How Hard Can It Be? Read online

  Best of all, though, when all of our power is being generated by neutrons quietly crashing into one another, Greenpeace will have to leave us alone and go back to unpicking dolphins from Chinamen’s fishing nets.

  Sunday 13 January 2008

  It seems it ain’t art if it ain’t ethnic – Opinion

  Here in Chipping Norton, there is a picture-perfect little theatre. It’s exactly the same as a London theatre, with a balcony and a bar, only it’s much, much smaller. You really do feel, as you perch on your primary-school chair, gazing on the Punch and Judy stage, that you are locked in a Cotswold-stone dolls’ house. It’s an enchanting place and everyone round these parts is very proud of it. So consequently everyone is very cross that the Arts Council recently announced it would no longer be supplying £40,000 a year to help fund it.

  And Chipping Norton is not alone. Even though the Arts Council has just received a £50m income boost from the government, it has sent letters to 194 mostly provincial playhouses, galleries and so on, saying they no longer fit with its ‘agenda’.

  ‘Hmmm,’ I wondered, ‘and what might this agenda be?’ So I checked, and it seems that to get funding these days what you’ve got to be is black or mad or preferably both. For instance, the Arts Council has recognized that there are very few people from ethnic minorities in senior positions in the arts, but instead of thinking: ‘Aha. This shows that very few black or Asian people are interested, so let’s concentrate on the white middle classes,’ it has now become involved with several schemes to get inner-city kids out of their big training shoes and into an Othello suit.

  There’s more. The Arts Council has never offered to translate my books into Urdu. Or Jilly Cooper’s. But it ‘remains committed’ to spending a fortune supporting ethnic-minority writers. Indeed, it claims to have six priorities in place at the moment. And of course ‘celebrating diversity’ is one of them. Not at all surprisingly, ‘celebrating Mrs Thatcher’ isn’t one of the others.

  The council spends nearly half a billion pounds a year and, so far as I can tell, in 2007 most of that was given to Benjamin Zephaniah and others in exchange for some ditties about how awful the slave trade was and how everyone in Britain ought to commit suicide.

  But wait. What’s this? It seems there was some money left over to send a bunch of kids from Calderdale to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which is a field full of what look like big bronze sheep droppings. It’s not my cup of tea but no matter – the droppings were sculpted by Henry Moore, so that sounds fine. Sadly no. Because afterwards the kids were taught about rap music and how to graffiti a wall. That has absolutely nothing to do with the arts at all. It’d be like teaching kung fu at a flower-arranging class.

  Here on the Chipping Norton arts scene things are rather different. Plans for 2008 include a play about space travel, devised by Niki McCretton, who I’m afraid is white. Then there’s a tribute to Abba, who were a very popular Swedish pop group featuring no disabled Bangladeshis, and a talk by Arabella Weir, who is the daughter of a notable diplomat. There are films too. But none, so far as I can see, is Brick Lane or that tosh from Al Gore. And then of course there’s the Christmas pantomime. Much loved by Douglas Hurd, who never misses it, and 7,000 children, all called Henry and Araminta, it’s a professional show featuring traditional storylines at this Christian time of year.

  You can see immediately why none of this fits in with the Arts Council’s ‘agenda’. And I’m afraid the concert planned for next Saturday doesn’t work either. Yes, the pianist, Helene Tysman, is foreign, which is good, but I’m afraid she’s only French. And that’s hopeless because they had an empire too, the bastards.

  What the management should be doing to maintain its grip on the Arts Council’s funding is hosting a celebration of haiku poetry, in silence, by the Al Gore polar-bear workers’ collective. Of course nobody would come, but hey – serving the needs of the area? Since when did that ever matter?

  It does, and that’s why I’d like to conclude with some words of encouragement for the management of Chipping Norton theatre and the other organizations around the country that don’t fit in with the Arts Council’s taste. It is extremely likely that you will be better off without the council’s forty grand a year. Because tied up in this rather small chalice is a ton of poisonous red tape demarcating what you can do, what you can say and how many ramps have to be fitted at each urinal. You can wave goodbye to all that BBC-regional-news-tick-the-ethnic-boxes nonsense when you replace the lunatics at the Arts Council with a set of different benefactors.

