If You'd Just Let Me Finish Read online

  I agree with all of them, but for different reasons. I know the country is completely off its rocker because, collectively, we own nearly half a million pet horses.

  There are so many that now, every weekend, every field in the land is hosting some kind of show to which thousands and thousands of people will turn up with their nags and stand about trying to decide which is the best. This in itself is a sign of madness because horses are like milk bottles: they are all exactly the same.

  But the problem runs deeper than that, because the people who own horses lose all sense of reason. And let’s be clear on this: when I say ‘people’, I mean ‘women’.

  Men see horses as a tool for gambling, or possibly food, whereas women see them as deities with an ability to cure all known illnesses.

  Got a cold? You’ll be told to go for a ride. Got a drink problem? There are places in Arizona that use horses to cure you. Are you a burglar? Well, statistics in Horse & Hound have shown that 107 per cent of people who sit on a horse never reoffend, and never get cancer either.

  A riding enthusiast will tell you that a horse invented the steam engine long before James Watt got involved and that it was simply unable to convey this important discovery to others.

  And as a result she will treat horses with a respect that’s borderline idiotic.

  If, as a man, you decided in the night not to bother getting up to go to the loo and simply emptied your bowels into the sheets, you can be fairly sure that your wife would be extremely cross. This is because you’re not a horse. A horse can do a big, steaming turd in its bed and she will cheerfully put on a pair of rubber gloves and change its sheets with a big-hearted smile.

  It’s the same story at breakfast time. When the horse is led into its paddock, it will do a number two right in the middle of its breakfast, which will also need to be cleared up. You try doing that on the bacon and eggs she’s made and see what happens.

  Then there’s the question of violence. If your dog were to attack a child, you would be horrified and would at least consider having it put down. It’s the same story with your children. If they get into a fight, you put them in their room with no supper.

  But when a horse kicks an eight-year-old with such force that its head comes off, you take the poor thing’s weeping parents to one side and scold them for letting their child get within range. ‘Now look. You’ve upset the horse.’

  One day your horse will be spooked by a paper bag, or a van, or a puddle, or a bit of rain, or a gust of wind, or the scent of a fox, and it will throw you to the ground. You will sustain fractured ribs and a broken collarbone, and somehow this will be your fault.

  Another interesting thing about horse ownership is that you must never have just one. You will need two or eleven or several hundred, some of which you will lend out to friends and family.

  No one does this with cars or cooking appliances or children. No one says, ‘Here, have one of my dogs. I’ve got loads.’ But horse people do, because they are mad.

  There’s more. When your children’s shoes have seen better days, you tell them that money’s tight and that they’ll last another term. You may even tell them off for wearing them out so quickly. But your horse? Crikey, no. The damn thing gets a new set of shoes every six weeks.

  This is not cheap. Nothing’s cheap with a horse. A saddle will be £1,500. The horse will need blankets, and they’re £150 a go. Then there’s a bridle at £150, and that’s before you start buying food. Hay costs more these days than rocket, and over a year it’d be cheaper to buy the damn thing a nicely togged eiderdown duvet than keep it in straw.

  You may even need to buy it a paddock from the local farmer. And the going rate for an acre these days is whatever the farmer wants. And because the farmer knows the horse woman has lost all connection with reality, he’ll want about £300,000. Then you’ll need to build your horse a house, which will cost more than yours did.

  Oh, I nearly forgot. The horse will then need its own enormous car, full of bedding and plumbing, which will be driven on bank-holiday Mondays by a teenage girl at 4mph. These cost more than most Bentleys.

  Eventually the breadwinner in the family – horse people never have jobs because they have the horses to look after – will consider sneaking out at night and lacing the horse’s food with some kind of lethal drug. But this is unwise, because when a horse is dead the costs really start to run out of control.

  You can’t sell it to Tesco any more and nor can you rent a bulldozer to dig a big hole and bury it. That’s because your wife will be sitting there, in her wheelchair, wailing through her voice synthesizer that such barbarity would make her cry and that crying will hurt all her broken bones.

