Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 31

  Which means that one day the Starbucks and the Forever 21s and the Banana Republics will be brought to their knees. And the streets of our towns will be handed back to Ronnie Barker, who’ll open all hours, sell us things we like and let us pay at the end of the week. In beads.

  9 September 2012

  Oh, my head hurts – I’ve a bad case of hangover envy

  As you probably heard, the government announced recently that during the month of what it’s calling ‘Stoptober’, it will run a nationwide campaign designed to make every smoker in the land stub out their last cigarette and quit.

  I don’t remember that being in the manifesto. And I certainly don’t remember giving my permission for the Department of Star Jumps and Push-Ups to spend vast lumps of my money on a series of bossy television advertisements designed to make my life less pleasant. So, in protest, I decided to give up drinking.

  Most nights, like many people of my age, I drink a bottle of wine, and this means that most mornings I have a bit of clutch slip until after I’ve had some coffee, a couple of Nurofen and some quiet time with the papers.

  I’m comfortable with that. But I’m not really comfortable with the effects the booze has had on my stomach. Visually, it’s a bit silly. It looks like I have the actual moon in my shirt. It’s so vast that when I bend over to tie up my shoelaces, it squashes into my lungs so firmly that I can’t breathe.

  And when I run, it turns into a giant pendulum, sloshing from side to side so vigorously that sometimes I get the impression it may actually break free from its moorings. I needed to get rid of it, and if in the process I could stick a finger in the eye of a hectoring government, so much the better. I therefore decided to give up booze.

  So the first night. I felt no need for wine. I’m not an alcoholic in the true sense of the word. But my hands felt a bit fidgety, like they’d been made redundant. They wanted something to do. They wanted a glass of something to nurture but what could I put in it?

  Milk? Lovely. My favourite drink in the whole wide world. But even more fattening than wine and at seven p.m. it seemed wrong. Water? No. The stupidest idea in the world. It’s just liquefied air. Something fizzy? Too carcinogenic. I thought about tea but I’m not old enough yet, and then discounted tomato juice on the basis that its primary function in life is to cure what I wouldn’t be suffering from any more.

  I went to the supermarket, where I discovered that all of the non-alcoholic ‘beverages’ are aimed either at people who want to stay awake, or who are four years old. It’s row after row of idiotic lime-green labelling and contents that appear to have come from the props department of Doctor Who.

  I was in despair until, at the last moment, I discovered a bottle of Robinsons lemon barley water. The taste of my childhood; Dan Maskell in a bottle. I took it home and it was like drinking the sound of a wood pigeon and a distant tractor. I was very happy.

  The second night, I was going out and it transpires that no bar or restaurant stocks Robinsons barley water. So I had to think of something else.

  I was still thinking several hours later, by which time my friends were unsteady on their feet and very garrulous.

  And suddenly I discovered the biggest problem of not drinking in a society that does. When everyone else is drunk, they look stupid, they sound stupid, they laugh at things that aren’t funny, such as a fart, and you start to hate them on a cellular level.

  You begin to wonder what they would look like without heads, and because you are sober, the imagery is frighteningly clear.

  Turning up in polite society and asking for a soft drink is like turning up and sobbing. It puts a damper on proceedings.

  A meeting of friends is supposed to be light and filled with laughter. The last thing a group of happy people wants is one person sitting in the middle talking about the trauma of Syria.

  If I was going to keep this non-drinking lark up, there is no doubt that the moon in my shirt would start to shrink. But, on the downside, I would lose all my friends and I would have to come to terms with the fact that never again would I have a great night out. No, really, I mean it. Can you think of a single memorable evening you’ve ever had when you weren’t absolutely blasted? Nope. Neither can I.

  In fact, you won’t really have a night out at all because such is the pressure to drink, to join the herd, to find a fart funny, that it’s a thousand times easier to decline the invitation and stay at home. Which is why for the next four nights I did just that, with my barley water, watching television and enriching my life not one bit.

  I learnt something else as well. It is possible to suffer from hangover envy. In a morning, as you’re doing a bit of light skipping, you see your friends clinging on to trees and street furniture, looking like a pile of laundry, with faces the colour of ostrich eggs.

  This should be uplifting. It should make you feel good as you boing along the street with a zip in your step and sparkling eyes. But, in fact, it makes you crestfallen. Because at four a.m., when you were asleep, which is the same as being dead, they were very much alive. They were making memories in police cells and on inappropriate girls, and you were at home snoring the snore of a dullard. Waking up feeling fresh is like dying with a clear conscience and a healthy bank balance. It means you’ve wasted your life.

  So here we are, ten days into my non-drinking regime. It’s nine p.m., I have a glass of wine by the laptop and some friends have just invited me over – I’m going and I don’t plan to be home till two. So when Top Gear returns to your screen, know this: yes, it will look like I’ve got a planet in my shirt, but I will be smiling the smile of a man who’s happy with his life. I will be smiling the smile of a man who’s had a drink.

