How Hard Can It Be? Page 6

  So why is it impossible to eat properly in Britain unless either you are in the middle of London or you are prepared to book six months in advance for a plate of vertical leaves drizzled with something odd? Why can’t someone open a restaurant in the provinces that serves bread, cheese, Branston pickle and some onions? Good, honest food for people who know how to use a lavatory and won’t slash all the seats.

  Sunday 11 May 2008

  A vicious Japanese loo ruined my ah so

  Superficially Japan is the most foreign, odd and complicated place this side of Jupiter’s third moon. Yet, strangely, every time I go there it’s like I’m being reunited with a long-lost twin brother.

  Think about it. It’s an overcrowded island nation that in recent history has enjoyed great power. What’s more, the Japanese have a fondness for good manners, bureaucracy and – when the chips are down – great cruelty. They drive on the correct side of the road. They have a royal family. And because they have built a society over thousands of years, they can tell where someone went to school, where they live and what their dreams and hopes are for the future simply by watching them hold a chopstick. In the same way, we know everything about a person if we discover they have a set of serviette rings.

  There’s more. We used to laugh when Clive James showed us those Japanese game shows in which contestants were made to eat slugs and go to work with their underpants full of stick insects. ‘How weird,’ we thought. But then, just a few years later, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was sitting up to her neck in a vat of maggots.

  I’ve been terrified recently that we in Britain have been sliding towards the American system, with our malls and our enormous bottoms. I’d much rather we had continued to walk in step with the Japanese, who are now so civilized that they have a system on the roads where the bus driver lets the car go first and you are allowed to smoke pretty much everywhere. As I enjoyed a cigarette and a beer with a group of friends in a Tokyo bar last week I thought how much more wonderful Britain would be if we adopted a similar policy.

  Perhaps because of this relaxed attitude, Japanese people can expect to live longer than anyone else on Earth. Like the French and the Icelanders, who also smoke a lot and eat well, they have a good chance of reaching 100. It’s only slaves to the American way who drop dead in a gym, aged six.

  There is, however, one aspect of Japanese life that is neither similar to the system we have in Britain nor something we should covet: going to the lavatory. This is a fairly standard procedure over much of the globe. Except in Germany, where you are invited to inspect your stools with a lollipop stick before flushing them away. Unfortunately, though, the Japanese have examined the simple water closet and decided that it could be improved with some electronics. The result, I’m afraid, is a disaster.

  It’s why the Japanese economy is now in such a mess: all their top people and scientists are stuck in their bathrooms, unable to wipe their bottoms.

  First of all the seat is warmed – and there is no way for the round-eye to know this, which means I had to sit there imagining the heat had come from the lorry driver who’d been the last person to use the motorway service-station cubicle. This is unnerving. Soon I became convinced that it was possible to catch encephalitis from the latent heat of a Japanese lorry driver’s bottom.

  Wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible, I turned and discovered to my horror that the loo roll had been replaced with what can only be described as the Starship Enterprise’s dashboard. And it was all in Japanese. The first button I pushed, with a trembly finger, made the seat get even warmer. Realizing that unless I acted quickly I’d be cooked, I stabbed at another button – which made a gout of liquid nitrogen shoot up my bottom. So hurriedly, and in great pain, I turned a hopeful-looking knob that simply redirected the fountain into my scrotum. In a state of some distress I pushed a slider control all the way down and immediately got a pretty good idea of what it might be like accidentally to impale yourself on the fuel rod from a nuclear power station. I was now in real trouble.

  And I didn’t understand why. Who would want to steam-clean their nether regions? Who wants a lavatory seat that can reach the same temperature as a barbecue? And, conversely, who gets up in the morning and thinks: ‘I know, I’ll stop off at the Brue Boar services this morning and deep-freeze my testicles’?

  Which brings me on to the next question. Why is it necessary to have directional control for the fountain of fire and ice? I can understand why a lady might need – and even enjoy – such a feature. But for chaps it’s jolly painful.