  I know this because just last week I spent some time with some chap from a notable charity. Each year, it needs £4m to stay afloat, and none comes from the government.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘We don’t want even 4p of their money. It’s always more trouble than it’s worth.’

  Or you can look at the Millennium Dome. When it was run by the government the dome was full of faith zones and Cherie Blair, celebrating diversity. And it was a disaster. Now it’s in private hands it’s full of Led Zeppelin and recently became recognized as the most popular concert venue in the world.

  Sunday 20 January 2008

  First, fairy cakes – then welding, kids – Opinion

  Since it came to power, the Labour government has introduced 2,685 pieces of legislation every year. And each has been either ill-conceived, draconian, bonkers, bitter, dangerous, counter-productive, childish, wrong, thoughtless, selfish, or designed primarily to make life a bit more miserable for everyone except six people in the BBC, fourteen on the Guardian and Al Gore.

  Still, with such a torrent of new rules and regulations pouring on to the statute books every day, it was statistically inevitable that one day they’d accidentally do something sensible. And last week that day arrived. They decided that everyone who’s capable of reaching the takeaway shop without being shot in the face is eating far too much Trex and that the way to get them eating Fairtrade lettuce and organic tofu instead is to make cooking a part of the school curriculum for children aged eleven–fourteen.

  Immediately head teachers came up with all sorts of objections. They didn’t have the space for normal lessons so where would they find the room for cookery classes? Had they considered, perhaps, using the school’s kitchen?

  Then the health and safety nutters woke up. ‘Aha,’ they said, ‘PE has to be taken by someone with a degree in sports paramedicry and similarly qualified people would be necessary for cooking classes or children would be going home with knives sticking out of their eyes and pans of boiling water on their heads.’

  Oh puh-lease. I spent five years in the chemistry lab playing with sulphuric acid and I’m fine. Sure, Jenkins minor got a bit disfigured one day but his hideous face is hardly a reason to refuse to teach anyone science.

  No. Teaching cookery is a great idea. It’s all so 1956. A class full of kids in aprons, baking bread, talking like the Queen and then pausing on their way home to scrump a few apples for tomorrow’s crumble. Yum. Yum. Rhubarb will become the new crack. And the only thing those new school-gate metal detectors will find is Fotherington’s cheese grater.

  However, once cooking classes are under way, I think it would be a good idea to overhaul the entire curriculum. I’ve argued since I was a boy that school, in its present form, is almost completely useless. The dim kids work and work and work until their little hormones are fried and then emerge after five years, suicidal, mad and with an A-level in media studies. The bright kids, meanwhile, lounge around all day, knowing that a CV will never be checked so, when asked how many A-levels they have, they can lie and say 264.

  All school does is put you off things that might, in later life, be interesting.

  Having been forced into chapel every Sunday for five years, I vowed I would never set foot in a church until the day I died. And not even then. I’ve said in my will that I want my funeral service to be held in a burger van. What’s more, by being made to read William Shakespeare at the age of fourteen, I develop
ed a lifelong aversion to the Bard and his silly witterings. And I still can’t eat meat pie. I look back now at those wasted hours in maths lessons, learning about algebra and matrices and sines, and I think, what was the point? It’s the same story with linear air tracks and oxbow lakes and civil-war battles. They’re all as pointless as a blunt stick.

  This is why I fervently believe school should be rather more than a factory-numbering system, churning out kids with a C or a D or an A*. It should be a place where you learn how to be an adult. And cooking is a start.

  Polish is a good idea too. Why teach us French when we all know that they can understand what we’re on about perfectly well if we poke them in the chest often enough? Far better to be able to say, in a Warsaw burr, ‘My boiler is broken. Can you come and mend it?’

