How Hard Can It Be? Read online

  I feel about this the same way that a mother might feel when her daughter, whom she’s loved and nurtured and helped – with £10 billion a year – suddenly turns round and says: ‘I hate you. And I’m going to get a flat on my own.’ You know the poor child is going to have her heart broken and get into trouble and catch chlamydia.

  So this column – it’s a plea. Can you stop it? You lost. You’re part of Britain. You’ve had 300 years to get used to that, and it’s starting to look as though you’re being stubborn.

  The fact is that the union has been a good thing. We are grateful to you for inventing penicillin and the telephone, and you should be grateful to us for introducing you to proper food and trousers.

  If you want to go, that’s fine – but can’t we at least part as friends? Because if we can’t, next time there’s a tennis match between Murray and Gasquet, I shall simply support the person who lives nearest to me. And that’d be the Frenchie.

  Sunday 6 July 2008

  Now we’re for it: we’ve stopped behaving badly

  There have been many very different reactions to Max Mosley’s basement bunk-up. Some have been offended and some unmoved, but most people, since it’s so Carry On up the Khyber, have read the reports and sniggered.

  Hmmm. I wonder if I’m alone in having a bit of respect for the man. I mean, there he is, a sixty-eight-year-old pensioner getting it on with five girls in the middle of the afternoon. Fair play to you, fella.

  I felt much the same way when I heard Prince William had put his chopper in Kate Middleton’s back garden. Oooh, there was a lot of harrumphing – but come on, chaps. The man’s a prince. All he did was borrow one of his granny’s helicopters to drop in on the floozy. Wouldn’t you?

  David Cameron laid out a new set of guidelines last week to which all Tory MEPs must now adhere. They fill me with horror and dread because it means we’re soon to be governed by a bunch of people who go to bed at ten, only drink ginger beer, never try to look up their secretaries’ skirts and are quite happy to get paid £4.50 an hour. In short, we’re going to be governed by bores and failures. Why is this a good idea? No one says of their friends, ‘I chose them because they are all so kind to animals and they do good works.’ We like people who like to laugh, to have fun, to break the rules once in a while. Trouble is, it’s hard to find people like that any more …

  In the olden days Private Eye was full of stories about journalists who’d ripped off their employers for forty grand and been in bed with a hooker when the story they were supposed to be covering broke. Now, it’s just an endless parade of mild hypocrisy. Eighteen months ago the Daily Mail said this. And now it’s saying the exact opposite. So what?

  The maelstrom of expenses fraud and serial shagging has become a gentle eddy of honest-to-God mistakes. And whatever happened to the long lunch? Today, whenever I order a glass of wine in the middle of the day, people look at me as though I might be a Martian. And that’s before I step outside for a cigarette.

  This brings me on to Amy Winehouse. Has it occurred to anyone that she might be having a jolly good time? In the 1950s and 1960s, before the world became so po-faced, the rich and the famous would gather in Mustique and the south of France for debauched, drug-fuelled orgies and no one batted an eyelid. Today we tut because Russell Crowe has thrown a telephone at someone. And look what happens when an Old Etonian tries to make some governmental alterations in Africa. Instead of a statue in Trafalgar Square he gets thirty-four years in the slammer.

  Imagine if we had someone like Winston Churchill in power today. A smoker. A drinker. A man given to Herculean bouts of depression. Under a hailstorm of criticism he wouldn’t last a week. Look at poor old Charles Kennedy. Gone now and replaced with someone who, I feel sure, would get a dopamine rush from taking his dog for a walk.

  It’s the same for all of us. You can be ostracized by your neighbours for putting your refuse in the wrong-coloured bin, you can have your car vandalized if it has four-wheel drive and last week there were calls for cyclists to be jailed if they attempted to enliven this ludicrous means of transport by getting a move on.

  Worse, the town of Redruth in Cornwall has imposed a nine p.m. curfew on all under-sixteens, which means that every fifteen-year-old boy must now be at home each evening with his parents watching Panorama. I fear the Cornish courts had better brace themselves for a massive increase in cases of matricide.

