Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (3 page)

As we know, European flights have been a bit tricky these past few weeks. Couple that to the dreary industrial action at British Airways, the lousy exchange rate and the complete shambles that is our economy, and it's certain that many people will be thinking about taking their holidays in Britain this year.

Indeed, I was in Cornwall last week and, even though it's only the middle of May, the beaches were already peppered with families, huddling behind windbreaks and peering at the horizon through their anorak hoods, fervently hoping for a triumph of optimism over meteorological fact.

This is the problem with holidaying in the British Isles. We have good weather, of course, but it's like an unreliable old friend. You never know when it will drop by to brighten your day. And it never stays long. It has other places to go. France, usually, or the Caribbean.

So let's think about that for a moment. This year there will be more holidaymakers at large in Britain than ever before. They will not be able to lie on a beach reading a book because the same northerly winds that brought the ash cloud are keeping temperatures down to the point where nitrogen freezes. So we have thousands and thousands of people, on holiday, bored and with all the money they didn't spend on flights burning a dirty great hole in their pockets. I sense a great business opportunity here.

While in Cornwall, I couldn't help noticing that there was a bee museum. Yes, that's right. A bee museum. The bees do
not balance balls on their noses or juggle miniature chainsaws. You just pay cash money to watch some bees fly about, being bees. It was just down the road from a gnome reserve, where you can go and trundle around the garden of someone who has very poor taste.

So, there is money to be made from insects and plastic garden ornaments. But for some reason what the bored British holidaymaker likes best of all is stones. If the stones are fastened together in the shape of a church, or an old house where someone's wife used to live, then you are quids in. But don't worry if this isn't the case.

Fallen-over stones are still massively popular with the army of moochers. They will spend hours, and pay out God knows how much on booklets and postcards and ice creams, and all you have to offer them in return is some rubble that you can claim once used to be an abbey.

Amazingly, though, you can even make money if the stones are just stones.

Round where I live there are some stones in a field. If you pay a pound, or 50p for children, then you are allowed to go and look at them. How brilliant is that? You almost certainly couldn't design a new type of Apple iPod or an Aston Martin DB9. But don't worry. You don't have to.

To make a living you just have to charge people to look at some stones that someone, a long time ago and for unclear reasons, up-ended in your top paddock.

There are some enormous stones in a field in Wiltshire that are free if you look at them from the nearby road. But the druids, or whoever manages the site, will charge you a whopping £6.90 if you want to see them close up. That's a fantastic business. Especially when you throw in the sale of the guidebooks, all of which say the same thing: ‘We don't have a clue why these stones are here.'

Mind you, the guardians of a stone I saw in Cornwall go one better. They have got hordes of people paying £3 to see a stone that may or may not mark the burial place of King Arthur. A king who didn't actually exist. How mental is that?

There are some stones by the stream on the farm I've just bought. I'm going to claim they mark the birthplace of James Bond, open a gift shop and charge people a fiver to come and stand near them for a few minutes. You should be thinking along the same lines. If you have any sort of geology in your garden, put up a leaflet in the local post office and Wallace Arnold will be bringing them round in droves for a gawp.

The capacity British holidaymakers have for finding uninteresting things so interesting that they will pay money to look at them beggars belief. They will pay to watch cows being born. They will pay to see needlework. They will pay to look at your flower beds. If you have a hobby, no matter how nerdy it may be, you can make money out of it from June to the end of September.

Unless your hobby is looking at pornography on the internet. You probably won't be able to make anything out of that. But don't despair.

Industry is an excellent draw, especially if it's closed down. There's a disused tin mine in Cornwall that charges adults eight quid and children a fiver. And what do they see? A hole in the ground that is no longer producing one of the most dreary commodities in the already not very exciting world of metallurgy.

Imagine the possibilities. You could charge people money to go and look round your branch of what used to be Woolworths. ‘This is where people used to choose their sweets, and if you follow me we'll have a look at where the racks of DVDs used to be.'

What else are tourists going to do? They've seen some stones. They've looked round the gnome reserve and they've watched bees. It's still raining, the children are still bored, you have their attention and that means you have a direct line to their credit card.

I met a man last week who rents wetsuits to people who want to go swimming but can't in the costumes they've brought because it's always too cold. He will also rent you a slab of polystyrene on which you can play in the waves. He has a £100,000 supercar, and I'm guessing now but I'd like to bet that by milking the misery of the trapped British holidaymaker, he's able to take his holidays abroad.

