And Another Thing_ The World According To Clarkson Part 1

The World According to Clarkson.

And Another Thing.

by Jeremy Clarkson.

I'm a n.o.body, my jet-set credit card tells me soI suppose all of us were out and about before Christmas, pummelling our credit cards to within an inch of their lives. So, some time in the next week or so, we can expect a sour-faced government minister to come on television to explain that we are now borrowing more than we're saving and that it has all got to stop.In the mid-1970s, shortly after credit cards first emerged, we owed 32 million.Now we've managed to get ourselves into debt to the tune of 50 billion, which works out at about 1,140 for every adult in the land.As a result, the economy is teetering on the brink of collapse and little old ladies are having to sell their cats for medical experiments. And children are being lured into prost.i.tution and up chimneys. It's all too awful for words.But there's a darker side to credit cards. A sinister underbelly that is rarely talked about. I'm talking about the misery of not having the right one.We've all been there. Dinner is over, the bill has arrived and everyone is chucking their plastic on to the saucer. It's a sea of platinum and gold. One chap has produced something with a Wells Fargo stagecoach on the front. Another has come up with an HM Government procurement card, just like James Bond would have.And then it's your turn. And all you've got is your green NatWest Switch card.Socially speaking, you are about to die. Or are you?A couple of years ago I read an interview with some chap who'd got a fistful of cards in his pocket and claimed that the more s.h.i.+ny examples, specifically the much-coveted black American Express, gave him 'certain privileges'.Obviously, I had to have one. So I lied about my salary, handed over 650 bleeding quid, and there it was, in a leatherette box, presented like a fine Tiffany earring. My very own pa.s.sport to the high life.A few weeks later I was flying economy cla.s.s to some G.o.dforsaken h.e.l.l hole I forget where and found myself sitting in one of those oyster bars at Heathrow, fielding questions from men in nylon trousers about Volkswagen diesels. After a while I remembered the black 'key' in my wallet and recalled a bit in the booklet that said it opened the door to airline lounges around the world.So, I plodded over to the club cla.s.s lounge with my cattle cla.s.s boarding ticket.'I'm afraid not,' said the woman cheerfully.'Aha,' I countered, 'but I have a black American Express card which affords me certain privileges.'It didn't. So I went back to the diesel men at the oyster bar.A month after that I was checking in at Blakes Hotel in Amsterdam when, again, I remembered the card and thought: 'I wonder if this will get me a room upgrade.'Joy of joys, it did. All I had to do was check into one of the emperor suites at 1 trillion a night and I would be automatically upgraded to a maharajah suite, with the enlarged minibar, at no extra cost. So, off to the economy broom cupboard I went.As the months went by, I kept producing the jet-set, jet-black Amex and the result was pretty much always the same. 'Non.'... 'Nein.' And in provincial Britain: 'What the f***'s that?'Actually, I'm being unfair. It wasn't only provincial Britain that was mystified.Pretty well everywhere east of New York and west of Los Angeles doesn't take Amex, no matter what colour the card is. Some say this is because Amex charges too much.Others because the Americans are infidel dogs.Eventually, I found a fellow customer and asked what she saw in it. 'Oh,' she said, tossing a mane of pricey hair backwards, 'it's marvellous. Only the other day I needed 24 variegates and my local florist didn't have them in stock. So I called the Amex helpline number and they got them for me.'Great. But I have never ever felt a need to fill the house with variegates. More worryingly, I seldom have the courage to produce the black plastic on those rare occasions when I find myself dining in a restaurant that accepts it. Because what message would I be giving out?When you produce a black Amex, what you are saying is that you earn 1 million a year. Is the waiter really going to be impressed? And what about your friends? They either earn a million too, in which case so what, or they don't, in which case they won't be your friends for much longer.Having a black Amex is not like having a big house. That's useful. And it's not like having a big car. That's more comfortable than a smaller one. The card exists, solely, to impress. It has no other function.If I were the sort of person who had clients, then maybe this would be useful. But a word of warning on that front. I lied about my salary to get one, so who's to say that the sweating golfer who whipped one out over dinner last night didn't lie, too. A. A. Gill has one, for G.o.d's sake.As a result, I shall be getting rid of it. This will help Britain's economy in a small way. But more importantly, it will do wonders for my self-esteem.Sunday 11 January 2004Oops: how I dropped the US air force right in itOops: how I dropped the US air force right in itGiven the American military's dreadful reputation for so-called friendly fire incidents, many people will not have been surprised last week when it was revealed that one of its F-15 jets had dropped a bomb on Yorks.h.i.+re.I wasn't surprised either, but for a different reason. You see, a few years ago, when I was flying an F-15, I inadvertently dropped a bomb on North Carolina.I was making one of those Killer Death Extreme Machine programmes which called for me to go very fast in a selection of different vehicles. So it was obvious I should hitch a ride in the fastest and toughest of America's airborne armoury. The Strike Eagle. The unshootdownable F-15E.What you saw on the television was me flying it, and then me being sick. What you didn't see for reasons of time, you understand was me trying to drop a laser-guided bomb on the ranges at Kitty Hawk.Now, you've all seen the news footage of such weapons being fired through the letter boxes of various baby-milk factories, so you know how they're supposed to work. The man in the back of the plane that would be me lines up the camera on the target and releases the bomb, which goes to wherever the cross hairs are pointing.These cameras have a phenomenal range. The distance they can 'see' is cla.s.sified but I noticed the range dial went up to 160 miles. That means the plane which bombed Yorks.h.i.+re could have been over Suss.e.x at the time.On my first run, the pilot, Gris 'Maverick' Grimwald, said he'd come in low and fast, jinking wildly as though we were under attack from surface-to-air missiles.In the back seat, I tuned one of the three screens to give me a picture from the plane's belly-mounted camera, which you then steer by moving a toggle on top of the joystick.I'd had two days of training and figured it would be like playing on a PlayStation. And so it is. But can you imagine what it would be like trying to operate a PlayStation while inside a tumble dryer? Because that's what it's like trying to operate a remote-control camera in an F-15. More realistically, have your children tried to play on their Game Boys while being driven in the back of a car? And that's at 60 mph in a vaguely straight line.Grimwald was doing, ooh, about 600 mph no more than a few hundred feet off the deck, and to make matters worse he was flinging the plane from side to side so that one second the screen showed the faraway Appalachian Mountains and then the next, fields screaming past in a hypers.p.a.ce fast forward blur.By the time I'd finished being sick, we were over the sea doing a six-G turn to get back to the starting point again. 'This time,' said Maverick (or 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d', as I liked to call him), 'I'll make it easier. We'll go a little higher, a little slower and I'll be less violent.'It didn't help. I saw the river where they filmed Deliverance, I saw the swamp that bogged down Jude Law in Cold Mountain and then I noticed the waterfall behind which Daniel Day-Lewis had hidden in The Last of the Mohicans. And then we were over the sea again and I was bringing up some cake that I'd eaten on my ninth birthday.b.a.s.t.a.r.d was not pleased. 