And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (11 page)

This is because, before the attacks, Americans treated planes like we treat buses. Security was so slack – the airlines didn’t even have to match luggage to passengers, for instance – that I’m surprised Bin Laden’s suicide jockeys had to resort to Stanley knives. I’d have thought they could have boarded with a brace of AKs and a box of rockets.

Now, though, the pendulum has swung completely the other way. The Americans won’t let you on a plane until they’ve ruined your laptop, and half a dozen spaniels have had a good rummage round your shoes.

In the civilised world, however, where there are Red Brigades and Baader Meinhofs, we have known all about hijackings for 30 years, so airports have always been run
like nuclear research facilities. We’ve always been barraged with silly questions while checking in. Bags have always had to be matched to passengers before a plane can take off. And the policemen have always dressed up like Vin Diesel.

In fact the only difference, so far as I can tell, between European air travel pre-September 11 and post-September 11 is that now you have to leave all your cutlery in a big bin before being allowed on board. So why the two-hour check-in rule?

It is a source of massive marital stress in this house. My wife insists on being there when asked, whereas I think 40 minutes is plenty.

I like to check in last, on the basis that the final bags to be loaded into the hold will be the first off at the other end, and I like to be greeted by a stewardess on the plane who tuts a lot and looks at her watch.

And here’s the killer. I’ve never missed a plane.

Deep down, I’ve always suspected that the two-hour rule is nothing more than airport authorities using the destruction of the World Trade Center as a means of getting us into their giant shopping malls for an extra hour so we can spend more on currency converters, oysters and inflatable pillows.

My wife, who as I write is packing for our Easter break, says I’m a cynic. So, OK then. If security remains the same and it has nothing to do with pre-flight retail therapy, why? Why does anybody think it takes two hours to walk from one side of a building to the other?

Does it perhaps have something to do with obesity? Are we all now so enormous that we move at the pace of
an earth mover? But with all the moving walkways at airports, I hardly think this is it. So why? In two hours, they could unpack and rebuild all the electrical appliances in my suitcase, perform keyhole surgery on my abdomen, do deep searches on all my relations and there’d still be enough time left to buy 200 fags and a tin of horrid Harrods shortbread. In two hours, I could park at Gatwick and have time to catch a plane from Manchester.

I suspect the answer may well be found by examining the class system. If you fly first or business, they tell you the check-in takes 60 minutes. It’s only people in cattle class who are asked to get there two hours before the plane’s due to leave.

On the face of it, this seems silly. Club-class people still have to get a boarding pass. Their bags still have to get to the plane. And don’t say the single fast-track lane moves any faster than the 400 channels for ordinary people, because I assure you it doesn’t.

So why should a club-class passenger be capable of getting to the plane in an hour when people in the back need two? Are airport authorities suggesting that people at the back can’t read direction signs properly and get lost a lot? Are they saying people in thrifty cannot walk past a burger joint without being overwhelmed with a need to stuff their faces with chips? Are we to understand that the less well-off cannot tell the time?

Well, let’s think. It’s always the Darrens and the Julies who have to be paged over the airport PA. And it’s only mouth breathers in football shirts who queue for half an hour for the X-ray machine and then empty their pockets of scissors and daggers. And when was the last time you
saw a businessman fumbling around for his passport after he got to the immigration desk?

I may be on to something here. They want you at the airport two hours early because in Brainless Britain everyone else is too thick to get to the plane any faster.

Perhaps a national IQ standard might be the answer. People from Mensa should be allowed to check in two minutes before the flight goes. Those with worryingly long arms must be there somewhat earlier.

Sunday 22 August 2004

When asked how he felt about the chaos at Heathrow last week, an American student who had been delayed for 12 hours said: ‘I am so exhausted now, it’s like, “whatever”.’

This is interesting because I went on holiday this year with two 13-year-old girls. Actually no. Let’s be specific about this. I went on a holiday where two 13-year-old girls were present. And one, who had been bombarded with text messages from a would-be suitor, said to the other: ‘It’s like, “whatever”.’

