If You'd Just Let Me Finish Page 6
Later, as I was being revived, a local man – I’m in Australia – asked me to try some of the honey he’d made. He puts his hives near the karri tree, which flowers only once every eight to ten years. And I have to say that it was the second-nicest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.
‘You have expensive taste,’ he said with a smile. ‘That stuff costs about £1 a gram.’
And that’s when the thought hit me. A man enters his midlife crisis because he has been plodding along in the same direction for thirty years and he starts to believe that, unless he does something radically different, he will waste the extra time that science and maths have granted him.
Normally, what he does to relieve the pressure is try to recapture his lost youth. But instead he should welcome the onset of autumn by embracing the future. In short, he should get a hat and take up beekeeping.
It’s gentle, sedate and harmless and, if you place your hives near some kind of exotic bush – bees may have a reputation for hard work but they are fundamentally lazy and will go to the nearest flower to their house – you end up with a honey that you can sell for a great deal of money.
There’s a dignity to that. Which is what makes it better than spending the rest of your days trying to keep up with your new wife, who’s nineteen.
26 July 2015
Splints, tick. Crutches, tick. Stuff health and safety, tick. Let the holiday begin
Judging by the absence of traffic on London’s roads, you’re all currently on holiday, which means that fairly soon you will be overcome with an uncontrollable urge to injure yourself. Many of you will do this by going water-skiing. Others will choose to be towed behind a speedboat on an enormous banana.
Well, you go right ahead, but don’t come crying to me when you arrive home on crutches, or in a box, or with a bottom so full of water that you could double up as a fish tank.
Water-skiing is like snow-skiing. Professionals make it look so easy that after a couple of bottles of wine you too think you could do it. But here’s the thing. It’s not easy and soon you will have a dislocated hip.
Being on an enormous banana is very easy. So easy that after just a few moments you will decide to try to turn it over. Nobody does this when they are watching television at home, or when they are sitting in a restaurant.
Nobody thinks, ‘I wonder if I can make this chair fall over?’ But put them on an enormous banana and almost straightaway they will start to rock violently from side to side until over they go. And then they are in a hospital with a head wound.
What’s really odd is that the need to try to turn the banana over becomes particularly irresistible when you are sharing the ride with your children. They’re sitting there, bouncing up and down and squeaking with delight, and you’re at the back, thinking that it’d be much better if you put them in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.
I was in Australia last week and every morning lots of people with Tarzan hair and ankle bracelets ran down the beach and leapt into the sea with their surfboards.
Within an hour most of them were in a shark, and those who weren’t were back on the beach with a skeleton that wasn’t joined up any more.
And I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why do you do this? Why spend a lovely sunny day putting yourself in harm’s way?’
If you keep going round the globe, you eventually reach New Zealand. And here things are even worse because as soon as you are off the plane you will feel compelled to jump off a bridge, trusting that the organizer, who may or may not be a little bit stoned, has tied the bungee rope properly.
And if by some miracle you survive this ordeal by gravity, you’ll climb into an enormous see-through ball and ask someone to push you off a cliff. It’s extraordinary. You’ve sat in an aeroplane for more than two days to reach New Zealand and as soon as you get there you decide to become a paraplegic.
It’s not just summer holidays either where we crave a spot of light paralysis for ourselves and our families.
On a weekend break in December many parents will take their children ice skating. It all sounds very idyllic: ruddy-faced kids whizzing about, mittens on strings, and the public-address system playing a selection of heart-warming carols. But do you know why they play carols at ice rinks? It’s to mask the screams coming from the first-aid room.
Well, that’s what it says on the door. Because ‘first-aid room’ suggests it’s full of nothing but a plump nurse with a cupboard full of sticking plasters and aspirin. But if you step through the door, it’s like going into the aftermath of an alien attack. There are limbless corpses everywhere and the walls are papered with flesh.
What’s the matter with Monopoly? Or chess? Or if you want to get some fresh air, a spot of homoerotic volleyball? Oh, and there’s another thing.
Why does everyone these days want to do a parachute jump? If you want to raise money for charity, which is the usual impetus, why not sell jam or do a sponsored walk? Why jump out of an aeroplane?
I have never jumped out of an aeroplane, and I never will. I’m sure it’s a rush, standing by the door, plucking up the courage to take one last step. But after that it will be a few seconds of pure terror with a choice of two possible outcomes. Either you end up back at the airfield where you started in one piece. Or you end up back at the airfield where you started with a broken ankle.
I definitely can’t understand why someone who has jumped out of an aeroplane and not broken their ankle would want to do it again. Because that’s like going to a casino and betting constantly on red. It’s a statistical certainty, bound by the laws of probability, that one day you’re going to lose.
And yet here we all are in the summer holidays, scattered to all four corners of the globe, water-skiing and jet-biking and trying our hands at stuff for which our office-bound minds are completely unprepared. And why? Why are we risking so much for a momentary thrill?
Well, it’s because of those signs in shopping centres that tell us the floor is slippery when wet. And it’s because of George Osborne’s high-visibility jacket. And it’s because of labelling on food.
