And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 6

  Not really, no.

  Sunday 9 May 2004

  Noises off can turn a man into a murderer

  On Thursday a group of hot-air fanatics floated seven enormous balloons over the centre of Birmingham and, as dawn broke, drenched the city with music that had been specially composed to change the way people sleep.

  I should imagine that the change was profound. Instead of waking up dreamily at about seven or eight o’clock, it seems entirely likely that the city’s 2 million inhabitants were out of their beds at 6.30 a.m., wondering what harebrained lunatic had sanctioned such a thing.

  That these balloonists lived to reach land shows the people of Birmingham to be exceptionally tolerant. If the Sky Orchestra had bombed my house with its ‘audio landscape’ at dawn, I would have shot its members out of the sky.

  I do not mind if something makes a noise while engaged in a pursuit that is practical and useful. People, for instance, who buy houses near Heathrow and then whinge about aeroplane noise need to be larched.

  I also despair at those who complain about low-flying RAF jets. One farmer in Wales became so fed up with the sound of the man-made thunder that he wrote ‘piss off Biggles’ on the roof of his house. Happily, every fly boy went over there for a look-see.

  And as for the man who complained last week that Paul McCartney’s rehearsals at the Millennium Dome were too loud: come on, mate. Complain about ‘Ebony and Ivory’ by all means, but don’t complain about an event that brings life to Tony Blair’s great white elephant.

  It’s the same story with traffic noise and the din made by farmers when it is time to harvest the crops. These are simply by-products of the modern age. I don’t even mind other people’s mobile phones, unless they’re using the Nokia ring tone.

  What I cannot abide, however, are people whose hobbies are solely designed to make a noise. I’m talking about born-again motorbikers who come to the countryside on a sunny Sunday specifically to make as much racket as possible. One day I will silence them by stretching a piece of cheese wire across the road.

  I’m also talking about campanologists who wait for the country to have a monumental hangover before polluting the Sunday morning stillness with their infernal bells.

  Why? If God thinks getting a bunch of beardies to play ‘Home Sweet Home’ on six tons of brass at seven in the morning is a sensible way of summoning his flock, he can get lost. It’s all very well banging on about peace and love, but what I want on a Sunday is a bit of peace and quiet.

  I wouldn’t mind, but church congregations are now so small that everyone would fit in the vicar’s Ford Fiesta. So why doesn’t he pop round to pick up everyone personally? And quietly. No leaning on your horn like an idle minicab driver, thanks very much.

  I also think it’s about time that something was done about microlights. Sure, an RAF jet is much louder, but by the time you’ve got back on to your chair, it’s already knocking people over in Cornwall. A microlight, on the other hand, struggles to make headway in even the gentlest of breezes so it just sits above your garden all day.

  I think it’s fine for people to have their own aircraft but I would impose a minimum speed limit up there of, let’s say, 600 mph. This minimises the inconvenience for those of us on the ground.

  That’s a simple solution. What’s not simple is what I should do about the blackbird that has nested in the eaves, just six inches from my pillow.

  This morning its chicks woke me at 5.20 and I spent the next two hours trying to think of what might be done.

  My wife suggests that we get a cat, but this is impossible because I hate the way their bottoms look like dishcloth holders. Mostly, though, I hate them because they give me asthma, which would keep me awake even more than the birds.

  It would be much easier to blow the nest, and everything in it, to kingdom come with my 12-bore. Yet I cannot bring myself to do that. I’m not even certain it’s legal.

  It probably is legal to remove the nest gently and put it in the dustbin. But, again, it seems wrong. Weird, isn’t it? I would enjoy beheading a biker but I cannot bring myself to kill five baby blackbirds.

  I thought about taking a leaf out of the Birmingham Sky Orchestra’s book and bombarding them through the night with old prog rock from a Sony Walkman, in the hope that they would sleep during the day.

