And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (17 page)

Doubtless when the shops open on Wednesday she’ll quietly take it back and exchange it for ‘Saigon’, the great new smell of Henry Kissinger.

Sunday 26 December 2004

With devastating but quiet savagery, the countryside is being destroyed by a million-strong herd of marauding deer. Surveys have shown their numbers are spiralling out of control and that they’re now tearing through crops and woodland like a pack of horned locusts.

Worse still, deer were responsible last year for 15,000 road accidents in Scotland alone. Ten people died, pinned to their headrests by those antlers after the animal came through the windscreen. Not a nice way to go.

A similar number were killed in East Anglia, and on one stretch of road through Cannock Chase in Staffordshire a deer is apparently hit once every three days. He must be getting awfully fed up with it by now.

Anyway, the government has decided to act. Amid howls of protest from gamekeepers, ministers have decided that a well-orchestrated nationwide cull is needed. But this being New Labour, they’ve got themselves into a right old lather about it.

If it were a bacterium, or a Conservative, that was eating all the trees and killing 50 people a year, they’d act instantly to wipe it out. But deer have big, brown, soulful eyes. And that gives the luvvies a problem.

I mean, this is a government that has publicly declared undying love for foxy-woxy, so even though the deer is engaged in wholesale slaughter of mankind, you can’t
really visualise Tony Blair running around the Highlands in a pair of stout wellies, hosing down Bambi’s mum with a hail of machine-gun fire.

As a result, ministers are going to great lengths to point out that the deer is a fine animal and must not be viewed as a pest or a nuisance. But that hundreds of thousands must, nevertheless, be shot in the face.

They’re even talking about allowing carefully selected and heavily licensed deer killers to roam the Highlands in the close season, shooting expectant mums. Quite something for a government whose local councils all over the country employ ‘deer liaison officers’.

Quite what a deer liaison officer does, I’m not sure. Personally, I’d rather spend his wages helping victims of the Asian earthquake, but there you go.

My favourite part of the government initiative is watching them agonise over what should be done with the mountain of carcasses. Because, of course, they’re all vegetablists, and as a result it simply hasn’t occurred to them that they could be garnished with onions and eaten.

You can even eat the muntjac, which looks like a big rat and barks like a dog. But, like crocodile and snake, it tastes of chicken.

This would be an ideal solution. Fat, poor people who spend their limited resources on crisps and lard could be encouraged to roam around the woods at night, killing deer. This way they’d get some exercise and a free meal.

But I fear that it won’t catch on, so I’m drawn to an idea that was first mooted two years ago by a wealthy Scottish landowner called Paul van Vlissingen. He spent £300,000 of his own money looking into the deer
problem, and has decided that the best way of keeping their numbers in check is by reintroducing wolves.

There’s no doubt that a pack of wolves gallivanting around the Highlands would keep deer numbers down, and this would save the trees and crops. But I can’t help wondering what else Mr Wolf might eat.

Obviously Johnny Fox would be a tasty target, which is fine, now that man isn’t allowed to hunt him any more. But what about the sheep? In the Alpine region of France, a pack of just 30 wolves does its level best to keep lamb off the menu in most local restaurants; and we see a similar problem in Sweden, where wolves, tired of eating deer, are helping themselves to pretty well anything that moves.

This brings me neatly to the wolf’s favourite
amusebouche
– us. Van Vlissingen says humans have nothing to worry about, because in the last hundred years there hasn’t been a single recorded case of a person, or even a part of a person, anywhere in Europe, being eaten by a wolf.

He also argues that in Alaska and Canada humans and wolves live happily together.

True, but that’s because in Alaska and Canada most people pack some kind of heat in the parka. Here, however, we’re not allowed to walk around with a blue-steel .44, so I suspect the reintroduction of wolves would mean the odd rambler would go west.

This means everyone wins. The government keeps deer numbers down without turning its deer liaison officers into murderers. We will be able to drive faster in greater safety on the roads; the countryside gets an interesting new animal; and the rambling queen, Janet Street-Porter, gets eaten.

