Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (8 page)

Sinister news from the shires.

After a summer that was too dry and then too wet, the hay harvest has been hopeless, and as a result, the price has reached £6 a bale. That's more than double the price last year and so it's now more expensive than marijuana. Yup. Grass will now cost you more than, er, grass. And that's if you can get hold of it at all.

One poor girl with a hungry horse rang me a while back to ask whether I was in a position to help since I'm now a farmer.

So I went to see the man I'd employed to cut my hay and he was perplexed. ‘Let me just get this straight. You want a few bales for your friend?' he asked incredulously. It was as though I'd asked him if I could watch his wife take a shower. The answer was a big fat no.

As a result of all this, the nation's horse enthusiasts are in a state of blind panic. In the coming winter their precious animals may die of starvation, and consequently many have turned to crime. At night there are thousands of middle-aged ladies sneaking around the countryside, stealing bales of hay that have been left in the fields. Farmers all over the country have been targeted and are at a loss.

Hay can't be stored indoors, under lock and key, because it has a nasty habit of catching fire, and it's not possible to shoot the thieves because of various laws. One solution is to package the hay in bales so large they won't fit in the back of a Volvo but there's a danger, if you do this, that the enormous
barrel could roll down a hill and kill one of the early members of the Electric Light Orchestra.

And so here we are. It's 2010. And such is the pressure on space that perfectly decent women called Arabella are stealing grass from farmers to feed their pets. What's it going to be like when it's not food for horses that becomes scarce but food for people?

As you may have heard, the harvests in Russia and Ukraine failed this year and now, with the biggest grain shortage for twenty-six years, the price of a ton of wheat has doubled to about £200. A bit of wonky weather in a couple of countries and suddenly a loaf of bread costs about the same as a pound of myrrh.

Without wishing to sound like an A-level politics student, it's easy to see what's gone wrong. There is simply not enough space on earth to grow food for the planet's ever-increasing population. And the consequences of this will be dire. Because if a woman with clipped vowels and a hairdo is prepared to become a thief to feed her horse, how low will she stoop when she needs to feed her child? For sure, there will be hair-pulling at the bakery. Maybe even some biting.

It's hard to know what to do. Even if we manage to inject some family-planning sense into the Roman Catholic Church, the population will continue to grow and this means that, one day, people are going to start to get hungry. And then they are going to start to starve. And then many will die. It's a fact. Genetically modified crops may delay the moment but it's coming. It's a mathematical certainty.

Unless, of course, we can find more land on which to grow stuff. You may think this is unlikely. We've been to the moon and it seems entirely unsuitable. Mars appears to be a dead loss as well, which means we have to look closer to home. And guess what. I've found some. Lots of it.

Mile upon mile of juicy soil, ready and able to produce millions of tons of delicious food for all the world. It's called the English countryside.

Last year I bought a farm in Oxfordshire and was delighted to discover that the government would pay me to grow nothing at all on about 400 acres. I can also get money to keep stubble in the ground for a bit longer than is sensible and for planting hedgerows. That's right. You work all day. Pay your tax. And the government then gives it to me so I can plant a nice hedge.

This is because of the skylark. Or the lapwing. Or some other whistling, chirruping airborne rat that doesn't matter. I like a bird. I'm even a member of the RSPB. But the notion that more than half my farm is a government-subsidized sanctuary for linnets while the world goes hungry is just stupid.

Especially as there's plenty of evidence to suggest it doesn't work. Examination of the latest environmental stewardship programme suggests that the only birds to benefit are the starling and lapwing. Which means the government is proposing to spend £2.9 billion on a programme, at a time of hardship and hunger, even though it knows one of the few beneficiaries is the starling – a bird that can knock down buildings with its urine and eat a whole tree in one go.

Now it may well be that this bird business is just a cover story to mask an undeniable truth – that, left to its own devices, farming would cease to be a viable industry. I must say I'm staggered by the smallness of the returns you get. You'd be better off spending your money on a powerboat.

However, I find it morally reprehensible that the previous government stated that it wanted 70 per cent of Britain's utilizable agricultural land to be in an environmental stewardship scheme by 2011. Did it not have calculators? Could
it not see there's going to be a global food shortage soon and that setting aside nearly three-quarters of Britain for the benefit of a sparrow is moronic?

Of course, I'm not a farmer. I don't understand the complexities of the industry. But I am a human being and, while it's nice to walk through my fields, listening to the starlings eating my trees, I do think that giving me money to leave land for the birds is madness.

I therefore have an idea. Instead of giving farmers vital subsidies not to grow food, how about this? Give them subsidies to grow some.

14 September 2010

This morning, all being well, my wife should be on her way back home from a charity bike ride to Arnhem in Holland. This involved cycling eighty miles a day, every day, for a week, and of course a great deal of effort and sweat was needed to get ready.