'Did you know,' he said, 'that each time we do one of these runs we're costing the American taxpayer $7,000 in fuel?'Do you know what? I don't care about the American taxpayer. So there was no way I could summon up a tear from the back seat of a jet that was, at the time, pointing straight at the sun. We were 90 degrees nose high, climbing vertically at a rate that you simply wouldn't believe.Let me put it this way. The lift in the BT Tower is fast. It gives you a 'funny tummy' as it climbs 600 feet in 30 seconds. So imagine what it's like in an F-15 that climbed 17,000 feet in 11 seconds. This was a cosmic zoom, made real.It's the F-15's party piece. Because there's so much thrust from its two Pratt & Whitney turbofans, it can not only do 2 times the speed of sound and carry 9,000 lb more than a Eurofighter, but it can also accelerate vertically.We'd gone high for the third run so I'd have plenty of time to locate the target with the camera, release the bomb and then hold the cross hairs in place as it fell to earth. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.And yet somehow I still managed to make a hash of it. Frantically I swivelled the camera around but could see nothing resembling a target, so I thought: 'I know. I'll drop the bomb anyway, because by the time it reaches the ground from this height I'm bound to have the cross hairs in place.'I didn't. b.a.s.t.a.r.d felt the plane twitch as I pressed the release b.u.t.ton and said: 'You have the target?''Yes,' I replied, swivelling the camera some more.But I didn't, and to this day I have no idea where that bomb went. It certainly didn't hit the target. I'm not even certain it hit North Carolina.So who knows? Maybe the bombing of Yorks.h.i.+re wasn't incompetence. Maybe it was payback.Sunday 18 January 2004Sorry, Hans, bra.s.sy Brits rule the beaches nowSorry, Hans, bra.s.sy Brits rule the beaches nowWhen package holidays began, all of a sudden we could experience life at close quarters with people from other nations. We thought the Germans were the most ridiculous people on the beach.As Monty Python pointed out years ago, they pinched the sun beds and barged into the queues and frightened the children. And if you weren't at the buffet spot-on seven, Fritz had wolfed all the sausages.But with the advent of the Boeing 747 came the long-haul holiday and we realised that the Germans were country mice compared with the Americans. No shorts were too large, no thong was too small.What's more, Hank does not like to sit on the beach and read a book. He likes to shout and play volleyball. When the Yanks are around, it's like being on holiday in a primary school playground.For years the Americans were in a cla.s.s of their own, but then the Berlin Wall fell down and, as a result, from the Indian Ocean through the Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, Boris and Katya were making all the running.In many ways the Russians are like the Americans. They're either far too fat or far too beautiful. There's no middle ground. And again, like Uncle Sam, no part of the body is immune from man-made enhancement. The Americans go for surf-white teeth; the Russians for alarming special forces tattoos. And neither seems to see anything wrong with breast enlargement. I saw one Russian woman on the beach in Barbados the other day who had the body of a walnut and a chest that put Antigua in the shade.However, where the Russians move into an easy lead is beach attire. For the men it's the traditional Speedo, while the women seem to get their fas.h.i.+on pointers from internet p.o.r.n sites. I haven't yet seen anyone strutting down the beach in stockings and suspenders but it's only a matter of time.Today, though, a new contender has come along and blown the old favourites into the seaweed. The t.i.tle of Most Stupid People on the Beach has gone in 2004... to Britain.We were designed to make Spitfires and Beagles. We're supposed to be in a shed, in gloves, inventing stuff. We therefore do not look good on a beach. We're piggy white and if you expose us to the sun, we turn into Battenburg cake.We're designed for bracing walks along the front in Scarborough and wet camping holidays in Scotland. But our newly discovered wealth means we can now go to the tropics. Because it's new money, we really have no idea what to do with it.Women are the worst offenders. On the beach they have a swimsuit, a watch and a pair of sungla.s.ses. Not much, in other words, to show other holidaymakers that they are 'considerably richer than yow'.It doesn't stop them trying. Obviously they don't go for the American thong or the Russian nipple ta.s.sels, but bikinis are held together with ludicrous gold clasps, sungla.s.ses have absurd hinges which look as if they've come from a maharajah's front door and as for the watches, they're more like carriage clocks with straps.At lunchtime things get worse because now there's an excuse to cover up. So out comes the T-s.h.i.+rt telling everyone that you've been somewhere else and the bejewelled sarong.I had to ask my wife where on earth these women buy their clothes, and she knew straight away. Dress shops. Specifically, dress shops in provincial towns that have been bought by husbands to stop their wives sleeping with the binmen.So where do the dress shops get their stock from? She was stumped. Not Armani, that's for sure, or any designer anyone outside Leicester has ever heard of.You've never seen chintz like it. And whatever happened to the simple flip-flop? Now it cannot be considered footwear unless it has a flower on it and some high heels.Then we get to the question of these women's teenage daughters, who strut around with the word 's.e.x' on their bikini bottoms. Or 'Peachy'. This is unnerving. Try to read a book about steams.h.i.+ps of the nineteenth century when you've got a 15-year-old advertising her backside nine inches from your face. It's especially unnerving for the Russians in their tight, revealing Speedos.Something must be done, so I've come up with a plan. When you're in a shop buying an outfit for your holiday, apply this simple test: have you ever seen Victoria Beckham in anything remotely similar? If the answer is yes, put it back on the peg.If this doesn't work, the government must step in. Again, I have an idea. Airports already have the technology to screen luggage for nail scissors and tweezers, so surely it can't be that hard to look for, and then confiscate, gold slingback shoes, overly complicated sungla.s.ses and any swimsuit with adornments.I don't mind what provincial British women wear in their own homes. But abroad they're not just letting themselves and their families down they're letting the country down, too, and that has to stop.And men: the Burberry baseball cap. No. All right? Just no.Sunday 25 January 2004Learn to kill a chicken, or you'll get no supperLearn to kill a chicken, or you'll get no supperWhen children from St George's middle school in Norfolk went into the playground at break-time recently, a shoot at the nearby Sandringham estate had just begun and as a result it was raining dead and wounded pheasants.This was a perfect opportunity for the teachers. The children could have been marshalled and shown how the birds should be plucked. 