  So you’ll need to organize a proper burial, with a vicar and so on. And don’t think you can sneakily call the local hunt when the nurse is putting your wife to bed, because a) she’ll hear their chainsaws as they chop it up, and b) even that will cost £300.

  It’s strange. We’ve arrived at a point where, if horses were treated like husbands, the RSPCA would make accusations of cruelty and come round with arrest warrants.

  And if that isn’t indicative of a nation’s madness, then I’ll eat my pigs.

  17 May 2015

  Smile, joke, sing about your ding-a-ling. Then Britain will rule again

  For many years Britain has had a global reputation for being the font of comedy. The world sent us Volkswagens and Coca-Cola and bananas and in return we sent them Benny Hill and Norman Wisdom and Mr Bean. Occasionally we even produced something that was actually funny. Such as British Leyland.

  But I worry now that our sense of fun has become eroded to the point where it’s a withered and gnarled old stump. I wonder if we are not funny any more. Many say the problem started more than ten years ago when, in an attempt to silence hate preachers, the government drew up a clunkily written law that by accident also forbade comedians to poke fun at people.

  This in effect outlawed every joke about the French and the Germans, and if the butt of your story was homosexual or black, you’d better have a good look over both shoulders before starting out. Because it is illegal to say or do something that is abusive or insulting ‘within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress’.

  Obviously, today, that’s extremely draconian because, thanks to social media, everything that everybody does is within the hearing or the sight of everyone else. The other day a comedian told a funny joke about me. He said, ‘Jeremy Clarkson is like Marmite: disgusting.’ I wasn’t at the event but, thanks to Twitter, I heard about it, and if I were lily-livered and weak, I could have asked the Old Bill to kick the poor chap’s front door in at six o’clock in the morning.

  So here we are. It takes only one fat, illiterate, greasy-haired pikey to say she’s offended by something someone said on TV, and that’s it. The newspapers leap to her defence, ignore the fact that it was obviously a joke and poke the police into action. And pretty soon the person who said it is in the dock, facing charges that are completely subjective. It’s ISIS justice with a smiling face, really.

  You couldn’t run a modern-day equivalent of Not the Nine O’Clock News. It wouldn’t be tolerated. And remember the Germans coming to Fawlty Towers, or The Life of Brian? You can no longer have any of that. Even Benny Hill chasing a nurse is not allowed, although, that said …

  But you’ve heard all this before, mostly from Rowan Atkinson. What has not been said, however, is that for some reason it’s not just in comedy that the spark of fun is going out. We see the same sort of seriousness infecting music.

  You listen to all those shop assistants singing their little hearts out on Britain’s Got a Weight Problem and not one of them smiles. And then you have all the earnest new bands who work really hard and practise playing their instruments in the hope we will consider them talented.

  Well, we thought Meat Loaf was talented, but that didn’t stop him bringing out ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’. We knew for s
ure that Chuck Berry was talented, but he still went right ahead and did ‘My Ding-a-Ling’. That doesn’t happen any more. Where’s the modern-day equivalent of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band? Why have Kasabian not sung us a song about their penises, or Princess Anne’s sousaphone?

  On the streets we have policemen who now have no sense of humour at all. Not that long ago the newspapers were always filled after various national events with bobbies having their helmets knocked off by jubilant youths. Try that now and in a jiffy you’ll be sharing the cells with a chap who told his mates about an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman.

  In any public building, there are signs everywhere saying abuse of staff will not be tolerated. This in effect outlaws any witticism you may be thinking of making.

  Only recently a friend told staff at East Midlands Airport that the security could do with a rocket up their backsides (which they could, by the way) and she was banned from flying that day.

  Of course, there are still funny films, but mostly these are American efforts called Horrible Wedding Crashers Go Nutz 2. On this side of the Pond things are tragic. In the 1960s Britain released 106 comedies, whereas so far this decade we’ve done 18. And of these, 11 aren’t funny.

