If You'd Just Let Me Finish Read online

  Oh, and when the nice man with the microphone and the earnest face asks for a few shots of you walking through your gardens, say no, because he’s stitching you up.

  The viewers will hear you saying that land management and pest control are in your blood, but they will see you strolling through the hydrangeas past an ornamental lake. And you’ll look like an idiot.

  Best really not to say anything at all, because you’ll be rational and you’ll be arguing a point that isn’t.

  Debating with the Scottish National Party is like debating with a table. No, it’s worse, because the table doesn’t actively hate you and, if you have more than an allotment, the SNP does.

  The good news, of course, is that over the coming months and years all sorts of legislation will be drafted and debated and none of it will work because it’s so obviously ridiculous.

  You can’t let people become rich and then give their wealth to someone who’s spent forty years sitting on his arse watching daytime television. It’s just absurd.

  A point that becomes obvious when you look at the goals. At present the SNP wants to take land from rich part-time residents and give it to locals. But how do you define ‘locals’? Do you have to live on the land, or near it? And what’s near? And why are the words ‘Sean’ and ‘Connery’ now ricocheting around my head?

  It gets more complicated because what if these locals decide that now they’re landowners they can sit about watching Cash in the Attic all day? Pretty soon, stags the size of elephants will be roaming the streets and goring children to death. And beavers will have turned the forests into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

  And then it’ll get worse because of all those migrants who are currently clinging to the underside of various lorries in Calais; they’re not stupid and pretty soon they’ll realize that if they keep heading north they’ll wind up in a part of the world where the poor are always right and the rich are always wrong.

  So they will say that the local who was gifted the land is now well-off and must consequently hand it over to them. So they can build a mosque. Which will then have to be handed over to the former landowners who by this stage will be at the bottom of the food chain.

  There is another solution, of course. The Scottish parliamentarians could take a drive next weekend into the Highlands and have a mooch about. They’d see that it is very beautiful, very open and for the most part very well maintained.

  They could have a picnic, make a heather daisy chain and then they could decide to do nothing at all. Because everything they have in mind will make it all worse.

  But of course, they won’t do this because the idea is mine and I’m English. So what do I know?

  28 June 2015

  I’ll just run this up the flagpole: we’ve let the Union Jack go to pot

  Last weekend a chap draped himself in the flag of ISIS and, with a young girl on his shoulders, went for a walk past the Houses of Parliament. Onlookers were, we’re told, a bit surprised by this brazen act, but the police decided that he hadn’t actually committed an offence and allowed him to carry on.

  Naturally, the incident caused a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Daily Express, with many horrified readers asking what would happen if they went about their business draped in a swastika.

  The answer, distressingly, is ‘not much’. Because flag-flying in most of Britain doesn’t really trouble the forces of law and order. You want to decorate your Uber cab’s dashboard with the flag of Pakistan, or hang a Gay Pride emblem from the window of your amazingly well-furnished apartment in Brighton? Well, go right ahead.

  Oh, and if you feel moved to set fire to the Union Jack in the middle of Parliament Square, that’s allowed too. You can’t urinate on it, though, because then you’d be prosecuted for displaying your penis.

  Elsewhere in the world, flags are a rather more serious business. If you were to damage the national flag in France, for example, you would be in a lot of bother. It’s the same story in Germany. In Greece, if you argue with a policeman, he will arrest you for insulting the flag. I know this from personal experience.

  Most countries have extremely strict rules on how a flag can be displayed. In America, for example, you can fly the state flag if you wish, but it has to be to the right of the Stars and Stripes, and it can’t be bigger or brighter or in a better condition.

  And if a hotel wishes to demonstrate its international credentials by flying the flags of many nations outside its reception area, the Stars and Stripes must be raised first and lowered last. But it must never be allowed to touch the ground.