'Right, now gather round, everyone. You, Johnny put the pheasant on its back and stand on its outstretched wings. Now pull the legs firmly...'It would have been a marvellous ill.u.s.tration of how animals get from their natural habitat into a lovely ca.s.serole.Sadly, this didn't happen. Instead, the teachers ran around wringing their hands.The children all cried. And letters were sent to the estate managers at Sandringham asking that birds are not shot while the children are outside. This way, the little munchkins will continue to believe that burgers grow on trees and that Coca-Cola comes from natural springs in Wyoming.After the incident, a woman in the Daily Mail said that she objected to organised shoots because the birds are bred specifically for slaughter. So how do you think bacon happens? Few people keep pigs for fun, you know.I am becoming increasingly depressed at the way we're trying to insulate ourselves from the reality of the food chain and the wonders of the natural world.Last week a 55-foot sperm whale that had beached itself in Taiwan was being transported on a lorry when it exploded in Tainan city. Pa.s.sers-by, buildings and cars were drenched by 50 tons of blood, goo and blubber. It can't have been a pretty sight. And doubtless there will now be some kind of legislation banning biologists from taking dead whales through a built-up area.Why? When an animal dies, or a human for that matter, the stomach fills with methane gas. Sometimes the pressure becomes so great that the carca.s.s goes off like a bomb.I'd like to think this explosive power could in some way be harnessed. I don't want to get lavatorial, but the cows in New Zealand produce 900,000 tons of methane every year. It's one of those little facts that I keep in my head for emergencies such as this.Anyway, it would be nice to think that we could get milk from their udders, meat from their legs and electricity from their bottoms. But I know that in this day and age people would be reluctant to switch on the lights at home if they thought that the power was coming from Daisy's farts.We are seeing this kind of nonsense on the current series of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! The contestants, with their man-made lifestyles and in some cases their man-made b.r.e.a.s.t.s are absolutely incapable of dealing with the jungle wildlife. Do they really believe that the producers would let them put their heads in a tank full of properly dangerous spiders and snakes? Of course not.So if they're not worried about being eaten or dying in screaming agony, what's the problem? It's not just creepy-crawlies that get them running around squealing, either. On Thursday the team were presented with a dead chicken for their supper.'Eugh. I'm not eating that,' cried Kerry, predictably. Fine. Leave it out in the sun and let it explode.The same thing happened recently on the American show Survivor. The starving contestants were given some chickens but couldn't bring themselves to kill and pluck them. They're chickens, for G.o.d's sake. And chickens are basically vegetables. We're talking here about a bird which is so daft, it can operate normally with no head. Anyway, while they were deliberating about what should be done, the birds were eaten by a couple of monitor lizards.I remember watching a report about Malta on some televisual travel show. We'd seen the harbour, heard about the tedious local customs and were moving on to the indigenous food. 'They eat rabbits!' cried the presenter with the sort of tone I might have used if I'd found out that they eat each other.For a moment I was baffled. They eat them whole and raw? They eat them alive? No. They kill them, skin them and put them in a pot with some onions, just like we do. And yet this woman, bright enough to be given a job in television, was astonished.I honestly don't understand this. Out there in the real world, away from the twenty-first-century supermarket/freezer/microwave chain of catering, there are insects which eat their partners after s.e.x, there are turkey vultures that will vomit on you when threatened, there are cats that kill for fun. And there are leopard seals that play aquatic tennis, using penguins as the ball.So in the big scheme of things, shooting a pheasant in the face or attaching a Friesian to the national grid really isn't all that bad.Of course, if you don't want to be a party to the killing or the exploitation, that's fine. Be a vegetarian. But if you're going to eat meat, don't stand on tiptoe and shriek when you find out how the cow became a McMeal.Sunday 1 February 2004To win a war, first you need a location scoutTo win a war, first you need a location scoutHollywood's powerful film and television workers' union has called for cinemagoers to boycott Cold Mountain because this all-American Civil War story was 'stolen' by the British and filmed in Romania.Brit director Anthony Mingh.e.l.la has. .h.i.t back, saying that he shot the movie in Transylvania because these days North Carolina, the actual location of Cold Mountain, is 'too full of golf courses'.This isn't true. North Carolina is a spectacular place with many smoky mountains, frothy rivers and spooky forests. It was the setting for Deliverance which, like Cold Mountain, needed huge vistas to give a sense of scale. But I don't recall catching a glimpse of Tiger Woods wandering through shot as Ned Beatty was being asked to squeal like a piggy.North Carolina was also used as an epic backdrop for The Last of the Mohicans, and again Daniel Day-Lewis did not have to worry about the French, the Huron and being hit on the head by one of Colin Montgomerie's tricky little chip shots.Nevertheless, Mingh.e.l.la insists that he went to Romania because the Carpathian Mountains more accurately reflect America in the 1860s. It's hard to argue with that. Certainly the 1,200 extras he hired for the battle scenes were more realistic. None that I could see was to be found fighting with a pistol in one hand and a 3.99 McMeal in the other.However, I suspect that the real reason why Mingh.e.l.la went to Romania rather than America is money. It's reckoned that, because of the cost of living and the minimal fees charged by all those extras, he saved about 16 million. Seems like plain common sense to me, but that hasn't stopped the Americans crying foul over the location, the Australian lead actress, the British lead actor and Ray Winstone's amazing Deep South (London) accent.This is rich. In fact, it couldn't be richer if they weighed down the argument with five gallons of double cream and two hundredweight of b.u.t.ter. What about Pearl Harbor in which Ben Affleck managed, single-handedly, to win the Battle of Britain? I know Tony Blair once made a post-9/11 speech thanking the Americans for standing side by side with us during the Blitz, but then he doesn't know the difference between a .22 air pistol and a Trident nuclear missile.In reality, there were some Americans who came over here to help in the early days of the war 244 of them to be precise. But don't think they came in a state of righteousness. Most were wannabe fly boys and adventurers who came because they had been turned down by the USAAF for being blind or daft, and they felt that the battered RAF wouldn't be so picky.We are, of course, grateful to them, even though the day after the j.a.panese attacked Hawaii, just about all of them went home, taking their Spitfires with them and leaving us with the bill for their training. This point, I feel, wasn't accurately made in the Affleck film, but that didn't stop me buying the DVD.Then you have Shaving Ryan's Privates in which the American army won the war despite the British making a complete hash of things, and A Bridge Too Far, in which Ryan O'Neal failed to storm though Arnhem thanks to the incompetence of Sean Connery.Oh, and let's not forget U-571, where Matthew Mc-Conaughey bravely stole an Enigma decoding machine, thus clearing the way for Steven Spielberg to take his Band of Brothers through Belgiums.h.i.+re.And why was Steve McQueen wearing his home clothes in The Great Escape? What branch of the services allows you to face the enemy in a pair of chinos, a baseball jacket and a T-s.h.i.