And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (22 page)

This is the conundrum faced by all environmental effort. Michael Crichton, in his extraordinary recent book,
State of Fear
– you have just got to read it – highlights the case of the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming which was ring-fenced as a wilderness in 1872.

Unfortunately, the eco-beards couldn’t stop meddling. First, they thought the elk was about to become extinct so they shot all the wolves in the park, and banned Indians from hunting. Soon, there were so many elk, they started
to eat the trees that the beavers used to make dams, so the beavers upped sticks and moved somewhere else. And without the beavers’ dams, the meadows dried up, the trout and the otter vanished and soil erosion became a serious problem. A problem exacerbated by the huge elk herds that were eating all the grass. So they had to start shooting the elk, by the thousand.

This brings me on to a plot of coastal land I’ve just bought on the Isle of Man.

It is a spectacular place, as wild and rugged and remote as you can possibly imagine. The air is needle sharp. The sea is ice clear. And then there’s the wildlife. There are seals, hen harriers, Manx shearwaters, many peregrine falcons, and some sheep.

There’s more, too, because the plot is the only European habitat of something called the lesser mottled grasshopper. Which means I’m now the sole custodian of an entire species. And how cool is that?

‘Not very,’ you might think, if you are one of the grasshoppers. You can imagine them, all huddled round, craning their little necks, trying to see who had bought their home: ‘Is it David Attenborough? Is it Bill Oddie? Or David Bellamy? Oh, bloody hellfire, it’s that fat yob off
Top Gear
.’

As a result, they all seem to have scarpered. I’ve been round the entire site on my hands and knees, looking for the damn things, but I think they may be hiding in one of the caves, fearful that I’m some kind of white hunter whose study walls are groaning under the weight of all the dead heads, and that I’m going to bludgeon them all to death with a baseball bat, for fun. Or spray the site with
Agent Orange from a helicopter gunship. And then open a quad bike racetrack to run over the survivors.

They have me all wrong, though. Which is why I’ve signed a voluntary deal with the government to make sure all the indigenous wildlife survives my tenure. This sounds simple. But it isn’t.

The first objective listed in the agreement says I must ‘provide the grass length and warm conditions required by the lesser mottled grasshopper’. Now, I know how to keep the grass short – I shall use the woolly lawnmower known in farming circles as a flock of sheeps – but how in the name of all that’s holy do you keep an insect ‘warm’?

I must also harvest the crops from the middle of the field outwards, so the corncrakes have a chance to flee, I can’t use dynamite to clear the gorse, nor can I clear it in the bird breeding season, I must produce dung for choughs – what, me personally? – I must rebuild the sod hedge, I can’t use slurry and I must plant 200 berry-bearing shrubs. Naturally, clubbing the seals is right out.

Of course I get a small grant, but it doesn’t get close to covering the cost of the work. Especially as I shall now have to spend the rest of time blow-drying all my sheeps, harvesting the barley with nail scissors and providing the grasshoppers with central heating. But I really don’t mind, because hidden in all the rules and regulations is the most delicious irony.

You see, for centuries, this bleak wilderness has been popular with weird-beard types who come out to walk their dogs and peer at the hen harriers. On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, the whole place is a technicolor blizzard of cagoulery and livid walking socks.

And the fact is, these rambling types are frightening the birds. They’re also inadvertently treading on all my grasshoppers, which means they’re not in touch with the wildlife so much as standing on it.

The government wants them gone and, since the Isle of Man has no right to roam, I’m well within my rights to litter the place with landmines. It’s certainly tempting.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are forever trying to ban the car because of the damage it does, and now I have the chance for some payback. To save an endangered species, the petrolhead has to ban the greens.

Isn’t that wonderful! To protect the environment, I have to get rid of the environmentalists.

Sunday 24 April 2005

Feeding white noise into a prisoner’s cell is classified as torture. The practice is banned by all civilised countries because the human mind cannot cope with endless random sound. It causes insanity, eventually.

