If You'd Just Let Me Finish Read online

  This, then, is what Britain would look like under a Labour government. Badgers will knock over all the walls, allowing an indestructible, tangled forest of horror to engulf our towns and cities at the rate of three inches a day. The cows and sheep will die. Foxes will murder the chickens. And soon there will be nothing to eat but the fruit these plants of doom produce. Which will turn us all into twitching, yellow-faced morons.

  11 October 2015

  Dear hotel manager, get off of my smalls. Yours, Keith Richards

  According to leaked paperwork, the Rolling Stones are demanding that all the hotels in which they stay provide extra butlers, a twenty-four-hour bar, after-hours dry-cleaning services, a plentiful supply of Marlboro cigarettes and clearly written instructions in every room on how the television works.

  The message then is clear: these ageing rockers have spent so long in the platinum-branded, super-pampered section of cloud-cuckoo-land that they’ve completely lost touch with reality. ‘Doubtless,’ you will scoff, ‘they also want to shower each night in the tears of an angel.’

  Yes, but just for a moment put yourself in the leopardskin shoes of Keith Richards. You’ve been on stage for a couple of hours, belting out an approximation of all your best-known hits, and now it’s eleven o’clock at night and you’re in your seventies and you’re tired. It’s possible, though photographs would suggest otherwise, you are also hungry.

  Well, you can’t go to a restaurant because the waiter, for a laugh, will eject some bodily fluids into your supper. And then ring a local newspaper to say that Keith Richards has just wolfed down a plateful of your – let’s be kind, let’s say – saliva. Garnished with a couple of the chef’s dingleberries.

  And there will be photographic evidence of this because every other person in the restaurant will have spent their entire evening sneaking pictures on their telephones. They may even end up with a snap of you apparently picking your nose that they will then sell for £100.

  So. Since you’re an old man and you don’t want to eat saliva or be humiliated in the newspapers for apparently picking your nose, you’ll be forced to retreat to your room to watch a bit of television. Which as we all know is now impossible in every single hotel in the world because the controls are completely unfathomable.

  There will be several remotes on the bedside table that you have to match up to all the equipment using nothing but guesswork and swearing. And eventually the television will stop playing the ‘Welcome Mr Ken Richard’ message and will become a forest of hash accompanied by the sort of white noise the CIA uses to make its captives go mad.

  While stabbing away at the wrong remote to make the volume go down, you will first of all open the lid of the DVD player and then you will turn the screen into the sort of menu you could understand only if you were a senior programmer at Microsoft. HDMI 2.0 and Aux mean nothing to a man who is a) seventy-one and b) drunk.

  Eventually, of course, you will get the television to show some kind of moving image. And since it’s usually a woman with massive breasts talking Klingon to a completely orange man with Silvio Berlusconi hair while foam is hosed into the shrieking audience, you will give in and call for assistance.

  But when you are a member of the biggest rock band in the world, you can’t do that because the hotel staff will sell you out. But then you already knew that because the perfectly reasonable request you made for written instructions on how the television works has been leaked.

  Maybe then you could do a spot of laundry. Oh no, you can’t, because no one can be arsed with that form in which they ask you to count how many items you are submitting and then has a column in which they are allowed to give their number. And guess what? Yup. Their number is always lower and always tallies with the amount of things they are returning.

  That’s a problem we all have, but for Keith Richards things are much worse. Because the chambermaid isn’t even going to get to the lift before she’s tipped your dirty smalls into a pile, whipped out her iPhone and shown the world that you don’t wipe your bottom properly.

  I’m not making this up. I am not Keith Richards but, after I checked out of one hotel in Australia, its management rang the newspapers and told them exactly what I’d done since I’d checked in. Some hotels won’t shop their guests to the press. But a lot do. And you can never tell which is going to do what. So you have to plan for the worst, which is why the Stones have ‘demanded’ – newspaper talk for ‘politely requested’ – special dry-cleaning services.