As a result, she spent much of the year in a gym, picking things up and putting them down again, very quickly, while listening to music such as Basement Jaxx and N-Dubz. Until – disaster. Just two weeks before the start date,
ping
– something important snapped in her neck.

I tried explaining that my neck was fine because I spent the year sitting in a chair watching television but this went down badly, so she went to the doctor, who suggested a muscle relaxant and painkiller called Voltarol. A packet of pills that, I kid you not, comes with an instruction manual.

Now, as we know, any man who consults an instruction manual must consider himself a failure. Instruction manuals are for the weak and the indecisive. They are for people who happily accept that someone, somewhere, knows better than they do. ‘Grunts': that's what they're called in the American infantry. However, I couldn't work out why a packet of non-prescription pills should require instructions, so I had a read. And it was amazing.

First of all, you are told how to take the pills. You swallow them with a glass of water. Unless, I presume, you are French, in which case you push them up your bottom. The French ingest everything up their back passages. I'm surprised they
don't eat this way as well. I'm also surprised they manage to have children.

Anyway. Back to the Voltarol and, specifically, the section on ‘common' side effects. These include diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, vertigo, a rash and a change in liver function.

Now, call me a party pooper if you like, but on balance I think I'd rather have a sore neck than run the risk of cycling to Holland with diarrhoea running down my legs, vomit exploding over the handlebars and a liver that thinks it's a piece of Lego.

It gets worse. Less common side effects include chest pains, yellowing of the eyes, collapse, swelling of the tongue and a propensity to vomit blood. In other words, if you take one of these pills to make your neck feel a bit better, there's a 1 in 1,000 chance you'll become a werewolf.

Sadly, though, it could be even worse. Because there's almost a 1 in 10,000 chance you could suffer blistering eyes, bleeding, blurred vision and confusion. In other words, you become a zombie.

So far, I have singled out Voltarol, but a trawl through the big wide world of medicine reveals that nearly all household pills 'n' potions can have dramatic side effects. Nurofen, for instance, can increase the risk of old people becoming deathly white and having a heart attack. Imodium can make your intestine paralytic, while a pill I was once prescribed for a slipped disc could, it seems, cause my gums to disintegrate and my teeth to fall out.

Boots, meanwhile, will happily sell you a hay fever relief that could cause your face to swell up, while it seems Sudafed is basically a magic mushroom. It can cause you to have nightmares and run about the garden imagining you are being chased by Jesus.

Then, of course, there's the big daddy. Viagra. This will cause your penis to stiffen, enabling you to have penetrative sexual intercourse – but with whom? That's the question. Because, according to the instruction manual, it will need to be someone who's turned on by a man who might be bleeding from his eyes and his nose. Still interested? Well, beware, because other potential side effects include nausea and ‘sudden death'.

So, there you are. You start out with a bit of rumpy-pumpy and wind up covered in sick and blood, with a dead man on top of you.

Of course, this is all nonsense. We are all well aware that all drugs are subjected to rigorous tests before they are allowed on to the market and that if Voltarol really did turn patients into flesh-eating zombies with altered livers and blistered eyes, someone would have noticed during clinical trials.

You may recall, several years ago, six healthy men were given a new anti-leukaemia drug called TGN1412 to see if there were any unpleasant side effects. After a short while, apparently, they began to run about the surgery, tearing off their shirts and complaining they were going to explode; heads swelled up to three times the normal size, toes and fingers began to fall off and immune systems collapsed. As a result, TGN1412 is now not on the market.

Its maker didn't say: ‘Well, there you are. A complete success. It cures leukaemia and all we need do is pop a little instruction manual in the box saying that there's a chance the patient might turn into the Elephant Man and explode.'

That's the point of clinical trials. You test the drug on animals. Then you test it on people. And if it all goes horribly wrong, you can't put it on the shelves. We know this. We know the drugs we can buy are safe. Why, then, do we have these stupid leaflets saying we may suffer from sudden death?

Well, it's the same reason my quad bike is festooned with stickers telling me that if I get on and ride it for even a short while, my head will be severed and I will catch fire. It's why the sun visor in my car is smothered in ugly notices telling me that a possible side effect of the airbag is that it will kill me. It's why police community support officers aren't allowed to help children cross the road.

It's because when there's a chance of something bad happening, there's always a lawyer in the background who can argue that the person concerned should have been warned. And that brings me back to a small point I made earlier.

I suggested the French habit of putting everything up their bottoms dramatically reduced their chances of having children. But I was forgetting something. Sex this way is how you end up with a lawyer.

19 September 2010

Like all right-minded people, I rejoiced when David Cameron announced last week that he would drive a bulldozer through the health and safety rules that have paralysed industry, killed millions and removed all sense of personal responsibility from absolutely everyone in the land.

