Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (24 page)

So where are you going skiing this year? Val d'Isère? Val de Shnoss? Schnoss de Val? Schnoss Nosh Losh de Schoss? Actually, scrub that. I'm not interested.

In fact, I have no idea why we always ask people where they're going because the one irrefutable fact about skiing resorts is: they are all identical.

There are high ones. There are low ones. There are big ones. There are little ones. And they're all full of wooden boxes and they all look just the same.

They're all full of slightly drunk English people called Harry getting cross with the hunky Italian, who has just given Sophia a dose of chlamydia, and Hans, who has barged into the bloody lift queue again, and the waiter, for charging £260 for what is nothing more than a dollop of melted cheese on bread.

And with Mrs Harry, for wanting to ski all day with the chiselled François, who has never said anything remotely funny in his life and probably has a tiny penis but makes up for these shortfalls by having eyes the colour of aquamarine and cheekbones that could be used to saw through a horse's saddle.

Over the years, I've been to quite a few skiing resorts around the world, and I've always reckoned that the best is a small one in Germany called Wank. Although there are no lifts, there are many long runs. Plus it's not very far away, it's not Swiss – so coffee doesn't cost 800 quid – and there's another good thing about it too. But I can't for the life of me remember what it is right now.

This year, however, I reckon you'll be better off going to France. It doesn't matter which resort you select because you're not there to look at Roman remains, or frescos. You're there to get up, sit on a ski lift, wish you still smoked, get cross with the Germans, get cross with your wife for going off with Monsieur Pommette-Stupide again, have lunch, get drunk, fall over, go to the doctor's, see a man with a ski pole in his eye, have some cheese on bread, pay the licensed burglar who served it £400, go to bed and try hard not to think about what the chalet girls are doing in their room. And since that's what you'll be doing every day, just choose a snowy French town near Geneva airport. La Clusaz isn't bad.

There are two reasons I'm recommending France. First, I think it will be very enjoyable to laugh openly at its downgraded credit rating, and second, thanks to a selection of ambulance-chasing Alpine lawyers, soon you won't be able to go there any more.

We tend to think that idiotic compensation awards could not possibly happen in France, where people seem to spend most of their time examining the latest American trend and then doing the exact opposite. But there have been two recent court cases involving accidents on the pistes, and in one a woman who was left tetraplegic was awarded £830,000.

The court decided that the Pyrenean resort had failed to warn skiers there was ice ahead and that it had narrowed the piste by installing a half-pipe – a U-shaped structure used to perform stunts – for snowboarders. And I'm sorry, but is this not the most stupid thing you've ever heard of?

Warning someone on a skiing holiday that there may be ice ahead is like warning morning sunbathers in St Tropez that come lunchtime it may get a bit toasty. Of course there's ice. And it's all part of the fun, suddenly hearing that terrible
clatter, feeling the sudden lurch and trying not to soil your ski pants.

Then there's the business of providing separate attractions for snowboarders. If it were left up to me, I'd ban them from the slopes completely and confiscate their stupid clothes, but anything that keeps them away from normal people, who are being propelled by gravity rather than a cocktail of crystal meth and exotic weeds, has to be a good thing.

There's more, though, because when you go skiing, you sort of know that an injury is not just possible or even likely, but inevitable. Terrible, blood-curdling injuries and severe pain? It's the price you pay for hurtling down a slope at a million miles an hour. So how can you possibly decide, as you hobble home looking like a Day-Glo version of Tutankhamun, that somehow the injuries you have sustained are the fault of the resort?

Sure, if your boss makes you go up an asbestos chimney without ropes and you fall and your head comes off, then yes, there needs to be redress. But skiing? I just don't get it at all.

And, of course, now that the French courts have decided to take a leaf from the book of Hank J. Silverman, attorney at law, of Aspen, Colorado, the cost of ski passes will rise to cover the increased insurance premiums. Worse, there's talk of making helmets compulsory.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Nothing fills me with such despair as the sight these days of the piste jammed full of people dressed up as if they're Valentino Rossi. And the idea that someone is going to force me to swap my Doncaster Rovers beanie for what is little more than a plastic colander fills me with rage. Next thing you know, they'll try to stop me skiing in jeans.

I realize, of course, that poor old Natasha Richardson sustained a terrible head injury while skiing and died. And if this
worries you, then you are perfectly welcome to dress up like a sperm. Likewise, you may choose to equip your children with hard hats – I do – but the idea that the law will be used to force everyone to follow suit is madness.

The good news, of course, is that it hasn't happened yet. So go to France and ski topless, at high speed, knowing that if you fall, you have a win-win choice. Either you can do the decent thing and accept it was your fault. Or you can sue and win such an enormous amount of damages that, single-handedly, you can reduce Nicolas Sarkozy's credit rating to an even more amusing B minus.

