How Hard Can It Be? Read online

  In some ways, however, I’d quite like to see unwanted food being loaded on to ships by Fairtrade enthusiasts. It would set them against the ecoists, who’d argue that the journey would kill some polar bears. There’d be fighting on the docks. It’d be a hippie bloodbath.

  Frankly everyone seems to have forgotten one simple thing. If I choose to buy a bag of potatoes, and then I choose not to eat them for some reason, that is my lookout. It is my money that I’m wasting, not George Monbiot’s. And similarly it’s no good pointing a finger at supermarkets, saying that they throw perfectly good food in the bin every day. Yes, though that’s because they are forced to put ‘best before’ dates on everything to avoid being prosecuted by the government for giving some fat kid a bit of wind. I agree. They should be made to keep every vegetable until it starts to look like a Doctor Who special effect. But then what should they do? Many Africans are desperate, but not so desperate that they’ll eat food which has mutated into an enormous bogey. So it goes into the ground. Where – guess what? It’ll rot.

  The best solution then is to worry about something more important – but sadly we are ruled by a government that will never pass up the opportunity for a bit more interference. If it could have an agent in every house, at every meal time, ready to prosecute parents for using too much salt and not making Johnny eat up his greens – trust me on this – it would.

  Unfortunately, however, the civil service is too busy counting discarded potatoes for that – so instead our glorious leaders have decided to make the whole process of waste disposal so bloody complicated that you would rather eat everything on your plate, and consequently explode, than go to all the bother of remembering which bin to use. Round where I live we have green boxes for newspapers, plain white paper and green bottles. But not bottle tops. They have to go in the blue box, along with the shampoo, the junk mail and the paper that isn’t quite white. And it gets worse because there’s also a garden-waste bag into which you may put hedge clippings, but not food waste. What you’re supposed to do if you’ve eaten half your hedge, which technically makes the other half food waste, I don’t know. Happily, though, the council will provide a ‘field officer’ – called Standartenfuhrer Schmidt, probably – who’ll call round with advice and leaflets, which when you’ve finished reading them should go in the blue bin. Or is it the green one? Honestly, you need to be Mr Memory Man to stand a chance.

  What I do to get round this problem is to feed all our waste – even the junk mail, the hypodermic needles and the peelings from the potatoes – to our chickens. It’s brilliant. The eggs they produce have actually started to come out in old HP Sauce bottles, which is handy. And I don’t have to tip the hens at Christmas.

  If you have no chickens, don’t despair. You can either wait for the government’s exciting Compost Awareness Week, which starts on 4 May. Or you can live entirely on bars of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut chocolate. Because no one in recorded history has ever thrown one away.

  Sunday 20 April 2008

  I’d rather hire a dog than a prostitute

  Ever since the invention of the saloon bar know-all, we’ve been told that when it comes to things that float, fly or fornicate, it’s better to rent than buy. Rubbish. If you have the money to buy a boat and choose instead to spend it on a pension plan, then you have a plebeian heart and a beige soul. The whole point of disposable income is that you have fun with it. And I’m sorry but you cannot catch 6 ft of air off the coast of St Tropez on a Pep. Whereas you can on a Fairline Targa 52.

  The argument for private planes is even more vivid. Of course you can charter one. And of course this makes financial sense. I’m sorry, though; if you have a private plane – provided it’s a luxuriously appointed wood’n’leather jet, not one of those sit-up-and-beg propellered vans – you will have dramatically more sex than if you have a slice of the Norwich Union.

  And that brings me on to fornication. Anyone who thinks it’s better to pay a prostitute than get married and have it on tap is so riddled with venereal disease that he’s not thinking straight.

  If you don’t believe me, take a look at Henry VIII. He caught something nasty from a hooker, went mad and took England out of the Catholic church. This forced a bunch of Bible-bashers to set up shop in America, which consequently became an English-speaking country. And as a result of that, we have to support them in their various military escapades around the globe. Our soldiers, then, are getting blown up in Helmand simply because Henry fancied some out-of-wedlock rumpy-pumpy with Miss Syphilis 1510.