+rt?Then there's Vietnam. Not once, according to Hollywood, did the Americans lose a battle. So how they lost the war is a mystery. This, I suspect, is the main reason why Hollywood didn't make Cold Mountain. Who's the bad guy when both sides are, er... American?It's a good job Britain still had a proper film industry when Second World War films were all the rage. Otherwise we'd have had Captain Chuck Gibson bombing the Mohne Dam with Brad and Tod in tow. And what kind of a name is Barnes Wallace? We'll call him Clint Thrust.Hollywood's record with the truth is simply abysmal, which isn't so bad if you treat the cinema as a place of entertainment. But in America the multiplex is just about the only place where anybody learns any history. After Black Hawk Down the audience left the theatre with a sense that America had been in Somalia fighting the humanitarian fight. Not simply trying to depose a warlord who didn't like the idea of US oil companies stealing all the oil.This, surely, should worry the Hollywood film and television workers far more than where a movie was shot. In Saving Private Ryan the French beaches were Irish. In Full Metal Jacket, Vietnam was the London Docklands, and in boxing Lennox Lewis was British.Who cares? I certainly didn't mind where Cold Mountain had been filmed or how much the extras had been paid. I just thought it was one of the longest films I'd ever seen. Good, though.Sunday 8 February 2004Fear of fat can seriously damage your healthFear of fat can seriously damage your healthScientists revealed recently that a child born in 2030 will live five years longer than a child born yesterday. So by the middle of this century there will be more people drawing a pension than people going to work.This will have a catastrophic effect on the economy because simple arithmetic shows there won't be enough money in the kitty to keep all these old people in hips and cat food.So what on earth are we going to do? Make people save more so they're self-sufficient in their old age? Get everyone to have more babies? Or s.h.i.+p in thousands of healthy young immigrants who can run around actually doing some work? A tricky decision.But then last week along came a report saying we won't be living so long after all. Thanks to the efforts of McCain with its oven-ready chips and McDonald's with its McMeals, we're all going to explode by the time we're 62.Now you'd have expected the government to greet the news with a sigh of relief.But not a bit of it. John Reid, the health secretary, said a big debate was needed to challenge the problem of obesity.So what's going on here? One minute we're told that we're all going to live to be 126 and that we'll have to eat each other to survive. Then we're told that actually it'd be best if we ate nothing at all.At first I suspected this might have something to do with cool Britannia. Tony likes his art galleries and funky bridges and frankly he doesn't want the place cluttered up with a load of fat ankles and prolapsed stomachs.Then I thought it was another bit of me-too-ism with Dubya. 'Hey, George. We've got fat people as well.'But then a man in a suit went on the television to say the government really ought to tax oven-ready chips, and suddenly it all became clear. They tax us when we move and tax us when we park. They tax us when we earn money and tax us when we spend it. They tax everything we put in our lungs and now they want to tax everything we put in our stomachs.Well, I have some observations. First of all, the American idea of obesity is far removed from our own. They have people who have moved beyond the point where fat is a problem or a joke and into the realms where it becomes revolting. We do not.I've checked, and in Britain I'd be officially obese if I weighed 18 stone. But 18 stone when you're 6 foot 5 inches isn't even on nodding terms with what the sceptics call fat: 18 stone would, in fact, make me Martin Johnson.Last year, when Top Gear was running, life was so hectic that in one week I remember eating supper on a Thursday night, thinking: 'G.o.d. I haven't had a bite of anything since Sunday lunchtime.' There just hadn't been the time and, as a result, in just a few months I lost more than two stone.Now Top Gear's not on air, I can kick around the house in loose robes all day, looking in the fridge every 20 minutes for cold sausages and filling in the gaps by tucking into Jaffa Cakes and Penguin biscuits. I'm relaxed and happy and I've put on a stone.So which is the healthier option? Stressy and thin or fat and happy? I'm not a doctor but I know what the answer is.Plus, think what this fat phobia will do to children. None of mine is what you'd call a waif and I'm genuinely scared that thanks to the nonsense being peddled by these health-obsessed n.a.z.is, they're going to start throwing up their lunch in the bike sheds.Perhaps then John Reid could admit that Norman Tebbit was right all those years ago and that we really should get on our bikes. Or maybe he might like to think about subsidising food that is good for us, rather than taxing food that isn't.Better still, he might like to address the real cause of misery and stress in this country today. A few years ago I took out an endowment mortgage of 75,000.There was no mention in the sales patter that the investment company might lose my money, but that's what it's done. Last week I got a letter saying that there will not be enough to pay off the mortgage and that I'd better do something about it if I want to keep my house.That's why I don't have a pension. It would be a complete and utter waste of time because you're entrusting your money to a bunch of suits who are too stupid to get a job in banking or estate agency.Look at their offices in the City. Big gleaming towers of gla.s.s and steel. Who's paying for them? We are. And it's the same with their soothing advertis.e.m.e.nts on the television.You want my advice? Spend your spare cash on chips and chocolate because that way you'll die the day you stop work with a smile on your face.And being carted off in an enormous coffin at 62 is better than lingering on for 40 more years, hoping for a handout from the next batch of immigrants the government has s.h.i.+pped in to keep the country's average age below 400.Sunday 15 February 2004Scotch stop skiing and return to your shedsScotch stop skiing and return to your shedsFor a while now, things have been going badly for Scotland. The s.h.i.+ny new parliament building is 10 times over budget and already three years late. The economy is stuttering, and all's not well under the kilt either because the birth rate is almost elephantine.Last week things got worse. The Welsh beat them at rugby and then again at football, and now we hear that the Glenshee Chairlift Company has lost 1 million in the past two years and must sell its two Highland ski resorts.Apparently, global warming is to blame. In the olden days, the Scotch people got some respite from the weather every winter because the ceaseless rain turned to snow, which was at least pretty. But now it just rains all the time.Good. I never really saw the point of skiing in Scotland. The tourist board says in its b.u.mf that heading north of the border with your planks is a 'really good way for novices to try out the sport before committing to a high-cost holiday elsewhere in the world'.Really? I would imagine that anyone who tried skiing for the first time in the Cairngorms would come away from the experience with frostbite, hypothermia, iced-up hair and a pa.s.sionate resolve to give up the sport for good. Learning to ski in Scotland is a bit like learning to scuba-dive in a quarry. You get the basics, but not the point.Of course, I don't much care for the act of skiing itself. As I've said before, I never understand why people ski down a slope to a bar and then go on a lift so they can ski down the same slope again. That's like walking to the pub on a Sunday, then going home and walking to the pub again. Madness. I ski to a bar and then go inside for a drink.This part of a skiing holiday I like very much. The crystal skies, the jaggedy mountains, that pin-sharp air and all those pretty girls in salopettes. It's a fun-filled blizzard of primary colours and you get a tan.Even the Val d'Isere doctor's surgery where I go, having fallen off my skis on the way back from the bar is full of wondrous new injuries. I once saw a bloke in there who had a ski pole sticking out of his eye.And then in the evenings you can drink wine until it's coming out of your ears, knowing that the mountain crispness will zap your hangover in the morning. Lovely.This, however, is not how I imagine a skiing holiday in the Highlands might pan out. I'm not sure anyone would get much satisfaction from executing a nice parallel turn on sheet heather. So, Scotland has to rely entirely on its apres-ski activities and, er... Well, quite.Sure, Val d'Isere is full of people called Bunty and Rupert who throw bread rolls at you and enjoy debagging one another, which can be wearisome.But what do you have for company in Glenshee? A family of weird