22 January 2012

We all learn at a young age that the Eskimos or the Inuit or the indigenous Canadians or whatever it is they like to be called these days have several thousand million words for snow.

But, while I hate to ruin your day, I'm afraid it's a myth. They have the same number of words as we do: one.

However, the Sami people of northern Scandinavia – or Samikins, as they prefer to be called – can choose from hundreds of words to describe what is falling from the sky.

And I'm not surprised. I'm at the top of Sweden as I write and the snow is wondrous in its ability to change from one minute to the next. As I look out of the window now, I'd describe it as ‘not see-through'. Earlier today it was ‘sideways'. Later I'm going out and it will be ‘a bloody nuisance'.

Of course, this is natural. I bet the Timbuktuians have many words for ‘sunshine' in the same way as Arabs have several for ‘sand' and we in Britain have many for ‘rain'. Cats, dogs, drizzle, light, soft, heavy, shower, downpour and so on.

Each person in the world needs to spice up his or her life by having new, intricate ways of talking about things that happen often. It's why I have many ways of describing ‘James May'.

It's said that English is fairly easy to learn, chiefly I suppose because, unlike the French, we don't insist that tables are female and that telephones are male. But I'm not sure that this is so, because for every word in the English language there are almost always a thousand or so more that mean pretty much exactly the same thing.

Heroin is a prime example. Even though it is used by only a tiny fraction of the population, it is also known as H, horse, black tar, brown sugar, junk, smack, gear and food. That's like nuclear physicists having a million words for the additive used in the manufacture of fuel rods.

When you say someone is homosexual, it's fairly clear what's meant. So why do we have so many other words that mean exactly the same thing? Furthermore, we have only one word for ‘red' but several dozen for ‘excrement'.

Army people are particularly good at dreaming up new ways of expressing themselves. Often they use acronyms that take longer to say than the words they have replaced – ‘IED', for example, is more of a tongue-twister than ‘bomb' or ‘mine'. Then they will say they have you ‘five by five' when they mean ‘I can hear you'. Or ‘on point' when they mean ‘in front', or ‘Your ego is writing cheques your body can't cash' when they mean ‘You really are a ghastly little show-off.'

It is of course wonderful, great, marvellous and indeed super that we have so many ways of saying things, emoting and expressing ourselves.

It's especially useful for newspaper sub-editors whose first choice of word won't fit on the page. Famously one tabloid sub shouted across the newsroom: ‘Does anyone know another word for Wednesday?'

There isn't one, of course. But strangely, in a language in which there is usually so much choice, there is also only one word for ‘friend'.

The person whom you call when your wife has walked out, your car has broken down and you need picking up from Scotland at four in the morning is a friend. Whereas the person who is a good laugh but pretends to be a recorded message when you are in trouble is also a friend.

At work you know plenty of people whom you would see
socially only if there had been some kind of devastating plague and everyone else in the world were dead. Somehow, though, they are all friends, as are the people who clutter up your Facebook page. Even though you have never actually met half of them.

I recognize that we have ‘acquaintance' to describe those whom we don't know well. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people whom we do. People whom we see regularly. Having only one word for that wildly disparate group is as daft as having only one word for ‘biscuit'.

Of course, you may say that ‘mate' does the job of differentiation quite well. But that's not strictly true. I have plenty of good mates but I don't know their phone numbers. So I couldn't call them from Scotland at four a.m. Strangely, the ones I could call are not mates at all. They're something else; something that in the English language cannot be explained.

The sort of loyal, faithful soul who would leap in front of a bullet to save you and sit and listen to your woes for the rest of time, pausing only to make you cups of tea, is like the smell of a dead mouse, or the bit of west London between Wormwood Scrubs and Holland Park, or the noise made by hip-hop musicians.

We've been so busy dreaming up new names for cocaine and Piers Morgan that we have been ignoring the fact that some things in life still don't appear in even the largest dictionary. What, for example, is the word for the cheese-like substance airlines put in their sandwiches?

We have a million words for the act of sex – and we even have one to describe the antics of a dog with worms, dragging itself along while sitting down – but if I asked you for a single word for the sensation of having to be happy with something that actually isn't quite good enough, you'd be stumped. We experience it every day with our phones and
our computers and even our houses. But nobody's bothered thinking of a word to describe it.

It's not just us, either. Irish has no word for ‘yes'. The Warlpiri Aborigines of Australia cannot count beyond two. And in the Amazonian Amondawa language there's no word for time.