  I look sometimes at the microcosm that is my own life and it’s terrifying. Because in recent years I have been criticized for bumping into a horse chestnut tree; I’ve been called a berk, on the front page of a national newspaper, for using an iPod while driving. And only a couple of weeks ago I was ‘blasted’ for enjoying a gin and tonic while at the North Pole. There’s a constant bombardment for me to sit up straight, eat my greens, comb my hair. It drives me mad. Honestly. Next time James May and I are at a Pole, we’ve decided he’s going to mainline heroin and I’m going to shoot a baby polar bear in the face. For fun.

  I fear for our future. I worry that bad behaviour is being erased from society, and that unless the trend can be reversed somehow we’ll all have to go through life on the Planet Stepford, a rictus grin masking the boiling turmoil of desperation inside. I yearn sometimes when I encounter a neatly stacked pyramid of tins of beans to push it over. Don’t you? Wouldn’t it break the monotony of having to drive at 30 mph and eating a wholefood Fairtrade sandwich at your desk?

  Recently Annie Robinson and I dreamt up a TV show that would serve as an antidote to the endless parade of hectoring and finger-wagging programmes we get today. Instead of running down the street after a cowboy builder who’d charged an old lady a million quid to build a fireplace, we would go after the victims. It was to be called Sucker and it would celebrate the ingenious while pointing the finger and howling with laughter at the stupid, the gullible and the fat. Never has the nation needed such a show more. And never has such a thing been less likely to get commissioned. Unless, of course, we could get Max Mosley to present it.

  Sunday 13 July 2008

  Working while on holiday is … wow, just look at that

  In the Sunday Times last weekend there was a huge story about how thousands of city families are now decamping to the countryside each summer. There were pictures of smiling mums with lovely teeth, under the wisteria, telling us how their children go on bike rides without being stabbed, and that because Nethercombe End is only 40 miles from the M5, their husbands can get up to the City for important meetings (with their mistresses, but it didn’t say that) in just sixteen hours.

  Right. Well, since I’m currently at my seaside cottage for the summer, let’s see if it really is possible to combine a family holiday with work. Here we go.

  The slate-grey sea trembles under a tempestuous sky. Waves: big green fists smash into the rocks and explode in a shower of crystalline white, whipped by the wind into a swirling ethereal moment when nature’s savagery and power combine in an instant of shrieking glory.

  Hang on a minute. I wanted to write this morning about Australia’s immigration policy. But sadly, each time I look out of the window, I’m consumed by the view. This means that every time I try to send an e-mail to the Top Gear edit suite about cuts I need for next week’s film, it always begins: ‘The seagull’s lonesome cry echoed eerily from the volcanic jaggedry …’ and no one in Soho has the first clue what’s got into me.

  Anyway. Australia recently announced that all illegal immigrants … Oh, God almighty. I’m going to have to break off for a moment. It appears my son has fallen over on the rocks while emptying the lobster pots … and yes, there is a great deal of blood spurting from his left leg. I fear he needs to go to hospital.

  He does. Back shortly …

  Right. Australia’s federal immigration minister Chris Evans, who is no relation to the biotech Welshman, announced last week that … holy Mother of God, I’ve just seen a whale. I’m not kidding. Was it a fin? Or a killer? There it is again. Bloody hell. It’s massiv
e.

  I must go on the internet to find out. And that’s going to take hours because here at the seaside, broadband is not the width of a human hair. It actually is a human hair, which feeds information at 35.7 kb per second. In English, that’s 7 mph.

  Two hours later. It was a minke. Fairly common in these waters, apparently. So anyway. Australia. Oh, hang on. Jane Moore’s leaving. She’s been staying for the past week, which means her column in the Sun will be all full of whales and tempestuous seas as well.

  This is the problem with trying to work from a house at the seaside. Because none of your friends has one, they come and stay in yours, which means you can’t do any work in the morning because you stayed up till three and your head hurts, and you can’t work in the afternoon because you’re drunk from lunch.

  The coastguard’s here. It seems a cyclist has careered through my field and six of our sheep were so frightened by his wizened face of hate they jumped off the cliff and into the sea. Three are dead. It’s all hands on deck to rescue the survivors.

