Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (2 page)

On Thursday morning I woke up in Colditz Castle, drove to Poland and found that I couldn't fly back to England as planned because all of northern Europe was shrouded in a cloud of ash that was thick enough to bring down a jetliner. But, mysteriously, not so thick that it was actually visible.

Brussels, then. That would be the answer. We'd drive at 180mph on the limit-free autobahns to Berlin, fly to Belgium and catch the Eurostar to London.

This, however, turned out to be ambitious, because the only vehicle we could lay our hands on was a knackered Volkswagen van that had a top speed of four. So Prague, then. That was nearer. Yes. We'd start from there instead.

Unfortunately, the index of our map was broken down into countries. And we didn't actually know which country we were in. We'd see a sign for Lückendorf, so I'd look it up in the index. But would it be filed under Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic? And how would it be spelt? The Germans may call it Lückendorf but the Poles might call it something entirely different. In much the same way that people in India call Bombay ‘Bombay'. But the BBC insists on calling it ‘Mumbai'.

By the time I'd decided Lückendorf doesn't really exist, we'd found a sign for Bogatynia and that doesn't seem to exist, either. The confusion meant that pretty soon we were on a farm track, our path blocked by a tractor that seemed to be scooping mud from a field and putting it on to the road. This encouraged us, since it seemed like a very un-German
thing to do and all the Poles are in my bathroom at the moment. We had, therefore, to be near Praha, as the BBC doesn't call it. But should.

We were, and our worries seemed to be over. But they weren't. By this stage the invisible cloud of ash had settled on Belgium and Brussels airport was closed. No matter, we decided. We shall go to Paris and catch the train from there.

Oh, no, we wouldn't. We learnt that all the Eurostar trains were chock-full but we figured that would be okay. We'd fly to Paris, rent a car and we'd drive home in that. Job done.

To celebrate, we went for a beer. I had a lot, if I'm honest, because I wanted to be too drunk to drive this last leg. I had so many that after a while Barclaycard decided it'd be fun to cancel my credit card. And I couldn't phone to explain that if it didn't turn the credit back on again, I'd come round to its offices with an axe. Because by this stage my phone was out of bullets. And then we found that our plane was due to land at Charles de Gaulle just five minutes before that shut down, too. Any delay would be catastrophic.

Normally, people getting on to a plane are fairly polite. We're happy to stand in the aisle for hours while people try to fit the dishwasher they've bought into the overhead locker. I chose not to be so patient on this occasion, though, and as a result there were many injuries. But because of the violence, the plane took off on time and landed just before the Paris shutdown was due to begin.

By now I was Cardiff-on-a-Saturday-night drunk. And fairly desperate for a pee. But not so desperate that I failed to realize the gravity of the situation at Charles de Gaulle. You know those last moments in
Titanic
when the ship is finally going down? Well, it was nothing like that. It was worse.

In the baggage claim was a pretty girl asking if anyone could give her a lift to North Jutland. In the main concourse
were businessmen begging rides to Amsterdam. And everyone was being approached by dodgy-looking North Africans with gold teeth and promises of taxis to anywhere. For you, my friend, special price.

Of particular note were the queues of people pointing and shouting at airline staff as though they were responsible somehow for the eruption. This seemed like an odd thing to do. I very much encourage assault, verbal or otherwise, on useless members of staff who won't help. But yelling will not bring order to the planet's mantle.

It's funny, isn't it? The airports had only been closed for six hours and society was cracking up. Not that I cared much about this because we had secured the last rental car in the whole airport and were in a rush to catch the midnight train from Calais. This meant there was no time for a pee.

By Senlis, my bladder was very full. By Lille, the pressure had become so great the contents had turned to amber. Ever peed from the window of a moving car? I have. It came out as pebbles. But it was worth it because at three in the morning I climbed into my own bed at home. Five countries. Planes. Trains and automobiles. And all because Mother Nature burped.

There is a warning here, because on the volcanic explosivity index (VEI) – which goes from one to eight – the eruption at Eyjafjallajokull will probably be classified as a two. And yet it shut down every airport in northern Europe. There are much bigger volcanoes in Iceland. They could, in theory, shut the whole world down for years.

Let's not forget that back in 1980 Mount St Helens in Washington state blew with a VEI rating of five. It was a huge blast but only local air traffic was affected.

What's changed, of course, is our attitude to safety, brought about in the main by our fear of being sued. Could volcanic
ash bring down a jetliner? Fifteen-hundred miles from the scene of the volcano itself, it is extremely unlikely, but so long as there are lawyers, licking their lips at the prospect of proving the crash could have been avoided, air traffic controllers are bound to push the big button labelled ‘Stop'.

