Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read online

  Soon we were reading about how carbon dioxide, an invisible, odourless gas, would cause London to drown in a sea of its own making, turn Italy into a desert and generate flies the size of toasters that would ravage Africa. Al Gore was the new H. G. Wells and your patio heater was a Dalek.

  One of the best stories to emerge from the period came from a chap called Bill McGuire, who is professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. Back in 1999, he said that one day a volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands would erupt and that this would cause a rock the size of the Isle of Man to crash into the sea. The immensity of the splash would generate a 500ft tsunami that in a matter of hours would decimate North America’s eastern seaboard and wipe all life from the Caribbean. It’s happened before, he said. And it will happen again.

  Sadly, in 2004, researchers from Southampton University concluded that, if La Palma’s volcano does erupt, it’ll cause nothing more than a bit of mud to slither into the Atlantic.

  Undaunted, Bill started on a new work and last week, at the Hay literary festival, he revealed it to a waiting world. It’s a monster. He says that soon, climate change will bring about an age of geological havoc including tsunamis and something he calls ‘volcano storms’.

  Volcano storms were first charted by Pliny the Younger during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and were seen most recently when Eyjafjallajokull blew up in Iceland. Few things are as scary, because inside the choking black ash cloud you have a forest of lightning, with jolts of raw power two miles long surging out of the volcano’s vents. And this terrifying, end-of-days spectacle, according to McGuire, is coming to Surrey very soon.

  Like all the best plots, his theory that global warming can affect the fabric of the planet is based in fact. After the last Ice Age, Sweden literally bounced upwards by 1,000ft and it’s still rising by nearly half an inch a year. So it stands to reason that one day the weight of the ice and snow that cover Greenland will diminish to a point where it’s no longer sufficient to keep the world’s largest island buried in the mud.

  When that happens, and it will be sudden, the elasticity of the earth’s crust will cause it to boing upwards by perhaps more than half a mile. And you don’t need to be a member of D:Ream to know what kind of a mess that will make of the northern hemisphere. A wave of biblical proportions will wipe out not just Iceland and Canada but most of America’s eastern seaboard and all of Europe down to the Alps. The Empire State Building will crash into the statue of Jesus in Rio and the Arc de Triomphe will end up on Mont Blanc.

  This is fantastic stuff. Scary. Possible. And we haven’t even got to the clincher yet, because McGuire says that as all the snow melts, the sea will become heavier and that will cause fault lines to shift all over the world. Japan. Mexico. Chile. All gone. The man is talking here about an extinction-level event. And the word is that when the film rights are sorted, Denzel is earmarked for the lead.

  Better still, at Hay, he delivered his cataclysmic view of events to come in much the same way that The War of the Worlds was first played on the radio. Seriously, as though it were fact. Very, very clever.

  The only problem is that I think his story needs a bit of a lift between the moment when Greenland bounces into the clouds and the last man on earth drops dead. I’m thinking of that audience-pleasing moment in the movie Deep Impact, when a small meteorite arrives out of nowhere and flattens Paris.

  And I have an idea. Let me run it past you. Like Greenland, Alaska will also bounce upwards when the weight of the ice currently pressing it down into the ooze reaches a critical point. And, as we know from all the recent eco scare stories about fracking, the very rock on which this great state is founded is full of methane and natural gas. That makes it a gigantic bomb. A bomb that will explode thanks entirely to you in your suburban house with your patio heater and your insatiable appetite for turn-on-and-offable gas.

  I think you’ll agree that this is a scary story. But I think the scariest part is that McGuire is actually employed by the government as an adviser. It actually takes him seriously. Worse – Westminster sorts take me seriously. Only last week, an MP called Ed Miliband quoted something I’d written in this column while making a speech about Scottish independence. On that basis, he will be back on his soap box this week warning citizens not to go to Anchorage because it’s about to explode.

