If You'd Just Let Me Finish Read online

  Weirdly, though, I’m surrounded these days by people who are jacking it in. Maybe their doctor has pulled one of his special serious faces, or maybe they’ve realized that each year passes more quickly than the last and that soon they’ll be in an oven. Whatever, the fact is that I regularly spend the evening at a party where no one’s drinking a thing.

  Last week Katie Glass, my colleague from the shiny end of The Sunday Times, wrote a very funny piece about giving up drinking. And a few days later a chap in the Telegraph wrote about much the same thing.

  Now it’s my turn. While I try to find a job, I’ve reassessed my drinking strategy. Californians have a habit of ringing at 11 p.m. and I realized that I couldn’t think as straight as they do with their leaves and mineral-water existence if I was halfway through my third bottle of Léoube.

  I would love to tell you that after a couple of weeks I feel sharp and on it, but that’s not true. I feel exactly the same, only fatter because, instead of drinking in front of the television at night, I nibble endlessly on party packs of Cadbury Fruit & Nut. I’m also more weary because I can’t get to sleep at night and then wake up, raring to go, at 5 a.m.

  More distressingly, I find myself extremely dreary. When I’m drunk I’ll have a stab at an anecdote and hope for the best but, when I’m not, I over-analyse the story I have in mind and invariably decide it’s best not to say anything at all.

  This has had an effect on my social life. Only last week a mate I’ve known for ten years held his stag night. He has just written to me explaining why I hadn’t been invited: ‘I thought you’d find it boring as you aren’t drinking.’ I knew what he meant, though: he and his mates didn’t want to spend the evening with a miserable old sod sipping elderflower cordial.

  Worse, when I do go to parties where everyone’s drunk, they all look and sound so stupid with their big, beaming faces and their flirtatious ways. I just want to sit in a corner and read a book. There’s a scene in the Amy documentary where she’s trying to go straight and is overheard telling a friend at a gigantic awards ceremony that without stimulants it’s just so boring. I felt for her, I really did, because I know what she means.

  Perhaps the biggest effect, though, has been on my wallet. Because I’m not spending forty quid a day on wine and another forty on taxis to run me around, I’m saving more than £500 a week. But because I’m now driving everywhere, I’m spending that, and a lot more besides, on parking tickets. That’s a side effect few people ever mention.

  I suppose I should make it plain I have not given up drink for ever. I couldn’t face the thought of living with the dullard in my own head for the rest of time. And I never want to be that guy at a party who spends the evening with a holier-than-thou attitude and a supercilious face.

  I want to emerge from this period of abstinence as a social drinker who can whoop it up with the best of them at an all-nighter but then stick to the effing elderflower cordial when it’s a Wednesday and I’ve an early start.

  More importantly, if you can’t enjoy a glass of wine on a lovely sunny day then you have removed one of the tent poles of civilization from your life. You have become no better than a cow, or a rabbit.

  Which brings me back to Amy Winehouse. How many times in her distressingly short life must she have made a steely-eyed decision to quit? How many times had she written a cheque that her mind simply couldn’t cash? How often did she promise to get the brakes on after two glasses and then wake up fourteen hours later full of regrets?

  You may think it’s a salutary lesson but it isn’t really, because Amy’s life was very odd. She had too much money and too much spare time and she was imprisoned by the paparazzi. Which meant she was stuck at home with nothing to do but drink more.

  It’s a shoulder-sagging tale. Such prodigious talent, wasted. But the truth of the matter is this. And it’s worth remembering if you’re thinking about taking up a life of absolute sobriety. What killed Amy was something far more dangerous than alcohol. It was the same thing that killed Janis and Keith and Jim and George and all the others. It’s probably what really killed good old Charles Kennedy too: fame.

  7 June 2015

  It’s a simple rule, PM: you stop my ration of sex and pork pies, I park for free

  A few weeks ago I came here and explained how I’d taken up tennis. The plan was simple. I’d learn how to do a forehand, work a bit on my rather weak second serve and then enter Wimbledon. And I must say, all was progressing extremely well until, inevitably, I put my back out.