  But how come, you may be wondering, these brilliantined old stick insects can’t even make it to the tobacconist’s for a packet of fags? Why have they asked the management to provide a supply of Marlboros?

  Right. Fine. Let’s assume that you are in a petrol station, paying for your fuel, when who should breeze in but Keith Richards himself. You’re going to stare, aren’t you? And wonder if it’d be OK to ask him for a selfie …

  Happily, while you’re deciding, someone else will jump in first. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Keith,’ they will say, ‘but I’m your number-one fan. I saw you once in Leeds and …’ They will go on for some time before asking for a photograph. This will involve passing their phone to a stranger who will not know how it works, so they will take a picture after five agonizing minutes of their own eye.

  And now everyone in the petrol station is thinking the same thing. If Keith has demonstrated his willingness to have his picture taken, surely he won’t mind doing one more …

  They’ve all got a back story. They’ve all got a reason for wanting a picture. They’re all number-one fans and they’ve all got different phones that no one else can work. All of which means that Keith, who just popped out for a packet of Marlboros, is going to be ninety-five by the time he gets back to the broken television set in the room.

  And doubtless you’re now scoffing again, pointing out that you paid for Keith’s lavish lifestyle so you’re entitled to take his picture and read about his every move in the Daily Mail.

  But wait a minute. You also paid for James Dyson’s lifestyle. But you don’t demand he comes out of the back office and gurns into your camera every time you buy a vacuum cleaner, do you?

  18 October 2015

  Sorry to be a bore but we must drill a great hole through Blackpool

  We keep being told that, thanks to various capitalist banker-bastards who all want second homes, property prices in provincial Britain are now so high that people – or ‘hard-working local families’, as politicians like to call them these days – simply cannot afford to put a roof over their heads. I don’t doubt for a moment that this is true.

  So what about all the refugees who burst from the back of vans on the M20 every evening and disappear into the undergrowth? We have to presume these poor displaced souls do not continue to live on embankments, feeding on berries and scrumped apples, and that they end up in some kind of house. But how can they afford to do this?

  Well, it turns out that Britain is playing host to an increasing number of what officialdom calls ‘houses in multiple occupation’ (HMOs). You probably know all about this phenomenon, but since I divide my time between Chipping Norton, Holland Park and the business lounge at Terminal 5, I did not.

  The idea is simple. Landlords, especially in seaside towns such as Blackpool, buy a large guesthouse that hasn’t been used much since people realized it was cheaper and sunnier to holiday every summer in Spain. They then rent out each room to whoever comes along. And they don’t have to worry about the rent not being paid because, thanks to housing-benefit rules, they are guaranteed a steady income from Her Majesty’s Government.

  So everyone’s a winner. Poor people in the town, whether they’re refugees or down-on-their-luck locals, get a super-cheap room they can call home; the landlord gets a return on his investment; and the government gets people off the streets for next to nothing. Lovely.

  Except, of course, it isn’t lovely at all, because the people who end up in HMOs tend not to be what you’d call �
�house proud’. And many are enthusiastic users of heroin or Stella Artois, which means that even if they try to tidy up a bit, it all goes wrong and they end up in the middle of the floor under a pile of broken furniture, gently marinating in a puddle of their own ordure.

  Soon, people in the street who are house proud and do not use heroin or Stella Artois tire of the smell and the begging and the crime and the noise and they sell their house to a landlord, who fills it with yet more lost souls. Until pretty soon the whole area is a cesspit of awfulness and disease.

  It really is. A BBC reporter told us last week about the state of various HMOs in Blackpool and it was all too disgusting for words. There were cookers that looked as though I’d been using them, deformed pets, mattresses bearing stains you don’t want to think about and flies the size of your hand feasting on the grimy stickiness of every flat surface.

  You looked at the pictures and you couldn’t help thinking, ‘Jesus H Christ. How bad was your life in Syria for this to be better?’