  10 June 2012

  They’ve read Milton, Mr Gove, now get ’em to rewire a plug

  It has been a tense week. With my elder daughter sitting her A levels, the boy facing his GSCEs and the youngest doing common entrance, it’s been seven days of American civil rights, worry, tears, the battle of Trafalgar and many heated arguments about the best way to do long multiplication. It’s been like living in a never-ending pub quiz.

  And to what end? Oh sure, the right results will be a passport to life’s next chapter and will help to propel their schools up the league tables. But the awful truth is: none of my children can wire a plug. Nor can they change a wheel, reattach the chain on a bicycle, darn a sock, make a Pimm’s, build a bonfire or mend a broken lavatory seat.

  Of course, schools have always taught children stuff that doesn’t matter, on the basis that parents have always been able to impart information about stuff that does. But parents can’t do that any more because we don’t know how to reattach a lavatory seat, either. And in my mind a boiler is powered by witchcraft.

  This means a generation of children will soon be emerging into the big wide world, blinking in wonderment at all the million billion things that make no sense. Their fresh-faced little heads will spin, and their stomachs will sink in despair as they realize they know absolutely nothing of any relevance.

  Will they be able to get a job as a hotel chambermaid? No. Partly because they will want more than the 5p an hour currently being paid to Mrs Borat, but mostly because they are not able to change a set of sheets. Street sweeping requires a rudimentary understanding of how a brush works. And plumbing? Forget it.

  Every job I can think of requires a set of skills that no teenager in Britain has. Apart from the media. And by the time they are ready to start earning a living, that avenue will be gone.

  Many may decide to go into business, which in the past used to be an easy option. If you had a product that people wanted to buy, and you sold it for more than it cost, then you would be sitting at the top table at the lodge within a matter of months.

  It isn’t like that any more. Today you start a business not because you want a fountain from which your family can drink. No, you start a business so that one day, as soon as possible, you can sell it.

  Again, that sounds simple, but let me assure you that it really isn’t. I’ve spent the past few months negotiating a business deal, and although I am not the most stupid man in the world, I haven’t understood a single thing that has been said or done. It has all been gobbledygook, presented in a series of so many acronyms that it sounded as if someone were reading out the model names of every Kawasaki motorcycle ever made.

  Each evening I’d call my accountant, who did his best to translate everything into primary school English. It was never any good because eventually it would go dark, and then it would get light and I would be forced by tiredness to say I’d understood when in truth I hadn’t.

  Are you familiar, for instance, with EBITDA? It sounds as though it might be a character at the bar in Star Wars but, in fact, it stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It’s critical you understand this in business but you don’t, do you? Because you don’t know what amortization is. And neither do I.

  There’s another issue with business that is not made clear on Dragons’ Den. When you agree terms, you stand up and shake hands.

  But then, the next day, the man with whom you did the deal has a completely different version of events in his head. ‘No,’ he’ll say, ‘you agreed to sell for 5p and give me your record collection.’

  So then you have to employ some suits, who
say that you should think more about EBIT rather than EBITDA unless, of course, you choose to use the DCF model. And then it goes quiet and you realize it’s your turn to speak and all you can think to say is, ‘Would anyone like a cup of tea?’

  I haven’t even got to the misery of tax yet. Not being Greek or Italian, I fully understand that a percentage of what I earn should go to the government. I recognize that if we want street lighting and a bobby on the beat and prisons, we cannot operate in a river of cash and hope the Germans will pay when our government cannot.

  I can even work out how much I need to pay each year. Half of everything I earn. It’s a simple sum. However, it turns out that in business, it’s not simple at all, and don’t ask why because you will then be plunged into a Scrabble bag of acronyms in which time slows down and your internal organs stop working.

  To make matters worse, accountancy types actually seem to enjoy sparring with each other using nothing but letters. ‘CGT?’ one will say. ‘Not with this PBT,’ will come the snorted retort. After an hour you feel compelled to stand up and say, ‘Are you dealing with my business stuff here, or are you playing out-loud Boggle?’