  Which brings me on to the newspapers, which are full of writers who want to be seen as serious and wise. They seem to think that being funny is a sign of weakness. Happily, this one has A. A. Gill, who can spend two whole columns ricocheting around ‘Pseuds Corner’ but then right in the middle of a discourse on pre-Byzantine architecture make a laugh-out-loud joke about turds.

  He’s rare, though. Because think about it: when was the last time you read anything in the Daily Mail that was funny? Or, apart from Matt, in the Telegraph? Yes, the Grauniad is funny, but usually not on purpose.

  On mainstream television almost all the laughs come with an American accent. I am an avid fan of Countryfile but I’ve never split my sides while watching it. Or Springwatch. And there hasn’t been anything funny on Newsnight since Jeremy Paxman’s weather forecasts.

  In the commercial breaks things are no better. Where’s the combover in the photo booth? Or Ray Gardner’s blackcurrant Tango rant, or the Carling Dambusters? John West once made a funny advertisement that showed a man kicking a bear in the plums. It was brilliant, but today in serious, austere, easily offended Britain it would not even get off the drawing board.

  What annoys me about all this is that behind the scenes, in pubs and around dinner tables, comedy is still alive and well and offensive and brilliant. You may not be able to say much in public in case you are branded a racist or a homophobe or a frivolous fluffy nonentity, but in private there are millions of us who can split a man’s sides at forty paces.

  Only last weekend I was with my younger daughter, talking about Rupert Brooke. ‘If I should die,’ I said. ‘Oops, spoiler alert,’ she replied.

  24 May 2015

  Dismantle Palmyra and rebuild it outside Padstow. That’ll fox Jihadi John

  When Saddam Hussein was running the show in Iraq, we all knew that he was waging a cruel and bloodthirsty war with Iran. We knew too that he was using nerve gas on his own people and allowing his son to feed those who survived to his pet tiger. And let’s be brutally honest, we really weren’t that bothered.

  Later, we were told by Mr Blair that Saddam had amassed a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and that these would definitely be raining down on London in about forty-five minutes. And immediately, a million banner-waving people took to the streets of the capital shouting, with one voice: ‘So what?’

  Eventually, we got the Arab Spring, during which a number of despotic leaders were replaced by a bunch of lunatics. In Libya, they cornered Colonel Gaddafi in a storm drain and reportedly pushed a scaffolding pole up his bottom. In Syria, it turned out that one anti-regime commander had started eating government soldiers.

  Then came the beheadings and the hangings and the public incinerations. Homosexuals were being thrown from tall buildings, and you could be stoned to death for having the wrong sort of sandals. This was all completely unacceptable and, as a result, we decided to do nothing at all.

  But then, last week, we heard that the forces of darkness had captured the Syrian city of Palmyra and were planning to destroy its two thousand-year-old Roman ruins. This sent us all into a state of shock. ‘Nooooo,’ we all cried. ‘They can’t destroy Palmyra. Nigel and Annabel went there on holiday a couple of years ago and said it was lovely.’

  The argument is a bit unpalatable. But the truth is there are billions of people in the world so we don’t really care if a complete stranger is pushed off a tall building. But there’s only one Palmyra. There’s only one Angkor Wat temple. There’s only one Highclere Castle. And you won’t like this but, given the choice of losing a stranger who lives on the other side of the world or the house where they film Downton Abbey … well, I’m sorry, but we all know the answer, don’t we?

  I’ve been to Palmyra. We filmed part of the Top Gear Middle East special there. You may remember the sequence: Richard Hammond and I dressed in burqas and James May fell over and had to go to hospital, suffering from more madness than usual.

  While he was in there I had a couple of days to mooch around and I learned absolutely nothing at all about the mile upon mile of columns or the palacey thing on a nearby hill. I couldn’t tell you who built it all, or why, because I wasn’t that bothered.

