Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (38 page)

As we speak, British boffins are busy building a remotely operated telescope high in Chile's Atacama Desert.

The optics have come from Austria, the mounts from America and the housing from a company in Cornwall that makes cat flaps.

When it is finished, it will be pointed at a randomly selected star to see if the light dims from time to time. If it does, they will know that orbiting planets are passing in front of it. And then they will get to work, measuring how much the light dims.

This will tell them if the planet in question has an atmosphere, and even what sort of atmosphere that might be. A lot of oxygen suggests it may be host to all sorts of plants and photosynthetic bacteria. If there is water vapour as well, then there might also be water on the ground and that could mean it is capable of supporting life.

There are, however, one or two slight issues with all of this. First of all, there are 125 billion galaxies. And there are probably 300 billion stars in each one. So the chances that our new telescope is looking at the right one at the right time are quite remote.

Second, we know that the earth is home to a great deal of oxygen and water but we keep being told by Prince Charles that it's the delicate balance of other things – such as the Ferrybridge power stations and the Dog and Duck's smoker-friendly patio heaters – that provide the conditions for life to flourish.

So even if the new telescope does spot a likely-looking planet, it may well be it has no ozone or a tiny bit too much methane and, as a result, the only life there is a walrus or a version of Esther Rantzen that has two heads and can only say ‘wibble'.

It gets worse because even if the life in question does have digital sound and non-stick frying pans, it's very unlikely that its inhabitants speak English. Or even French. Over the years, scientists have pondered this problem, with many suggesting that maths would be the only way of conversing.

They've been wasting their time, though, because even the nearest star – apart from the sun – is about 25 trillion miles away and it would take 81,000 years to get there.

And there's no point using the radio to transmit all our prime numbers and theories about pi because the message would still take more than four years to arrive. And if there was anyone on the other end, they'd just think, ‘Oh Christ, we've had a call from James May.' And not bother replying.

To sum up, then. There is only an infinitesimal chance that our telescope will find a planet capable of supporting intelligent life, and even if it does, we can't speak to the inhabitants. As a result, the whole exercise is a complete waste of everyone's time.

Except it isn't, and here's why. Back in the day, a bunch of Vikings set off across a seemingly endless ocean to seek out new worlds and new civilizations that they could rape. After 500 miles they must have thought, ‘This is pointless.' After 1,000 miles one of the rowers must have stood up and said to the captain, ‘Look, sir, I'm sorry, but I really want to give up.'

But they didn't give up. And after nearly 2,000 miles of rowing and sweat and toil, they bumped into America. Where there was no intelligent life, so they went back to Oslo.

More recently, Victorian explorers stomped about in
Africa being eaten by lions and catching malaria simply so they could find the source of the Nile. Before then you had Captain Cook who went off to find Australia, even though the world knew it wasn't there.

A Dutch explorer called Abel Tasman had been to the region in 1642. He had found Tasmania, New Zealand and later the Fiji islands, but many doubted there was any other large land mass. So Cook's mission was pointless and stupid. Except, of course, it wasn't.

Exploration against all the odds is still going on today. For the past few months, Russian, American and British scientists have been engaged in a race to explore a recently discovered sub-glacial lake in Antarctica. Though, sadly, the British team had to pull out over the Christmas period because its generators ran out of fuel.

Undaunted, the others are soldiering on in the belief that 52 million years ago the region was home to a giant rainforest and that some strange life forms have survived. I have to say that this is unlikely because the lake in question is buried under a slab of ice that's two miles thick. Which means there's no air and no sunlight.

‘Unlikely', however, is not a good enough reason for quitting. Nor is ‘pointless'.

Many years ago I was on board a plane that sort of crash-landed at a remote airstrip in the Sahara. It could have been in Libya or it could have been in Chad. The pilot didn't know because he was a bit drunk.

Anyway, we would be stuck for a while, so I decided to sit under the plane's port wing. After an hour or so, this became boring, so I switched to the starboard wing. And when this became dreary I set off on foot to have a look over the nearest horizon. Even though I knew for sure, because I'd already seen from the air, that I'd find nothing of any use at all.

Human beings like checking stuff out. When a child says he wants to go into the woods to ‘explore', no parent says, ‘What's the point? All you're going to find are nettles.' And it was the same when John F. Kennedy said America would send a spaceship to the moon. Everyone knew it was just a big dusty golf ball and that no good would come of it; but they went anyway, and who now thinks it was a bad idea?

I don't expect our new telescope will find a damn thing. I really don't. But let me conclude with this: many years ago, a friend lost his signet ring while swimming off Pampelonne beach in the south of France. The next day he set off on a completely pointless mission to find it. And he did.

