Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 26

  Then there’s the whole issue of what it means to be British. For hundreds of years that was the easiest question of them all: we were polite, fair-minded and aloof. We went to work on big red buses, in bowler hats. We had a queen and beefeaters, and when times were hard, we didn’t grumble.

  What are we now, though? How would you define our ‘unit’? It’s pretty tricky. We’re a nation of bankers, Simon Cowell, football hooligans, royalists, Muslims, tea shops, benefits cheats, Elgar, pearly queens and Polish plumbers.

  The French work tirelessly on maintaining their spiritual history and their ways, which is why most people in France are proud of their country. You don’t get Nicolas Sarkozy campaigning for re-election by saying, ‘We are the surrender capital of the world!’ It’s the same story in America, where you can be black, white, rich, poor or Donald Trump – it doesn’t matter because everyone subscribes to the American way. And as a result, the only American who has ever emigrated is Gwyneth Paltrow.

  At the Olympic opening ceremony, I bet you any money there’s not a single thing we recognize as being typically British. We don’t even know what ‘typically British’ is any more. We’re a unit embarrassed by our past, uncertain about our present and frightened by our future. Which, I presume, is why nearly half of us would rather be Australian.

  22 April 2012

  Welcome to the fifty-fourth series of Top Gear. I’m seventy-seven, you know

  Alarming news from the pointy bit of London. According to various financial wizards, millions of fiftysomethings will have to stay at work until their arthritic fingers are bent double and their whole face is one giant liver spot.

  Pensions experts say that if you want to enjoy a reasonable standard of living in your retirement, you need an income of around half your gross working wage. For a man thirty years ago, that typically meant keeping your nose on the grindstone until you were sixty-four. Today the average retirement age for men is sixty-five.

  But because of all the gloom, analysis suggests that people will soon have to stay at work until they are at least seventy-seven. And at that age what jobs, exactly, are these poor victims of the system expected to do?

  Certainly I don’t want a surgeon to operate on any member of my family if he arrives in theatre on a mobility scooter, with a worrying wet patch on the front of his trousers. Nor would I put a seventy-five-year-old in charge of a deep-fat fryer. Bomb disposal is right out as well.

  The human body is now a longer-lasting item than at any point in history, but by the time it is seventy-seven years old, chances are that there is something wrong with it. And I’m sorry, but how would you feel if your trial judge were suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s? Or your computer repairman had Parkinson’s? Or the ref turned up at Old Trafford with a guide dog?

  It is great if a hale and hearty septuagenarian with a fine mind and bouncy legs wants to work as a lollipop lady, but forcing someone who is tired and ill and a bit mental to go out and earn a crust demonstrates to me that the whole system is properly broken.

  After forty years of commuting and dealing with office politics and bringing home the bacon, it’s only right and proper that people should be able to put their feet up. I cannot imagine for one moment how horrible it would be for me still to be earning a living by driving round corners too quickly and shouting when I’m seventy-seven. It’ll be a young person’s job by then, and rightly so.

  I have dreamt for some time now of the day when I can wake up without an alarm and spend my hours pottering about in the greenhouse, killing insects and wearing a jumper with holes in it. No more deadlines. No more five a.m. starts. And, best of all, no more James May.

  However, today I’m not dreaming about it any more. For reasons that are far too dreary to explain, I’m not actually working at the moment. I’m in a period of temporary retirement. And it is without any question or shadow of doubt the worst thing in the world.

  I spend all day inventing things to do, and then inventing reasons why it’s better to do all those things tomorrow. I look in the fridge every half an hour to see if by some miracle I missed a plate of cold sausages on my previous sixteen visits. I look at stupid things on the internet. I read instruction manuals. And I thank God for the Leveson inquiry. I’ve watched it so much I’ve even developed a crush on the girl who sits over Robert Jay’s right shoulder. Each morning I speculate on what she may be wearing that day.

  It’s not just the boredom, either. It’s the expense. Yesterday I thought it would be a good idea to have the interior of my car retrimmed. Then I went out and bought some garden furniture. I spent most of this morning looking at old Mercs on a website, and unless someone gives me something to do soon, I know I’m going to buy one.

  Then there’s the drinking. If I’m out, I’ll have a glass or two of wine with lunch. But I’ve no one to go out with because they’re all working. So I have a glass or two on my own. Then, since there’s no reason not to finish off the bottle, I do. Then I go back on the internet and buy something else that I neither want nor need.

  It’s no good expecting to survive on half your usual earnings when you are retired. You will need ten times more than Bill Gates just to make it through till lunchtime.

  Of course, it is possible to keep busy without a chequebook. Mostly this involves going for a walk. And pretending to be interested in all the things that you see. On my last foray into the countryside I spent fifteen minutes examining the latch on a gate. Then I photographed a flower that I’d found so that I could look it up on the internet when I got home. It’s just ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, as a wise man once said.

  Naturally, for me, this period of inactivity will end and I’ll go back to work. But in a real retirement you are simply filling time until a doctor shoves a tube up your nose, looks at his chart and uses the worst word in medicine: ‘riddled’.