  But I did think, as I gazed from my hotel window, that it was jolly impressive so much was still standing after such a long time. And as a result, I do think now that something must be done to make sure a bunch of disaffected computer-game enthusiasts from Middlesex don’t run amok out there with the Semtex. But what?

  At present we have the United Nations, which lists all sorts of things as ‘important’ but then does absolutely nothing to stop them being destroyed. It didn’t send in ‘peace-keepers’ to protect those buddhas in Afghanistan and they are doing the square root of bugger all to protect what remains in Palmyra. They simply shrug and tell us that what could be moved has already been moved to Damascus. And that the fate of what couldn’t be moved is now in the hands of Jihadi John and his mates.

  That won’t do, so I’ve hatched a plan. The UN needs to draw up a list of the things that really are more important than a few lives and then steps must be taken to ensure that no harm can come to them, ever.

  Obviously, we can’t use troops because I fear there’d be a bit of a public relations backlash. ‘Why are you sending soldiers to protect a few old stones when you won’t use them to look after all the people?’ That wouldn’t sound good on the evening news.

  And there’s more, because it’s hard in this day and age to know where the troops would be needed. Who could have predicted five years ago that Kurdistan, eastern Ukraine and Syria would be no-go areas for Johnny Westerner? So where’s next? Nobody knows. You could put troops in Egypt to protect the pyramids, only for it to kick off in Petra or Athens.

  There is, as I see it, only one solution. We cannot hand the responsibility of looking after these things to the Americans because they have a very poor grasp of history and no sense at all of the need for preservation. The Italians, on the other hand, are good at nurturing the past, but I’m not sure I’d want to entrust the world’s most important jewels to Luigi and Pietro. As an Italian colonel once told me, ‘Our soldiers like to make love, not war.’

  No. The job must be given to the British. We like the past so much we live in it most of the time. But don’t worry. I’m not suggesting that we ask our troops to risk their limbs and lives to protect the world’s ruins and temples. My solution is way more elegant than that. It’s this: we send engineers out into the world now and bring all the world’s treasures to Britain.

  Piece by piece, stone by stone, we dismantle the pyramids, ship them to Britain and build them again in, say, Leicestershire. We then scoop Petra out of the mountain and rehouse it in Cheddar Gorge. Angkor Wat? I see that in Oxfordshire. And who wouldn’t li
ke to see the Great Wall of China separating England from Scotland?

  This would not only ensure that these wonderful things are safe for all of time but also it would enable history enthusiasts to see everything that matters in a week, rather than in a lifetime.

  So let’s get cracking. Let’s get out to Palmyra and bring the columns to Britain. And if the local historians start to make a fuss, we can simply point out that if Lord Elgin hadn’t brought those marbles back from Greece, they would now be gone for good.

  31 May 2015

  Gotta get a job – then I can give up elderflower cordial and live again

  I went last week to see a brilliant new documentary about Amy Winehouse. Made by the same chap who directed Senna, it uses cameraphone and home-movie footage to tell the gut-wrenchingly sad story of a talented woman drinking herself to death.

  Then, of course, there’s poor old Charles Kennedy, the former Liberal Democrat leader, who died last week at fifty-five – exactly my age. He was an affable soul who liked what I’m sure he would have called a tincture, and a family statement says the post-mortem showed his death ‘was a consequence of his battle with alcoholism’.

  It’s strange, isn’t it? Alcohol seems to be such a cruel and tiresomely predictable mistress. It’s blamed for a part in the demise of Janis Joplin and Keith Moon and Jim Morrison and George Best and many others, and yet most still think drinking it in vast quantities is amusing.

  That’s probably because alcohol makes fully grown men fall over, which is always hysterical, and it makes women from the north of England fall out of their dresses, which is even better. Alcohol removes the inhibitions and calms the nerves. It breaks the ice and soothes the soul. Alcohol brings colour and depth to our lives, which is why, here in northern Europe, where the skies are grey and the scenery is largely dull, we drink such a lot of it.