Sunday 2 January 2005

You’d imagine that the world ladies’ bowls championship would be a genteel affair, brought to you by Werther’s Originals, Rover, Saga Holidays and Thora Hird’s stairlift.

But no. Seven of the eight quarter-finalists chosen to represent Britain are aged between 21 and 37. One, an extremely comely young lady, was pictured in the newspapers last week wearing an unzipped leather biker’s jacket and very little else.

This has prompted commentators to come out from behind their tea urns and remark that the team has perhaps been chosen for its televisual appeal rather than its ability. I’m sure they have a point.

You see, in the olden days, when most bowls players were born, there were no photographs in the newspapers, so people were allowed to be fat and ugly. Joseph Whit-worth, the great gunsmith, was a national hero because no one knew he had the face of a baboon. Isambard Kingdom Brunel achieved success because the great British public had no clue he was a midget.

Back then, skill and intelligence were what you needed to get on. But now, with the zoom lens and the tabloid newspaper, neither thing matters a jot.

We’re entering a whole new world where, to get on, it’s not what you know or who you know, or even what
you know about who you know. All that matters is what you look like.

David Beckham, I’m told, is far from Britain’s best footballer. But he has become a global success because he’s a handsome chap. Then you have Tony Blair. He became leader of the Labour Party simply because he is better looking than Robin Cook and John Prescott. What’s more, he will win a third term because he has more sex appeal than Michael Howard. And Gordon Brown will never be prime minister because the hinge on his lower jaw appears to be loose.

Then there’s Sienna Miller. Who, I hear you ask. Well, she’s the bit-part star of two films you haven’t seen, but because she’s so unbelievably pretty her engagement to another woman called Judy managed last week to knock the Asia catastrophe off the front pages.

I understand all of this. You wouldn’t deliberately buy an ugly sofa or an ugly car, so why would you invite an ugly person to peer at you from the other side of the electric fish tank?

By the same token, I’d rather watch my new crush, Fiona Bruce, reading out the Cumbrian lambing reports for 2004 than Reginald Bosanquet, with his florid nose, telling me about the tsunami. I have a friend whose car dealership was staffed entirely by astonishingly good-looking girls. When asked why, he said with a grin that pretty ones cost the same as ugly ones. I understand that, too.

There is, however, an enormous drawback to all of this. You see, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Denzel Washington may look good in leather miniskirts
and Roman armour, but where would we have been 30 years ago if the only qualifications needed for Hollywood superstardom were perfectly square, perfectly white teeth and big arms? Without Gene Hackman, that’s for sure.

You can be assured, too, that the over-hootered Dustin Hoffman would still be eking out a living in some New York dive, along with Jack Nicholson and Anthony Hopkins.

At the moment the only possible hope for the facially challenged or the stomachularly enormous is comedy. Good-looking people only had to smile to climb into a stranger’s pants, whereas the Stephen Frys and Jimmy Carrs of the world needed to tickle the humour bone before they were allowed near another person’s pelvis.

I’ll give you a challenge at this point. Name me one slim, attractive girl who’s famous for being funny. Dawn French? Jo Brand? You get my drift here.

Comedy, however, has only a limited number of openings, which is why, in the not too distant future, I can see a backlash coming. It used to be the case that a person’s social standing caused jealousy and bitterness. People would wonder why the idiotic fourth son of the Duke of Nether Wallop could have peach and peacock for supper while his bright manservant had to make do with a cup of mud.

Well, how long will it be before the world’s ugly people start to wonder why Kate Moss is a millionaire and why their television screens are full of orange men and pneumatic blonde girls when their own children, who have double firsts in Latin, can’t get a job on the bins?

Certainly I hope the backlash comes soon because, unless that bowling bird unzips her jacket and puts the other competitors off, Britain is very likely to get knocked out of the tournament.

Sunday 9 January 2005

Well, as Britain’s pop stars predicted, there was no snow in Africa this Christmas, but, strangely, there was quite a lot of it in Texas, and Saudi Arabia.