  And then there’s the problem with the flush. The first button I pressed filled the cubicle with karaoke tunes. The second started the tap in the corner. It wasn’t till I got to the sub-menu in the eighth quadrant that I was treated to the sound of water being sucked away.

  Unfortunately it was just the recording of a flush being played through the WC’s speaker system. Am I missing something here? I can think of no reason anyone might want to convince people in neighbouring cubicles that they are flushing the bog when in fact they are not. And why would you want to play this sound at a volume that could kill bats? Because, trust me, you can.

  Finally I leant over the unit to see if there was a conventional handle, and somehow while doing this I made a jet of water squirt into my crotch. Which meant I eventually emerged from the cubicle looking as though I hadn’t bothered to lower my trousers. Everyone in the restaurant laughed at my misfortune. And once again I felt very much at home.

  Sunday 25 May 2008

  Argh! I’ve fallen into a speed trap

  On many occasions, the organizers of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, which is held in a field near Wales every year, have invited me to go along and give a talk. And on an equal number of occasions, I’ve said no. There’s a good reason for this. You might imagine that Hay is a lovely day out for all the family, a chance for children to meet the authors they love and, conversely, an opportunity for writers to meet the people who actually read their books.

  Of course, it’s no such thing. Mainly it’s a chance for ramblers and hippies to gather in a field and convince themselves that everyone thinks the same way that they do. In essence, it’s a competition each year to see who can dream up the most organically idiotic way of cleaning their teeth. Cow manure or nettles. The great debate.

  Then there are the attractions. There’s lots of movement and dance, a carbon gym and plenty of unnecessarily funky capital letters from the 2FaCeD DaNcE workshop. This year the Guardian had even built a House of Hay (geddit) out of what in Farringdon Road would undoubtedly pass for hay, but was, in fact, straw. It’d be an ideal building material for people who like rats and want to have breathing difficulties.

  I have always thought that if I went along they’d pull my hair and steal my milk in the playground. But this year, with Boris in London’s hot seat, a Tory looking after Crewe and Gordon scoring nought in the opinion polls, I figured – wrongly, as it turned out – I’d be safe. So I fired up the SUV and said: ‘Come on, kids. Let’s go and laugh at the lefties. It’ll be fun.’

  Annoyingly, the organizers had not sent any directions for those who were coming by road. Instead, we were told to use something called a train that would take us to Hereford – 20 miles shy of the books. If you didn’t fancy this, you could come by coach. There were two options. A six-day trek from London via every market town in the land. Or an even longer journey from Bradford to Worcester, which is listed in my road map as being ‘nowhere near Hay-on-Wye’. What you were supposed to do if you were coming from Crewe, it didn’t say. Stay at home and watch Tom Clancy films on your plasma, probably.

  To get around the festival itself, shuttle buses were provided. And, of course, these were very publicly running on biodiesel. Or, as I like to call it, a poor man’s lunch. If you didn’t fancy assuaging your middle-class guilt with that, you could use a bicycle, and three people had done just that. But because it was raining heavily, most had simply come in their stupid litt
le eco-Fiat cars and turned 84 per cent of the surrounding countryside into a quagmire. Green? No, more a soupy Ypres brown, in fact.

  Inside the tented village, many of the organizers were wearing tie-dye. One chap was sporting a kaftan. Beards were everywhere, and everyone was squelching around in sturdy shoes from the Street-Porter range. It looked like a scene from the Haight-Ashbury happy-clappy handbook on bonkers living.

  But no. Behind the scenes, there was trouble afoot. Because the festival is now sponsored in part by a bank, and because all bankers, obviously, are the spawn of Satan, there’s now a rival festival a mile or so down the road. This event, organized by someone calling herself the Poet, had invited Arthur Scargill to speak while the assembled druids ate bits of dirt from their smocks and mocked people at the real Hay festival.

