Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (30 page)

Britain's gold-medal-winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington has announced that during the Olympics she will not be looking at Twitter or any other similar site because she gets upset by remarks about her appearance.

What kind of person looks at a picture of Ms Adlington and thinks, ‘I know what I'll do today. I'll go online and let the long-legged, blue-eyed, world-beating blonde know that her conk's a bit on the large side. And then afterwards I'm going to leave a message for Uma Thurman saying she's got thin hair'?

You may think that if this is happening there must be a lunatic on the loose. But you'd be wrong. There are, in fact, tens of thousands of lunatics out there, all of whom spend their days going online to insult a selection of people they've never met.

When a newspaper prints a picture of a pretty girl, comments are invited from readers, all of which follow a pattern. Savagery. Just last week the television presenter Melanie Sykes was described as a ‘sleazeball' for finding a boyfriend. Somebody called Hilary Duff was accused of having a ‘man's shoulders'. And Keira Knightley was told she looked like a ‘famine victim hours from death'.

My wife has been subjected to this as well. She was photographed recently while out running, and you simply wouldn't believe how much bile this prompted. One person was so cruel that I was tempted to go round to her house and cut
her in half with a sword. I also wanted to set fire to her photograph albums and boil her pets.

But therein lies the problem. She's anonymous. She's known only as a stupid user name – ‘Fluffykins' or some such. She could be in Birmingham or Hobart. She's a microbe in a fog of seven billion particles and she knows it. Which is why, as I write, she's probably telling Bruce Forsyth he looks like a Russian icebreaker. With a moustache!!!!!

Would she walk up to a person in the street and say, ‘God, you're fat'? No. And yet she sees nothing wrong with getting the message across just as clearly on the internet. Because that's the sad truth. The only people who read these comments are the people to whom they refer. And they are powerless to reply.

If I say something that offends you, either here or on the television, you know where I am. You can find me. You can shove a pie into my face or throw manure over my garden wall. These things happen and, in a way, it's to be expected.

But the person who ignores Adlington's remarkable achievements in the pool and concentrates only on her nose? She has no idea who they are or where they live.

This has to stop. And we know it's possible from the recent conviction of a Newcastle University student who was given two years' community service for bombarding the football pundit Stan Collymore with racially abusive tweets. This showed that if you are a racialist and you use the n-word, you are not anonymous and the police can find you.

We should be able to do the same. Easily. When people call from blocked numbers in the middle of the night to sing unpleasant songs, I should be able to get their number from Vodafone in a heartbeat. When Adlington is abused for having a daggerboard on the front of her face, she should be
able to locate the culprit with a couple of clicks. His name. His address. The name of his boss. The lot.

Fans of the internet boast about its openness but, actually, it isn't open at all. It's a web of secrecy, full of dark corners that can be probed only by government agencies, and sometimes not even then. There are tens of thousands of lunatics out there, and the problem could be solved at a stroke if they were forced to step out from behind their user names and bask in the ice-cold glare of retribution.

This is not just a solution for Adlington. It's a solution for Lord Justice Leveson as well. For what feels like the past 200 years this poor old man has been made to sit in what appears to be
World of Sport
's old studios, listening to a bombastic man in silly spectacles questioning every single person who has ever been, met or seen a politician, journalist or celebrity.

He is charged, among other things, with trying to recommend a code of conduct to which newspapers must adhere. But whatever he comes up with is pointless because clamping down on newspapers in the digital age is like worrying about a cut finger when you have rabies.

Newspapers are already covered by the laws of libel, which don't affect those on the internet to anything like the same degree. Because even if you can find the online culprit, what's the point of suing a penniless fat man who lives with his mum and spends his day spouting bile from his porn store in the loft? Even if he did turn out to be loaded, you're still up a creek with no boat because the only people who read his bile were you and your immediate family.

Privacy? There's a big debate here, too, but again I must ask why. Why is it not possible for a newspaper to dig around in your dirt when ‘Buttcrack775483' can go through your
bins and your knicker drawer – even your stools, if it takes his fancy – and describe exactly what he finds on his blog, knowing that he will get away with it?

I'm not suggesting for a moment that you should not be allowed to laugh about the vastness of my stomach. Within certain bounds of reason, you should be entitled to say pretty much what you like about whomsoever you like. But only if you do so in full view.

In short, we need to get rid of web anonymity. And if there's one recommendation I'd make to newspapers, it is this: only accept readers' comments if they are prepared to divulge their name and address. That way, we could choose to visit the person who thinks it's hilarious to make fun of Rebecca Adlington. And give him a comedy nose as well.