  16 September 2012

  If breasts are no big deal, girls, don’t get them reupholstered

  In the past week I’ve been mildly startled by the attitude of many women, who’ve said they cannot understand why someone would take photographs of a girl sunbathing topless, why a magazine would pay money for the right to publish them and why Buckingham Palace should have used the courts to try to prevent further images from reaching a wider audience. All have said the same thing: ‘Breasts are no big deal.’

  On the face of it, that’s true. How can they be a big deal when half the world has them? Well, I’ll tell you how. Because the other half can’t really ever think of anything else.

  In a list of stuff that matters most to a man, breasts appear at No. 4, between oxygen and food.

  Breasts fascinate us. We cannot imagine why women don’t spend all day at home playing with them, because if we had them, that’s what we’d do. It’s why we were all so keen to have a look at what sort the future queen has. Would they be angry, sad, milky or pointy? Would they look like deflated zeppelins or dried fish? Or would they not really be there at all?

  Often we are told by women that when at work or out socializing, they are heartily fed up with men who talk to their chest rather than their face. Well, I would like to say here and now that men do not do that. I would like to. But I cannot. Because on occasion we do. We can’t help it.

  In the same way that women could not help having a quiet moment with their laptop if they thought the internet was hosting a full-frontal picture of George Clooney.

  Of course, since the invention of clothing there have been many attempts to desexualize the breast. In the 1960s, National Geographic magazine was undoubtedly seen as a weighty and learned tome full of many interesting facts about the world and its people. Not to me, it wasn’t. It was a girlie mag.

  Later, women’s liberationists argued that by burning their bras they were freeing themselves from the shackles of history and propelling themselves through the glass ceiling. And this received a great deal of support from male observers, all of whom were equally keen for bra-less women to be seen anywhere.

  Today new mothers are often to be found in crowded places breastfeeding their infants. They could go behind a tree or to a quiet spot, but by popping one out in public
they send a clear message: This is not a sex toy. It’s a food dispensary unit, so stop staring.

  Yeah, right. Telling us to stop staring at a breast is like telling us not to stare at a burning airliner. It isn’t possible.

  The Duchess of Cambridge is probably fearful that she is the first senior royal to be seen in public in such a state of undress.

  Not so. Queen Mary II was painted topless, and in France, scene of the current brouhaha, Charles VII’s mistress would constantly swan around court with her breasts on show. It was the fashion then.

  You might like to think that things changed in Victorian times but evidently not. The Victorians were idiotically prudish and got it into their tiny minds that the ankle and the shoulder should be concealed beneath many layers of velvet, steel and wood. Despite this, it was absolutely fine to turn up at a Brunellian reception for the monarch herself in the sort of top that even Kate Moss would find ‘too revealing’.

  So men have been exposed to breasts for centuries. Many of us were brought up on them. We see them every day in the nation’s bestselling newspaper, on the internet and on even the coldest Saturday night in Newcastle. We see them on the beach when we go on holiday and in the office on a hot day. Breasts are simply everywhere. They should be about as sexual as moths. But they aren’t.

  Let me pose a delicate question. In the sort of exotic South Sea societies that used to appear in the National Geographic magazine, it is still completely normal for women to be topless as they go about their daily business. So does this mean that during lovemaking sessions, their boyfriends and husbands treat their breasts like their noses and ignore them? It’s possible, I suppose, but I very much doubt it.

  What’s more, if breasts are no big deal, why do women buy bras that lift and separate and do all sorts of other things besides? Why queue round the block to have your breasts reupholstered?

  It’s because you know that, in fact, your breasts are a big deal. Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor knows it too and that’s why she was so mortified to find them in the press and plastered all over the internet.

  Those pictures should not have been taken and they should not have been published. And it is stupid to claim that she’s to blame because she was in full view of the public road. Because that’s only true if you were looking at her through a two-million-millimetre telephoto lens.

  Happily, though, the argument brings me on to a solution. Doubtless one day the photographer who took the offending snaps will be identified, and when that happens he will become a public figure. According to his rules, that will make him fair game.

  So someone should wait for him to go to the lavatory and then snap away. If he chooses to complain about having a private moment appear on the internet, then we will simply argue that, at the time, he was clearly visible to anyone who happened to be on a stepladder peering over the top of the cubicle. And that he should have known better.

  23 September 2012

  Call me Comrade Clarkson, liberator of the jobsworths

  In the past couple of weeks everyone in the country, except me, seems to have decided that Andrew Mitchell, the government chief whip, is a potty-mouthed snob who goes through life gorging on swan, goosing his housekeeper and shooting poor people for sport.

  Last week the police released details of exactly what was said between officers and Mr Mitchell after he’d been told he couldn’t ride his bicycle through the main gates at Downing Street. Mr Mitchell demanded that he be allowed to exit through the main gate whereupon it was explained to him this was not possible.

  A police officer on duty said: ‘I am more than happy to open the side pedestrian gate for you, sir, but it is policy that we are not to allow cycles through the main vehicle gate.’

  At this point Mr Mitchell seems to have become angry, telling the officers they had best learn their effing place, that they were effing plebs and that they hadn’t heard the last of the matter.