  Needless to say, local councils have got it into their heads that landlords – or ‘greedy landlords’, as we must call them these days – are entirely to blame and, as a result, rush about the place in a blizzard of hi-vis vests and clipboards and over-the-top hazmat face masks, ordering them to make improvements or else.

  Right. I see. So let’s just assume for a moment that the greedy capitalist banker-landlord-bastard employs a team of decorators to run amok with the Farrow & Ball. Does the council think that the heroin and Stella enthusiasts will come home that night and think, ‘Ooh. This smells lemon-fresh, so I shall immediately give up drink and drugs and become a plumber’?

  Because that doesn’t happen. What does happen is they continue to come home from the off-licence every night, with yet another deformed pet and a wheelbarrow full of heroin, which they consume until all the new paint is stained with yet more vomit and effluent.

  The council then blames the Tories and the private sector and uses taxpayers’ cash to create its own accommodation, which must meet such high health and safety standards that the drug addicts and the drunks end up on the street, selling themselves to whoever comes along. Until they are finally given a clean bed, by a doctor, so they can at least die with the dignity life was so unwilling to provide.

  It’s hard to know what to do about all this. The private-landlord idea works well economically, but life in the conditions it creates cannot be much fun. The council-run schemes, like all Soviet thinking, sound great on paper but don’t work at all. And still the refugees keep on coming. And property prices keep on rising, and young, hard-working families in rural areas keep being driven into town centres to look for jobs.

  Happily, however, there does seem to be a solution, especially in some of the worst-affected areas of Britain: fracking. All these terrible HMOs in places such as Blackpool and Morecambe and Lancaster sit on a freak of geological good fortune: the rocks are full of gas that can be extracted and used to reduce Britain’s dependence on Russia for its lighting and warmth.

  We know this. We know too that we have the technology to extract this gas quietly and safely. And we know that, if only we could get on and do this, Lancashire would become as rich as Saudi Arabia. There would be jobs and cash and shimmering skyscrapers where all the run-down guesthouses stand now.

  Amazingly, however, we are not able to get the fracking ball rolling because Friends of the Earth and its frizzy-haired mates in other eco-organizations are fighting the proposals every step of the way.

  Because of the desire of these groups to live in a medieval mudbath, hard-working families in Blackpool and desperate refugees who have fled their own countries for their lives are being forced to endure conditions that are truly inhumane.

  I do not know what clean-living, bicycle-riding, smoke-free environmentalists die from. But if there is any justice in the world, it would be shame.

  25 October 2015

  Beneath the splinter in my foot lies the key to all human endeavour

  In the closing stages of last weekend’s American Grand Prix, a man called Nico Rosberg was well out in front. And all he had to do to keep his world championship chances alive was drive round a few corners without making a mistake. It should have been easy.

  Except it wasn’t, because with just a handful of laps to go he suddenly became June Whitfield. He got his feet all muddled up, pressed the wrong pedal and slithered on to the grass verge in an uncoordinated mud-brown soup of Reginald Molehusbandry. His teammate swept past, and that was that. A year’s work up the Swanee.

  It’s strange, isn’t it? Nico is a talented driver. He could drive round and round a track all day without making a single mistake, and yet, when the chips were down and the pressure was on, he blew it.

  We see the same sort of thing going on in penalty shootouts. In a Sunday-afternoon kickabout, any big-name player could score a hundred times out of a hundred. But in a World Cup decider, even the best striker becomes a big wobbly octopus and hoofs the ball into the next postcode.

  All of which raises a question. If a footballer at the top of his game is capable of using his mind to become completely useless, then why can’t someone with no skill at all use his or her mind to become a leading goal scorer at Manchester United?

  Back in 2004 I went to see the mighty Wasps rugby team play an amateur outfit from Solihull called the Pertemps Bees. On paper the part-timers looked as though they didn’t stand a chance. They were fork-lift-truck drivers and plumbers taking on a team that featured God knows how many England players.

  And yet, while the Wasps had all the skill, the Bees had all the heart. And as the final whistle blew, the mind had triumphed over the much heavier, faster and more muscular matter. Yup, the Bees won.