It’s because we live our day-to-day lives in a big cotton-wool ball, with handrails to stop us falling over and new roundabouts to make sure we aren’t knocked off our bicycles.
All this health and safety flies in the face of everything that makes us human – our playfulness, our need to explore strange new worlds and cut our knees occasionally.
Which is why, for two glorious weeks every year, we can fling off our socks and ride motorcycles in shorts and drink too much alcohol and eat too much food. Will we get a fatty liver and a broken leg as a result? Yup. Do we care? Nope.
Because soon we will be back at the airport, not being allowed to take any liquids on the plane in case we moisturize the pilot to death.
2 August 2015
This will relax you, said the prison yoga teacher as she pulled my leg off
Back in the summer it was decided by various people with serious faces and stethoscopes around their necks that I needed a complete break, and they weren’t talking about two weeks in the sun, with a book and a million cocktail parties every night. They were talking about a whole month in the Stone Age.
They said very sternly that after dealing with the stresses of a dying mother and the BBC television chief Danny Cohen and a lost job and a million other things besides, I was about to become a drooling vegetable, and that I must go immediately to a prison where there would be no contact at all with the outside world.
I readily agreed because in my mind this ‘prison’ would actually be a businessman’s retreat, filled with Scandinavian furniture and half-naked Vietnamese women who’d spend all day smearing my eyes with cucumber juice and rubbing my feet with warm stones.
It wasn’t. In fact, it was an actual prison. Cell blocks. Shared dormitories. Guards. Razor wire. And to fill the yawning chasm between the 5 a.m. roll call and 10 p.m. lights out, hours and hours of what I’ve now decided is the absolute worst thing in the worl
d – yoga.
You may have heard from people who admire Jeremy Corbyn and go to Goa for their holidays that it’s wonderfully relaxing and an excellent way to stay in shape. But it’s neither of those things, I can assure you.
First of all, an instructor with the voice of a mouse and National Geographic magazine centre-spread breasts invites you to lie on the floor in a room full of whale song that is played at exactly the volume necessary to make her instructions inaudible.
Occasionally you pick up a snippet in which she is saying, very softly, that you should adopt a position called the downward dog, or the pigeon or the crow, and you have no clue what any of this means. Of course you don’t. Yoga is designed to be unfathomable, like golf, so that old hands can roll their eyes when a new boy mistakes the pigeon for the crow. Or accidentally becomes a dog.
The only way, really, of knowing what you’re supposed to be doing is by looking across to see what your neighbour’s up to, but I don’t recommend this, as the position they’ve adopted is almost always either impossible or disgusting. Once, I noticed the woman next to me had cut herself in half and was using her tongue as a set of shoelaces.
My biggest problem, however, is that my body can only really be body-shaped. Lying on my tummy with my legs pulled over my head so that I look like a treble clef is therefore extremely uncomfortable. This is why I spent the first ten minutes grimacing and swearing.
Eventually the mouse woman came over to see what was wrong, and I explained that I hadn’t been as unrelaxed since I was in a Hawker Hunter that was tumbling in an inverted flat spin towards Wiltshire at about 400mph.
‘May I touch your body?’ she said soothingly.
‘Yes,’ I grunted.
And with that, she gently pulled my leg back until it came off. The pain was excruciating, so I got to my foot, hopped out of the room and spent the next few days with a pronounced and uncomfortable limp.
We’re told yoga was first practised five thousand years ago, as though this somehow makes it acceptable. Well, it doesn’t. Human sacrifice was practised five thousand years ago, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to spend your afternoons plunging a sword into the nearest virgin.
I used this argument, out loud, on the prison guards, who pulled sympathetic faces and said that in future I could do meditation instead. This is much easier. You sit on the floor, with your index finger and thumb joined together, and hum.
The benefits? None at all, so far as I can see. I’m told it’s so that you can live ‘in the moment’. But how, if you are living in the moment, do you ever work out what’s in the fridge for supper or whether you need to go to the lavatory or how to structure your next business deal?
The simple answer is: you can’t. So we can safely say that those who do meditation don’t have jobs that matter. And don’t really understand how the world works. Many, I imagine, are committed socialists. And all will have extremely dirty bottoms.
‘Do you not like it?’ said the mouse woman incredulously.
‘Oh, I don’t mind any of this new-age stuff,’ I said. ‘It gives ugly people something to do.’
After this I wasn’t invited to her classes any more and was made to spend several hours a day talking to a horse. Or standing on my head in a swimming pool. Or doing something called Zumba. At one point I was given a stone that, the lecturer said, would help me stay calm in difficult situations. That night, I rubbed it a lot.
And then one day I found something that was even more useless and annoying than yoga. It’s called t’ai chi, which makes it sound exotic and moodily spiritual, but in fact it’s nothing more than slow-motion kung fu.
Seriously, you tiptoe through a garden very slowly, as though you are playing Grandmother’s Footsteps, and every so often you stop, turn and do a karate chop that takes about fifteen minutes to complete. For sheer stupidity, it’s up there with ley lines and astrology.