It seems, then, that our language is full to bursting with words we don't need and a bit light when it comes to things we do. And on that note, I'm off to fix the thingumajig on the bottom of my boiler near the whatsit.

29 January 2012

Obviously, it is important during times of economic turmoil to keep the Labour party as far away as possible from the purse strings. So, I suspect every right-minded person in the land breathed a massive sigh of relief when the unions rode roughshod over the rank and file and selected the completely unelectable Ed Miliband to be their leader.

‘Good,' we all thought. ‘The silly little man can flounder about in the background while people who know what they're doing set about rebooting the system.'

Last week he was being particularly stupid, suggesting once again that banks should be forced to get cleaners and postboys to choose how much executives should be paid. Really, Ed? Seriously? Do you think that would work?

I only ask because, years ago, Neil Kinnock was on the BBC's
Question Time
discussing a proposed increase in VAT, when a member of the audience leapt angrily to her feet and said: ‘It's all right for you. You must be on £90 or £100 a week.'

She genuinely thought that the then leader of the opposition was earning £5,000 a year. And that this was a fortune. So how would she react today if she were appointed by Barclays to sit on the board and pass judgment on bonuses of five million or ten million quid?

She'd have a fit. They'd end up with a postal order for £2.75. Then they'd move to Frankfurt. And Britain's financial services industry would be finished.

The trouble is that thanks to the hysteria surrounding Fred
Goodwin – why doesn't he just change his name by deed poll to Sir Fred? – and Stephen Hester turning down his £1 million of share options in Royal Bank of Scotland, Miliband genuinely seems to have struck a chord.

People really do believe that other people should not be allowed to earn very large sums of money. I don't understand this. Soon the Facebook chappy Mark Zuckerberg will be worth $28 billion and that's fine by me because it makes absolutely no difference to my life whatsoever.

It's the same story with other high earners, such as the editor of the
Daily Mail
. If his pay were slashed and he had to move into a small house, the only people affected would be him and his immediate family.

And yet, people have got it into their heads that if rich people are paid less, it will somehow make them feel better. That's a hateful state of mind.

It's like a gang of ugly people roaming the streets throwing acid in the faces of those who are beautiful. It's like breaking the legs of those who are good at sport because you are not. It's like having cancer and hoping everyone else develops it as well.

David Cameron is scorned by Miliband and by people who leave comments on newspaper websites for being privileged. They say that because he has never had to burn his furniture to keep warm, he doesn't understand what it's like to be poor.

Well, I've never been to the South Pole but I know it's bloody cold. I've never been burnt at the stake, but I know it would be horrid. I've never been shot either but I know it would hurt. You don't need to have experienced something to understand what it means.

Anyway, it's not like a privileged person can help it. It's something they're born with, whether they like it or not. So
how dare Miliband suggest that someone cannot do a job because they came into the world in an elegant pram with a silver spoon in their mouth? It's the same as saying they can't do a job because they were born with one leg, or ginger hair, or a black face. It's obscene and Miliband should be ashamed of himself.

But he isn't. He's consumed with envy and rage and he must be stopped before the stupid and the gullible put him into No. 10. Happily, I have a plan.

Miliband is the MP for Doncaster North and it's hard to see how he has any empathy with this former mining community. His mum is Polish. His dad was born in Belgium. He was born in London and educated at Oxford. He taught for a year at Harvard. It's entirely possible he had not even heard of Doncaster until he was twenty-seven.

So what we need is an independent candidate to stand against him. Someone who was not just born and raised in Donny but someone who can stand up and say, in an authentic Yorkshire accent if need be, that every single person in his family tree, right back to the middle of the eighteenth century, lived and died in the area.

Maybe their grandfather on one side could have been a popular family doctor in Sprotbrough. Maybe his or her grandfather on the other side could have run a pub, such as the Royal Oak in Tickhill. Obviously, whoever takes on the job must be able to say they have some mining stock in their genes.

In other words, we are looking for someone who wasn't just parachuted in to a safe seat but who understands and likes the place. Someone who didn't go to Oxford or Harvard but cut his teeth at a journalism college in Sheffield and later on a local paper in neighbouring Rotherham.

Sadly, the only person I can think of who fulfils all these
requirements is me, and I really don't want to give up my day job. It is more fun to drive across Italy in a Lamborghini than it is to smile while on a sponsored jog to raise money for a new youth centre. And yet …

I'm not suggesting for a moment that I could topple Miliband. Doncaster North is a Labour party fortress and the pages of history are littered with the carcasses of idiots from the world of television who thought they'd like to be an MP. And yet …

Someone has to do something to keep Miliband away from the nation's important decisions. And wouldn't it be fantastic to watch his little face the moment he realized his party had won the general election. But he had lost his seat.

5 February 2012