In my daughter’s world almost everything is ‘like, whatever’.

The poor weather is like, whatever. The onset of a new school term is like, whatever. Paula Radcliffe’s 23-mile marathon is like, whatever. Mysteriously, though, Led Zeppelin are so like, cool.

I’m sure your children speak the same way; I’m equally sure they deliver longer sentences in a flat monotone with a scorpion tail of rising inflection at the end.

This unbelievably irritating syntax, I suspect, has been picked up from too many Australian television programmes.

Couple these speech patterns with the ‘like, whatever’ that has come from some exclusively blonde and pink valley in Los Angeles, and we’re left with an odd conclusion. A girl born in London and raised in Oxfordshire
has developed an accent from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Yup, thanks to satellite television, my daughter now speaks Polynesian.

This is not the end of the world because eventually she will grow out of it in much the same way that you and I at some point stopped describing Emerson, Lake and Palmer as ‘far out’ and Goa as ‘groovy’.

What she may not grow out of, however, is her insistence that ‘today’ is spelt with a 2 and that ‘great’ somehow has an 8 in it. This new language has now spilt from the mobile phone into her thank-you letters and homework.

Those of a
Daily Telegraph
disposition believe that txt spk spells the end for proper English and are furious, but really it’s hard to see why.

Think. When pictograms and hieroglyphics were replaced with letters and numbers, did people paint angry drawings in green ink in the caves of Tunbridge Wells, declaring that this new ‘writing’ was the work of the devil? Imagine having to “write” to a newspaper wn you’ve hrd a swllw. How much easier it is to simply draw one.

Throughout history, great men have laboured over the written word, endlessly modifying the letters so they could be transcribed more quickly and read more easily. Nobody, for instance, complained when the Carolingian minuscule came along. They simply used it until they decided Gothic angularity was better. And then they used that.

The alphabet, too, has been endlessly altered to contemporary demands. Not until the invention of the settee and the dimmer switch and thus the introduction of
Nancy Mitford’s guide to what’s in and what’s not was the letter U deemed necessary. It was not until the fifteenth century that we were given a J, and although the W came along in the tenth century, modern Germans still seem to manage perfectly well by using a V instead. Except when the German managing director of Aston Martin tries to say ‘vanquish’.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote ‘nostrils’ as ‘nosethirles’ and Shakespeare spelt his name differently on each of the five occasions he is known to have written it. Spelling was not an issue until the invention of school and the consequent need to fill the children’s day with something other than rotational farming methods.

Now our days are filled with distractions. You’ve got to locate a signal for your BlackBerry, download some garage on to your iPod and still find time to work, cook, clean the house and kick someone’s head in on the PlayStation. Speed writing is therefore a damn good idea.

At journalism college I was taught Teeline shorthand and although I wasn’t very good at it – I cheated in my final exam by using a tape recorder, long hair and an earpiece – I did recognise that it made a great deal more sense than the traditional phonetic alphabet.

Some people, even without the benefit of long hair and earpieces, were happily writing at 110 words a minute, more than twice what could be achieved if they were writing ‘properly’. So why, I figured, if this works so well, do we still persevere with ABC, the language of the quill?

We changed the way we wrote when steel-nibbed pens replaced feathers, so why not change now that silicon impulses have replaced the Biro? You can’t write shorthand
on a conventional keyboard but you can write txt spk. And it is perfectly legible. ‘2day i wnt 2 c the dctr who sd my bld prssur ws gr8’. What part of that can you not understand? A language without vowels: it’s never done the Welsh any harm.

Adopting txt spk as the new alphabet would mean that I could say more each week in this tiny creased corner of your newspaper. And because I’m paid by the word it means that I’d be better off too. This would be ‘cool’. And the lovely thing is that the newspaper’s accountants would have to dismiss the pay rise by saying it’s ‘like, whatever’.

Sunday 29 August 2004

There was much talk in the scientific community last week about the origins and meaning of an interstellar radio message picked up by a telescope in Puerto Rico.