  The pain was substantial. ‘Searing’ is the only word I can think of that describes it. Imagine the scene in Marathon Man when Dustin Hoffman has his teeth drilled without anaesthetic. Now imagine, as he sits there, that his testicles are attached to the mains. Well, you’re nowhere near the agony I was having to endure.

  I couldn’t even think straight, which is why I agreed to have a massage. I have never believed that such things can cure anything, except if you are in Thailand and you’re a businessman and you are lonely.

  Massages, as far as I can see, fall into three distinct categories: annoying, ticklish and painful. But since it was impossible to imagine that my back pain could be made worse, I agreed to let a woman do some rubbing.

  As is usual, I was made to fill in a form that asked all sorts of questions about my general health and medical history. This is not because the masseuse needs to know. It’s to give the impression that what she’s about to do is scientific in some way.

  Then she spent an hour or so hurting me, and afterwards she sat me down and gave me a list of things I must and must not do to make myself better. When sitting down I must use a hard kitchen chair and avoid a soft, comfy sofa. I must drink lashings of water. And I must do star jumps when waiting for the pelican crossing lights to go green.

  Diet? Yes, she had views on that too. I must avoid pretty much everything that I like and stick to magnesium, zinc and various alloys that as far as I can tell are to be found only in the gearbox housing of a Chevrolet Corvette.

  And as she sat there, painting a picture of the bleak and miserable life that lay before me, I started to think that there is something wrong in the world and that it needs to be fixed.

  It’s this. No one with a serious face and a suit ever tells us to have fun, to go to the seaside, have a flutter on the horses and eat an ice cream. We’re never instructed to go to the cinema and eat popcorn or look at internet pornography or get a nice suntan. It’s quite the reverse, in fact.

  We are told not to smoke and, when some of us replace the devil’s delivery system with an electronic alternative, we are told that this is just as bad and we can’t use that either. We are told to drink responsibly, by which they mean one schooner of sherry a year. We are told to drive slowly and practise safe sex.

  They tell us eggs and milk are bad for our hearts and beer is bad for our livers. They tell us salt is worse than arsenic and we must stop drinking Coca-Cola immediately or our penises will become like press studs. Not that we need them for anything other than urinating these days.

  And that’s before we get to the environment. Here we are told that we must eat our cars to stave off back pain and save the polar bear, that we must wear old jumpers and recycle our poo. Barbecues, pork pies, motorcycles, central heating, soap … in fact, every single thing that makes us happy and comfortable is a no-no.

  If we lived our lives in the manner prescribed by eco-mentalists, doctors and the government, we’d get up early, eat some yeast with our ethically sourced children, run up and down some stairs, cycle to work, grab a handful of weeds at lunchtime, work more, go to the gym to pick things up and put them down again and then cycle home for an evening of self-improvement, fitness and a spoonful of thin, organic broth.

  Later, in the bedroom, having filled in consent forms in the presence of a lawyer and two witnesses, we would wrap ourselves from head to foot in cling film and be allowed a few moments of light relief with our partners before turning out the light and going
to sleep at 9.30 p.m.

  The upshot of all this is simple. Fewer people would become fat or ill, and as a result the nation’s hospitals would become empty, which is good news for the NHS and its cash-strapped managers. What’s more, the Earth would be habitable for another 4.6 billion years as opposed to 4.59 billion years.

  But to be honest, neither of these things is a good enough reason for turning our lives into dreary and painful fat-free expanses of tummy-rumbling nothingness. I want to be happy, not thin. And you can’t be both.

  Which brings me on to a plan I’ve hatched. Governments are bound to meddle and lecture. It’s in the nature of those who crave power to exercise that power; then their goal has been achieved.

  So they are never going to sit back once they’re in office and say, ‘Hey, guys. You’re all sentient beings. Do what you want.’

  They’re going to keep on telling us to dispose of our chewing gum thoughtfully and not put Fairy Liquid in the municipal fountains. And that’s fine. But we should insist on a new rule that introduces a bit of balance.