  I don’t think you should rent anything. If it’s a house, you’ll fall out with the owners, because you won’t clean it to their level of expectation and they won’t mend stuff quite as quickly as you want. If it’s a car – who knows what kind of madman was in it last week? Me, probably. So the brakes will almost certainly disintegrate the first time you need them and then you’ll be killed. And if it’s a holiday cottage, you will be disappointed. This is because no one has ever walked into a seaside villa and thought, wow, this is much better than I was expecting. All rented properties are moderately worse than the pictures in the brochure suggest. This is a fact.

  And on top of all this, nothing says you’ve failed in life quite so neatly as a Hertz key ring or a need to spend your evening bouncing up and down on six stone of Estonian skin and bone.

  That said, however, I was drawn last week to the news that Londoners can now rent a dog. The idea is very simple. You pay an American company called Flexpetz an annual fee of £3,350, and for that you get four ‘doggy days’ a month. It’s not cheap, but the firm will give you a lead, and the advantages are huge … My house is carpeted with dogs. They are everywhere; and apart from the labrador that ate slug pellets and is now a drooling vegetable, I love them all very much indeed. Which means I shall be extremely tearful when one of them dies. That’s the beauty of rent-a-dog. You get those furry chops to stroke and the big brown eyes and the gentle farting noises as it lies by the fire. Then, when it pegs out, you just hose it into the gutter, call Flexpetz and get another.

  It gets better. At present my yard is peppered with about forty dog eggs every day. Disgusting. However, you can pick up a rental dog in the morning, after it’s been to the lavatory, and then give it back as soon as its legs start to cross. And, of course, you never need worry about leaving a rental dog in the car while you’re at work. Or which kennels to use when you’re on holiday. Or what to do when it goes bald and starts to smell.

  What’s more, if you split with your other half, you no longer have to saw the dog in two and then argue about who gets the interesting end. Or worry because your former husband insists on the back.

  You can even tailor the dog to meet your requirements. So for my trips to the Isle of Man, where there are many ramblers, I’d get an enormous bull mastiff leopard German Nazi killer dog. And then in London I’d have a yorkie – the only thing in the world guaranteed to get you more sex than a Gulfstream V jet.

  You needn’t even be put off by Flexpetz’s insistence that you feed its animals on holistic food. This sounds like expensive nonsense for weak blonde ladies who lunch. In fact it means food in its natural state. A recently killed rabbit – or rambler – is therefore fine.

  Of course, some people say it is cruel to rent out pets in this way. An RSPCA spokesman said last week that ‘most dogs need the security of a proper routine with one owner, and without this they could become stressed and unhappy’. He’s wrong. My dogs love me because I tickle their tummies. If a burglar did that, they’d love him just as much – more, if he gave them a ham sandwich as well. Dogs love whoever happens to feed them, so you can be assured that if you feed your rent-a-dog it will love you too.

  So there we are. If it floats, flies or fornicates, you are better off buying; but if it barks, reach for the rental agreement.

  Sunday 27 April 2008

  Pricking science’s silly sausages

  There are food riots in Haiti and Bangladesh. In Kenya hunger has
driven half the population to set fire to the other half. In Bolivia they are fighting over vegetables. And even in Italy people took to the streets to complain about the price of pasta. So you might imagine that all of the world’s scientists are currently in their bunkers, desperately trying to figure out why the world is running out of food all of a sudden and, more importantly, what can be done. For sure, they had a stab a while back at genetically modifying wheat so that it would grow – with no water, sunlight or soil – into a pre-packed, pre-sliced loaf. Sadly, though, the whole thing had to be abandoned when some anti-GM food activists turned up in white boiler suits and rolled all over the experiment.

  And now, it seems, the world’s boffins have got more important things on their enormous minds. Last week, for instance, as the fires in Haiti burnt, a group of eggheads at Yale University announced that, after some exhaustive research, they’d proved women who eat chocolate five times a week are 40 per cent less likely to get pre-eclampsia than those who indulge only once a week.