3 June 2012

Ray Bradbury died last week. So now the author of
Fahrenheit 451
and
The Martian Chronicles
is up there in the firmament with all the other great science-fiction writers: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams and Arthur C. Clarke. There's still a demand for science fiction, of course.
Doctor Who
remains popular among children and
Prometheus
is doing good business at the cinema. But in print? Well, you may imagine, if you spend any time at all in the bookshop, that all anyone seems to write about these days are mentally unstable Scandinavian detectives and women being lightly whipped.

In fact, though, you're wrong. Science fiction is thriving; only today it's all being written by global-warming enthusiasts.

Global warming was invented by Margaret Thatcher as a blunt instrument she could use to bop Arthur Scargill and his sooty miners over the head. But it didn't really catch on until the name was changed from ‘global warming', which sounds comforting and pleasant, to ‘climate change', which has unstoppable, apocalyptic overtones. With its new handle in place, science fiction had its modern day Martian.

Soon we were reading about how carbon dioxide, an invisible, odourless gas, would cause London to drown in a sea of its own making, turn Italy into a desert and generate flies the size of toasters that would ravage Africa. Al Gore was the new H. G. Wells and your patio heater was a Dalek.

One of the best stories to emerge from the period came
from a chap called Bill McGuire, who is professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. Back in 1999, he said that one day a volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands would erupt and that this would cause a rock the size of the Isle of Man to crash into the sea. The immensity of the splash would generate a 500ft tsunami that in a matter of hours would decimate North America's eastern seaboard and wipe all life from the Caribbean. It's happened before, he said. And it will happen again.

Sadly, in 2004, researchers from Southampton University concluded that, if La Palma's volcano does erupt, it'll cause nothing more than a bit of mud to slither into the Atlantic.

Undaunted, Bill started on a new work and last week, at the Hay literary festival, he revealed it to a waiting world. It's a monster. He says that soon, climate change will bring about an age of geological havoc including tsunamis and something he calls ‘volcano storms'.

Volcano storms were first charted by Pliny the Younger during the eruption of Vesuvius in
AD
79 and were seen most recently when Eyjafjallajokull blew up in Iceland. Few things are as scary, because inside the choking black ash cloud you have a forest of lightning, with jolts of raw power two miles long surging out of the volcano's vents. And this terrifying, end-of-days spectacle, according to McGuire, is coming to Surrey very soon.

Like all the best plots, his theory that global warming can affect the fabric of the planet is based in fact. After the last Ice Age, Sweden literally bounced upwards by 1,000ft and it's still rising by nearly half an inch a year. So it stands to reason that one day the weight of the ice and snow that cover Greenland will diminish to a point where it's no longer sufficient to keep the world's largest island buried in the mud.

When that happens, and it will be sudden, the elasticity of
the earth's crust will cause it to
boing
upwards by perhaps more than half a mile. And you don't need to be a member of D:Ream to know what kind of a mess that will make of the northern hemisphere. A wave of biblical proportions will wipe out not just Iceland and Canada but most of America's eastern seaboard and all of Europe down to the Alps. The Empire State Building will crash into the statue of Jesus in Rio and the Arc de Triomphe will end up on Mont Blanc.

This is fantastic stuff. Scary. Possible. And we haven't even got to the clincher yet, because McGuire says that as all the snow melts, the sea will become heavier and that will cause fault lines to shift all over the world. Japan. Mexico. Chile. All gone. The man is talking here about an extinction-level event. And the word is that when the film rights are sorted, Denzel is earmarked for the lead.

Better still, at Hay, he delivered his cataclysmic view of events to come in much the same way that
The War of the Worlds
was first played on the radio. Seriously, as though it were fact. Very, very clever.

The only problem is that I think his story needs a bit of a lift between the moment when Greenland bounces into the clouds and the last man on earth drops dead. I'm thinking of that audience-pleasing moment in the movie
Deep Impact
, when a small meteorite arrives out of nowhere and flattens Paris.

And I have an idea. Let me run it past you. Like Greenland, Alaska will also bounce upwards when the weight of the ice currently pressing it down into the ooze reaches a critical point. And, as we know from all the recent eco scare stories about fracking, the very rock on which this great state is founded is full of methane and natural gas. That makes it a gigantic bomb. A bomb that will explode thanks entirely to you in your suburban house with your patio heater and your insatiable appetite for turn-on-and-offable gas.

I think you'll agree that this is a scary story. But I think the scariest part is that McGuire is actually employed by the government as an adviser. It actually takes him seriously. Worse – Westminster sorts take me seriously. Only last week, an MP called Ed Miliband quoted something I'd written in this column while making a speech about Scottish independence. On that basis, he will be back on his soap box this week warning citizens not to go to Anchorage because it's about to explode.

