil storm troopers. Which means they are employing a body of people whose sole job is to kill the town.

  Do they think that, if left to our own devices, we’d all park on zebra crossings for a year? If they do, it means they don’t trust us. And if they don’t trust us, then the relationship has broken down and it’s time for some civil unrest.

  9 May 2010

  Roll up to look at my pebbles – just £5 a ticket

  As we know, European flights have been a bit tricky these past few weeks. Couple that to the dreary industrial action at British Airways, the lousy exchange rate and the complete shambles that is our economy, and it’s certain that many people will be thinking about taking their holidays in Britain this year.

  Indeed, I was in Cornwall last week and, even though it’s only the middle of May, the beaches were already peppered with families, huddling behind windbreaks and peering at the horizon through their anorak hoods, fervently hoping for a triumph of optimism
over meteorological fact.

  This is the problem with holidaying in the British Isles. We have good weather, of course, but it’s like an unreliable old friend. You never know when it will drop by to brighten your day. And it never stays long. It has other places to go. France, usually, or the Caribbean.

  So let’s think about that for a moment. This year there will be more holidaymakers at large in Britain than ever before. They will not be able to lie on a beach reading a book because the same northerly winds that brought the ash cloud are keeping temperatures down to the point where nitrogen freezes. So we have thousands and thousands of people, on holiday, bored and with all the money they didn’t spend on flights burning a dirty great hole in their pockets. I sense a great business opportunity here.

  While in Cornwall, I couldn’t help noticing that there was a bee museum. Yes, that’s right. A bee museum. The bees do not balance balls on their noses or juggle miniature chainsaws. You just pay cash money to watch some bees fly about, being bees. It was just down the road from a gnome reserve, where you can go and trundle around the garden of someone who has very poor taste.

  So, there is money to be made from insects and plastic garden ornaments. But for some reason what the bored British holidaymaker likes best of all is stones. If the stones are fastened together in the shape of a church, or an old house where someone’s wife used to live, then you are quids in. But don’t worry if this isn’t the case.

  Fallen-over stones are still massively popular with the army of moochers. They will spend hours, and pay out God knows how much on booklets and postcards and ice creams, and all you have to offer them in return is some rubble that you can claim once used to be an abbey.

  Amazingly, though, you can even make money if the stones are just stones.

  Round where I live there are some stones in a field. If you pay a pound, or 50p for children, then you are allowed to go and look at them. How brilliant is that? You almost certainly couldn’t design a new type of Apple iPod or an Aston Martin DB9. But don’t worry. You don’t have to.

  To make a living you just have to charge people to look at some stones that someone, a long time ago and for unclear reasons, up-ended in your top paddock.

  There are some enormous stones in a field in Wiltshire that are free if you look at them from the nearby road. But the druids, or whoever manages the site, will charge you a whopping £6.90 if you want to see them close up. That’s a fantastic business. Especially when you throw in the sale of the guidebooks, all of which say the same thing: ‘We don’t have a clue why these stones are here.’

  Mind you, the guardians of a stone I saw in Cornwall go one better. They have got hordes of people paying £3 to see a stone that may or may not mark the burial place of King Arthur. A king who didn’t actually exist. How mental is that?

  There are some stones by the stream on the farm I’ve just bought. I’m going to claim they mark the birthplace of James Bond, open a gift shop and charge people a fiver to come and stand near them for a few minutes. You should be thinking along the same lines. If you have any sort of geology in your garden, put up a leaflet in the local post office and Wallace Arnold will be bringing them round in droves for a gawp.

  The capacity British holidaymakers have for finding uninteresting things so interesting that they will pay money to look at them beggars belief. They will pay to watch cows being born. They will pay to see needlework. They will pay to look at your flower beds. If you have a hobby, no matter how nerdy it may be, you can make money out of it from June to the end of September.

  Unless your hobby is looking at pornography on the internet. You probably won’t be able to make anything out of that. But don’t despair.

  Industry is an excellent draw, especially if it’s closed down. There’s a disused tin mine in Cornwall that charges adults eight quid and children a fiver. And what do they see? A hole in the ground that is no longer producing one of the most dreary commodities in the already not very exciting world of metallurgy.

  Imagine the possibilities. You could charge people money to go and look round your branch of what used to be Woolworths. ‘This is where people used to choose their sweets, and if you follow me we’ll have a look at where the racks of DVDs used to be.’

  What else are tourists going to do? They’ve seen some stones. They’ve looked round the gnome reserve and they’ve watched bees. It’s still raining, the children are still bored, you have their attention and that means you have a direct line to their credit card.