  Meanwhile, in Britain, scientists at Manchester and Newcastle universities announced that if you eat two tomatoes a day you are less likely to get sunburnt when on holiday this year. And that you will have a lovely complexion well into old age.

  What’s more, on the very same day that the Americans were making their announcement about chocolate and the Brits about tomatoes, leading scientists in Germany published a report that says if you have a dog in your house your children are less likely to develop hay fever. I promise I am not making any of this up.

  And then we learnt that a popular osteoporosis drug will break your heart, that hair dye will give you cancer and that those pots of friendly bacteria, which look like jars of sperm, will stop your kids getting eczema.

  Furthermore – and I’m still only giving you the scientific news from Tuesday – we heard that women who take HRT will have a stroke; that smokers get depressed more easily; that Range Rovers cause global warming; and that if you take pills for high blood pressure you will become stick-thin and, I don’t know, fall through grates in the street or be taken away by a stork.

  I thought we’d reached a new pit of scientific balderdash when they announced last month that anyone who eats one sausage a day, or three rashers of bacon, increases their chances of getting bowel cancer by a fifth. But no. Scientists in California decided to go one better and announced last Monday, wait for it, that if you send your children to a playgroup you cut their chances of catching leukaemia by 30 per cent.

  Honestly, if you believed everything these scientists say you’d never dare get up, go outside or dip your celery into even the smallest pinch of salt. You’d be terrified that a tomato might turn you into Joan Collins. You wouldn’t smoke or drink or go near a pylon in case you caught ebola. In fact you’d spend your entire life in a playgroup classroom, fearful that at any minute the door would be broken down by a swarm of cancerous sausages.

  Happily, of course, we pay not the slightest bit of attention because we think we know exactly what’s going on here. We reckon, for instance, that if a scientist says a playgroup will cure the common cold he’s being funded by a company that owns playgroups. And similarly we suspect that when a scientist stands up and says you have to eat tomatoes, his clothes, hairstyle and house may well have been paid for by someone with a greenhouse.

  And then there’s the sausages business. Do they really expect us to believe that a scientist woke up one morning and thought, I know, I’m going to see if a pork chipolata does anything nasty to my bowels. All of which brings me on to a bunch of boffins in Australia who are warning people not to flush their tropical fish down the lavatory. I know several people who keep such fish in England and none has ever felt the need to put his often very expensive collection in the khazi. Apparently, though, that’s what they do in Oz; and now one particular breed, called the platys, has made it to the ocean, where it’s causing havoc.

  It was bred to live in an aquarium because it suffers from what I call Hammond syndrome – an inferiority complex resulting from the fact that it’s about 6 ft short of being a shark. It is also tough and bright. Not only is it capable of dealing with the complexities of a U-bend, but it can also swim through several miles of Australian faeces just so it can get into the Pacific, where it is now decimating fish stocks, eating frogs and generally running around shouting: ‘You’re going home in a f****** ambulance.’

  Are you bothered? Neither am I, really, but I am wondering. Why did a scientist get up one day, stretch and then say: ‘Hmm, I wonder if any aquarium fish have escaped into the wild today?’ And if he didn’t, did anyone pay him to find out? And why? Who benefits from all the newspaper coverage? Is it the Spanish, I wonder? Are they about to claim the world is running out of food because the sea is running out of fish? And that this has nothing to do with their giant aquatic vacuum cleaners that charge about the oceans, sucking everything smaller than a pea into their holds, and is entirely the fault of Bruce and Sheila who put their platys down the Armitage Shanks one morning.

  Sunday 4 May 2008

  Feed them, or they’ll slash all the seats

  Last weekend, as I spiralled round an endless succession of identical ring roads in the Midlands, looking for somewhere to have lunch, I realized with a heavy heart that the global food shortage had reached Britain. Quite simply, there was nowhere serving anything that a human being might reasonably want to put into its mouth.