  On the next series of Sir Sugar’s The Apprentice, he should put those gormless marketing-speak idiots in a proper business meeting and then ask them to explain what just went on. It would be hysterical.

  It’s not hysterical, however, when it’s your livelihood. It’s bewildering and upsetting. And it’s why I shall finish with an idea for Michael Gove, the education secretary, who suggested last week that kids must be able to spell ‘appreciate’ and do the twelve times table by the time they’re nine.

  This is all well and good for those who wish to follow the traditional path to university. But wouldn’t it be a good idea to have other schools for those who wish to follow a path to somewhere called the world? Plug-wiring at nine a.m. Cook your own pie at lunchtime. And double EBITDA in the afternoon.

  17 June 2012

  Blow me up, Scotty, before I land on your Manx home

  An Isle of Man-based company has stunned the nerd world by announcing that within three years it will be able to offer tourists a trip around the moon, and then onwards into bits of space where no man has gone before.

  Passengers will be loaded on board one of four second-hand Russian re-entry capsules, and then blasted to one of two recycled Russian former space stations.

  From here they will embark on an eight-month round trip through the final frontier.

  Hmmm. Quite a few engineering types, including Sir Branson, are currently engaged in the development of space tourism and I’m not quite sure why, because almost everyone I ever meet says they’d rather spend their holidays in the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima.

  They say space flight frightens them because if something goes wrong, there’s no air. This, of course, is true but there is also no air in the sea and that doesn’t stop anyone snorkelling. Plus space is not full of fish that will stick a spear through your heart, or inject you with a poison, or tear your leg off.

  Also, space is not full of currents that will whisk you off to Venus, or people on jet skis who will run you down, or doped-up boatmen who will forget where they dropped you off and leave you out there until your tongue is the size of a marrow and you die a slow, agonizing death. Only a few humans have ever died in space. Plenty, however, have died in the sea.

  I will agree that there are a few problems with space tourism. Cost is one. The Isle of Man round trip will be £100 million. And then there’s the boredom. For a while the lack of gravity is undoubtedly fun. You can laugh at how everyone’s hair is floating about like seaweed and spend an amusing few moments trying to convince your mates that the globule of liquid floating past their faces is tasty orange juice and not a drop of urine that somehow escaped from the lavatory.

  But then what? On a cruise ship, you can stop off at the Virgin Islands for ‘romantic cocktails’. But you can’t do that in space. There’s no Jim Davidson, either. You can’t even sleep with the captain. You just have to sit there looking out of the window, at nothing at all, for half a million miles, wondering whether a Russian spaceship that’s been recycled in the Isle of Man, where they have not invented the diesel locomotive yet, is really the right vehicle for the job.

  It certainly sounds preposterous. But, actually, when you spend a few moments sucking the end of your Biro and thinking, you can’t help wondering: is it? John F. Kennedy told us back in 1962 that we chose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they were easy, but because they were hard. No one ever asked what the ‘other things’ were because they were too busy absorbing the central message: space travel, it’s tricky.

  I, however, am not so sure that it is. Because NASA showed us in 1970 that it was entirely possible to get a leaking spaceship from the middle of nowhere back to earth, into the atmosphere and gently into the Pacific using nothing more than the electricity needed to power a toaster, a slide rule, some duct tape and the cover of a flight manual.

  We were also told that to go into space you needed to be a brave young man with the stamina of an Olympic marathon runner, the reactions of a cobra, the brains of an emeritus maths professor and the ability to hold your breath for seventeen weeks. Humans, they said, need not apply. For space travel you had to be superhuman.

  But then in 1998, when the former Mercury astronaut John Glenn was seventy-seven years old, they put him up there without a second thought. And now we often find the International Space Station is full of portly middle-aged men and women who get frightened on a bus and who spend all day in the vast empty ocean, growing lettuces.