  Retirement may conjure up visions of lemon barley water and grandchildren and a nicely tended garden by the sea, but actually it’s a period of catastrophic boredom that has only one ending: death.

  You should bear that in mind tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off and you have to trudge through the rain to the bus stop so that you can spend all day dealing with broken photocopiers and emails from people who have electronic diarrhoea.

  You may imagine on the way home, when you are forced to sit next to a lunatic on the train, and it’s late and you’ve spilt jam on your suit, that it would be nice to put your feet up one day. Well, mine are up now – and it isn’t.

  We should therefore rejoice at the economic turmoil that means we now have an excuse to keep at it until we are seventy-seven. Because even if your job is emptying the lavatories at an Indian army base in the tropics, it’s better than not having a job at all.

  29 April 2012

  Heston’s grub is great – but so what if your date is ugly?

  I’m sure you will be interested to hear that at a glittering ceremony in London last week a herd of food enthusiasts announced with much trumpetry that the best restaurant in the world is a place called Noma in Copenhagen.

  Not as far as I’m concerned it isn’t, because I went to have lunch there last month and it was shut.

  So we ended up at another top restaurant, where, for starters, we were given Kilner jars full of steam. How loony is that?

  Another restaurant to feature high up the list of excellence is Mugaritz, in San Sebastian, where, provided you are not blown to pieces by a Basque on the way, you are served ‘edible stones’. This is ridiculous. Of course all stones are edible, except perhaps for the ones that you find in Donald Trump’s kidneys. But I can’t see why you would want to put one in your stomach. Or pay for it.

  There is a madness in the world of restauranteering at the moment. I’ve been a few times to Dinner, Heston’s services in Knightsbridge, and while I think the food is absolutely unbe-grigging-lievable and the service even better, it is bonkers to make meat look like a tangerine and to make ice cream
with nitrogen.

  It’s photo-opportunity food, really. Fun once in a while, but it has as much to do with reality as those split-to-the-crotch frocks that actresses wear on the red carpet.

  So, to bow down before the genius of Heston Blumenthal, or a man who has the balls to make people pay for steam or stones, is absolutely fine if you are a food enthusiast or a silly rich person, but why publish a list of best restaurants as though it were somehow definitive? Because if you are working on the tills in the Dunfermline branch of Asda, it sort of isn’t.

  Those who compile the list may turn round at this point and say: ‘Aha. But you, Mr so-called Clarkson, work in an industry that spends half its life giving out awards.’ You’re right. I do. And giving awards for cars is daft, too.

  This year’s European car of the year is a hybrid called the Vauxhall Ampera, and while I agree that it’s a fine and noble choice if you are a climate-change fanatic with no sense of style, it is emphatically not fine if you are Elton John.

  Film awards make no sense either. This year the Oscar for best picture went to The Artist, which I enjoyed very much indeed. But a fifteen-year-old lout with a fondness for vandalizing headstones and stealing cars would probably describe it as ‘a bit boring’.

  Every single night of every single year the Grosvenor House hotel in London is filled with Jimmy Carr, who is presenting Geoff Stokes with an award for being the best fertilizer salesman in the north-west. Geoff isn’t, though. It’s just that his company has bought more advertising that year from the organizers.

  BAFTA, or to give it its other name, the Islington Appreciation Society, seems to reckon that Made in Chelsea is better than Downton Abbey.

  But surely that depends on whether you are an elderly snob or a teenage airhead. Choosing between the two is like trying to decide whether you would rather be a petrol pump or a tree.

  The fact, then, is this. Apart from the Rose d’Or television festival, which is usually wise with its choices, all awards are a senseless waste of human endeavour. But at least with cars and television shows and films everyone is eligible to chip in with their ten penn’orth. Because we are all exposed to these things every day, we can listen to what the experts say and then make up our own minds.

  Eating out, though, is different. Being told that the best restaurant in the world is in Copenhagen is of absolutely no use if you live in Swansea, it’s 7.30 p.m. and you’re feeling a bit peckish. Then the best restaurant in the world is the kebab joint round the corner.

  The food revolution is getting completely out of hand. Steve Hackett is about to start a tour of Britain, which is huge news, but it’s lost in the hubbub of chitchat following reports that someone called Ferran Adria, who used to have a caff in Spain, is about to open a tapas bar in London.

  Similarly, we are expected to pause for a moment to reflect solemnly on the news that Danny Meyer is thinking of setting up shop in Britain. So what? He’s a bloody cook, for crying out loud, and he will probably charge you £400 for a bit of limestone served on a bed of steaming helium.

  The problem, I think, is that these days far too much emphasis is placed on the food. I know one well-respected restaurant in London where everything tastes and looks like something else.

  You order pigeon because you like pigeon. It arrives at the table in a banana fancy-dress costume and tastes like rabbit. And I want to grab the chef by his swarthy Latin mutton chops and ask him why he has ruined my dinner.

  Now I just order something from the menu that I don’t like, knowing there’s a good chance it’ll taste like something I do.

  It gets worse. I ate at a restaurant the other day where the menu said, ‘Chicken, flattened by a brick.’ Seriously now. Do we really need to know how the creature died? ‘Pheasant. Shot in the face by a drunken Freemason.’ ‘Deer. Run over by a Toyota.’ Is that what you want?