beards from Tipton and a pint of McEwan's. Skiing is supposed to be sophisticated, and Scotland just isn't.Of course, you might say that Scotland is only 500 miles away and is therefore easier to get to than Val d'Isere, but actually both are an hour or so away by plane. Yes, it's easier to drive to Scotland but you should be aware that if there is any snow on the hills, it will have blocked the roads. So you won't get there anyway.If you do make it, you'll certainly find good access to the top of the mountains, thanks to the new Cairngorm funicular railway, which seems to have cost the taxpayer nearly as much as the Scottish parliament. And now isn't really needed because, according to The Economist, the number of McPa.s.ses sold since the 1980s has halved.The Glenshee Chairlift Company does believe a buyer can be found for its two resorts, but unless they can find someone who has the business ac.u.men of an otter, I wouldn't hold your breath. With cheap air fares and no sign of a recession, France and even Colorado are always going to be less wet.This might be sad news for those who worked there but it's good news for the rest of the world because John Logie Baird was Scottish. Alexander Graham Bell was Scottish. Alexander Fleming was Scottish. James Watt was Scottish. Charles Macintosh was Scottish. John Dunlop was Scottish. Scottish people invented everything: the kaleidoscope, paint pigment, carpet cleaners, the US Navy, adhesive postage stamps, hypodermic needles, anaesthetics, golf, paraffin, radar, hollow pipe drainage, breech-loading rifles. This list is simply endless.Plainly, the Scotch were put on the earth to invent stuff. And for the past hundred years or so they have been sidetracked by this ridiculous flirtation with skiing, and getting their chairs back from Westminster Abbey. They took over every trade union and b.a.l.l.sed them all up, and now they're making a pretty good fist of wrecking Westminster too.Pack it in, the lot of you, and get back to your garden sheds with your spanners and your microscopes.George Bush said recently he wants to go to Mars. So how about one of you forgets about winter sports for a while and builds him a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.Sunday 22 February 2004My son thinks I'm gay, and it can only get worseMy son thinks I'm gay, and it can only get worseIt was a perfect scene. My boy and me walking back across the fields from his Sunday morning game of rugby. The sky was bright. Lunch was in the Aga. And all was well with the world.'Daddy,' he said, pointing at our new garden shed. 'There are people in India who live in houses that are smaller than that.''Huh,' I joshed. 'Never mind India. The first flat I owned in London was smaller than that. And even then I couldn't afford it on my own, so I lived there with another boy.'There wasn't even a pause while his seven-year-old brain processed this information. He just came straight out and said, in the vernacular of youth: 'So were you, like, gay when you were younger?'A few days later, the subject came up again. Some h.o.m.os.e.xual people were on the television news complaining about George W. Bush's views on same-s.e.x weddings, and I thought: am I going mad?Of course you can't have same-s.e.x weddings. It undermines the whole point of marriage, the concept that two people form a stable unit in which children can be conceived and raised. Arguing that h.o.m.os.e.xuals should be allowed to marry is as silly as arguing that I should be allowed to play for Manchester United.I was born with the ball skills of an emperor penguin, so I can't play football.Andrew Lloyd Webber was born with a face like a melted wellington, so he can't be a model. And if you're born with a predilection for members of the same genital group, you can't get married. Get over it.And yet, actually, it's me that will have to get over it because soon my children's generation will be in charge and they see nothing odd about boys marrying their boyfriends. My son, as we know, thinks his dad used to be gay, and that's fine with him.It's not just h.o.m.os.e.xuality. Any item from the news leaves me feeling bewildered and alienated, a stranger on my own planet. A government employee who pa.s.sed secret emails to her mates isn't to be prosecuted. Marks & Spencer has opened a Lifestore, America won't intervene in Haiti because it's an election year. Posh doesn't want hair like Jordan. It's all just too incredible.The trouble is that I'm 43 and therefore past my dead-by date. I was designed to live until I was 40, and now it's only central heating and Mr Sheen furniture polish that's keeping me out of the crematorium.So now we've got the young bloods raring to go, but they're permanently at odds with the wrinklies who are still around, not really wanting anything to change. I have a name for this. Prince Charles Syndrome. He wants to get cracking with his vision of Britain but his mum's still in charge, being cautious and opening day-care centres for the handicapped.This is a problem. All over San Francisco there are lots of vibrant young men and women who think it's perfectly acceptable for h.o.m.os.e.xuals to adopt babies. They think that having two dads or two mums would in no way skew the child's view of life. But they're being held back by an old guy in Was.h.i.+ngton.Here, young people who only watch Buffy and Dec want to abolish the licence fee but find themselves at odds with old people who wonder what they'd do without John Humphrys in the morning and Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday afternoon.If I were dead, the children would listen to Chris Moyles over breakfast and there would be peace. But since I'm not, the radio is in the bin and there is war.A lot of people are asking whether Christians and Muslims can co-exist in our shrinking world. But I'm more worried about the c.o.c.ktail of young and old. Of course, it's bad enough for me at 43, but what must it be like for my mum, who's pus.h.i.+ng 70? There can't be a single thing in her life that makes any sense at all.We took her to a pantomime at Christmas and even that, so far as she was concerned, might as well have been performed in Klingon. 'Why,' she wondered as we came out, 'don't they do all the old songs?' The same reason, I suppose, that M&S has Indonesian knick-knacks among the bananas and bras.Here we have someone who can't watch American television programmes because 'I can't understand what they're on about', and yet she's living on the same planet at the same time as her grandchildren, who've watched so much Australian soap they go up at the end of sentences.She takes them out for supper and all they do is sit in the restaurant with their big twenty-first-century thumbs playing on their Game Boys. This must be horrible for her generation, but it's going to be worse for ours because we'll live longer and the pace of change will get even faster.You think it's bad now, but imagine what will happen when your kids are in charge.Gay vicars, internet reality TV from your next-door neighbours', public inquiries every time anyone dies, satellite speed traps, thinking computers, cloned dogs, foxes on the parish council, Polish on the curriculum, holidays on Mars. The world is their oyster. But for the rest of us it'll be a pearl-free barrel of bilge.Sunday 29 February 2004Sorry, but the public apology is a Big LieSorry, but the public apology is a Big LieTo demonstrate the toughness of a Toyota pick-up truck for a television programme, I found a tree and then crashed into it.Unfortunately, when the film was shown an eagle-eyed viewer thought the horse chestnut looked just like one in his village, so he toddled across the road and, sure enough, there were smears of red paint on the trunk. Naturally he reported the matter to the parish council, which wrote a letter of complaint.As a result I was summoned to the office of a BBC bigwig, where I spent half an hour looking at my shoes, saying, 'I dunno sir,' and, 'It was only a tree.' I also argued that if it were a parish council tree, this meant that it was public property and therefore I was ent.i.tled to drive into it.But it was no good, and a letter was sent back to the parish council offering an unreserved apology and guaranteeing that in future Top Gear would try to drive through the village without cras.h.i.