  I had in my mind a white-painted pub, perhaps by a restored lock. I imagined pretty gardens, some brightly painted canal boats, a pint of frothing ale and a hearty ploughman’s with lashings of Branston and some crunchy pickled onions.

  There were many brown signs with knives and forks on them, pointing down sun-drenched country lanes. Each one, though, led to a conference hotel that was invariably teeming with men in idiotic Oakley sunglasses, looking at flip charts. Or theme pubs with gardens full of purple dinosaurs with steps up the back.

  My satellite navigation system was no help either. I asked it to list all the restaurants within 10 miles of the M6 and, after a silicon shrug, it came up with a cafe called something like the Wife Beater. And that was about it.

  Most of the restaurants we happened upon were garish, neon-buffed, American add-ons to retail parks. Why? Who wants to make a day out of shopping? ‘We’ll buy a terrible sofa in the sales, and then before we go to get something that makes an unnecessary noise when we’re gardening (which these days is pretty much everything), we’ll have a slap-up lunch at the Harvester.’

  Here’s something you might like to chew on. They always ask in these places if you’ve ever eaten at a Harvester before. And I bet no one has ever said yes. I have, which is why I found it so easy to drive right on by in search of my increasingly elusive canal-side pub. Eventually, though, the tummy-rumbling became too much, and so in Coventry – which bills itself as a city of peace and reconciliation but is in fact a city ruined by the bloody Germans – we ended up in something called TGI Friday’s.

  A pretty girl, who was about eight, asked us to have a seat in an anteroom while our table was prepared; and here I noticed something odd. Why, in places where the menu features pictures of the food they’re serving, are all the seats in the waiting area slashed? Do people who buy noisy fence-paint sprayers have an inability to sit down for more than thirty seconds without thinking: ‘I know. I’ll take out my Stanley knife now and cut this chair into ribbons’? Perhaps this is why DFS does so well. Its customers cannot watch Traffic Cops Action Kill on Sky 457+1 without tearing their settees into small pieces with knives.

  I have similar thoughts whenever I visit the lavatories at large public events. How do they all miss the bowl by such an enormous margin? Are they doing it deliberately or is it a congenital fault with their bomb-aiming equipment? In which case, what on earth must their bathrooms look like at home?

  After a short wait, during which time I never felt inclined to throw any of the chairs through a window, we were shown to our table –
where I remembered Clarkson’s first law of eating in the provinces: ‘The chef is from Coventry. He was not trained in Paris.’ This means I always select something that can’t be mucked up. Celery, usually.

  On this occasion, however, I went for a burger, which, according to the manager, could not be served ‘rare’ because meat, unless cooked properly, would kill us all. Of course, this isn’t true if you buy decent meat from a decent butcher or if you are a dog, but no matter. My nuked beef arrived between two pieces of what, I suppose, you could describe as bread. But only if you were mad. Let me put it this way: if I threw it at you in a food fight, I feel fairly sure that it would take your head clean off.

  Plainly, then, this is a place you go to not because you are hungry or because you want to treat your family to a tasty meal. No. You go there to get heavier. As lunches go, it was right up there with an experience I had at a restaurant in Saigon. The menu said, ‘Rather burnt rice land slug’ and I ordered it because it sounded intriguing, but sadly it wasn’t. It turned out to be as described – a rather burnt slug.

  I can understand why the Vietnamese serve burnt slugs. I can understand why a chicken I was once given in Mali was skin and bone separated by nothing but warmed air. And I know why in Havana I was once given a spaghetti bolognese that came whole. Like a Frisbee. Here in Britain there is no excuse for eating rubbish. We are bombarded with cookery programmes – and every Christmas the shelves in WH Smith groan under the weight of all the recipe books. Most people could name half a dozen footballers and maybe a handful of royals, but if you asked someone to list all the famous chefs in Britain we’d be here till Doomsday. They’re all so famous that we know them now by their Christian names: Gordon, Delia, Jamie, Marco, Heston, Gary, One Fat, the Hairy and so on and so on.