  Flying it upside down is a really serious business, a point demonstrated with much poignancy in the recent House of Cards series. Do that and you’re telling the world that the country is broken and urgent help is needed. But only the Philippines will come to your aid because that’s the only country that recognizes an upside-down flag as an actual distress symbol. Everyone else sticks with things such as flares and people rushing about shouting, ‘Help. Help. I’m on fire.’

  There was a huge brouhaha in America last week after the state of South Carolina decided, in the wake of the racially motivated church shootings, to stop flying the Confederate flag.

  Its fans are horrified. ‘Yes,’ they cried. ‘We know that the young man who shot all those people in that church was photographed holding the flag in question, but we want to fly it so that we are constantly reminded that our side lost and that today we are slavery enthusiasts with a penchant for attack dogs and unnecessarily noisy cars.’

  It’s strange, isn’t it? A flag is only a bit of material fluttering in the breeze, but it’s seen all over the world as a powerful symbol of pride and history. Someone could have an iPhone 6 in his pocket and a Google Nest ‘smart home’ system indoors, but present him with a flag and he comes over all dewy-eyed and medieval. And it’s hard to see why, because the idea of a national emblem didn’t really get any traction until the middle of the eighteenth century.

  Yes, Denmark’s was around four hundred years before that, but Afghanistan has changed its national flag nearly two dozen times in the past hundred years. And how can the people of Romania get exercised about their flag when it’s exactly the same as Chad’s?

  You certainly need to be very careful when you’re in Canada, because its rules about the Maple Leaf are long and complicated. You can’t, for instance, use it to make a cushion or a seat cover. You can’t sign it or mark it in any way. And you are advised not to use it for decorative purposes.

  In India it’s even more complicated. The national flag may not be made from synthetic materials and can be used for carrying nothing except petals. And if you drop it in a puddle, then you have to go to prison for a year.

  Things are a bit different in Britain, of course. You can turn it into a T-shirt or a pair of knickers. You can write on it and, as the Sex Pistols demonstrated, use it to mock Mrs Queen.

  However, things get tricky if you want to actually put it on a flagpole, because then you are immersed in a world of bureaucracy, health, safety and planning permission issues. For example, you can fly a flag on the roof of your building but not – at least without consent – if you are already flying one from a pole projecting from the wall. It doesn’t say why.

  Furthermore, you can’t have a flagpole that is more than fifteen feet tall. And you can erect it only after you’ve convinced the local health and safety executive that nobody could be injured as a result. Quite how anyone could be injured by a flagpole, I don’t know, but those are the rules.

  You can, if you wish, drape an English flag from the window of your council house, but only if you are prepared to find yourself being taunted on the internet by various Labour politicians. And while you are allowed to burn your flag as a protest, you may be prosecuted if it’s made from synthetic materials, as they will give off a toxic smoke.

  The upshot is, then, that you can walk about London wrapped in an ISIS flag and you can use a Union Jack to wipe your bottom. A
nd if you fly it upside down, the only people who’ll complain are a few elderly pedants in Tunbridge Wells.

  But if you want to fly our national flag, the right way up, from the roof of your house, it’s not worth the bother.

  12 July 2015

  Spare me the 57 varieties of Angela who think they make a better ketchup

  Naturally, we are all very smug about the economic situation in continental Europe because in Britain everything is going jolly well. Or is it?

  We keep being told that unemployment is low because everyone has set up their own business. But what do these businesses do? Make nuclear reactors? Smelt iron ore? Deliver anti-submarine laser weapons into a geostationary orbit?

  I’m afraid not. Because so far as I can tell, every new business in Britain is selling extremely twee home-made tomato ketchup to country pubs.

  You must have noticed. You’ve ordered the beer-battered cod, which is served, according to the six-foot-square handwritten menu, with hand-cut, twice-cooked chips and a minted pea purée and, when it all arrives, you ask for some ketchup.

  It comes in a worryingly pretty little bottle with a ghastly hand-drawn trug-and-muddy-veg label, but you are assured that it really is ketchup and that it’s made locally by a lovely local woman called Angela, so you spoon the contents all over your food, which will immediately render everything you’ve ordered completely inedible.