+ng into anything.I wasn't really sorry and I'm still not sorry. I only agreed to say I was because then the situation would die down and we could go to another village and crash into something else.Ever since Clint Eastwood ordered those gunmen to apologise to his mule in A Fistful of Dollars, there's been a sense that saying sorry to make everything all right has been a bit of a joke. If the baddies had apologised, the film would have ended immediately. But they didn't, so there was a lot of shooting and, in Clint's case at least, plenty of squinting too.But then along came Tony Blair, who, after the Hutton Inquiry, said that all he had ever wanted was for the BBC to apologise to his mule, Campbell. As a result of that, apologising has become a global obsession. Spurs players were recently castigated, not for losing a match but for not saying sorry that they'd lost.I am afraid that His Tonyness's attempts to appear as big-hearted as Eastwood may have set a dangerous precedent. What's to stop Saddam Hussein apologising to his captors for all the genocide: 'I don't know what came over me. I really am most dreadfully sorry. Can I go now?'No, really. In Pakistan a man responsible for selling nuclear secrets to Libya and North Korea has escaped prosecution by begging on television for the nation's forgiveness. Oh well, that's all right.We occasionally see apologies in newspapers when they've said oh, I don't know that Jordan has 17 A-levels and a degree in nanotechnology from Harvard. But it'll be in a typeface so small that it's not visible to the naked eye, it'll be on page 38, next to a distracting shower advertis.e.m.e.nt, and it'll have been written only because some hotshot lawyer was standing over the writer with a gun in one hand and a writ in the other.Saying sorry because you've been forced to means you're not sorry at all. An apology has to be real to heal. As G. K. Chesterton said: 'A stiff apology is a second insult.'Justin Timbertrousers apologised after baring Janet Jackson's breast live on American television. But was he really sorry? Bill Clinton apologised after his game of hide the cigar became public but only because he'd been caught.And now that Jimmy Hill lookalike who's running for president has apologised for saying all Sikhs are terrorists. But John Kerry is a politician, so actually he didn't apologise at all. He said he was sorry if his remarks had been misunderstood, which is the same as saying 'I'm sorry that you're all too stupid to understand what I'm on about.'As a word, 'sorry' is a useful get-out-of-jail-free card when you're having an argument with your wife and there's only 10 minutes before your favourite television programme starts: 'Yes, I know I've dropped coal in your hollandaise sauce. I am a useless husband on every level and I'm sorry. Now can I watch 24?'Sorry works when you tread on someone's toe, or if a child accidentally burps after drinking too much Coca-Cola. Sorry is for minor indiscretions like being a bit late. When you need to squeeze past someone at the cinema to reach your seat, you say sorry because it's another way of saying excuse me. And excuse me just won't do if you've done something big: 'I've just shot your husband in the middle of his face. I do hope you'll excuse me.'Of course, to bring a bit of gravitas to the moment of humiliation and to dispel the illusion that they've done nothing more than spill water on someone's trousers, people who make public statements today have learnt to adopt a serious face and say that they are making an 'unreserved' apology.But when you saw Lord Ryder making his 'unreserved' apology on behalf of the BBC to St Tony and the half-horse half-donkey Alastair, weren't you reminded, just a little, of John Cleese dangling, upside down, from that loft apartment window in A Fish Called Wanda, apologising to the psychotic ex-CIA man played by Kevin Kline?Elton John once said that sorry seems the hardest word. But that's not true. A brave man, a man with a spine and some iron in his blood, would say: 'I don't accept your apology and I want you larched.'Sunday 7 March 2004Calling your kid Noah or c.o.ke how wet is that?Calling your kid Noah or c.o.ke how wet is that?Lots of my fortysomething friends seem to be taking a leaf out of the Blairs' book on birth control and squeezing out a last-minute baby.There are two things you must remember when someone rings to say they've just produced an offspring. First, and for no obvious reason, you must ask how much it weighs, and second, you must try not to drop the phone when they tell you what name they've chosen. 'Chardonnay?' you have to say in measured tones. 'How very, ummmm, oaky.'The annual list of most popular names shows that the Bible is still a source of inspiration for most, and that the two names at No. 1 are the super-traditional Jack and Emily. But look beneath the top 10 and it's a maelstrom of lunacy where working-cla.s.s children are named after Australian pop stars and footballers' wives. And the middle cla.s.ses are no better, going for increasingly ludicrous handles. I mean, what kind of a name is Araminta?We grew up laughing at Frank Zappa for calling his daughter Moon Unit, but today we're naming our kids after remote Himalayan villages and exotic cheeses.People have always named their children to reflect their aspirations that's why Ruby and Opal were so popular in the nineteenth century, and it's why my poor old mum was named after s.h.i.+rley Temple. I suppose it's also why so many people coming from the Caribbean in the 1950s called their boy kids Winston.This is no bad thing, being named after a prime minister or an actress your parents admired. But in America people aspire to goods and services, and that's resulted in a surge in popularity for names such as Armani, Timberland, L'Oreal and Celica, which is a type of Toyota. One poor sod last year was called Del Monte.At this point, I was about to launch into yet another attack on the Americans who regularly choose a child's name by picking letters out of a Scrabble bag. But I've just remembered that over here Harvey Smith called his horse Sanyo Music Centre, so let's move on.Before naming a child Diet c.o.ke or Josh Stick, it's important to remember that the name you choose will have a huge impact on how the poor thing's life will turn out.When Mr and Mrs Gauntlet christened their son Victor, he was going to be the chairman of Aston Martin, and so it turned out to be. If Mr and Mrs Arkwright call their son Stan, he's going to be a plumber. Mike Pemberton, on the other hand, is going to be a pilot and Brooklyn in all probability will be a bridge.One of my friends was deeply concerned about this. He originally wanted to call his new boy-child Jack, because he said Jack Wilman sounded like a rogue CIA agent and he liked the idea of his son being endlessly lowered from helicopters into nuclear submarines. 