  My point, I suppose, is this. Food is only a small part of what makes a dining experience great. Acoustics are just as important. So is lighting, especially if you have an ugly date. But by far and away the most important thing is the company.

  The best restaurant in the world, then? It may be in Denmark. That’s what the experts say. But really it’s the one where your friends go.

  6 May 2012

  One hundred lines, Miliband Minor: ‘I must not show off in class’

  Recently a number of people in suits were summoned to appear in front of a panel of other people in suits in a fantastically expensive and time-consuming attempt to find out exactly who listened to Sienna Miller making her hair appointments and precisely what sort of horse David Cameron prefers.

  Interestingly, some of the people in suits said one thing while others said quite the opposite. Which means that a panel of politicians has had to try to work out who has been telling porkies. Fine. But then what?

  You may imagine that if you tell a bare-faced lie to members of Her Majesty’s elected government, your liver will be removed and your head placed on a spike in the Brent Cross shopping centre. There’s even been talk of offenders being locked away for the rest of measurable time in a deafening room under Big Ben. But it doesn’t quite work that way.

  To find out how you are punished, we need to go back to 1957 – the last time a non-politician faced being reprimanded for contempt of parliament. Inevitably it was a journalist, the fearsome John Junor, who had wondered in his newspaper’s editorial why extra petrol was being allocated to politicians during rationing. (To feed the generators in their duck houses, probably.)

  And what was his punishment for this heinous crime? Was he hanged? Incarcerated? Deported? Or is that what the famed mace is for? Did they use it to stove in his skull?

  No, actually. In fact, he was summoned to the bar of the House of Commons, which is quite literally a white line across the floor, where he was made to say sorry. I’m not kidding. They took one of the most powerful newspaper people of the time and made him stand on the naughty step. And that makes me wonder. Would the use of primary school punishments work today?

  At present there is no way of punishing a banker who has been greedy. We know that what he’s done is wrong. And, in the wee small hours, he knows what he’s done is wrong. But how can he be made to pay for his sin? At best he can be drummed out of the lodge, made to resign from the golf club and stripped of his knighthood. But that’s about it.

  We see the same problem in broadcasting. If I make a mistake, can Ofcom take away my children? Fine me? Put me in prison? No. Time and again I read in the Daily Mail that I’ve had my ‘knuckles rapped’ for ‘sparking’ some kind of fury. But the truth is, nothing of the sort ever happens. I don’t even get a call from the headmaster.

  And, who knows, maybe I might be rather more careful if I really did face having my knuckles rapped with a blackboard rubber. Maybe a banker would be a bit less willing to lend money to someone who couldn’t pay him back if he thought that he might be forced to stand in Threadneedle Street wearing a dunce’s hat.

  And then we must move to Greece, where last weekend many people voted for a party that wants to break out the retsina and party like it’s 1999. You may think that, in a country that claims to have invented democracy, that’s their right.

  But since their blinkered stupidity means the rest of the world has been thrown into a state of economic panic, there’s no doubt in my mind that they should all be made to stand outside for a while.

  I definitely think this kind of school-room justice would work in football. At the moment the yellow card is the premium economy punishment.

  A barely noticeable uplift from a straight free kick but a long way from the club-class red. A yellow card doesn’t mean anything. But what if the offender were made to go and stand in a corner while sucking his thumb for ten minutes? There would be far fewer late tackles, I bet.

  Then we have weather forecasters. They tell us it will be a lovely day tomorrow and then bounce back the following evening showing not a hint of guilt that the picnic you organized on their
recommendation was washed into the River Test by hailstones the size of small Toyotas. Would it not be a good idea, if they’ve made a mistake, to force them to deliver the next evening’s bulletin in their school uniform? Certainly I’d like to see ITV’s Becky Mantin do this.

  It’s in public life, though, that the humiliation would work best. All last week Ed Miliband was being foolish, acting up in front of his friends by saying his party had nothing to do with the country’s woes and that the current leaders are interested only in millionaires. It was constant party political sound-bite diarrhoea, and there’s only one punishment that would work. He needs to be put on silence. And Ed Balls, the fat-faced henchman who sits next to him in the debating society? Make him hold his hand out, palm upwards, and get the serjeant at arms to hit it with a ruler.

  And what of the man – he exists somewhere – who chaired a meeting about Britain’s naval requirements for the next fifty years and said: ‘Yes. I agree. Even though we have no planes to put on the deck, we shall spend £10 billion of someone else’s money building two new aircraft carriers’?

  Why is he not summoned to the office of Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, and made to write out, 1,000 times: ‘I must not order very expensive warships that can’t possibly work.’

  Other options under my new regime are detention on a Saturday afternoon – I think Theresa May could do with a couple of hours for the Heathrow immigration debacle – and the one thing that used to bring me up short in my school days: the threat of my parents finding out that I’d been smoking while eating in the street, with village boys, in home clothes.

  This is what we do with George Osborne. We simply tell him that if he doesn’t stop making silly mistakes in class, we shall write to his mum.

  13 May 2012