  Or better still, why not teach everyone how to mend their own boiler instead. Seriously. Why not have plumbing lessons? Because basic welding, I promise, will stand you in better stead as an adult than being able to conjugate Julius Caesar’s table.

  Do you know something? I distinctly remember being put on to the school minibus when I was fourteen and driven, on vomity roads, to the Peak District simply so that I could see a millstone grit outcrop. Why? Who thought that would be in any way relevant to anything I might one day do for a living? Couldn’t they have spent the time instead teaching me how to change the spark plugs on a car, or how to remove a low-voltage bulb without burning my fingers, or how to carve a leg of lamb, or how to play poker, or how to cut hair?

  Or, and this brings me on to the most important point of all, they could have opened my eyes to the joys and importance of reading a newspaper. I really do mean this. My children can tell you about Portia’s gentle rain and when to use the imperative but they don’t have the first clue about what’s going on in Kenya or why Hillary Clinton is a loony. No teacher sits them down and discusses what we used to call current affairs. This is madness. If we can find forty-five minutes in the school timetable to teach the children how to make food out of tofu and lentils, then surely we could also find a similar period for them to discuss the issues of the day. This way they would be less round and, er, more rounded. If you see what I mean.

  Sunday 27 January 2008

  Oi, state birdbrains – leave our land alone

  Two years ago, a pub and restaurant tycoon called Michael Cannon bought a massive 3,000-acre Co. Durham grouse moor from the family of the Queen Mother. And last week his management company appeared in court, accused of ruining it. Government agents said the moor – a site of special scientific interest – had been crisscrossed with new roads, car parks, turning circles and drainage ditches. In total 4,433 square metres of important upland habitat for merlins, moorhens, short-eared owls, snipe, curlews and redshanks had been buried under 11,300 tons of almost certainly unsustainable, non-organic aggregate.

  Cannon’s company put its hands up to three breaches of the Wildlife and Countryside Act. But for these misjudgements and ‘wounding’ the countryside the judge fined it £50,000 and ordered it to pay £237,000 in costs. So there we are. Score: one for the moorhens, and none for the jumped-up, parvenu, bird-murdering vandal bastard.

  Unfortunately, however, this case isn’t quite as clear-cut as you might imagine. You see, Cannon is painted as a ghastly man who was caught in the nick of time, just before he carpeted the entire estate in inch-thick shagpile and fitted it with dimmer switches. In fact, having paid £4m for the moor, he invested a further £3m on improving the quality of the heather, which he describes as being more important than the rainforest. He employed more keepers, worked with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and built a small number of gravel tracks so vehicles could reach peatier parts of the estate without sinking.

  The government agents talk about 4,433 square metres being buried under aggregate. This sounds like a huge amount, but in fact it’s just over 1 acre. A small sacrifice when it does so much to improve the 2,999 others. The fact is that since Cannon took over, the number of rare black grouse on his land has jumped from four to 150. And last year on the estate the bag was 16,054 birds, the biggest number since 1872.

  And there’s your problem. Government agents have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. They simply noted the site was of special scientific interest, observed that tracks had been made and drainage ditches installed and, using their tiny bri-nylon minds along with a bottomless pit of government money, reckoned that this was a crime against the moorhen.

  These are the people who ran about screaming when I was on television recently driving up a mountain in Scotland. ‘You’ve ruined it,’ they yelled, perhaps not realizing that a three-ton car cannot possibly dent a 20-trillion-ton lump of solid granite. ‘But you’ve squashed the heather,’ they whimpered. Yes, but if you knew anything at all about the countryside, you’d know that heather is burnt every so often to encourage new growth, which provides food for birdlife using the old woody heather as cover.

  I face a similar set of problems in the Isle of Man, where I have a small piece of land. It’s listed as a site of special scientific interest, which means I must harvest the crops from the inside of the field outwards and use sheep to keep the grass down. I am willing to do this. I am also willing to avoid fertilizer, which means my turnips look like conkers and my barley is the colour of a U-boat.