  I admit, I am not even on nodding terms with the concept of cooking. To my smoke-addled tongue, fish tastes pretty much exactly the same as chicken. And red wine is indistinguishable from beer. But I do know this. No ketchup is a match for the real thing. And the real thing is made by Heinz.

  I appreciate that there are a lot of lovely and bored middle-aged women who’ve spent a lifetime becoming very good cooks. And I’m not surprised that when their children leave home, they feel the need to make a few quid from what is a labour of love. But why do these people think that they can make a better ketchup, on their kitchen table, than Heinz?

  Nobody looks at a pair of training shoes and thinks, ‘Hmmm. I reckon people would like a pair of home-made training shoes instead.’ Nobody has ever started a business selling home-made pencils. Or home-made telephones.

  We look at the iPhone and we think, ‘Hmmm. Even though I can buy all the components for this at my local electrical store, I’m fairly sure that if I tried to turn them into something that can receive pornography from space, it would be a disaster.’ And yet, people fork Heinz ketchup into their mouths and think, ‘I can make a nicer tomato sauce than this.’ Well, you can’t, so don’t.

  I therefore say this to the nation’s pub owners, if a well-to-do lady with expensive hair and summer frock comes flouncing into your establishment with a wicker basket full of stuff she’s made in her own kitchen, explain politely but firmly that you’re not interested.

  They don’t, though. They actually buy the stuff she’s made because they think it’s un-posh to serve stuff made by Heinz. Well, it isn’t. And it’s the same story with HP sauce. Nothing. Else. Will. Do. OK?

  Ask Richard Branson. He knows. In the early 1990s he was approached by a Canadian outfit that reckoned it had produced a drink that was even more zesty and refreshing than Coca-Cola. Now, you know and I know that this is impossible. On a hot day, or when you have a major-league hangover, there is simply nothing to rival a cold can of Coke. The black doctor in the red ambulance is what I call it.

  Sadly, however, Branson didn’t know this, so he invested a great deal of time, money and effort into launching Virgin Cola. He introduced it to America by arriving in New York’s Times Square on a tank. And he made it the beverage of choice on his aeroplanes and trains. And yet, despite all this huge marketing push, it flopped. ‘I consider our cola venture to be one of the biggest mistakes we ever made,’ he said.

  There are certain things in life – Google springs to mind here – that are nailed, things that are so good and so ingrained into the human psyche that nothing else will ever come close. And that brings me back to Heinz tomato ketchup and what I hope is a helpful idea to ensure the green shoots of Britain’s ketchup-based recovery continue to grow beyond next Tuesday.

  First of all, why tomatoes? If you must make a ketchup, why not use mushrooms? Such a thing is commercially available through a company called Geo Watkins, but you haven’t heard of that, have you? No, and neither has anyone else, so there’s an opening. Or, because mushroom ketchup does look a bit like diarrhoea, why not marrow ketchup? Or carrot ketchup? Or sweetcorn ketchup?

  Or why not make household-waste ketchup? Simply pour the contents of your under-the-sink bin into a vat of vinegar and lots of sugar and stir it all up until it has the texture of wallpaper paste. And then – here’s the really clever part of my plan – serve it in a bottle that harks backs to the Heinz original.

  We in Britain love stuff that doesn’t work. Red phone boxes. The original Mini. The House of Lords. And we miss having a sauce bottle that refuses to deliver its contents. It’s why we buy so many Gillette razors – because they come in a packet that can only be opened with Semtex.

  Today, Heinz sells its tomato ketchup in squeezy bottles, and that’s no good at all. We need glass bottles with a neck that is precisely two millimetres narrower than the width of the average kitchen knife. And the contents need to have a viscosity that enables them to sit completely still unless you hit the bottom of the bottle with a force slightly greater than the breaking point of the human trapezoid bone.