  Four hours later. God, I hate cyclists. But where was I? Oh yes. Shafts of sunlight scream out of the leaden sky, piercing the endlessly swirling might of the ocean. No, sorry. What I mean is: for many years Australia has stood alone on the question of immigration, as immune to the body of world opinion as … the cheeky stonechat that’s just landed on my gatepost.

  Um. I’ve just been for a walk. I would never walk at home, but here it’s different. I can pick samphire to fry up with a bit of butter. It goes well with the lobsters we catch. The powerful flavour helps to mask the taste of the twelve-year-old’s arterial leg juice.

  The people from the Top Gear office just called to talk about the interview in tonight’s show. They’re uncertain about whether we should go straight from the shot of the horse to the bit where Richard Hammond falls over. I told them I’d seen a minke whale. They weren’t very interested.

  What interests me most of all right now, much more than whether Australia really is full or whether there’s a bit of space left over for most of Somalia, is whether to take all the children we have staying to Laser Blast this afternoon or whether we should stay here and play Risk.

  Everyone’s falling out over the issue. This is the problem. It’s unfair, really, to drag your children away from their friends every summer, especially if you, like us, won’t let them bring their PlayStations because they should be outside in the fresh air, cutting their legs off. So we ship their friends over here too. Hundreds of them. This means it’s impossible to concentrate on the plight of Australia’s Vietnamese boat people when there are only six Crunch Corners left and Isobel wants them all. And Arabella doesn’t like anything green. And Tom will eat chips only if they are the shape of a 1973 Ford Mustang. And Dan’s retching because of the samphire.

  In an office in EC1, none of this ever happens.

  You should see the cargo ship that just trundled by – its huge diesel engine drumming the beat of international trade as its bluff prow waged an endless game of shudder-me-rivets with …

  Sorry. Australia. Immigration. Er … I don’t care. I’ll worry about it when I get back to work. Here, by the seaside, I am on holiday, which is not the same thing. I’m therefore off for a beer.

  Sunday 20 July 2008

  By ’eck, our funny accents are the envy of the world

  As I write, a team of researchers at Leeds University is working its way through £460,000 of our money, preparing a language and dialect atlas of Britain in the twenty-first century. Good. This is an excellent and important use of public money.

  I can understand why the world started on the rocky path to civilization with so many different languages. Thousands of years ago, before the internet came along, it was extremely unlikely that a tribe in New Guinea would come up with the same word for a carrot as a bunch of Basques living in the Pyrenees. I can also work out why languages die. There is simply no point speaking a tongue that’s shared by only four other people. It’s a waste of paint on the signposts.

  That said, I do not understand why English, which has been around since the Saxons put down their axes, has so many regional variations. And, more important, why those regional variations are still with us today, now that we all watch the same television programmes whether we live in Durban, Detroit, Darwin or Dunstable.

  My youngest daughter, who seems to spend half her day watching pink animated crap from America, is part of the generation that thinks you dial 911 if you want the police and that ‘colour’ has no ‘u’. You’d expect her therefore to sound like Paris Hilton. And yet when she opens her mouth, it’s as though Joyce Grenfell isn’t dead after all.

  Then there’s estuary English, concocted from a base of cockney and enlivened with constant use of the word ‘like’, which comes from Los Angeles, and the word ‘fink’ instead of ‘think’, which is a West Indian add-on; many say its spread across Britain is thanks to the popularity of EastEnders. This, however, can’t be so because otherwise they’d speak it in Inverness too, and they don’t.

  It’s not as if we cannot change the accents with which we were born. If you listen to the Queen on a recording made in 1956, it sounds as though she’s speaking while trying to keep a peeled grape between her buttocks, and that her vocal cords are actually made from glass. Whereas today she sounds like any normal public-school games mistress.

  Margaret Thatcher did the same thing and, if I’m honest, so did I. When I was eleven I was offered a part in a radio play, provided I lost my Yorkshire accent. I did, and it remained lost until I returned to the north after five years away at school, when, without my thinking, it came back. Then, when I moved to London, it was replaced, quite by accident, with an accent so Sloanily preposterous that I’m surprised I was able to buy anything in a shop without the man on the till being filled with an uncontrollable urge to leap over the counter and kick my head in.

