And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (9 page)

But let’s just imagine for a moment that he’d said yes. Let’s imagine that we lived in a world where a handful of people could have something altered or banned by saying in a letter: ‘I don’t like this very much and I want it stopped.’

I could write to the Church Bells Standards Authority and, as a result of my complaint, campanology would be outlawed immediately. And after a second letter, all American tourists arriving at Heathrow would be turned away. How long do you think Bill Oddie would last in a world like this?

And not just Bill, either. I’m sure that the Queen, with her palaces and servants, upsets and annoys someone somewhere so let’s ban her, too, and her family. And while we’re at it, I know a handful of people who don’t like that enormous new gherkin building in London, so let’s pull it down, along with the British Library and Preston.

Cats give me asthma and I find their bottoms offensive, so everyone would have to put their beloved moggy in a sack and bash its head in with a croquet mallet.

Providing, of course, croquet hadn’t upset someone in the meantime. In which case you’d have to use a frozen leg of lamb. Or, more likely, a nut cutlet.

Oh no, wait. Nuts can make some people swell up. So you see, already we’ve run into a problem. You’ve got your cat in a sack but no way of killing it.

I’m struggling to think of anything which would be permitted in a world where nothing was allowed to cause offence to anyone. Cars, condoms, Christianity.

Everything would have to go, except perhaps Michael Palin and maybe David Attenborough.

You probably think this is silly but I’m afraid it’s not. When you go to the cinema these days, you’re given a synopsis of the movie before the MGM lion has roared.

‘This film contains scenes of flashing lights and strong language, and there’s a bit of mild violence when the German’s goggles fill with ketchup. Oh, and there’s some semi-nudity when we see Susannah York in her stockings and I’m afraid there’s a dog called Blackie.’ This is because the audience may contain nuts.

And let’s not forget, shall we, where this whole thing
started. Following just two complaints – that’s two, not 2 million – the ASA has asked Sloggi to be more careful in future about where it places posters featuring girls in their underwear.

Happily our great leader, Tony Blair, is still a beacon of hope in this sanitised world. A million people complained, in person, about his plans to bomb Iraq, but he paid not the slightest bit of attention. We should all take a leaf out of his book.

Sunday 13 June 2004

A friend called last week in some distress to say that his VAT bill was a little larger than expected. Then I had lunch with somebody who spent the entire meal agonising over which school is best for his daughter.

Meanwhile, in Lambeth Palace the Archbishop of Canterbury is to be found, pacing his sitting room, wondering whether or not to make a guest appearance on
The Simpsons
. It’s not exactly up there with Thomas à Becket’s problems, is it?

The trouble is that, after about four billion years of worrying about sabre-toothed tigers, the plague, having your heart ripped out by religious zealots and being bombed by the Germans, we’ve been left with an inability to stop worrying when actually everything’s fine.

We worry today about the onset of baldness and cellulite with the same intensity as people in 1665 worried about the Great Plague. Today, for instance, the sun is shining, the sky is a cobalt blue, the thermometer is nudging 75°F, I have received an unexpected windfall from a video distribution company, there are three parties lined up for the weekend and the children are well. Yet I’m sitting here worrying about the amount of junk there is in space. Only the other day a French rocket was destroyed when it hurtled into a partially eaten hamburger left in orbit by one of Neil Armstrong’s mates. Or it could have been a speck of paint.

There are apparently 100,000 pieces of flotsam and jetsam whizzing round the Earth; and soon, experts say, somebody will be killed when his spacecraft crashes into a spanner dropped by some clumsy Russian, back in 1969.

I’m also worried that my daughter’s skirt is too short, that Nigella Lawson may be turning into a man, and that the enormous quantities of Diet Coke that I drink in a day will give me tooth cancer. And I don’t even read the
Daily Mail
.