  I met a man last week who rents wetsuits to people who want to go swimming but can’t in the costumes they’ve brought because it’s always too cold. He will also rent you a slab of polystyrene on which you can play in the waves. He has a £100,000 supercar, and I’m guessing now but I’d like to bet that by milking the misery of the trapped British holidaymaker, he’s able to take his holidays abroad.

  16 May 2010

  Madam Minister, your briefs are full of flirty, dirty talk

  There seems to have been some sort of brouhaha about a shortage of women in the new Camerclegg cabinet, and I must say, it does seem to be a bit unbalanced. This, I fear, is very unhealthy. There is nothing that fills my heart with such dread as an all-male gathering. This is why I avoid stag nights and ‘lads’ nights out’ with the same fervent determination as I avoid close encounters with nettles and rabid dogs. I do not understand business, cigars bore me, I have no interest in cricket and if anyone slaps me on the back, I am filled with a sometimes overwhelming need to respond with a punch to the face.

  When men are not talking about business and cricket and slapping one another’s backs, they talk nonsense, wondering, for instance, if it is possible to live upside down, or cross the Atlantic on a vacuum cleaner. This sort of thing is useless when you have been charged with running the country. You may start out with every intention of working out how the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills could be abolished. But pretty soon, after you’ve checked on the cricket scores, you’re going to be wondering if it’s possible to ingest ice cream through your nose.

  Men need women in order to function properly, and the reason for this is simple: a conversation with an interesting man is just a conversation with an interesting man. Ultimately, it’s going nowhere.

  Whereas a conversation with an interesting woman, provided she isn’t completely enormous, could go out of the door, up the stairs and into the bedroom. Or into the garden. Or to the back seat of the car. It could go anywhere.

  This is why men are much funnier and cleverer when women are around. Because we flirt and women flirt back. And flirting is the oil that lubricates the engine of ingenuity and wit.

  I cannot be arsed to think a single original thought when I’m surrounded by men. But throw a woman into the mix and usually I have developed a new world order by teatime. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the cabinet is the right place for such behaviour. Trying to make Theresa May understand the need for national service is one thing. Trying to make her understand while imagining what she would look like naked adds all sorts of complications that the country can well do without at the moment.

  What’s more, we are talking about people here who are separated by many miles from their families. They are cooped up in a room together and it is at times like this when flirting can lead to all sorts of other problems. If you are not careful, you could end up in the bath with Edwina Currie.

  Right now, the government has no money at all to pay for the war in which we are engaged or even the medicines needed to put the soldiers back together again. And it’s hard to think how this can be sorted out if Liam Fox is playing a secretive game of mental footsie with Caroline Spelman.

  You may argue, if you wish, that grown men and women with big jobs do not flirt, but I disagree. Only the very dull and the very dead do not. When a person is tired of flirting, they are tired of life. And we don’t want people like that in charge of anything.

  So, you might imagine that the best solution is to be
governed entirely by women. Thanks to her multitasking skills, a woman in government could look after defence in the morning, work and pensions in the afternoon and health while doing the ironing. You therefore wouldn’t need twenty-eight seats round the table. Just four.

  However, I’m not sure an all-woman government would work at all because have you ever heard women talking when they think no men can hear?

  We imagine it’s all schools and shopping and needlework. But it isn’t. I’ve been in the position these past few days to eavesdrop on a group of girls. Bright girls with important jobs. And what they’ve talked about – non-stop – is sex.

  Not romantic, swoony, Mr Darcy-in-a-lake sex, either. Real, hardcore, back-end-of-the-internet sex. Who’s been sodomized by whom and where. Who’s had surgery on their inner labia. What lesbianism would be like. At one point I thought they’d moved on to gardening because I thought they were talking about a nearby clematis. But I’d misheard. It was clitoris. And it seemed to occupy them for hours.

  One girl explained last night, when she thought I was asleep, that she got her builders to do as she wished by stopping on the way home, taking off her bra and standing in the cold for a few minutes. But they were quickly back on labial surgery.

  Often, invitations were extended for the others to have a look at an interesting piece of pubic topiary. I found this amazing. I have been a man for fifty years and I have never been invited by another man to look at his penis. Nor have I felt the need to ask a mate to check out my testicles to see if they are ‘normal’. And certainly, I’ve never got my builder to do as he’s told by coming home with my old chap hanging out.

  The women I’ve been with aren’t unusual, either. A few weeks ago I overheard two girlfriends chatting, and the subject – for several hours – was masturbation. Was the Bullet better than the Rabbit? What positions worked best? And what fantasies? It was extraordinary because, again, I cannot imagine men discussing onanism in the same terms. In fact, I cannot recall it being discussed at all.