10 June 2012

It has been a tense week. With my elder daughter sitting her A levels, the boy facing his GSCEs and the youngest doing common entrance, it's been seven days of American civil rights, worry, tears, the battle of Trafalgar and many heated arguments about the best way to do long multiplication. It's been like living in a never-ending pub quiz.

And to what end? Oh sure, the right results will be a passport to life's next chapter and will help to propel their schools up the league tables. But the awful truth is: none of my children can wire a plug. Nor can they change a wheel, reattach the chain on a bicycle, darn a sock, make a Pimm's, build a bonfire or mend a broken lavatory seat.

Of course, schools have always taught children stuff that doesn't matter, on the basis that parents have always been able to impart information about stuff that does. But parents can't do that any more because we don't know how to reattach a lavatory seat, either. And in my mind a boiler is powered by witchcraft.

This means a generation of children will soon be emerging into the big wide world, blinking in wonderment at all the million billion things that make no sense. Their fresh-faced little heads will spin, and their stomachs will sink in despair as they realize they know absolutely nothing of any relevance.

Will they be able to get a job as a hotel chambermaid? No. Partly because they will want more than the 5p an hour currently being paid to Mrs Borat, but mostly because they are
not able to change a set of sheets. Street sweeping requires a rudimentary understanding of how a brush works. And plumbing? Forget it.

Every job I can think of requires a set of skills that no teenager in Britain has. Apart from the media. And by the time they are ready to start earning a living, that avenue will be gone.

Many may decide to go into business, which in the past used to be an easy option. If you had a product that people wanted to buy, and you sold it for more than it cost, then you would be sitting at the top table at the lodge within a matter of months.

It isn't like that any more. Today you start a business not because you want a fountain from which your family can drink. No, you start a business so that one day, as soon as possible, you can sell it.

Again, that sounds simple, but let me assure you that it really isn't. I've spent the past few months negotiating a business deal, and although I am not the most stupid man in the world, I haven't understood a single thing that has been said or done. It has all been gobbledygook, presented in a series of so many acronyms that it sounded as if someone were reading out the model names of every Kawasaki motorcycle ever made.

Each evening I'd call my accountant, who did his best to translate everything into primary school English. It was never any good because eventually it would go dark, and then it would get light and I would be forced by tiredness to say I'd understood when in truth I hadn't.

Are you familiar, for instance, with EBITDA? It sounds as though it might be a character at the bar in
Star Wars
but, in fact, it stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It's critical you understand this in
business but you don't, do you? Because you don't know what amortization is. And neither do I.

There's another issue with business that is not made clear on
Dragons' Den
. When you agree terms, you stand up and shake hands.

But then, the next day, the man with whom you did the deal has a completely different version of events in his head. ‘No,' he'll say, ‘you agreed to sell for 5p and give me your record collection.'

So then you have to employ some suits, who say that you should think more about EBIT rather than EBITDA unless, of course, you choose to use the DCF model. And then it goes quiet and you realize it's your turn to speak and all you can think to say is, ‘Would anyone like a cup of tea?'

I haven't even got to the misery of tax yet. Not being Greek or Italian, I fully understand that a percentage of what I earn should go to the government. I recognize that if we want street lighting and a bobby on the beat and prisons, we cannot operate in a river of cash and hope the Germans will pay when our government cannot.

I can even work out how much I need to pay each year. Half of everything I earn. It's a simple sum. However, it turns out that in business, it's not simple at all, and don't ask why because you will then be plunged into a Scrabble bag of acronyms in which time slows down and your internal organs stop working.

To make matters worse, accountancy types actually seem to enjoy sparring with each other using nothing but letters. ‘CGT?' one will say. ‘Not with this PBT,' will come the snorted retort. After an hour you feel compelled to stand up and say, ‘Are you dealing with my business stuff here, or are you playing out-loud Boggle?'

On the next series of Sir Sugar's
The Apprentice
, he should
put those gormless marketing-speak idiots in a proper business meeting and then ask them to explain what just went on. It would be hysterical.

It's not hysterical, however, when it's your livelihood. It's bewildering and upsetting. And it's why I shall finish with an idea for Michael Gove, the education secretary, who suggested last week that kids must be able to spell ‘appreciate' and do the twelve times table by the time they're nine.

This is all well and good for those who wish to follow the traditional path to university. But wouldn't it be a good idea to have other schools for those who wish to follow a path to somewhere called the world? Plug-wiring at nine a.m. Cook your own pie at lunchtime. And double EBITDA in the afternoon.

17 June 2012