It won't be a volcano that ends man's existence on this planet. It'll be the no-win no-fee lawyers. They are the ones who brought Europe to a halt last week. They are the ones who made a simple trip from Berlin to London into a five-country, all-day hammer blow on your licence fee. They are the ones who must be stopped.

18 April 2010

In the olden days it was easy to make a television work. You plugged an aerial cable into the back, then bashed the top with your fist until, eventually, Hughie Green stopped jumping up and down. Things have changed. Have you tried to make a modern TV work? It cannot be done. No, don't argue: it can't. You have to get a man round and then it still won't work because you have absolutely no idea what to press on the remote-control device. I am looking now at the plipper thing for the TV in my office. It has thirty-two buttons on it, including one marked ‘COMPO/(rgb 8)'.

Any idea what that does? I haven't. I do understand the one marked ‘Power', but this does not actually turn the television on. So far as I can tell, nothing does, which is why, for three years, it has been off. Frankly, for getting the news I'd have been better off building a chain of beacons.

Then there is the world of the mobile phone. Sometimes my wife asks me to answer her Raspberry and not once in a year have I been able to do so before the caller rings off. To my way of thinking, it's not a communication device. It's a sex toy for geeks. A laptop enthusiast's Rabbit.

However, my life took a dramatic turn for the worse last week because I took delivery of a new flat in London. It's been done up by a developer and fitted with every single item from every single gadget magazine in the universe. This means I cannot operate a single thing. Nothing, d'you hear? Nothing at all.

Let us take, for example, the old-fashioned pleasure of
making a cup of coffee. For many years this involved putting some water in a kettle and boiling it. But now kettles are seen as messy, which is why my new flat has a multi-buttoned aluminium panel set into the wall. The idea is that you fill it with beans and the boiling water is instant. Sounds great, but the instruction book is 400 pages long and I'm sorry, but if I waded through that, my longing for a cup of coffee would be replaced by a fervent need for a quart of Armagnac.

The coffee machine, though, is the tip of the iceberg. There's a music system that can beam any radio station in the world into any room. Last night I selected a classic rock station from San Francisco and was enjoying very much the non-stop stream of Supertramp, until I wanted to go to bed. This meant turning the system off and, for me at least, that is impossible.

Normally, of course, you just hit the offending electronic good with a hammer or throw it on the floor – this works well for alarm clocks in hotel rooms – but I was holding a remote-control device. Smashing that into a million pieces, I realized, would not stop the noise. I needed to find the actual box and I couldn't. So the only solution was to fly to California … and burn the radio station down.

I considered it but in the end went to bed to ‘The Logical Song'. The irony was not lost on me. This morning the station was playing ‘Dreamer'. The irony was lost on me there, though. In a boiling torrent of rage. It's not just the music system and the kettle, either.

The extractor fan above the hob has seven settings. Why? What's wrong with off and on? I can't think of anything that's less in need of seven settings … apart from maybe a pacemaker.

Other things? Well, I can't open the garage door – it's remote control, obviously – and the entry phone doesn't
appear to be connected to the front door. That means there's an increased chance it's connected to air traffic control at Heathrow and, as a result, I daren't go near it.

Burglar alarm? Nope. Television? Nope. Broadband? Not a chance. And the cooker? Hmm, you could use its controls to remotely pilot a US Air Force spy drone. But to make a shepherd's pie? Not in a million years. And, of course, I can't contact the man who installed any of this stuff because he's in Aspen. People who install high-tech equipment are always in bloody Aspen. This is because they're always American.

They go to gadget shows in Las Vegas, get completely carried away and then come to Europe to install systems that no one over here can understand. We've only just got over drawbridges, for Christ's sake. Then they disappear and the people who made the various bits and pieces go bust. Which means you're left in a house that has everything – and nothing at all.

In a desperate attempt to turn everything off, I thought I'd find the fuse box. Fuse box? To an American gadgeteer, a fuse box is as Victorian as a horse and carriage. So, in my new flat, the fuse box is a fuse room. And it's not hard to find, because you can hear the circuitry humming from a hundred yards away. Or you could if you weren't being deafened by ‘Even in the Quietest Moments'.

Then you open the door and, Holy Mother of God, it's like stepping on to the bridge of the
Starship Enterprise
. I am not joking. There are rows and rows of switches and thousands of tiny blinking green lights. Thousands? Yes. Thousands.

I have been on the flight deck of a modern Airbus jetliner and I assure you there are fewer switches and lights up there than there are in the bowels of my three-bedroom flat. It's so scary that you don't dare touch anything in case, when you come out again, you are in Chicago.

Apparently this is not unusual. Many modern properties have rooms such as this, full of warp cores and modems and circuit breakers. The fans needed to keep it all cool would propel a military hovercraft; the power needed just to power itself would light Leeds; and it's all for no purpose whatsoever because no one in the real world understands any of it.