13 January 2013

Three more teeth have been smashed out of the high street this month. Jessops, the camera people, went belly up and HMV, the purveyor of tunes and action films, called in the administrator, before Blockbuster, which wanted you to rent the same films from it, followed suit.

We're told they were casualties of the nation's new-found love affair with online shopping and renting. And this seems to make sense. Figures just out reveal that 9 per cent of all business in Britain is done on the internet. That's the highest proportion in the world.

It doesn't include me because I find online shopping a bit sinister. I have it in my mind that the moment I feed the details of my credit card into the system, someone in California will use them to buy a light aircraft. I know this is irrational but it's what I believe, and as a result I have never bought anything from someone I can't see.

There are other reasons too. If you buy online, your goods have to be delivered. Which means the streets of suburbia are now full of dithering van drivers getting lost and doing three-point turns and generally getting in everyone's way. This annoys me.

Plus, if your groceries are being delivered, you have to be in when they arrive. And if you also have to be in to receive your kids' birthday presents, your replacement toaster, your copy of
Madagascar
3, your new shoes, a sex toy, a dog blanket and three hats, you will never find the time to go out. Which means you will become friendless and lonely.

And cross. Because, from what I can gather, supermarkets guess at what might make a suitable replacement if what you ordered isn't in stock. And usually they get it spectacularly wrong. Duraglit, for example, cannot be used to power a torch. And you can't make a salad with advocaat. Plus, as I like to point out to American barmen, I'll only accept that Pepsi is a substitute for Coca-Cola if they accept that Monopoly money is a substitute for cash.

Anyway, as you can see, there are many good reasons I choose not to shop online. But I must say that shopping for real is becoming increasingly difficult these days. Because most shops never have a single thing in stock, ever.

Shopping for shoes in Tod's, for instance, is like being stuck in Monty Python's cheese shop. Loafers? Nope. Brogues? Nope. Wellies? Nope. Lace-ups? Nope. Slip-ons? No, sir. Not today. I'm convinced the storeroom is full of nothing but sales assistants making coffee while pretending to look for the size you need.

Then you have Sony. I went there last week to buy a television and a PlayStation. The first branch I tried had closed down, and the second had neither in stock. How can Sony not stock a Sony PlayStation? Apple? Yes, it had the iPhone I needed, but no way of taking the data from the previous model and putting it on the new version.

So, after a wasted half-hour, we cancelled the credit-card transaction and I left empty-handed.

You will find this everywhere you go – shops that carry just enough goods to fill the window display and that's it. You want to actually buy something? Well, they ask a lot of damn-fool questions about where you live and whether you're transsexual, and then the gormless imbecile on the till tells you that what you wanted is still in its component parts, in Hamburg.

That said, there was one notable exception to all of this, one shop that carried a selection of goods and was staffed with extremely enthusiastic, knowledgeable and delightful staff. Its name was Jessops.

We are used, these days, to shop assistants being one step removed from plankton. Many have not mastered the art of speech, know nothing about what they're selling and would much rather you died of a heart attack than bought anything. Not in Jessops, though.

Let's be brutally honest. The sort of people who are keen on cameras and photography are deeply suspect. I imagine that most are mainly interested in pornography. But even when the Jessops people were presented with a man who plainly wanted a camera to take up-skirt shots of women in the supermarket, they remained as bubbly and as helpful as ever.

They were knowledgeable too. I went to the company's Westfield branch in west London on several occasions over the past couple of years – my kids do photography at school, in case you were wondering – and whoever served me could always explain whether one of the submenus on a Canon was better than that on a Nikon. They knew about f-stops and aperture priority. They knew about focal length and could advise on toughness. They had plainly been trained well and they were brilliant. And they always had whatever I selected in stock.

And where did the former chief executive of this fine chain of shops end up? Yup. HMV. Another well-organized shop, if I'm honest.

Now, I don't know anything about retailing, but I can see a pattern here. Run a shop well and it will go out of business. Run it on a shoestring with no stock and staff who can only just about manage to walk on two legs and you'll hang on in there. Just. But not for long.

Some say this is a good thing; that when all the chain stores have gone, the high street will once again become home to lots of little shops selling home-made biscuits. But in a world that worships cheapness and convenience, it's more likely that the high street will become home to nothing more than charity shops, pizza takeaway joints and
Daily Mail
photographers, prowling around looking for a drunk girl in a short skirt.

Eventually, Amazon and eBay will turn Stow-on-the-Wold into downtown Detroit and cause Hartlepool to drown in a sea of vomit.

Still, it's not completely the end of the world. Because many of the Jessops sales staff are now posting pictures of themselves and contact details in the windows of the shops where they used to work. They are, in short, selling themselves. And, frankly, they are probably the best things you can buy on the high street right now.