But that’s what we’re getting with this election campaign. An endless white noise of promises that can’t be kept, statistics that mean nothing, and a smattering of pantomime personal abuse.

Why? Well, put simply, it is very cheap to cover a general election campaign.

Unlike, say, in a war, newspapers and television stations don’t have to buy their reporters airline tickets, flak jackets and satellite phones. For the price of a train ticket to the stump in Peterborough, they can fill hours of airtime and hundreds of pages, and if anyone dares to complain about the bombardment, they’re told it’s important. Really?

When you push the switch on the wall, light comes into the room. When you are hungry, you go to a shop and buy food. When you are tired, you go to sleep. And when you are bored, you arrange to see friends. None of this has anything to do with whatever government happens to be prevailing at the time.

I’m willing to bet that none of the problems you have in life at the moment has anything at all to do with the decision-makers in Westminster. Is your daughter having
a rough time at school? Is your wife having an affair? Neither of these things will be solved by the outcome of a general election.

Boris Johnson once claimed that a vote for the Tories would cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3. He even had some science to back these claims, but it’s nonsense really.

The Conservative Party likes to say Tony Blair is responsible for the emergence of MRSA, but this is political arrogance. MRSA is caused by nurses and doctors not washing their hands properly, and personal hygiene is not a political issue. Nor should it be.

On the flip side, I’m also pretty sure that none of the joy in your life has been created by politicians, either. Did they write the book you’re enjoying at the moment, or make the film you watched last night? Do they make your children giggle, or your dog wag its tail?

Whatever it is that turns you on – watching a soufflé rise, making an Airfix model of a Mosquito bomber, riding your motorcycle – all will be unaffected by the general election.

What’s more, whichever way the vote goes, the sewage network will continue to function and so will the company for which you work. Roads will continue to be fixed, doctors will continue to mend the sick, the police will continue to maintain law and order (except in Nottingham, obviously). We now have a system in this country, an infrastructure, and for the most part it would continue to run even if all the 650 Members of Parliament decided to spend the rest of time dressed as Hiawatha on a remote Scottish island.

Each one of us is now governed by a parish council, a district council, a county council and the European Union.

Unless we live in Scotland or Wales, in which case there’s Holyrood or the assembly as well.

So, what is it, exactly, that the House of Commons does? I’ve thought hard about this, and the only thing that’s truly changed in my life since Mr Blair came to power is the M4 bus lane.

Other than that, he’s blundered about, making a lot of speeches, but unless you’re a Polish plumber, or you’re in the army, or you hunt foxes, he and his kind have made no difference at all. We all still get up, go to work, pay our bills and go to bed. New Labour has been, for the vast majority, utterly irrelevant.

And I’m not being party political here. All the main parties are making all sorts of promises about what they’ll do if they win the election: 600 border guards, the abolition of top-up fees, a base rate for stamp duty, local income tax. But it’s all just fiddling with a finite pot of money. None of it will make any difference.

Unless it’s the Lib Dems, who want us all to have wire-wool hair and go everywhere on an ox.

I’m not suggesting we don’t need leaders. We shall always need someone to react to American requests for soldiers, or an African need for food. But I do think the finite pot of tax money might be stretched a little further if there weren’t 650 leaders, all on expenses.

Could it not be run, perhaps, like a cross between a parish council – which, now we’re in the EU, is exactly what it is – and jury service? Can we not just have a
dozen people, picked at random from the current electoral register, who sit in a village hall somewhere, making decisions only when they’re necessary?

If Ruth Kelly and John Prescott can do it, then anyone can. And in case the random selection procedure does cough up the odd loony who wants to invade France, majority decisions will be taken.

What I’m talking about is benign, reactive government rather than cancerous, proactive government whose endless schemes dominate our viewing and reading pleasure and, with the exception of the M4 bus lane, achieve nothing of significance.