  But I’m told that baby blackbirds aren’t like baby people and that this won’t work. Nor will milk laced with heroin, apparently.

  So what I’m going to do is feed them with lots of grain until they’re really fat.

  Then I shall drown them in armagnac. And then, after they’ve been in the Aga for eight minutes, I shall pop them into a baked potato and eat them.

  It’s called payback and, if it works, I shall try the same thing with the bell-ringers.

  Sunday 16 May 2004

  The lusty lads have left me feeling exposed

  It’s easy for women. When they are in the newsagent’s at a railway station they can buy pretty much any magazine that takes their fancy, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to read it on the forthcoming train journey.

  Woman and Home. Home and Garden. Garden and Hair. Hair and Beauty. Beauty and Slimming. Slimming and Slimmers. Slim Women. Slim Home. Slim Garden. Slim Hair.

  They’re all fine.

  It’s not so easy for a man. We know we should pick up The Spectator or a book on Victorian poetry because this will make us appear sensitive and clever. And yet, what we really want is to spend the journey looking at naked Australian surfers, especially if they have been the victims of shark attacks.

  That means buying a lads’ mag, which used to be fine. But now, unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to do such a thing, not if you want to read it in public.

  The first time I saw a photograph of someone who had been eaten by a shark, I was pretty impressed. The second time was enjoyable too; but now, thanks to the proliferation of the lads’ mags, I’m bored witless by South African lifeguards who have lost their torsos.

  Shark attack photos have been the staple diet of men’s magazines since they arrived on the scene, 10 years ago. But with the launch, and apparent success, of Zoo and Nuts, which are weeklies, the old monthlies have had to up the ante a bit.

  With a circulation of 600,000 or so, FHM, the biggest seller, has the most to lose, so this month you can feast your eyes on a cow with two extra legs growing out of its neck, and a man who was born with his head on back to front. Also, there is a horse-shaped boy, a bloke with testicles the size of prize-winning pumpkins and a man with what appears to be a sack of red potatoes growing out of his face.

  Fine, but this kind of stuff doesn’t really work on a train. I mean, it is hard to savour the shots of a man with elephantiasis when you have a stranger who may be a nun sitting next to you.

  And it is no good turning the page because whoa, it’s a double-page spread of Abi Titmuss wearing nothing but a sheen of baby oil.

  This is another problem. In the early days of lads’ mags, it wasn’t hard to find someone from a soap opera or the pop charts who, for a small fee, would appear in the centre pages, wearing nothing but a swimming costume. But now, with paparazzi on every beach in the world, the tabloid newspapers and celebrity glossies can quench our thirst for shots of G-list celebrities in their G-strings. So the lads’ mags have to go further.

  That frightens away serious actresses from Casualty and Coronation Farm and means we are left to gawp at girls who once went out with someone who sold a dog to someone who lives next door to Richard and Judy.

  This week, for instance, Zoo has printed a picture of Lisa Snowdon’s bottom. Who is Lisa Snowdon? I have absolutely no idea. Nuts, meanwhile, has pics of Anoushka and Steph who, we are told, are presenters on MTV.

  Would you read Asian Babes on the train? Would you pull out the Playboy centrefold and nod appreciatively? Precisely. And it’s no different with Anoushka and Steph, even though, it turns out, they have been to a 40th birthday party, hosted by someo
ne called Shane Richie.

  So this brings us back to the newsagent’s at the railway station and the quandary of what to buy.

  GQ has columns by Boris Johnson and Peter Mandelson, which gives it an upmarket, serious feel, but there are visual landmines in there, too. You turn the page expecting to find a piece on starvation in Africa, but oh no, it’s Kate Winslet’s thrupennies, and the nun’s giving you daggers.

  So what about the New Statesman? Well, yes, but it pretty much guarantees that you’ll wake up in Wakefield, 200 miles from your intended stop, with a bit of dribble hanging down from the side of your mouth.