Its enthusiasts tell us that thousands of years ago people had inner peace because they used t’ai chi to achieve equilibrium. But that’s rubbish. They had inner peace because all they had to do all year was plant seeds and then relax while the weather turned them into food.
They sat on the floor because they had no chairs and they hummed because they had no PlayStations. And they did things in slow motion because they were never in a hurry.
We are and, yes, that does sometimes tie us in knots. But there’s a cure for this that isn’t uncomfortable at all. It’s how I spent my last week in prison: sitting in the sunshine, chatting with friends and smoking.
4 October 2015
Chickens are safe, but Labour’s Ms Vegan will leave us ripped to shreds
With all the hullabaloo about white poppies and whether he’ll sing the national anthem, you might not have noticed that Jeremy Corbyn has chosen a person called Kerry McCarthy to be Labour’s spokeschair on the environment, food and rural affairs.
I was very surprised by this because I thought the radio announcer had said the job had gone to Perry McCarthy, who was Top Gear’s first Stig. That would have been weird. But further research has revealed that actually the choice of Kerry is even weirder, because she describes herself as a militant vegan. Which means that if Labour does get elected, the person in charge of the nation’s farming will not even eat an egg.
Worse, her veganism isn’t something she does quietly and for her own reasons. She believes that we should all be vegan and is on record as having said that eating meat should be viewed in exactly the same way as smoking tobacco. And how would that work then? You’d have to eat your pork chop on the pavement outside the restaurant, in the rain? And on a train, you’d have to have an electronic udder on which you could vape if you wanted some milk in your tea?
Hold on, I need to be careful here because veganism is actually a disability. It’s fine when you are nineteen and you hate your parents and you want to be a nuisance, but if you only eat weeds’n’seeds in later life you will become deficient in vitamin B12, which – this is true – will cause you to become ugly, uncoordinated and stupid.
Of course, a vegan will tell you that this is a small price to pay if it means the nation’s chickens and cows are free to roam wild and happy. They have in their minds a countryside freed from the smothering, chemically infused fire blanket of modern farming. They dream of meadows and babbling brooks, and hirsute women in boiler suits making love to one another on a mattress of bluebells and Fair Trade Birkenstocks.
The trouble is that Ms McCarthy was born in Luton and studied Russian, naturally, at Liverpool University. Which means her only connection with the countryside is her refusal to take part in it. And that makes me a better spokesperson because I have an actual farm. Obviously, I don’t do any farming as such; mostly, I drive round the fields in my Range Rover glowering at ramblers. But last weekend I did some manual labour, so now I have a pretty good idea of what Britain would look like if dear old Kerry ever found herself in the hot seat …
Last year I noticed that a path through one of the woods had become so overgrown it was impassable even in my car so I asked the farmer if he’d attach one of those whirry things to the back of his tractor and clear away some of the undergrowth. He did a good job but just twelve months later all the plants that had been minced and smashed were back, stronger and more determined than ever.
So last weekend, because the farmer was busy spraying something important on to the fields before the weather did something crucial, I decided to have a go at clearing the path myself. I therefore rented a flail, attached it to the back of my quad bike and set off.
Now Ms McCarthy would have us believe that when nature is left to its own devices it will produce nothing but forget-me-nots and grasses that whisper in the breeze. But nature is no different from its most vibrant invention – man. Which means that the weak and the timid are overwhelmed almost immediately by the strong and the vicious. It’s a jungle out there, literally.
My path, therefore, was overgrown with horse-sized thistles, net
tles that appeared to be dead but which could still send a man into anaphylactic shock and thick bramble bushes with thorns like the incisors on a great white shark.
Still, I figured, none of this would be a problem for my flail, which went straight over the first bramble bush and then died in a horrible graunching cacophony of smoke, failure and expense.
This was no problem, though, because I had also rented a chainsaw that, after just four hundred pulls on the cord, began its two-stroke dance of death. Now, I’ve seen Scarface, so I know that chainsaws can deal with human bone, no problem at all. I’ve also seen shows on lumberjacking in Canada, so I’m aware that they can take down even the mightiest redwood. But after just three seconds in an autumnal Cotswold bramble bush the chain came off and that was that.
Feeling a little fed up, I realized I’d have to clear the path using old-fashioned branch cutters so, having parked the quad bike, the flail and the broken chainsaw in a nearby stream, I began to wage my one-man war with Kerry McCarthy’s vision of heaven.
It was extremely tough going because each end of a bramble stalk is anchored into the ground, forming a hoop that is designed to trip you up and pitch you head first into the thorns. Or you will step into an unseen badger hole. Either way, you’re going down. Had I attacked my own face with the chainsaw, the end result would have been less gruesome.
But, using swearing, I was soon making progress and after three hours had nearly cleared a square yard. But then I noticed something terrifying. It turns out that a bramble bush grows by three inches a day, which means that the path you’re clearing is closing behind you. Until eventually you are trapped on a shrinking island in the middle of an acre of lacerating, poisonous anaphylactic death.