16 May 2010

There seems to have been some sort of brouhaha about a shortage of women in the new Camerclegg cabinet, and I must say, it does seem to be a bit unbalanced. This, I fear, is very unhealthy. There is nothing that fills my heart with such dread as an all-male gathering. This is why I avoid stag nights and ‘lads' nights out' with the same fervent determination as I avoid close encounters with nettles and rabid dogs. I do not understand business, cigars bore me, I have no interest in cricket and if anyone slaps me on the back, I am filled with a sometimes overwhelming need to respond with a punch to the face.

When men are not talking about business and cricket and slapping one another's backs, they talk nonsense, wondering, for instance, if it is possible to live upside down, or cross the Atlantic on a vacuum cleaner. This sort of thing is useless when you have been charged with running the country. You may start out with every intention of working out how the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills could be abolished. But pretty soon, after you've checked on the cricket scores, you're going to be wondering if it's possible to ingest ice cream through your nose.

Men need women in order to function properly, and the reason for this is simple: a conversation with an interesting man is just a conversation with an interesting man. Ultimately, it's going nowhere.

Whereas a conversation with an interesting woman, provided she isn't completely enormous, could go out of the
door, up the stairs and into the bedroom. Or into the garden. Or to the back seat of the car. It could go anywhere.

This is why men are much funnier and cleverer when women are around. Because we flirt and women flirt back. And flirting is the oil that lubricates the engine of ingenuity and wit.

I cannot be arsed to think a single original thought when I'm surrounded by men. But throw a woman into the mix and usually I have developed a new world order by teatime. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the cabinet is the right place for such behaviour. Trying to make Theresa May understand the need for national service is one thing. Trying to make her understand while imagining what she would look like naked adds all sorts of complications that the country can well do without at the moment.

What's more, we are talking about people here who are separated by many miles from their families. They are cooped up in a room together and it is at times like this when flirting can lead to all sorts of other problems. If you are not careful, you could end up in the bath with Edwina Currie.

Right now, the government has no money at all to pay for the war in which we are engaged or even the medicines needed to put the soldiers back together again. And it's hard to think how this can be sorted out if Liam Fox is playing a secretive game of mental footsie with Caroline Spelman.

You may argue, if you wish, that grown men and women with big jobs do not flirt, but I disagree. Only the very dull and the very dead do not. When a person is tired of flirting, they are tired of life. And we don't want people like that in charge of anything.

So, you might imagine that the best solution is to be governed entirely by women. Thanks to her multitasking skills, a woman in government could look after defence in
the morning, work and pensions in the afternoon and health while doing the ironing. You therefore wouldn't need twenty-eight seats round the table. Just four.

However, I'm not sure an all-woman government would work at all because have you ever heard women talking when they think no men can hear?

We imagine it's all schools and shopping and needlework. But it isn't. I've been in the position these past few days to eavesdrop on a group of girls. Bright girls with important jobs. And what they've talked about – non-stop – is sex.

Not romantic, swoony, Mr Darcy-in-a-lake sex, either. Real, hardcore, back-end-of-the-internet sex. Who's been sodomized by whom and where. Who's had surgery on their inner labia. What lesbianism would be like. At one point I thought they'd moved on to gardening because I thought they were talking about a nearby clematis. But I'd misheard. It was clitoris. And it seemed to occupy them for hours.

One girl explained last night, when she thought I was asleep, that she got her builders to do as she wished by stopping on the way home, taking off her bra and standing in the cold for a few minutes. But they were quickly back on labial surgery.

Often, invitations were extended for the others to have a look at an interesting piece of pubic topiary. I found this amazing. I have been a man for fifty years and I have never been invited by another man to look at his penis. Nor have I felt the need to ask a mate to check out my testicles to see if they are ‘normal'. And certainly, I've never got my builder to do as he's told by coming home with my old chap hanging out.

The women I've been with aren't unusual, either. A few weeks ago I overheard two girlfriends chatting, and the subject – for several hours – was masturbation. Was the Bullet
better than the Rabbit? What positions worked best? And what fantasies? It was extraordinary because, again, I cannot imagine men discussing onanism in the same terms. In fact, I cannot recall it being discussed at all.

When we understand all this, we can see perfectly well why committees don't work. There are too many distractions.

This is why companies and countries run by one person are so productive. Because they don't spend all day flirting or talking about sex or seeing how far they can lean back in their chair without falling over, they get things done. I therefore have a suggestion. Soon, we will be asked if we wish to change the voting system. I think we should seriously consider introducing a dictatorship.

23 May 2010

Alarming news from the north. Last week someone broke into a field on the outskirts of Knutsford in Cheshire and stole a hundred mummy and baby sheeps. The farmer's wife is distraught as one of the stolen animals was a pet. And they took its new lamb as well. It's all just too heartbreaking for words. And it's by no means an isolated incident.