To the untrained ear it sounds like a Clanger talking to the Soup Dragon, but to those who run Seti, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, it could well be ‘first contact’, the first real evidence that we are not alone in the universe.

The temptation is to reply, but how do we know the message was meant for us? What if it were directed at some other species on Earth? And how would the sender respond if he were to discover that his intergalactic email had been intercepted? I have a horrible feeling that the real recipient may be the wasp, which this year seems to be around in greater numbers than ever. Come on, you must have noticed that since the signal was picked up it has been impossible to go outside without being buzzed.

There’s plenty of evidence that wasps are not of this earth. Unlike any other animal, with the possible exception of the owl and the Australian, they serve no purpose. They’re not in the food chain, they can’t make honey and they’re not fluffy. Nature has a habit of extinguishing its more useless experiments. The dinosaur went west when it grew too big and the dodo when it mislaid its wings.

But the pointy yet strangely pointless wasp soldiers on. Why?

There’s more, too. Wasps can smell a bowl of sugar from five miles away. How? Sugar does not smell. What’s more, they can organise flight paths from their nests to known sources of food. Again, how, unless they have been trained in the complexities of air traffic control?

Here’s another nugget. Wasps are vindictive. Pretty well every creature will attack when it’s hungry or threatened whereas a wasp will attack if you’ve annoyed it in some way. Local councils, which tend to be staffed by animal-loving eco-mentalists, are forever producing leaflets portraying the wasp as a benign part of the British summer – a sort of airborne nettle – forgetting perhaps that each year wasps kill more people than sharks, alligators, lightning, scorpions, jellyfish and spiders combined.

And try this for size. A wasp can lay its eggs inside a caterpillar, knowing that when they hatch the baby wasps will be able to eat the creature from the inside out. And here’s the really clever bit. Normally, the host’s immune system would destroy the eggs before they had a chance to hatch; so, to get round this they are coated with a virus that genetically modifies the caterpillar to ignore the invasion. In other words, a wasp can alter the very being of another creature.

Biologists have examined this virus and found that it exists nowhere else on Earth. They’ve also worked out that it’s been around for more than 100 million years… which is when that strange radio message from the stars was sent.

You may be interested to learn that wasps eat garden
furniture. They chew the wood, mixing it with saliva to make paper for their nests. And we think dolphins are intelligent. Furthermore, wasps are pretty much indestructible. I now have an electric tennis racket that turns the art of insect control into a sport. Instead of catgut, the strings are made from metal strips connected to a powerful battery. One touch will kill anything up to and including a large dog, but wasps? They sit there, jiggling around, until you take your finger off the power button, whereupon they simply fly away.

Only the other day, after what I have to say was a damn good shot, I cut a German Yellowjacket in half with a carving knife. Such a devastating blow would have killed Flipper instantly, but the wasp? Its head remained alive, its antennae wiggling, perhaps sending messages to outer space, pinpointing my position.

We need at this point to examine the mating characteristics of the wasp, which are, to say the least, odd. As summer draws to an end the males produce a huge semen duvet in which the queen will hibernate. When she wakes for the spring, she uses the sperm to fertilise her eggs and the cycle is repeated.

This process poses a few questions. How, for instance, does a wasp produce semen? This would involve masturbation, and that’s a concept which is difficult to visualise: 10,000 wasps in a nest all taking Captain Picard to warp speed. We know they are making paper for their nests, but what else are they using it for? To print some copies of
Asian Babe Wasps
? ‘Ooh, Adolf. After you with that picture of the Norwegian queen.’

It sounds unlikely. It sounds even more unlikely when
you discover that having spent the summer collecting proteins for their young, adult male wasps are free, as autumn approaches, to gorge themselves on rotting apples. This renders them fat, lazy and drunk.

Perhaps this is why the radio message has been received. Perhaps the alien beings that put the wasp on Earth are calling to find out why world domination has not yet been achieved. I doubt they’ll be pleased when they find that their army has been defeated by Granny Smith.