The
Mail
sees terror and pain in just about every aspect of our lives today. Cornflakes will kill you unless an immigrant from Albania gets you first. Farmed salmon will rot your children’s eyes, genetically modified wheat will invade your garden and eat your pets, and heaven help those who don’t maintain an efficient oral hygiene programme. Because they’re going to have killer mushrooms growing out of their gums.

I’d like very much to blame the newspapers for whipping up our worry genes into an undoable knot, but actually, I fear, the real culprit here is everybody aged over 40.

I, for instance, am plodding through middle age, convinced that the perfect world we enjoyed in, oh, about 1976 is being taken away and ruined. I don’t see a need for speed humps and navel piercings, and I can’t understand why I have to be called Jezza.

Every day I read the newspapers with a growing sense that the lunatics have taken over the asylum and that every single thing, from the Kyoto treaty to the endless bans on garden weedkillers, is designed to put the world into reverse.

It’s sad, but older people always believe that life was better when they were younger. Hearing tales of my mother’s upbringing is like being immersed in a warm bath with Enid Blyton. It was all one big Noddy story, with ruddy-faced constables chasing ragamuffins for scrumping apples.

The thing is, though, that her mother will have painted an equally fuzzy picture of
her
childhood, and so on. But in every single way, life at this precise second is better and more comfortable than at any time in the whole of human history.

We’re told that entertainment is getting worse but even
Big Brother
is better than sitting in the front room watching grandad washing in a tin bath. My granny may have enjoyed her sun-drenched
Cider with Rosie
romps in the haywain, but when she had a toothache she had to go to the local barber, who hit the tooth with a hammer. When her husband lost his job, the family starved. And when her friend had a placenta previa, she died.

Back then you didn’t worry about the Sats at your daughter’s school or the length of her skirt, because the chances are she would have succumbed to something unspeakable at the age of four. And even if she did make it into double figures, she wouldn’t have been allowed into a school or a polling station.

I look today at those people on
Oprah
prattling on about their tormented love lives and I can’t help thinking: ‘Yes, it can’t have been nice to come home and find your son in women’s underwear, but not that long ago you might have come home to find him in the sabre-toothed tiger.’

Then we have today’s army of stress counsellors, who are on hand to iron out the emotional creases after some minor accident at work. They tell us that life in the twenty-first century is more complicated than ever before, but it just so isn’t.

By encouraging us to fret about minor injuries and bits of the international space station dropping on our heads and the threat posed to mankind’s very existence by farmed salmon and cornflakes and bloody global warming, we’ll all be completely unprepared for the day when Saudi Arabia goes pop and we really do have something to worry about.

Sunday 4 July 2004

It didn’t take long. Just a few days after a report said that the north–south divide in Britain was getting wider, all sorts of commentators have leapt into print to say it isn’t.

Bill Deedes, grand old man of the
Daily Telegraph
, argued that life up north in the 1930s was far worse than it is now; estate agents pointed to the burgeoning property market; and Ken Morrison, the supermarket chief, said shelf-stackers up north work harder than shelf-stackers down south.

We’re told that Corby, in the London ‘catchment area’, has the highest percentage of unskilled workers, and Peterborough, just 50 minutes from King’s Cross, has more business failures than any other town in the country.

So, people of Richmond-upon-Thames, you can relax. The gritty souls of Sheffield are not being forced through hunger to sell their children for medical experiments, so there’s no need to drown in guilt. And there’s no danger any time soon of being presented with a German-style reunification tax to keep the north afloat.

Actually, I wouldn’t be so sure. I think we’re heading for a genuinely serious problem. Because I think the north is in real trouble. When I was growing up in Doncaster, trips to London weren’t much of a culture shock. Yes, it was big, but the food was just as lousy, the service was just as hopeless and the carpets were just as patterned.

In those days the people of Doncaster dug coal and operated power stations and built trains and tractors. Sure, they didn’t earn as much as the people who ran banks in Tunbridge Wells, but the gulf wasn’t that wide. It is now. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks in my home town and nobody over 40 seemed to have teeth, just the occasional lava-black stump. Worse, those under 40 who asked for an autograph hadn’t the faintest idea how to spell their names.