  But then I am told I must also allow people to go out there with their dogs, which chase the sheep into the sea and leave so much shit around the place that it scares away the birds I’m trying to attract with my DDT-free crops and escape-route harvesting techniques. That’s the trouble with environmentalists. Their love of wildlife is almost always outweighed by their hatred of the rich. They think that anyone with a Range Rover and a few quid in the bank must have earned that money by pumping polonium into the ozone layer and beating tramps to death with baby ospreys for sexual kicks. They therefore assume that he or she will view the countryside as nothing more than a site for a factory that can pick up the baton dropped by the people at Bhopal.

  The most worrying thing about the Cannon case, though, leaving aside the large fine and costs, is the system that allows blinkered busybodies to poke about in someone else’s garden. They are using legislation brought in to prevent fly-tipping, badger-baiting and the theft of rare birds’ eggs – which is laudable – to prosecute someone for damaging their own property. Technically this means they could come round to my house and prosecute my children for damaging the grade I & II-listed kitchen door. And you know what? Now I’ve fessed up they probably will.

  But will they arrest someone for paving over their front lawn or replacing the front hedge with a horrid wall made from upended crazy paving? No? Why not? This Jewsonization of the suburbs causes flooding and is largely responsible for the demise of the songbird. That and the stupid cat.

  Natural England, the government agency that brought the prosecution against Cannon, would do well to remember that the only reason it exists is to preserve the beauty of the countryside. And the only reason it’s so beautiful is that it’s been looked after for thousands of years by wealthy landowners. If it wants to keep the land green and pleasant it would be better off tearing up its Fairtrade mission statement that talks of social inclusion and the evils of bullying, and going after those people who fill every rural lay-by with thousands of old mattresses.

  Sunday 3 February 2008

  Give it up, Hamza – you’re too ugly

  Soweto was my generation’s Baghdad. Every night, we saw pictures of it on the news, scenes of burly policemen cruising the streets in Chevrolets, shooting children for fun. Of mobs setting fire to buses and blocking the roads with burning tyres.

  Now, though, just twenty years later, it’s a bit like Surrey. There are well-kept lawns and lots of four-wheel-drive cars. There’s a shopping centre and a forest of cranes building a stadium for the upcoming World Cup. Sure, there’s Winnie Mandela’s mansion, which sits like a bulletproofed blister in the middle of it all, and th
e ‘Education is good for you’ graffiti doesn’t quite ring true. But I spent a day there last week and at no point did anyone put a tyre round my neck and set fire to it. I even had a jolly nice lunch under a jolly nice bougainvillea bush.

  So what was it that brought about this transformation? Was it the legion of pop stars who sang about the iniquities of apartheid? Or was it the sanctions? Or could it be that pressure groups back then concentrated on real problems rather than the environment?

  You do wonder, don’t you? If the firebrands and the beardies would stop worrying about polar bears, could a similar transformation be achieved in Darfur and Zimbabwe and the mayoral office of London?

  I’m afraid not. The main reason the war against apartheid was won is that Nelson Mandela looks good on a T-shirt.

  I mean it. Look at all the successful freedom fighters and you’ll note they all had one thing in common: a chiselled, romantic figurehead. Che Guevara, for instance, worked well as a screen print, and as a result the rebels still hold power in Cuba. And because Yasser Arafat looked like he’d just stepped out of that bar in Star Wars, Palestine is still a prison rather than a country. Why do you suppose Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom? Simple. The IRA was never going to win, because with Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams they were represented on the world stage by a ginger and a minger. The Basques have a similar problem. I met Eta’s political leader a couple of years ago and he was about as charismatic as a root vegetable. Potty Pol had a great name but because his face didn’t work on a badge his efforts in Cambodia were always going to come to naught. And it’s the same story with Shining Path, the Tamil Tigers and Nazi Germany, for that matter. If Hitler had looked like Jim Morrison who knows what shape the world might be in today?