20 January 2013

Round about now your teenage child will be queuing at the check-in desk for an airline you have never heard of, and flying off to a part of the world you have never visited, to spend a few months doing stuff you don't understand. It's called a gap year. And it sounds fun.

Now, when I grew up in South Yorkshire there was no such thing as a gap year. You left school at three o'clock in the afternoon and by quarter to four you were down the pit. Besides, ‘abroad' was Nottingham, and ‘university' … it was a place of learning for hoity-toity homosexuals. So it was on nobody's radar in Doncaster.

It certainly wasn't on mine. I left school, rather earlier than I'd planned, on a Thursday and by Monday morning I was starting work, on a picket line, outside the
Rotherham Advertiser
. And I spent the short gap in between buying a coat and a notebook.

Things seem to have changed, though, because most of my friends' children are currently cycling round Mexico before taking a trip to Cambodia via space. They're all turning their geography lessons into reality, in Israel, New Zealand and Canada. And it all seems to have been funded by light babysitting, occasional bar work and a one-off payment from some long-forgotten godparent.

Last weekend my daughter outlined her gap-year plans. She announced that she'll go to Cape Town, do a spot of work, buy a car and then drive it via various countries beginning with Z to Uganda. It would be the tip of Africa to the
equator, the trip of a lifetime. And the total cost, so far as I can see, is about £7.50.

When she had finished outlining the route, where she would stay and what she would see, a deathly hush descended like a snowy blanket on the adults in the room. Sure, we had arranged our faces to suggest we were thinking of pitfalls she might not have considered and titbits that we, in our wisdom, could pass on.

But I know everyone in that room was thinking the exact same thing. And it had nothing to do with my daughter's wellbeing. It was this: ‘Goddamn. I would kill someone's small dog to make a trip like that.' And it got me thinking. Maybe in society's haste to create a gap year, we've put it in the wrong place.

Eighteen-year-olds are vibrant and their brains are tuned beautifully to receive and disseminate even the most complex information. So it stands to reason that at this age they should be at work, dreaming up new ideas and making the world a better place.

It's stupid that they spend the sharpest year of their lives catching chlamydia on a beach in Thailand when they could be inventing batteries that rejuvenate themselves, and corkscrews that actually work.

Gap years, I think, would work better for older people. Now I'm not suggesting for a moment that you get up from the breakfast table and, after a brief trip to the cash machine, set off like the hero in a Leslie Thomas book, on an odyssey of beach bars, sultry girls, mad jobs, endless starry nights and no real sense of what the next day will bring. That would be absurd. You have a job in accountancy and responsibilities to your children and your family. So you can't just set off and drift about the world in a two-legged demonstration of Brownian motion.

Besides, you have a lodge meeting at the civic centre on Thursday so you can't very well be in Laos that day, lying on a hammock, drinking an ice-cold beer with an Australian girl called Sarah who's wearing a white, Flake-advert gypsy dress and not much else.

No. I'm not suggesting that a gap year would work at all well for people in their forties and fifties. But what about when you're sixty-five? What about a gap year between the drudgery of work and the mind-numbing tedium of retirement?

In the olden days you retired because you were simply too old and feeble to carry the coal to the surface any more. But today people pack in the day job with forty years of life left in their bones. And then what? They spend half their savings on a lousy cruise on a lousy ship round a lousy bit of coastline of what we used to call the eastern bloc. And then they come home to the floral-print conservatory and an eternity of watering plants and praying one of the children will ring that day.

They won't. They've got their own kids to worry about, and all the responsibilities of moving on and moving up. Listen to Harry Chapin's song ‘Cat's in the Cradle' and forget about them. And forget about your savings, too. Leave them where they are. Hitch a lift to the ferry port in Dover and see what happens next.

At sixty-five you're showroom-fresh. You can play tennis and ski and scuba dive. So why don't you just bugger off and spend twelve months doing what you can while it's all still possible?

You know by that age what you haven't seen and what you want to see. You know what you haven't done. So go and do it. Bungee jump into the Grand Canyon and make love on a Tahitian beach. I know what you're thinking. What about the cat? How would I carry all my things?

Well, stop it. Kick the cat out. It'll be fine, and when it comes to luggage, take a leaf out of the teenagers' book. It doesn't matter whether my son is going skiing for a week, going to a party at the other end of the country or pheasant shooting in Outer Mongolia, he only ever travels with what he's wearing, a phone and a credit card.

And what's wrong with that? Someone always has a phone charger and a jumper you can borrow. And if you need a new pair of pants, which you will after you've worn them back to front on day two, inside out on day three and both on day four, get a job for a couple of days.

Or you could get an allotment, I suppose, and have Betty round for a sherry a week on Tuesday.

27 January 2013