  Hmmm. While his choice of abuse seems a bit weak, I sympathize with his sentiments absolutely. Because what petty-minded pen-pusher made this policy and why? What possible difference can it make which gate people use when leaving work? Why should bicycles use one gate and cars another?

  These are the questions that matter. Except, of course, we already know the answers. ‘It’s security, sir.’ Or maybe: ‘It’s health and safety, sir.’ These are the catch-all responses from anyone in a uniform who thinks if he uses the word ‘sir’ as often as possible, we won’t notice he’s being a complete arse.

  Only very recently I arrived at a department of the BBC, where I engaged in the usual good-natured banter with a security guard I’ve known for many years. I asked how he was. He asked after my family. We chatted momentarily about the weather and then, after I explained that I’d accidentally left my pass at home, he said he couldn’t let me in. ‘Security policy,’ he said, with the good-natured shrug of a small cog that has never asked a bigger cog: ‘Why?’

  I felt it immediately: a hotness surging into my head and threatening to sever my tongue from its mountings, leaving it free to call the blithering idiot many cruel and unusual names. I began to imagine what he might look like without a head. And the noises he’d make if I staked him out in the desert with no eyelids.

  This happens all the time. With traffic wardens who somehow can’t see that I only popped into the tobacconist’s for a moment; with airport security guards who think my youngest daughter is a dead ringer for Abu Hamza; and most recently in America with a moron who wanted photo ID before I could rent a luggage locker.

  Then you have the imbeciles at the post office and various other large organizations who explain their company’s stupid policy and, when they see you’re about to boil over, point at a sign on their desk that says: ‘The company will not tolerate physical or verbal abuse directed at our employees.’ In other words: ‘If you complain about our small-minded idiocy you will go to prison.’

  So you stand there and you say, as calmly as you can: ‘Why can you not deliver my parcel/fridge/important document?’ And invariably you are told it is for security reasons. Or health and safety.

  Actually, neither of those things is the reason. No. The reason the police officers in Downing Street, the nation’s traffic wardens and the counter staff at the post office do not bend the rules even when they can see you’re making sense is simple: they fear for their jobs. They’ve been told by their line manager what the policy is and they know that if they bend it even a little bit, just once, they will be sacked.

  Things are different in Italy. Last week I flew back to Britain through Milan’s Linate airport. And it was plainly obvious that the X-ray arch machine had been set to such a level it could detect tiny fragments of zinc in a lady’s vajazzle, or bits of nickel in those hard bits at the end of a man’s shoelaces.

  We see this a lot with airport scanners these days and we know what the response will be. You’ll be sent back to take off yet another item of clothing until you are butt naked. And even then, thanks to the cardamom in the chicken casserole you ate the night before, a man will want to rub his wand over your genitals. It’s humiliating and disgusting.

  In Milan, however, they do things rather differently. Someone would walk through the machine. It would beep. The security guard would note that it was a businessman or an old lady and would simply wave them through. I beeped. He looked at me. Saw no beard. Saw I had hands rather than hooks. And that was that.

  Of course, he will have been told loudly, and usually by the Americans, that every single person getting on every single airliner is likely to explode at any moment, but Luigi uses his nous. And he has obviously worked out that if a terrorist organization is going to go to all the bother of blowing up a plane, it probably won’t be the 11.30 a.m. commuter shuttle from Milan to London.

  So why is Luigi allowed to use the power of reason when Mr Patel at Heathrow is not? Simple. Because Luigi cannot be sacked.

  Well, he can, but under the terms of Italian employment law, his employer mu
st continue to pay his wages, his mortgage, his children’s school fees and the grocery bill of his descendants forever.

  I have no doubt at all that Mr Mitchell, a Tory, would fight tooth and nail to stop such communist laws being introduced in Britain. Which is why he will continue to be told by knees-knocking policemen that they can’t let him cycle through the vehicle gate because using their common sense is more than their job’s worth.

  Simple solution. Introduce a system where it becomes less than their job’s worth.

  30 September 2012

  If foreigners weren’t watching, we’d be lynching bell-ringers

  While on a tour of a factory in South America recently, David Cameron appeased the nation’s meat-eaters by saying that at some point in the next parliament there might possibly be a referendum on whether Britain stayed in the European Union.

  Isolationism is very popular at the moment. Not just with middle England but with the Scotch, too, and the Corns – everyone. If you gave people in Leicester the chance to form their own government and their own state, I bet you any money a majority would say, ‘Ooh, yes please.’

  Certainly the idea of Chipping Norton breaking free from the shackles of Westminster and Brussels is very appealing. There is little crime, so we wouldn’t need a police force. Or an army. Many people own guns, so we’d easily be able to hold out should we be attacked by Stow-on-the-Wold or Moreton-in-Marsh. We have meat, trout and vegetables. We could trade jam for oil. And we have wind for power.

  Taxes would be very low, since we would only really need a school, two doctors and a fire station. And we could introduce some new laws relevant to our way of life. We could make it illegal to be Piers Morgan or to harbour a badger. Campanology would be outlawed, too, along with motorcycles. On the face of it, then, life would be peachy.