Just a few days earlier in Lancashire, a farmer in Ramsbottom – I'm afraid I'm not making that up – woke up one morning to find that someone had half-inched 271 of his flock.

Meanwhile, in Wales, 200 were nicked, a similar number went missing in the Borders, and in Cumbria alone fifteen farmers have been targeted. It seems, then, that up north, sheep are the new bullion.

It's not just sheep, though. In Tamworth, Staffordshire, someone has been nicking piglets; in Norfolk, Mrs Queen lost £15,000-worth of cows; and in Shropshire some chap rang the police the other day to say someone had stolen 800,000 of his bees. That's on top of the 500,000 bees that were stolen from Lothian last June. At this rate I may have to think about fitting a burglar alarm to my tortoise.

So what's going on here and, more importantly, why has no one yet been caught? I mean, how hard can it be to find someone who has stolen a million bees? Surely he'll be in a hospital, swollen beyond all recognition and moaning the low moan of deep, relentless agony.

I want to catch him, frankly, because stealing someone's
bees is a bit like stealing someone's eczema flakes. What exactly are you going to do with them?

Then there is this sheep-rustling business. To steal 271 sheep with no one hearing, you need to have several things: some experience of how sheep behave, a knowledge of the countryside, a fleet of dogs and a big lorry. Now I'm no detective but I reckon that if we examine this evidence, the culprit is almost certainly going to be a shepherd. Interestingly, however, police investigating the crimes are not looking for someone sitting on a fence, in a brand new smock. Instead, they seem to have decided that crime syndicates are at work here. Wow! The Wurzels with sawn-offs.

Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. Apparently, stolen sheep and underground, unlicensed slaughterhouses aren't troubled with European Union hygiene regulations. Which means the market could soon be flooded with a surplus of dodgy joints. It sounds to me as though there could be a Mr Big at large in the hills. Pablo Esco-baa, perhaps.

Frankly, though, I can't imagine the profits are that large. Which is why I find myself wondering why we now have Ronnie and Reggie Gummidge from the Cosy Nostra rushing about in the uplands stealing sheep when they could be doing the traditional gangster thing: robbing banks.

I always wanted to be a bank robber when I grew up. As a career, it seemed ideal: short periods of glamorous and interesting work followed by lengthy spells of relaxation in Spain. All my heroes were bank robbers: Butch and Sundance; Jack Hawkins's League of Gentlemen; Bonnie and Clyde. Bank robbers were cool.

There was a time when a bank was robbed every other night. We became used to waking up in the morning to the sound of Dixon tearing past our house in his Austin Westminster, on the trail of some blagger in a stripy jersey and a Jag.

You'd imagine that today bank robbery would be even more popular.

We all know the police are mostly engaged in the lucrative business of apprehending motorists. And the few who are allowed to concentrate on proper crime are either back at the station, filling in forms, or on courses, learning how to climb over a garden wall. The chances of being caught, then, are almost zero.

Obviously, if you wander into your local branch of Barclays and, halfway through the robbery, you succumb to the drugs you've taken and fall asleep, then, yes, you're going to get nicked. But if you really concentrate on planning and get all the details just so, you'll be fine. The only problem would be the crowds of well-wishers showering you with rose petals as you ran for the getaway car.

And yet despite all this, the last really big bank job on UK soil was in 1994, when raiders made off with £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast. That's an astonishing sixteen years ago. So what's happened? Why have people stopped stealing wedge, which makes you popular and cool and rich, and started stealing honey bees, which makes you go to hospital?

I wouldn't mind, but the people behind the Belfast heist have never been caught. And most of the money has never been recovered. One night's work: £26.5 million. And no time in the slammer. That's got to beat traipsing around the freezing moors at night, whispering orders at Shep in the hope that you can flog a dodgy chop to Mrs Miggins at No. 22 for a couple of quid.

It's odd, but I think I have the answer. If you go to a hilltop farm, you will find a sheep. But if you go to a bank, you can be pretty certain you will not find any cash. Obviously, they've given most of it to the Greeks, but what about the
rest? I think it's melted because I haven't seen or used any for years. So to be a bank robber in the twenty-first century you don't need to be able to crack safes – just computer codes. And I'm sorry, but fiddling about on HSBC's hard drive is a miserable pursuit. Certainly, it's way less cool than nicking the Queen's cows.

It gets worse. Modern cars are almost impregnable, modern art is worthless, half the world lives with a panic button and a can of Mace under its pillow, CCTV has made all city centres no-go areas and most of the police are tooled up with shooters.

This, then, is why there has been such a spate of animal thefts. Because these days, what else is there to nick?

30 May 2010