'Ah yes,' I pointed out, 'but I can also see "Jack Wilman" written down the side of a van.'This isn't necessarily a bad thing. If it's written in squirly script and the van is full of home-made crusty-bread potted-meat sandwiches, that's fine. But Jack Wilman? That's the sort of van that would have ladders on the roof. So he's gone for Noah, which means the boy will almost certainly grow up to be gay.To make matters more complicated, a survey out last week suggests teenagers are a lot more conservative than we might think. They're in favour of the monarchy, long prison sentences and patriotism, so this would lead us to believe they'd be against having silly names such as Rawlplug.But my oldest daughter disagrees. On a really, really drunken night, my wife and I seriously thought about calling her Boadicea, but the following day over the Nurofen we went for Emily. And now she's livid about it, riding around the garden with knives on her bicycle wheels, saying we were dull and unimaginative.I am dull and unimaginative because when I was little two of my tortoises, Sullivan and Bubble, died. That left me with Gilbert and Squeak, which made me a laughing stock and gave me a profound respect for a sensible naming policy.This is why I admire the Icelandic system so much. Up there, your surname is your father's Christian name with either 'son' or 'dottir' tagged on the end. So Prince Charles would be Charles Philipson and Nigella Lawson would be Nigella Nigelsdottir.It's not a policy supported by feminists, but it has worked for centuries and they don't want to see it being abused by people who suddenly get it into their heads that their son ought to be called Snowmobile. Because then his daughter, if he were similarly inclined, might well end up being called Fifi Trixibelle Peaches Snowmobiledottir.That would be ludicrous, so the government has drawn up a list of approved names from which you must choose.If we had such a system here, we could use it to maintain the beauty of traditional English names. There'd be no Tiger Lily and no Anastasia. Mr and Mrs Beckham would have been told to stop being so stupid. And my children would have been called Roy, Brenda and Enid.Sunday 14 March 2004Put Piers on a plinth, he deserves immortalityPut Piers on a plinth, he deserves immortalityFor 150 years, people have been arguing about what or who should be immortalised on the empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. And then last week came the news that we're to get a statue of a disabled and pregnant woman called Alison Lapper.My first reaction was: why not the Flying Scotsman? It's for sale at the moment for just 2 million and would be ideal, since it fits in with Ken Livingstone's much publicised love for public transport and genuinely reflects Britain's glorious engineering achievements of yesteryear.The trouble is that whatever you choose will be used as a pigeon perch and then vandalised. And it would be a shame to see the lovely old engine treated this way so how about my next brainwave? If it's to be a bird bog and a magnet for drunks and yobs intent on ruining it, then why not put a statue of Piers Morgan up there?You may have heard that at the British Press Awards last week I strolled over to Piers, the editor of the Daily Mirror, and punched him in the middle of his face.That, however, is only partly true. I also punched him on the jaw and on his cheek.Why? Well, he seems to think that if someone appears on television it is all right to publish photographs of them kissing girls goodnight and appearing on the beach while fat.I disagree.Which is why I haven't and won't spoil his fledgling career on the box by revealing details of his complicated private life.This disagreement has been running for some time. It all started when I refused to jump s.h.i.+p and write for the Mirror, saying I'd rather write operating manuals for car stereos, and the feud became public on the last Concorde flight, when I emptied a gla.s.s of water into his lap.So when everyone noticed we were both at the press awards, an air of expectancy fell on the room like a big itchy blanket. In recent years this do has become a back-slapping festival of bonhomie and fine wines, and everyone felt that here, at last, was a chance to go back to the old days of fisticuffs and abuse. Journalists behaving like journalists and not businessmen.n.o.body came over and said, 'Piers says you stink,' but there was a playground mood nevertheless.The problem was, I'd never hit anyone before. I may not have the intellect of Stephen Fry but the reason I don't have his nose is that I have enough nous to know that if I punch somebody they will punch me right back.Besides, fighting is so undignified. Who can forget John Prescott, his face all screwed up, as he lashed out at the protester in the run-up to the last general election? And then there was Jimmy Nail, who invited A. A. Gill outside for a spot of pugilism last year. You just wanted to say: 'Oh, don't be silly.'The first time Piers and I came close, he was talking the talk of the terraces, saying that I might be big but I'd go down like a sack of potatoes.Sadly, I don't speak 'football' and by the time I'd worked out what he was on about, the editor of the News of the World had stepped in and was asking us to break it up.I honestly can't remember what it was that finally triggered the action. One minute we were trading insults and the next I felt the hot surge of adrenalin and punched him.At this point the Sun's diminutive motoring correspondent waded into the arena, addressing n.o.body in particular with a menacing: 'I'm warning you. I'm from Newcastle.'Off to my left, a fat man in a white tux and with a huge Cuban cigar was drawling, 'Finish it. Outside. Finish it,' over and over again.And then there was the brother of a former famous editor of the Sun, rus.h.i.+ng hither and thither as thought he had inadvertently trodden on 6 million volts. In other words, every single man in there was suddenly seven years old.It's funny. Over the next couple of days women asked with a look of disdain why I hit him. Men, on the other hand, asked with barely disguised glee where I hit him.Piers fell into the man camp magnificently. Much as I don't like him, I have to hand him full credit for saying after the third punch: 'Is that all you've got?'Later, he explained he'd had worse drubbings from his three-year-old son.And me? Well, I seem to have broken one of my fingers. It's bright blue, won't move and looks like a burst sausage. How can this be? Bruce Willis finished off a whole skysc.r.a.per full of baddies without so much as tearing his vest, whereas I hit one middle-aged bloke and came away broken.I'd like to say this is because I'm weak and fragile and unskilled in the ways of the ruffian. But actually I suspect it has more to do with the strength of Mr Morgan.That's why it's such a good idea to immortalise him with a statue in Trafalgar Square.You can insult it, throw things at it, get birds to foul it and punch it from now to the end of time. But it'll always emerge completely undamaged.Sunday 21 March 2004Hurricane Hank pulls a fast one on the scramjetHurricane Hank pulls a fast one on the scramjetSo Nasa has smashed the speed record for plane flight. In a test last weekend, an unmanned 'scramjet' was dropped from the belly of a B-52 bomber and reached a speed of Mach 7, or almost 5,000 mph.Pundits are talking about planes that could get from London to Sydney in two hours and from Paris to New York in 30 minutes. So well done, America, for making it work and G.o.d bless Mr Bush.Except for one small thing. Two years ago a British scramjet quietly, and with no fuss, reached similar speeds over the Australian outback. Yup, like everything else, scramjets are one of ours.For 40 years scramjets have been the holy grail for the world of aviation. Unlike in a normal jet, air comes into the front of the engine, is mixed with hydrogen, ignited and then hurled out of the back. There are no moving parts, no harmful exhaust gases and, best of all, the faster you go, the faster it goes.Theoretically, they have a limitless top speed.The British version was developed by an operation called QinetiQ which, over the years, has come up with stuff like microwave radar, carbon fibre and liquid crystal displays.Today, in their unheated pre-war prefabs, with nicotine-yellow walls and damp concrete stairwells, men with colossal brains and plastic shoes are working on power systems for America's new joint strike fighter and a huge sail that harvests fog. (It's based on a sub-Saharan beetle, the stenocara, which collects moisture from the night air on its back and then has a handy water supply through the day.)Do you remember reading recently about the millimetric scanning device that can see through clothes? It was designed for airport security, but there was much t.i.ttering about other applications. Either way, that was one of theirs, too, so I should imagine that a simple little thing like a scramjet gave them no problems at all. They probably did it in a coffee break.The big question, however, is why they didn't make more of a fuss when the test was successful. Is this a return to the days of the jet engine and the hovercraft, yet another example of British inventiveness being thwarted by British corporate and governmental apathy?No. No fuss was made because, contrary to what you've been