  So far, then, no books had actually made an appearance, but this came as no surprise since it is written that when one or two socialists come together they will immediately forget about the common goal and start squabbling over who’s got the most environmentally friendly yurt. It’s the Judaean People’s Front all over again.

  To try to give my children a taste of what life might have been like if their mum and dad had been lunatics, we bought them an ice cream made from sheep’s milk. Nutritionally, they’d have been better off licking Arthur Scargill’s hair. We did at least run into the children’s author Georgia Byng, who took my youngest daughter’s mind off the shit sheep ice cream.

  My talk seemed to go quite well. The tent was full of families who’d paid £15 a ticket, none of which comes to me, incidentally; and so, in return, I tried to give them all a laugh – which they were unlikely to get from the ice cream or the Mexican diplomat’s lecture on his conservation project to save the Latin American monarch butterfly.

  But with each answer, I was inadvertently signing my own death warrant. There I was, jokily telling all the small boys in the audience that I’d once done 186 mph through the Limehouse Link in London, and that speed limits are for the weak. And backstage it was all being moulded by the eco-greens into a howling, sack-the-idiot press release.

  I probably will be, and it’s my own silly fault. I never saw it coming. I was expecting them to burn a pile of my books; I was ready for George Monbiot to leap on stage and arrest me for having a patio heater. I’d even taken a change of clothing in case a fat woman, full of root vegetables and hate, shoved a custard pie in my face again. It never occurred to me that I’d been invited specifically to shoot myself in the face.

  Top Gear is back on your screens in three weeks. It’ll be hosted by Bill Oddie and will feature lots of movement and dance. And how you can make a car out of straw.

  Sunday 1 June 2008

  It’s just a dumb animal, Mr Oddie

  It seems that Bill Oddie’s fluffy Springwatch television programme has been in a spot of bother because it keeps showing pictures of animals and birds doing sex. Well, obviously I’m not especially given to defending the twitching weird beard but, honestly, all that birds and animals do is eat, sleep and mate. If you take the rumpy-pumpy out of the equation, what’s left?

  You can’t even show them having lunch these days because a bird wrenching a worm from the ground would have vegetablists putting the producer’s name on an internet hit list. Anyway, the sparrow porn, the rampant carnivorism and the ducky gangbangs are not the problem. No. It’s the awful syrupy way that all nature’s little creatures are judged and measured by human standards.

  We are shown some footage of daddy swallow tenderly picking each of his little babies from the nest … and dropping them on to the floor, where they will gasp for a bit, in great pain, and then die. It’s presented as though we are watching Josef Fritzl, but we are not. We are watching an ounce of feathers and bone killing its kids, not because it’s stupid or psychopathic but because it’s a bird. Are we supposed to think that all swallows kill their kids? Isn’t that a bit like saying all human men wander about town centres at night stabbing one another with screwdrivers?

  By all means tell me that a swallow can fly all the way from Africa and find the same barn in Norfolk that it left six months earlier. That is amazing. Or find one that can’t. Because that would be hysterical. But do not try to convince me that swallows have some great intelligence that we humans lack. Because they don’t.

  It’s much the same story with dolphins. Time and time again, nature presenters portray them as bright. But compared with what – a table lamp? A lobster? The fact is this: my dishwasher, by any measure, has a greater power of reasoning.

  And anyway if it’s suggested that a swallow could write a book if only it had hands, or build a box-girder bridge if you gave it a spanner, then when we see it indulging in infanticide, we will feel duty-bound to come round to the Springwatch bird box and wring its cruel and vindictive little neck.

  Of course, we can get sentimental about animals. I like my dogs very much. Sometimes I talk to them as though they are my children. I’ve even trained them to fetch sticks and sit down. In other words, I’ve attempted to make them more human. But this is futile because they are not human. I know this because they spend most of their day in the paddocks eating horse shit. When they’ve had their fill, they come into the house and vomit on to every flat surface they can find. This has caused a great many arguments between my wife and me since we made a deal when the real children were young that I’d deal with the sick and she’d deal with the poo. I maintain, on this basis, that although the horse poo has come out of the dog’s mouth and is therefore technically vomit, it is not. And that she must therefore clear it up. Normally, we end up taking out our rage on the dogs.