  Today I think I speak what most people would call BBC, or received, English. But no. The other day, a linguistics expert, not knowing anything about my early life, listened to me for a while and said ‘Doncaster’. Not Barnsley, you’ll note, or Sheffield. He was very specific and absolutely right. Apparently, it’s the way I say ‘one’.

  This science of speech was much used when the police had a tape from someone they believed was the Yorkshire Ripper. Anyone could tell the voice was Geordie. Experts, however, could nail it down to a specific village. And they still can. Despite Paris Hilton and EastEnders, Kettering, for instance, still has an accent quite unlike the one used in neighbouring Corby.

  According to the scholars, you can zigzag across America for a year and encounter only four different accents (I find that a bit hard to believe, but whatever). In Britain you can drive for just one day and each time you stop for petrol, the cashier will sound different. It’s Punjabi in the morning, Hindi at lunchtime and Tamil in the evening.

  I love this variety, although of course it can cause problems. I, for instance, would never employ anyone with a Brummie accent. I don’t wish to be rude to the people of Birmingham, but I’m sorry, it makes you sound thick. Likewise, whenever I meet someone with a Somerset burr, I always imagine that in the next five minutes I’m going to be tied to a candlelit table, with a goat, and raped.

  I’m not unusual in this respect. If you walk into a Glossop pub with a Stalybridge accent, someone is going to drop you. And if a Liverpudlian ever tries to get a job reading the national news, someone on the anti-racist, anti-ageist, pro-whale Guardian interview panel is going to say: ‘The door is the wooden thing in the wall behind you.’

  If, however, you have a Yorkshire accent, advertisers will want to give you huge lumps of money for voicing a television commercial because, apparently, it makes you sound honest. This explains why Sean Bean is currently trying to sell me absolutely everything.

  And no. You cannot try to adopt a Yorkshire accent because unless you are from Yorkshire you will shorten the word ‘the’ to a ‘t’, like Robert Carlyle did in T
he Full Monty. That’s wrong. Dick Van Dyke wrong. Ray Winstone’s Cold Mountain Deep South … London wrong. Sean Connery in everything he’s ever done wrong. In Yorkshire the word ‘the’ is replaced by the briefest pause and a small nod of the head.

  This small thing is important because when the world finally realizes French, German and, yes, even Mandarin Chinese have no place in a modern English-speaking world, we can continue to have our national, and indeed regional, differences highlighted every time we open our mouths to order a McDonald’s.

  Sunday 27 July 2008

  Peep in my wife’s knicker drawer and see what you get

  I should have written about Max Mosley last week. But I couldn’t. I walked round the garden until my shoes were worn out, I looked at the view, I sucked half a dozen Biros dry and I was still sitting here, as the paper’s deadline passed, unable to form a cohesive opinion.

  Here’s the problem. I like to think I am a journalist. I know the nation’s proper journalists will harrumph at that and explain that three years on the Rotherham Advertiser and a certificate of competency in shorthand don’t make me a proper hack, any more than a stint as a Saturday shop girl qualifies someone to run Wal-Mart.

  But be that as it may, I trained to be a journalist, I love journalism. And I crave the company of journalists. So, wearing this hat, I am absolutely appalled by the implications of the Max Mosley outcome. I mean, here is a man whose strength of character is such that he thinks: ‘No. I won’t do any work this afternoon. I’ll go to a flat in Chelsea where five prostitutes will check my hair for lice.’

  Is it important that we know this? You’re damn right it’s important. This guy was effectively elected to his position at the FIA, the governing body of Formula One, by 125m people. He is therefore a public figure, and we can’t have public figures bunking off for a bit of sex in German. It is also important we know that David Mellor was dressing up in a Chelsea kit while shagging some floozy and that John Major was bathing with Edwina Currie. Because if a prime minister can’t keep his pecker in his trousers, then how do we know he can’t keep his fingers off the button that fires the Tridents? If we have a law that prevents the press from investigating wrongdoing among public figures then it is carte blanche for the entire House of Lords to spend the rest of the year gorging on swan while taking it in turns to do man love on the woolsack.