  So, if Mr Cameron wants to tell us to wipe our bottoms more carefully, he must follow that up with an instruction for us to get drunk and spend a fiver on the 3.30 at Lingfield.

  If he wants to put a tax on fizzy drinks, he must then say, ‘And next Thursday no parking tickets will be issued.’

  He needs to understand that we aren’t here for the benefit of the state or the long-term future of the planet. He is, but we’re here to have fun. And putting your back out isn’t.

  14 June 2015

  Jo’burg turns to man’s best fiend – but he’s no match for my twelve-bore

  A motorway on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It’s ten at night and up ahead the hard shoulder is a discotastic blizzard of blue lights. As we draw near, we see three police cars, a lorry and quite a lot of uniformed men leaning on things.

  My driver, a policeman from nearby Pretoria, has already heard from his colleagues what’s happened. ‘They found three guys in the back of the truck and there was a gunfight and they are dead,’ he says.

  With that, we sweep past the scene at an uninterrupted 70mph and go back to the hotel, where I spend a little while thinking, because can you imagine what would happen if the policemanists in Britain shot three people on the hard shoulder of the M1? It would be closed for a month. Nearby towns would be evacuated. And everyone would be running about, waving their arms in the air, for about a year.

  And yet in South Africa the motorway was not only kept fully open but in the newspapers the next day I could find no mention at all of the incident. Three guys shot? In a country where you can shoot your girlfriend through the bathroom door and be out of jail by teatime, who cares?

  The next day I was looking at some bones at the Cradle of Humankind, a spot in the Bush where it’s said monkeys first became men. And over a cup of coffee a local bone professor was telling me that crime in South Africa was not that bad. ‘Out here,’ he said, ‘it’s fine. I’ve never been the victim, apart from three burglaries, and my wife was mugged at gunpoint.’

  Violent crime is so common that it doesn’t trouble the seismograph needle. ‘Busy day at the office, dear?’ ‘Not really. My secretary was murdered, but other than that …’

  South Africa takes the concept of ‘stoic’ to new heights. It’s a country with balls, where eyewitnesses don’t stand there weeping. There’s a Blitz spirit that I admire hugely. Apart from one thing …

  Last year a friend of mine awoke in the night at his farm about forty minutes from the centre of Jo’burg to find three armed men in his bedroom. He and his family were tied up as the place was ransacked. Usually the victims are then shot, as dead people make poor witnesses, but my friend was lucky. Today he lives in the centre of Johannesburg to be safe. Well, it was that or Palmyra.

  Last weekend I met the man who now lives in his house and asked if he was worried the burglars might come back. ‘Well, they may,’ he replied. ‘But I’m OK because I have a couple of tactical dogs.’

  Now in Britain we’ve heard of guard dogs and in America I have encountered an attack dog. But tactical dogs are different. Tactical dogs are Terminators, trained only to do one thing, which is: kill everyone.

  It seems that in every ten litters there will be one puppy that’s capable of becoming a hunter-killer. The rest will go off to be pets and seeing dogs and guard dogs, but this one – at a cost of about £3,000 – will be turned into a furry torpedo.

  An attack dog can be controlled. You can say ‘kill’ or ‘sit’ and it will do as it’s told. But a tactical dog will not. If it sees a human it doesn’t recognize, even if it’s a three-year-old child, it will kill them. You can stand there shouting in your special stern voice, ‘No, Fenton. Bad dog. Put the baby down.’ But it will make absolutely no difference.

  As a result, it’s easier to own an assault rifle or a fighter aircraft. By law, your tactical dog cannot be allowed to go for a walk. Nor can it be permitted to stroll around the house, because if your neighbour pops round to borrow some sugar she’ll go home with no throat. A tactical dog cannot even be kept in a cage. It has to live in a crate.

  It all sounds very scary and, given the choice, I’d probably not burgle a house that contained such a thing.

  Or would I? Because tactical dogs can be dealt with by a poison that is known in South Africa as ‘Two Step’. Invented by Union Carbide, it’s an unholy substance that you put into meat and throw over the fence. The dog eats it, takes two steps and then is not even remotely tactical any more because it’s dead.