A poet once wrote, ‘Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.’ It has become the mantra of the terminally disillusioned. But this morning I offer a solution. What if there were no boss at all?

Sunday 1 May 2005

Not long ago, I wrote a column saying that high street stores have got completely out of sync and only sell clothing that is in no way relevant to the prevailing weather conditions. So on a cold day in March you cannot buy a coat. And on a hot day in August you cannot buy a pair of swimming trunks.

What I did not realise at the time is that these days, unless you have a spare fortnight or so, you cannot buy anything at all.

Last week, for instance, I was strolling home from my first ever breakfast meeting – it made me feel very important – when I saw a plasma television set in the window of a shop. ‘Ooh,’ I thought, ‘because I’m now the sort of person who gets invited to breakfast meetings, I should have one of those.’ And since I had five minutes to kill, I went inside with my credit card greased and ready for a battering.

The salesman opened proceedings with a lot of technical gobbledegook I didn’t care about or understand, but I was expecting that. What I was not expecting was the sheer complication of giving him my money.

As a general rule, the only thing I ever buy is petrol. So I’m aware of how credit cards function. You dash into the shop, the Indian man pushes it through a swipy thing, you sign your name and dash back out to the car again. The job’s done in seconds.

I’ve heard that it’s the same story in supermarkets. A woman who breathes through her mouth drives your Loyd Grossman tomato sauce through a beam of light several times and then summons a colleague called Janet who goes to the back of the store to see how much it costs. It all sounds very efficient.

But apart from petrol stations and supermarkets, the whole buying process is now littered with an immense amount of needless baggage. I mean, have you ever tried to get something from the internet?

I watched my wife downloading songs from iTunes on to her iPod the other iDay and I reckoned it looked simple. And it is. But only after you’ve told Mr Apple who you are, where you live, what password you would like, whether you want some Viagra, how much you earn and all sorts of other stuff that is in no way relevant to the fact that I wanted to buy
Radar Love
by Golden Earring.

Back in the real world, things are just as bad. And the worst offenders, so far as I can tell, are those that sell stuff with plugs, the shops that show
Richard and Judy
in a hundred different ways: electrical retailers. What happens here is that the spotty man with enough product in his hair to fry a fish takes your credit card, goes to his computer terminal, logs on and begins to write
War and Peace
.

After a while – it was a week or so – I became so exasperated that I moved along the counter to see if he’d at least got to the bit where Marya chucks Anatole, but guess what? He wasn’t writing
War and Peace
at all. What he was doing was all the company’s internal accounting and stock control, informing some mainframe in Ipswich that he was in the process of selling a television.

This, I’m sure, is better than having a man in a brown store coat out the back, noticing when the pile of 42-inchers is getting a bit low. A big flashy computer program is something you can talk about with the suppliers at breakfast meetings.

It looks good.

Anyway, when the man with the solid hair had finished updating the company’s database, he started to ask me a series of impertinent questions. Like where I lived, my home phone number and my email address, presumably so that his bosses could sell my details to a spammer who, knowing I’d just bought a plasma television, would clock me immediately as someone who has breakfast meetings and therefore is someone in need of a larger penis.

By this stage, he had already taken up the time I usually set aside in a whole year for shopping. And he hadn’t even started on the credit card transaction, or the delivery address. Which was different from my home address. Which meant he had to re-program the company’s entire software package.

I began to be overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, a sense that I might be in the shop for ever. So I started giving serious consideration to the idea of popping next door and buying a knife. I’m not by nature a murderer, but I began to visualise the blade in question and how it might look sticking out of the salesman’s head.

All that saved him was the sure-fire knowledge that I’d get the same treatment in the knife shop, the same endless pitter-patter of a computer keyboard and the same requests for personal information; the only difference being that, if you buy a knife, you end up with an inbox full of
messages from people in America wondering if you’d like to buy some camouflage trousers and maybe shoot a black man.