  And it’s not just in sport that we see this. There are documented cases of people with quite serious illnesses getting well after taking a Smartie once a day for a month. They’d been told they were testing a new type of chocolate-flavoured drug and, because their mind believed this, their body got better.

  Last weekend I was in Warsaw and I somehow managed to get a splinter in the ball of my foot. I’m not one to make a fuss or exaggerate, as you know, but I was in screaming agony. And yet on Saturday night I walked on to a stage in front of 50,000 people and for the next two hours I completely forgot about my gaping wound. It was as though it wasn’t there.

  This morning I’m getting a cold. I know it. I can feel the telltale signs in the back of my throat, and there’s a heaviness to everything I do. I know for a fact, however, that it will not actually become a cold because tomorrow morning I’m flying to Seattle to do an Important Job and I have told myself that I cannot therefore have a runny nose.

  This will work. It always does. If you really and truly cannot spare the time to lie in bed watching Cash in the Attic, then the cold will simply lie there, dormant, twiddling its thumbs, waiting for you to go on holiday. Then it will arrive. In spades.

  I have never, not once in all my life, taken a day off work because of illness. And I have never, not once in all my life, had a holiday that hasn’t at some point been spoiled by a bug or a chill of some sort.

  It’s not just me either. A group of Tibetan monks amazed doctors recently in an experiment in which they were placed in a freezing-cold room draped in wet, cold sheets. None shivered. They just sat there, concentrating on increasing the heat generated from their bodies until, after just a few minutes, the sheets were dry and warm.

  Apparently, they do this as a regular competition: seeing who can dry the most sheets in a single evening. Well, what else is there to do when you’re a monk? ‘Come on, lads. Let’s see which of us is the best at being a tumble dryer.’

  All of which makes me wonder. Is it really worth going to Mars? Yes, man has an insatiable desire to know what’s over the next hill, and what sort of lizard bats live at the deepest parts of the ocean. But surely the most valuable bit of exploration not yet done is to the centre of our own heads. And no, don’t
worry. I’m not going to toe the Hollywood line that we use less than 10 per cent of our brains and that we could all be Iron Man if only we could unlock the rest. I’m well aware that we use more than 10 per cent of our brains just to ball our fists.

  However, while we know how a brain works – we know which bits are flickering away when we run or read or watch pornography – we don’t know how the wiring works when it decides to ignore the pain of a splinter or to cure the common cold.

  We know it can do this. We’ve all heard about farmers who walk miles carrying the arm that’s been torn off by their tractor. We’ve all read those Victoria Cross citations about pilots who landed their shot-up plane even though they had 164 bullet wounds, and we’ve all experienced it ourselves: the ability to forget discomfort when there are more important things to be getting on with.

  Imagine, though, if we could wire ourselves up so that we could do this at will. Illness would no longer matter. We could all be Wayne Rooney. We could all be Nico Rosberg. And, unlike him, we wouldn’t bottle it at the last moment. It’d be brilliant. But instead of working this all out, we’re busy mapping the sea bed and digging up pharaohs.

  1 November 2015

  Vite, vite, Johnny French. We can’t wait much longer for a nuclear roast turkey

  When the nuclear power station at Chernobyl blew up, everyone ran about, waving their arms in the air and saying millions would die from the radioactive fallout. Farmers in Wales said their sheep had turned green and many had grown a new head. Ukraine, said the experts, would be a desert until the end of time.

  Well, I went to Chernobyl last year and spent a day mooching about in the nearby city of Pripyat. The trees were full of fruit. The woods echoed to the sound of wolf cubs playing joyfully in the sunshine. And so far I have grown no warts.

  It’s a similar story in Fukushima. A tsunami caused what’s described as a ‘level 7 event’ and, once again, the experts were to be seen on television, wailing and gnashing their teeth and explaining how everyone in Japan would die a horrible death within weeks. And yet, so far, the number of people who’ve died from radiation exposure is, er, nought.