Last year gave Australia its driest summer since records started in 1859, there were wasps in the Yukon, huge swarms of rain-fed locusts in the Sahara and temperatures in Iceland hit 76.6°F.

Closer to home, big chunks of Cornwall were washed away, Carlisle sank and Scotland was blown clean off the top of Britain. Meanwhile, my cottage in the Isle of Man, which has braved the elements without a scratch for 150 years, was deprived of its roof.

As a result, a great many earnest young men have been cropping up on Channel 4 News, wearing an ‘I told you so’ expression and explaining that we’ve got to stop driving cars and eating strawberries out of season. They say that man-made global warming is driving the weather nuts and that if we don’t radically change our ways everyone on earth will be boiled.

Well, let’s just say we all part-exchange our cars for horses and eat only what happened to have been in the garden that afternoon. And let’s imagine the world’s governments and multinationals sink billions into finding new ways of propelling aircraft and heating our houses.

Let’s imagine we do everything the greens want… and the temperature keeps on rising. Then what?

This is the problem. The earnest-faced young men want us to have carbon credit cards and nut-fuelled boilers. They want radical change to combat something over which we might have no control. You see, none of the recent weird weather events is weird. There was a flood in Boscastle 400 years ago. Texas had a white Christmas in 1922. And last year the average global temperatures were only as high as those in 1649, which was long before the invention of the Yorkshire Electricity Board, the Airbus A320 and the Ford Fiesta.

Man’s total contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions is just 3 per cent, which might be enough to kill the world. But it might not. Nobody knows. And it seems rather silly to spend billions developing cauliflower-powered cars when they might not make any difference, and half the world is starving.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Nboto. We’d love to build a well in your village, but unfortunately Mr Porritt is spending all our money on a new type of possibly unnecessary engine that runs on saliva.’

Of course, there is no doubt that the world is warming up, but let’s just stop and think for a moment what the consequences might be. Switzerland loses its skiing resorts? The beach in Miami is washed away? North Carolina gets knocked over by a hurricane? Anything bothering you yet?

We keep being told that in just 20 years there will be no snow in the Atlas Mountains, but honestly: who cares? And so what if the sea level rises by five inches? I can
appreciate that this would be a nuisance if you were Dutch. But you’re not, so relax.

Finding out that global warming will change the landscape in a part of the world where we don’t live is as relevant as finding out that the lesser mottled Tasmanian butterfly is on the verge of extinction. It isn’t even worthy of a shrug.

In fact, in Britain more ferocious and turbulent weather would be a good thing because it was 57°F and drizzling yesterday, and it’ll be 57°F and drizzling tomorrow. And yet, despite the sameness, we are the only people on earth who use prevailing conditions as an ice breaker at parties.

‘
Ici qu’il fait frais pendant cette période d’anneée
,’ is not something you will hear at French social events. And nor have I ever heard a German say, ‘
Es ist ausgefallenes nettes
.’

Last week, every news channel in Britain cut live every 15 minutes to some dizzy bird in wellies, standing in a puddle, saying the wind was very strong and the sea was very rough. No other nation would do that – not just two weeks after the definition of a rough sea had been rewritten by that tsunami.

An Englishman’s home is not his castle. An Englishman’s home is, as Bill Bryson once pointed out, a large, grey, Tupperware box. A constant, year-round sea of endless misty greyness. So I would therefore welcome some proper storms and heatwaves and swarms of locusts sweeping down from the heavens every afternoon.

Imagine the joy, when conversation begins to flag, of being able to substitute ‘it’s turned out nice’ for ‘I was sucked into space by a tornado this morning’.

And imagine being told on the weather forecast that a glacier had buried Birmingham. Big British weather. Bring it on.

Sunday 16 January 2005

At a lavish, laser-speckled launch party in France last week, Tony Blair said that the new Airbus was ‘a symbol of confidence that we can compete and win in the global market’.

Nearly right, you big-eared thicko. Actually, it is a symbol of confidence that we can compete and win in the global market despite the utter stupidity of your government.