  Or you can simply walk up to the crate in which it’s kept and shoot it. Or hit it over the head with a hammer. And what’s the point of owning an expensive and hard-to-maintain weapon that can be rendered inoperative by something a burglar can buy from B&Q for £9.99?

  I get the distinct impression that these dogs are owned by people who were never in the army but want, passionately, you to think they were. I suspect that many may be paintball enthusiasts who take it all a bit too seriously.

  And I don’t mind any of that. If someone wants to crawl about in the undergrowth, with a not very convincing Special Forces beard, a dagger tattooed on each of his right biceps and a worrying bulge in his trousers, that’s his lookout. But how on earth can we live in a world where these people are allowed to turn a dog into a battlefield nuclear weapon?

  I’m not a weird-beard animalista, but I can’t see the point in keeping a dog in a crate when for a lot less money you could buy a shotgun, which is more effective at dealing with burglars, is more wieldy and as a bonus cannot be poisoned or neutered with a hammer.

  And, yes, it can be black and fearsome to behold. It doesn’t have to be fashioned from walnut and topped off with engravings of a pigeon on the brightwork.

  As a general rule, I’m not really in favour of people (other than me) owning guns. But you have to admit that in a country where everyone really does need protection, they’re better than turning a dog into three stone of nothing but teeth, muscle and a deranged mind.

  21 June 2015

  An Englishman’s idea to stop Mao Tse Sturgeon taking the laird’s land

  The government of the People’s Republic of Scotland reminded us last week that half the land north of the border is owned by just 432 people and that this is unfair. Right, I see. So how many people should own it? Five hundred? A thousand? A million? Or should it be divided up equally between everyone who lives there – 0.00574 of a square mile each?

  They tried that in Vietnam after the war was over and it didn’t go well because some people got a well-drained plot where rice would grow nicely and some people got a car park. Which is why now everyone works in a factory making training shoes.

  It seems the Scottish parliament doesn’t really know what the solution is either. It says that it wants a million acres in public ownership by 2020 but it doesn’t say what it will do with it. Grow tomatoes? Open a tortoise farm? Charge rich Englishmen thousands of pounds
to come along and shoot a deer in the face?

  Probably not that. In fact, it seems to have it in for shooting, saying that by ending the tax breaks on game activities, it will raise £10 million a year. But that, in government terms, is about £3.75. Which is basically nothing at all. And the government says that if a landowner is seen to be obstructive or annoying in any way, they will be forced to sell their land.

  It all seems very Orwellian, but it comes at you with a smiley face and a trouser suit. ‘Scotland’s land,’ says Nicola Sturgeon, ‘must be an asset that benefits the many, not the few,’ before adding under her breath: ‘We want an anarcho-syndicalist commune with workers’ control of factories …’

  The BBC has dressed it all up as a piece of radical thinking and has interviewed all sorts of toothless and incoherent crones who plainly don’t understand the concept of ownership. But don’t be fooled. Everything that’s being proposed – and the news that Mrs Queen’s earnings from Scotland may be under threat too – is a left and a right into the heart of the better-off.

  It’s sixth-form politics made real. Pie-in-the-sky idealism. It’s been tried all over the world and it hasn’t worked, anywhere, ever. Mugabe, Stalin, Castro, Pot, Mao, Sturgeon. They’re all the same.

  Of course, the better-off are livid. All last week they were popping up on television to say they understand land management better than someone with a beard, an earring and a degree in the redistribution of wealth from the University of McLenin. This is undoubtedly true but, my God, they’ve been making a hash of getting the message across.

  Here’s a tip. If you are a Scottish laird and you want to tell the nice man from the BBC about how you barely eke a living from your half-million-acre estate, don’t agree to be interviewed while standing in front of your massive house.

  I know that, inside, everything is held together by moths and that you have burned all your pets to stay warm, but people sitting in a Glasgow tenement are going to lob a can of Special Brew at the benefits plasma and say, ‘Och aye the noo. It’s all right for McSome.’