It’s all very well saying the housing market has boomed just recently, but the houses in question were going for £500 just four years ago. That they’re going for £7,500 now in no way implies that the north–south divide is narrowing. Then there are the towns. Deedes may paint a gloomy picture of life up north in the great recession, but I urge him with all my heart to look at somewhere like Conisborough today. There is nowhere – absolutely nowhere – down south which is quite so desperate.

First of all, on a Tuesday morning in term-time the place was full of children, all of whom tried to sell me stuff – wheels, car radios, security, anything. I’ve seen this kind of thing in Chad and India and Cuba, but I’m talking about a town that’s just 150 miles from Marble Arch.

Of course there are poorer places in London – Hackney, for instance, but in Hackney the badly-off are just part of the mix. In Conisborough there’s no Hoxton Square to bring a bit of light relief. It’s just mile after mile of broken windows and the bloody Earth Centre.

If a child from Doncaster were to visit London today, he’d have palpitations. He’d notice that everybody had teeth and Range Rovers and could write. He’d peer into
the low-voltage world of the capital’s restaurants and wonder what on earth people were putting in their mouths. And what, pray, would he make of a Lulu Guinness handbag?

I know, of course, that local newspapers up north, supported by people from Harrogate and Altrincham, will dismiss what I’m saying as the rantings of a spoilt southern media poof. But please don’t get all cold prickly, because then everybody down here will continue to think you’re all right. And you’re not.

I know the north is friendly. I know about the community spirit in places like Conisborough. I know about the gritty resolve. I know about the joyous countryside. But what would you rather have: teeth or a nice view?

There have been calls for some of Tony’s barmy army of civil servants to be moved up north, and there has been talk of the BBC shifting some of its services away from the capital. But I think they mean Amersham.

This sort of thing isn’t enough. For the past century the south-east has had a gentle gravitational pull on the north, but now it has the tug of a black hole.

The latest figures suggest that if current levels of migration continue, nobody will be left in the north within 40 years.

You have only to look at my family tree for confirmation of this. Since 1780, every one of my forefathers was born and lived in Yorkshire. That’s five generations on both sides of the family – maybe 2,000 people – all of whom were born, married and buried within 12 miles of one another.

Today I live somewhere else and so do all my cousins.

Even my mother, after 70 years in Doncaster, upped sticks last week and moved down south. There are many things which could be done to reunite the United Kingdom, but rather than preach I’ve been sitting here thinking about what it would take to entice me back there again.

I’m afraid it’s a long list and it starts with ‘£1 million’. What about you? Are you a lapsed northerner? What would it take for you to go back? Let me know.

Sunday 11 July 2004

When I heard that Morrissey was to re-form the New York Dolls for a concert in London this summer, I must confess that I raised a bit of an eyebrow.

The Dolls, when they met in the early 1970s, had absolutely no musical ability whatsoever. None of them could sing, none of them could play an instrument and, perhaps as a result, none of the albums they released was what you would call a commercial success.

Today, however, they are seen by many as one of the most important pieces of the rock’n’roll jigsaw.

In essence, they are credited with being the bridge between glam and punk rock, the band that spawned the Sex Pistols and the Clash in England, and the Ramones and Television in America.

They were punks before punk rock had been invented, so it was only right and proper that Morrissey should invite them over for a reunion gig. What puzzled me was how he intended to do it, because, put simply, most of them were dead.

First to go was the drummer Billy Murcia who, while supporting Rod Stewart on a tour of England, decided that it would be a good idea to make a champagne and mandrax cocktail. While unconscious, his friends put him in a cold bath and poured so much coffee down his throat that he drowned.

Undaunted, the Dolls replaced him with a chap called Jerry Nolan who could actually play the drums. This caused so many rows that he left the band and moved to Sweden, where he died from meningitis.