  Specialist publications do have a certain allure. Sit on a train reading What Computer? or Autocar and you can be pretty much assured that nobody will sit next to you. The downside, of course, is that you will have to read What Computer? or Autocar.

  All specialist publications assume the reader knows as much about the subject as the staff. I recently bought a home cinema magazine and there was not one single word that made any sense at all.

  Socially, it is possible to buy a magazine such as Arena or Wallpaper* but it’s hard to work out what they are about. Mostly, they seem to be full of rather trendy people leaning on bicycles in alleyways, and they are not what you’d call funny – which brings me to the solution.

  Being British, and male, we may like reading about gardening or food, and we do have an extraordinary appetite for television listings magazines. But what we like most of all is a damn good laugh.

  This means that when I get to a railway station I always buy the two funniest magazines you’ll find anywhere in the world: Viz and Private Eye.

  Sunday 23 May 2004

  Mobile phones that do everything – except work

  After Margaret Thatcher announced she’d be privatising water, she probably thought there was nothing left to sell. But there was – the air.

  Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were quick to realise this and so, in 2000, they sold it at auction to a group of multinational companies for a whopping £22 billion.

  Now those multinationals are selling it back to us in the shape of third-generation (3G) mobile phones that allow you to check prices on the Italian stock exchange, email naked girls in Vietnam, watch the BBC news, and remind you that next Saturday is your wedding anniversary.

  In essence, if you buy one of these phones, you are getting a Filofax, a television, a cinema, a portal to the internet, a computer, a video camera and a photograph album. Great, but is it necessary?

  My mobile phone man tells me that, according to his accounts, only 3 per cent of his customers use their current phones for sending photographs. So why should anyone, apart from Rebecca Loos, want a 3G phone that lets you talk, face to face, on a video link?

  On Tomorrow’s World years ago, Raymond Baxter told us that such a thing was possible. So did Judith Haan. And so did Philippa Forrester. But video calls never caught on, because we use the phone primarily for lying and it is much harder to tell porkies when you’re being watched.

  So why, if we don’t want video phones at home, might we want them when we are out and about? And how long do you suppose the battery will last?

  What’s worse is that you still won’t be able to use the phones as phones because, as has always been the way with mobiles – except the Nokia 6310 – people on the other end sound like Daleks and, just before you have a chance to sign off, the call will end. So you have to ring back just to say goodbye.

  It is easy to see what is going on here. Having spent a Nasa-sized fortune on the radio waves to handle all this data, the mobile phone industry is attempting space travel before it can walk.

  When the motor car was invented, people did not sit around, wondering how a washing machine and a tumble drier could be attached to the back. They honed it and refined it. Only now, 100 years down the line, are we seeing the fitting of extras such as television screens and satellite navigation.

  This is plainly not happening with mobiles. Last year, I bought my wife a Sony Ericsson Something Or Other for about £1 million. It turned out to be a fantastic personal organiser and video game console, but for speaking to other people she might as well have used a chair leg.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the man in the shop, when I complained. ‘That particular model isn’t very good.’

  Not very good! For the past 12 months, she’s rung me up, we’ve said ‘What?’ at the top of our voices a lot and then, when she’s inadvertently moved more than two inches from a base station, the line’s gone dead.

  I have a Motorola that has several thousand features, all of which are jolly useful, I’m sure. But the speaker is so quiet, I can’t even hear the beeps and static coming from my wife’s Sony. The damn thing would make Brian Blessed sound like a hamster.

  It will have to go, which means the two hours I spent reading the instruction manual will have been a waste of time, and now I’ll have to spend another two hours reading a booklet about whatever I buy instead. But I don’t have time to do that because I’m in the middle of the book about my wireless internet. Honestly, that’s all I read these days – instruction books for gadgets that don’t work.

  What I want from a cooker is the ability to cook food. What I want from a washing machine is the ability to make clothes clean. And what I want from a phone is the ability to speak with someone else without them thinking I’m the love child of an unusual relationship between Stephen Hawking and Telstar.