  This is unfair. They do not know that if they must heave out the contents of their stomachs they should try to avoid the Bukhara rugs. A dog knows to bark at burglars and to be doe-eyed and sweet when you tickle its tummy; but don’t get confused – it has no concept of Pakistani hand-knotted silks.

  You see the problem. Because Oddie tells us that badgers are sweet and swallows are clever, we are unable to react properly when they vomit on our furniture or eat our children. Some people are so confused by the heart-wrenching nature of nature programmes that they have descended into madness and become vegetarians.

  They point at me with hate in their eyes because I’ve killed a pheasant. But it’s not a pheasant. It’s lunch. What’s more, I’ll shoot any fox that breaks into my chicken coop and attempts to destroy my breakfast factory. And I’ll stop only if one day foxy-woxy turns up with a bigger gun than mine.

  Every time an Australian gets washed up on Bondi beach with one leg and half his head missing, there’s always some shaggy-haired dopehead on the news saying the great white that attacked the poor soul was only being a shark. Absolutely. And we’re only being human, which is why we’re throwing hand grenades at the bloody thing.

  The best way, I reckon, to cure people of their soft-focus, teary-eyed view of animals is to get them to imagine a nature programme made by dogs about humans. What would they make of people who collect stamps? Or people who ride motorcycles? Or vicars? Or people who devote their whole lives to helping others? How many hours would they devote to the fact that the most powerful people on earth now face the choice of electing as their leader a black man with a vision but no policies or someone who’s so old that he needs to have his food mashed? They’d find us as strange as we, by rights, should find them.

  And what on earth would Rover Attenborough say when he happened upon Kate Humble? ‘Look at this one. She’s adorable. Talented. Funny. And very cute. So what the bloody hell is she doing on television with a fat, hairy man who won’t shut up, gets off on stag beetles having sex and becomes all sentimental when a swallow doesn’t follow the Daily Mail’s instructions on being a good dad?’

  Sunday 8 June 2008

  Swim with sharks – it’s easy money

  Not that long ago it was very hard to make big lumps of money. You had to learn Latin, grow a side parting, wear a suit, play squash, do acc
ountancy and get up extremely early in the morning. Friends had to be stabbed in the back and children ignored. Then along came the Greater London Authority, which, we’re told, was a fountain of cash. It seems that all you had to do to get a huge grant was call Ken’s Kremlin and explain that, as a Muslim polar bear, you were very concerned about the melting ice caps, the slave trade, Fairtrade potato crisps and, er, nuclear proliferation, and immediately your piggy bank would burst.

  Sadly, though, when Boris took over, the gravy train for lunatics was halted and it looked as though the terminally lazy might have to go back to rubbing scratch cards or applying for a slot on Britain Doesn’t Appear to Have Any Discernible Talent.

  There’s more grim news. When the government announced it was thinking of locking up men with beards for forty-two days, some people suggested that anyone who was not subsequently charged would be entitled to £3,000 a night for every night beyond twenty-eight days’ detention. Excellent. You simply grow some facial hair and stroll into Terminal 5 with some wires poking out of your shoes, and Bob’s your sugar daddy. You get three meals a day, a smorgasbord of drugs and you walk away after six weeks with £42,000 in your trousers.

  Unfortunately, the whole forty-two-day thing now seems likely to be a dead duck, but don’t despair, because how’s this for a money-making idea? Simply go on a scuba-diving holiday and get lost. Obviously, you don’t want to be getting, ahem, ‘separated from the dive boat’ in Norway. Or in a gravel pit in Wakefield. It’s best to go to a place where the sea is warm. This will make your ‘ordeal’ quite comfortable. And as an added bonus there will be sharks, which will sound great after you’ve been miraculously rescued and your story is appearing in Hello! magazine.