  So, you don’t have to be fit or clever and you don’t have to be able to hold your breath for very long because the truth is that if something goes wrong, long before you suffocate, your blood will boil and your eyes will pop out of your head and your brain will burst.

  However, there is one problem that does not seem to have been addressed by our friends on Fraggle Rock. It’s a big one.

  Had you been able to inspect the space shuttle as it sat on its launch pad, you might have noticed that the solid rocket boosters were carrying explosives.

  The idea was that if something went wrong in the early stage of the shuttle’s ascent and it was heading at several thousand miles an hour for downtown Miami, a man in a bunker at Cape Canaveral – a man who was never allowed to meet any of the people on board – would press a button. And blow it to kingdom come.

  This, you see, is the trouble with rockets. Once they are lit, you cannot turn them off again. They run until the fuel is gone. So if something goes wrong with the guidance system and the rocket is heading back down to earth, there’s nothing anyone can do. That’s why NASA employed a man in a bunker.

  If you watch footage of the Challenger disaster, you will note that after the shuttle disintegrates, both solid rocket boosters spiral off and then explode at precisely the same moment. That’s because the button was pressed to destroy them.

  The Isle of Man government will have to think about this. And then it will have to employ a man whose only job is to blow up the spaceship and everyone on board. Because that’s better than letting it crash into someone’s house.

  Although, I just have one request for the successful applicant. If it’s heading for the headquarters of the Manx rambling association, leave it be.

  24 June 2012

  And your premium bond prize is … a seat in the Lords

  If you were put in charge of a brand new country and told to organize a whole new system of government, you probably wouldn’t come up with the House of Lords. ‘Right. We’ve got some elected members in the Commons and now, to make sure they don’t do anything stupid, we shall have another tier, which we shall fill with religious zealots, chaps whose great-grandads won a battle and various other odds and sods who only ever wake up when their bedsores start to weep.’

  However, even though it makes absolutely no sense at all, the House of Lords has worked well for centu
ries.

  It even continued to work when some of the inbreds were replaced by Muslim whales. It works so well, in fact, that Nick Clegg, who is the deputy prime minister, wants to change it. He’s even made some suggestions that come straight from paragraph one, page one, chapter one of a book called How to Let People Know You Are Mad.

  In short, he wants to cut the numbers in the Lords from 826 to 450, most of whom would be elected to represent a specific region. So far, then, he’s just come up with a direct copy of the House of Commons. But since the elected representatives won’t have the power to make law, what exactly will the job advert say?

  ‘Wanted: a man or a woman – or a whale – to waste their lives listening to adenoidal dullards drone on about waste management on the Isle of Sheppey. The successful applicant must be willing to have his or her private life picked over in microscopic detail by journalists. On the upside, you’ll get paid. But not much.’

  I know exactly the sort of people who’ll sign up for a slice of that. They’re the people you find in any large organization, the sort who go to a lot of meetings and when there eat all the biscuits. They’re people who never once in their whole joyless, friend-free, celibate lives contribute anything meaningful, constructive, imaginative, daring, fascinating or worthwhile.

  They go on marches but half the time have no idea what they’re marching for. They get involved in action groups. They wear protest T-shirts over their anoraks so they look stupid. They enjoy regional news. They disagree with shampoo. A lot have cats. All of them are a waste of blood and organs. Many are called Colin. And Nick Clegg wants to put them in the hot seat.

  And it gets worse. Because when you’ve elected your Colin, you’re stuck with him for fifteen years, which … let’s do the maths … is pretty much adjacent to forever.

  Naturally the costs involved are humungous and, frankly, how many elected representatives do we need? Because if his harebrained scheme goes ahead, we will have to vote for people to sit on a parish council, a borough council, a county council, the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the European parliament. We will be spending most of our lives in polling booths, choosing between candidates who are only united by their utter uselessness.