As I sat on the floor, then, with no heating, no kettle, no freezer, no television, no broadband, no light and no hope any time soon of turning the situation around, a profound thought wafted into my head. Our endless pursuit of a high-tech future seems to have taken us back to the Stone Age.

2 May 2010

Now that the general election is over, we can turn our attention to one of the most important issues in our lives today: my local cobbler has closed down. I can't say that I ever used it because that would be a lie; I didn't, but I liked having it there. A genial old man in a brown coat, stitching up battered clogs, reminded me of a time when we didn't simply throw our training shoes away because they went out of fashion or because our football team signed a sponsorship deal with Puma. Waste Not. Want Not. It wasn't called that, but it should have been.

The florist has gone, too. I can't say I ever used that, either, mainly because the girl who runs the rival business on the high street is much prettier. But, again, I liked having it there. I liked living in a town that had two florists and now I don't any more.

Other shops that have closed down in the past couple of years include the hi-fi shop, the bra shop, the children's clothing shop, both off-licences and the delicatessen. Now, I should explain at this point that I did use the deli. Once. I bought some cheese there and it was very nice. Not so nice, sadly, that I actually bought more, but I liked the idea, should I be in town buying some stamps or getting my shoes mended, that if I were overcome by a need for a spot of Wensleydale, I could sally forth etc. and get some. And now, I can't.

Obviously, I am writing about Chipping Norton, and this news, you may think, would be of some interest in the
Chipping Norton Gazette
. But we have no such thing. And, anyway, I bet exactly the same thing is going on in your town; that it's now just a bland, featureless desert of estate agents, fast-food joints and charity shops.

I know that charity shops perform a vital service. I am aware of this and I wish them all the very best as they leach into the premises once occupied by butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. The trouble is, I hate them.

I never want to buy a Victorian teapot. And I don't like to be reminded when I go into town that it's still possible. A Victorian teapot is no good when you want cheese or a romper suit. A Victorian teapot is no good even if you want a cup of tea. So I don't want one, even if it's only 3d – as it usually says on the label in these places.

I suppose, if push came to shove, I'd rather have a charity shop than a set of whitewashed windows that sit like broken teeth in the gums of the high street, reminding their former owners of their failure. However, what I really want is the cobbler back. And the bra shop and the florist and at least one of the offies.

They won't be back, though. They're gone for good. And it's a worry because when you take away a town centre's independent retailers, you take away its soul. You also take away the reason for going there. And then what? Why live cheek by jowl in the flabby doughnut when there's no jam in the centre?

I do not intend to dwell on the consequences here because I'm more interested in stopping the rot. And to do that, we need to work out why, all of a sudden, so many small shops are shutting up for good.

Some, of course, blame the recession. But many of these places had signs above the door saying they were established in 1890. That means they'd survived recessions in the past, and wars and diphtheria.

The most common scapegoat is the supermarket or the out-of-town retail park. People say that it is much cheaper to buy cheese from Asda than it is to buy it from a chap in an apron in your local deli. This is true. But if it's cheapness you want, then surely it'd be best to make the cheese yourself. All you need is some milk, some rennet and the bassist from Blur.

No. I suspect the reason we choose to visit a supermarket rather than flog around a town that was designed by King Alfred is that it's so much more convenient.

And that, I think, is where a solution to the problem of urban decay can be found. Realistically, we can never do anything to reverse the spread of supermarkets, but we can level the playing field. We just have to make town-centre shopping easier. And that can be achieved by getting rid of traffic wardens. Or civil enforcement officers, as they are now called. And how Russian is that?

Whatever they're called, I'm not suggesting they should be put in a vat and melted down, but if this were necessary, then so be it. The fact is, they have to go. All of them.

Every single time I go into my local town, I get a parking ticket. I'm driving along, I am suddenly consumed by a need for a bra, I park in a perfectly sensible place that causes no inconvenience to anyone, pop into the shop, find it's selling only Victorian teapots, come out again … and blam. I've been done. If they put that much effort into catching terrorists, nothing would ever explode ever again.

In Oxford I work on the basis that I'm going to be done anyway, so I just park right outside where I want to be. The last time I went there, I parked in a bus lane and went to watch a film. The fine was the same as if I'd made an effort.

It's as though towns don't want people to stop and shop. And, of course, many don't – those run by people who still
cling to the outdated and now completely discredited theory that man causes global warming, for example. They would rather the locals stayed at home and beat themselves with twigs. But even enlightened boroughs continue to employ civil storm troopers. Which means they are employing a body of people whose sole job is to kill the town.

Do they think that, if left to our own devices, we'd all park on zebra crossings for a year? If they do, it means they don't trust us. And if they don't trust us, then the relationship has broken down and it's time for some civil unrest.

9 May 2010