  I want a telephone that is full of telephone technology, not cameras and internets. I want it to be a Ryanair-no-frills phone. A Ronseal communicator that does only what it says on the tin. In other words, I don’t want it to stop working every time I go behind a tree.

  I’m not kidding. My phone cuts off – at least I think it does; it’s so quiet, I can’t be sure – where the M40 meets the M25. This is not the middle of the Gobi Desert. It’s not the bottom of the Mariana trench.

  Predictably, health and safety is the problem here. The reason why our phones are so useless as communicators is because if they were more powerful they’d fry our heads.

  Fair enough, so how’s this for a plan? When we go abroad, our phones hook up to whichever service provider has the strongest signal at that time. So why can’t they do that when we’re at home? When I’m in Devon, where Orange is strong, I want to talk via Orange; and when I’m in London, where Vodafone provides the best coverage, I want to use Vodafone. Is that impossible?

  Technically, the answer is no. But financially it’s ‘difficult’, so we’re stuck with phones that shtwang lang. krzzzzz. Hello. Hello, hello…

  Sunday 30 May 2004

  We really have to draw a line under tattoos

  As the rugby World Cup drew near, Jonny Wilkinson upped his training regime a notch. He was at the ground 12 hours a day for six days a week so that when the big day came he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, miss.

  David Beckham seems to have taken a rather different approach as he prepares for the forthcoming Euro 2004 football tournament. Instead of wasting his time at the training camp, he has got himself another tattoo. His tenth, apparently.

  Worryingly, it didn’t seem to do him much good last week when England were held to a one-all draw by a Subbuteo team of Japanese little people.

  But then it’s hard to see how a tattoo might improve anyone’s footballing skills.

  In fact, it’s hard to see the point of a tattoo at all.

  I remember, when I was a local newspaper reporter in the late 1970s, writing a piece about unemployment in the wake of some strike or other. One interviewee told me he had all the right qualifications but was always rejected after an interview. He couldn’t see why, but I could. It was the enormous spider’s web that had been tattooed on his face.

  There was a time when a tattoo would demonstrate that you had been in the nick or the navy, but now pretty well everyone I ever see has what looks like a huge Harley-Davidson motif peeping out of their trousers.

  Has Camilla Parker Bowles got a gia
nt eagle with a man’s skull eating a snake on her backside? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

  No, wait. Actually I would be surprised because despite the notable exception of Lord Lichfield, who has a seahorse on his arm, and Sir Winston Churchill’s mother, who had a snake round her wrist, tattooing is still very Club Yob. It’s still the preserve of pole dancers and people with England flags fluttering from their car aerials. Abs, formerly from the band Five, has a tattoo on his nipple and I think that says it all.

  Of course, when I was 16 I fancied the notion of having a small red Che Guevara-style red star permanently etched into my left buttock.

  I didn’t, for two reasons. First, the law states that you can’t get a tattoo unless you are drunk. That’s why 18 is the minimum age.

  Second, a tattoo artist once ran his needle over my forearm to show me just what a painless experience it was. He was lying. It felt like I was being stabbed in slow motion.

  What would I have ended up with? Aids, probably, and a smudge on my bottom. What’s the point of that? Why endure all the pain and expense when you’ll have something that you’ll never see. That’s like manhandling a giant Bukhara rug all the way back from Uzbekistan and then using it to carpet your loft.

  You see these people, in Heat magazine usually, with half a yard of gothic symbolism plastered all over their back and you think: Do you hang your curtains pattern-side out for the neighbours to admire?

  There are other problems, too. Tattooing has been around since the dawn of time, but if we examine the work of all the great artists – Leonardo da Vinci, van Gogh, Monet – we find they would apply their skill and dexterity to just about any surface: walls, ceilings, canvas, paper. But not the human body.