told by the over-excited Americans, you will never go to Australia or anywhere on a scramjet.'Anyone who tells you different is in an election year,' one expert said last week.Here's why. First, the hydrogen needed for a 12,000-mile trip to Sydney and hydrogen is light, remember would weigh more than the plane it was fuelling.Next, scramjets start to work only when the plane is doing Mach 5 (3,810 mph). And how, pray, are you supposed to reach that kind of speed?The Nasa plane in last weekend's test was taken to an alt.i.tude of 40,000 feet by the B-52, where it was dropped. A rocket then took it up to 90,000 feet and Mach 7. At this point the scramjet took over and yes, there was minimal acceleration, but it was out of fuel in just 11 seconds.You may recall the British Hotol project from the late 1980s. This, it was said, would use scramjets and rockets. Brilliant. Sydney would be just 45 minutes away.But not even Britain's boffins could figure out how it would get off the ground in the first place.I don't want to sound like a doom-monger, but think about it. You have a 15-minute bus ride from the car park to the terminal, a half-hour queue for check-in, another half-hour being laughed at by security staff as they 'look' through your clothes, and then an hour's walk to the gate.Here you'll board a bomber that will take an hour or so to reach the right alt.i.tude, before you are loaded into a rocket which shoots you up into s.p.a.ce. You then career back down again in scramjet mode, landing in Australia at about 14 million mph. Where you'll be eaten by a crocodile.'Scramjets will never happen,' one expert said. I told him never was a big word, but he was adamant: 'Not just not in your lifetime. Never.'Nasa has to smile sweetly when people talk about getting to the moon in 30 minutes because they have to whip up the imagination of Hank from Minnesota. They know that, with no bucks, there's no Buck Rogers.The British team members, along with their Australian partners, never made a big deal of their success because they knew it would work only on cruise missiles and tank sh.e.l.ls. I'm afraid that we're still stuck on our Airbuses and jumbos, lumbering through the ozone layer at a miserable 500 mph.Don't despair, though. While the Americans are busy congratulating themselves for their 11-second leap into the record books, the boffins at QinetiQ have moved on to the next stage: a plane that will cruise at Mach 5. It's called the sustained hypersonic flight experiment, it uses the proven ramjet from a Sea Dart missile and the first model, they say, will be airborne in 18 months' time.Expect to read about it in about five years when the Americans make it work too.Sunday 4 April 2004Health and safety and the death of televisionHealth and safety and the death of televisionAt the Last Supper Jesus washed his disciples' feet, and for 2,000 years Christians have followed suit, going to church at Easter so the vicar can move among them with a wet towel.This week, however, at the Maundy Thursday celebration in Sheffield Cathedral, the Revd Jack Nicholls had to use a different towel for each member of the congregation in case he pa.s.sed on a bout of athlete's foot. Welcome, everybody, to the mad and dangerous world of the Health and Safety Executive.This is a world where army training courses in the Brecon Beacons must now be fitted with handrails in case the soldiers fall over and where baby walkers are banned in case the toddler topples into the fire.I need to be careful at this point. The Health and Safety wallahs are a touchy bunch, saying they do important work such as stopping nuclear power stations from exploding. Almost certainly they would say, if Jesus came back to Earth tomorrow and washed two people's feet with the same towel, that they wouldn't prosecute him.Unless one of them had leprosy, of course, in which case they'd have no alternative. And no, Mr Christ, we won't take into consideration the fact that you have in the past brought people back from the dead. Also, can you stop walking on water, because that's just stupid.I don't deny that the Health and Safety Executive stops children from going up chimneys, but mostly what it does is infect the nation with a sense that 'being safe' is more important than being happy. They even argue that 'health and safety is the cornerstone of a civilised society'. But this couldn't be more wrong.Health and Safety is the cancer of a civilised society, a huge, ungainly, malignant, pulsating wart.In the past, companies used to live in fear of the trade unions, who would walk in through the front door and usher every worker they found out through the back.We thought the Arthur Scargills and Jimmy Knapps had been killed off by Margaret Thatcher; but no. They have simply metamorphosed into the Health and Safety Executive, and now they're back, sticking their trouble-making noses into every single aspect of every single thing we do.Only last week it was revealed that in the past three years 15 people have been killed on a single stretch of road in Wilts.h.i.+re. One road safety campaigner greeted the news by saying, 'It's the same as a jumbo jet cras.h.i.+ng every year.'I'm sorry, matey, but if you do the maths it just isn't.Today, companies can get a government bribe of up to 100,000 if they employ workers' safety advisers. But don't be tempted, because these idiots will argue that your office carpets are more perilous than a terrorist bomb.No, really. We're told that 95 per cent of major slips at work result in broken bones. (Is that so?) And that somebody falls over in this country every three minutes, which, they argue, incurs an incalculable human cost.No it doesn't. The human cost of the Holocaust was incalculable, whereas I fell down the stairs only yesterday and it cost nothing. There's more, too. Just last week the lift doors at the BBC's White City building closed on my knee and wouldn't open again. And the bruise I received was completely free.Still, the HSE says that simple cost-effective steps can be taken to ensure that n.o.body trips. Spillages, they say, must be managed, suitable footwear should be fitted, effective matting systems must be used, offices must be redesigned and workers must be retrained. Cost-effective? How can it be when the staff do nothing all day except work to stay upright?Health and safety is now so out of control that I find it nearly impossible to do my job. Certainly the series I made a few years ago called Extreme Machines simply couldn't be produced today.Back then, we gave the sound recordist a heart attack when we asked him to abseil off an oil tanker at 3 a.m. in the middle of a Cape of Good Hope storm. We put the cameraman in such a position that he fell off a 1,000-bhp swamp buggy in Florida and then, after we got the mud out of his lungs, we wedged him in a two-seat Spitfire that ran out of fuel at 5,000 feet.I climbed into drag-racing snowmobiles and fighter jets without a moment's thought. Yes, it was dangerous, but it was fun. We knew the risks and we took them because a) it was a laugh, and b) hopefully it made great telly.Nowadays, though, producers must fill in a hazard a.s.sessment form before they go on a shoot. They have to show that they've thought about all the safety implications and if there's a breach, they not the BBC are liable. Result: they won't take any risks at all.On Top Gear, we refer to the Health and Safety people as the PPD. The Programme Prevention Department.Sunday 11 April 2004Getting totally wrecked at sea isn't a crimeGetting totally wrecked at sea isn't a crimeOh no. The government has begun a four-month consultation period to see if weekend sailors pottering about on the Solent or the Norfolk Broads should be stopped and breathalysed.Now, I can see that it might be difficult to drive a tank while under the influence of heroin. And I understand that Huw Edwards would find it tricky to read the Autocue if he were off his face on acid. But sailing a boat, on the sea, after a few wines? I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound hard at all.Sure, there was the case of the drunken Icelandic trawlerman who crashed into a British couple's yacht, causing damage that cost 25,000 to