  This way, everyone can sit in country pubs, delighted that they are reliving the old days, shaking away at a bottle that will never give up its contents. And as a result never finding out that the sauce in the bottle is made from old teabags, some prawn shells and last night’s leftovers. Or paella, as the Spanish call it.

  19 July 2015

  Before you make a fool of yourself, Mr Midlife, try this for a real buzz

  By and large, we do not pour scorn on teenagers for having spots and sitting about all day being sullen and uncommunicative. We understand that in those difficult years their brains are being soused by more chemicals than you’d find in the evidence room at a Bogotá police station.

  And we know that it’s impossible to keep a bedroom tidy or have decent table manners when you are nothing more than a life-support system for your testicles.

  We are similarly tolerant of the elderly. We recognize that, as the crooked hand of winter casts its shadow in a person’s head, he or she is going to smell a bit and forget stuff. That’s why we don’t push old ladies out of our way on the pavement or laugh at old men for wearing zip-up slippers. Because we know that comfortable footwear is simply nature at work.

  And yet we seem to have no sympathy at all for a middle-aged chap who wakes up one morning and thinks instinctively, ‘Right. I must have an affair with my secretary and buy a Porsche.’

  When a woman of good character decides one day to go shoplifting, we sympathize. Or at least we should. Because she can’t help it. She is going through the menopause.

  It’s the same story with periods. Every twenty-eight days a woman becomes so mad and irrational she doesn’t even know she’s being mad and irrational. And if anyone suggests she is, she replies by shouting and swearing and throwing frying pans at your head. And we don’t get cross or impatient when this happens because it’s a fact of life.

  Well, so is a man’s midlife crisis. He knows that he is designed to have been eaten by a lion by the time he reaches forty-five, and that it’s only science and maths that are keeping him alive. He’s done everything he was created to do. He’s procreated and provided. And now? He’s just meat.

  To make matters worse, his children aren’t speaking to him. His parents are drooling into their Shackletons wingbacks, his wife is out shoplifting, he can hear the Reaper’s approach and he feels as though, if he’s going to be kicking around for a little while, he may as well use the bits of his body that haven’t stopped working.

  And when he does? Well,
the world turns on him and points the accusatory finger of love-rat condemnation.

  This is unkind. We are horrified that Alan Turing was chemically castrated to ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality. And today we would be appalled if anyone told a gay man to stop being gay. And yet it is socially acceptable to openly laugh at a fifty-year-old man who’s hurtling around the dancefloor at a techno club with his twenty-two-year-old secretary.

  He doesn’t want to be there. He hates modern music and his legs hurt. But he can’t help himself. And it’s not just the secretary thing either. When a middle-aged man goes to the barber and asks for a dramatic rug rethink, he knows he’s going to emerge from the shop looking absolutely ridiculous.

  Every fibre of his being is well aware of the fact that a thick, luxuriant barnet does not go well with a chicken-skin neck and droopy moobs, but his pant compass is saying, ‘Get a hair transplant.’ And it’s a message that cannot be easily ignored.

  I spend all day thinking that I should take up deep-sea diving. The call is powerful. I fancy myself down there in the deep, wrestling sea snakes and emerging from the surf looking like the hero in a Wilbur Smith book.

  And then I have guilt when I spend the day instead playing Solitaire on my computer and looking out of the window.

  The guilt is dreadful. It’s all-consuming sometimes. I know that the Reaper is on his horse and heading my way at a decent canter. I know I have only a short time left and that I should fill it with as much excitement as possible. But I get out of breath quickly, and if I’m no good at something after two minutes, I give up. Which smears the sense of guilt with a veneer of shame and regret.

  If I were a woman, I’d cheer myself up by stealing a ballpoint from W. H. Smith, but I’m not, which is why, last week, I went canoeing. I used to like canoeing. I was even quite good at it. But, I dunno, something seems to have happened in the past forty years so that after half a minute of paddling all I could think was: ‘Why doesn’t this bloody thing have an outboard engine?’