Sadly, however, his announcement came too late for me because just a day later I was due to attend my first health and safety course. It's now compulsory for any BBC employee who travels to parts of the world that aren't Stow-on-the-Wold or Fulham.

I was seething with rage because it would be unpaid and it would last from eight in the morning until seven in the evening for an entire working week. So when was I going to write my newspaper columns? Or prepare scripts? Or do any actual work? This is the problem with health and safety people. They simply don't understand that we have work to do and that there's just no time for their high-visibility, no-job's-worth-dying-for nonsense.

Because you know what? As a journalist, I reckon some jobs are worth dying for. If a journalist had got advance word of the massacre in Rwanda, then maybe it could have been stopped. Would that have been worth a life? Damn right it would. And the life I'd have taken is that of the stupid health and safety officer who thinks you should be on a how-to-use-a-ladder course rather than the front line.

And anyway, how, in six days, could they possibly hope to cover all of the hazards a programme such as
Top Gear
might
face on its travels? Altitude sickness, what to do if you get a fish in your penis, extreme cold, road accidents, how to be beheaded with dignity and what to do while being shelled in Mogadishu. The suggestion was that we'd emerge after a week as a cross between Dr Christiaan Barnard and James Bond.

The first morning suggested this wouldn't be so. We were taken into the gardens of the conference centre in Bracknell in Berkshire, where, among the rhododendrons, two firemen called Baz and Tel were staging a mock battle using a mock gun. Then Baz fell to the ground with mock blood spurting from a mock prosthetic wound in his arm. Apparently, we were supposed to have heard a shot but, sadly, Tel's mock gun had jammed.

It was like watching the Wokingham Amateur Dramatic Society stage a version of
Apocalypse Now
, and I thought: ‘Holy shit. I've got six days of this.'

Afterwards, we were taken to a classroom for a lecture on how to deal with the sort of bullet wound we'd seen but I couldn't really concentrate because I was dying for a cigarette and it was two hours until break. The morning passed in a blur of acronyms, none of which I can even remember now. DRAB. Or is it BARD? And what do the letters stand for? All I do remember is that, thanks to the Labour government, we must now refer to an RTA (road traffic accident) as an RTC (road traffic collision) because accidents imply no one was to blame whereas collisions don't.

And blame? That's another whole industry filling a million more crap hotels in Berkshire with their courses and their fat women in trouser suits.

Then, the lecturer's radio crackled. There'd been an accident in the grounds: Baz had fallen out of a tree. So off we rushed to see what could be done. And there was more fake
blood pumping out of yet another fake wound. This is how it went on. Lecture. Baz had a horrible accident. Lecture. Baz had a horrible accident. Lecture. Baz fell out of trees, trod on landmines, crashed his car, got shot, got blown up. Baz was the unluckiest fireman in history.

And, to make everything a bit more weird, a funeral was held at our hotel on Thursday. Now, I hope and pray that the deceased did not die in a hail of gunfire because during the post-crematorium ‘do', we were running around outside, learning how to take cover in a gunfight.

And, to make everything worse, when one of the mourners approached to ask for our autographs, James May shot her in the face with a water pistol.

I was learning very many things and what I was learning is this: it is impossible to see a tripwire in a wood, it is disgusting to stick your fingers in an open wound, Serbian checkpoint guards cannot be reasoned with and unexploded ordnance has an acronym but I'm damned if I can remember what it is. Oh, and if you have a beard and you have a heart attack on the street, you are 40 per cent less likely to survive … because passers-by are unwilling to give the kiss of life to someone with facial hair.

Later, I learnt that men with spinal injuries get a hard-on and that it's impossible to work out where gunfire is coming from. Which is why, when the shooting started, Richard Hammond hid in front of a bush. And was killed.

On Thursday afternoon Baz fell out of another tree and needed to be moved because the Wokingham Amateur Dramatic Society was threatening to cut our heads off. We rolled him on to a blanket in the correct fashion but we couldn't move him because none of us had been on the BBC's manual labour course. I wish I was joking about that but I'm not. Baz died, I'm afraid. Again.

At this stage you probably imagine I'm going to sign off by saying it was all a complete waste of time and that in six weeks' time almost all of what I learnt will have been forgotten. But here's the thing. On day one, Tel told us about a twelve-year-old girl who had been hit by a car.

She rolled on to the bonnet, with a broken leg, and then slid down on to the road, where she banged her head and fell unconscious. A crowd gathered and everyone agreed that she should not be moved because she might have a spinal injury. She died. And she died because her tongue was blocking her airway.

I now know what to do in that situation. And was that one single retainable fact worth a week of my time? Honestly? Yes.

26 September 2010