Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (10 page)

Last week a colleague of mine called James May claimed that any man who could not land an aeroplane and put up a shelf and defuse a bomb was nothing more than an organic bag for keeping sperm at the right temperature until it's needed by a lady.

Speaking to us from the pages of the
Radio Times
, he says traditional skills are disappearing from the curriculum and that there are now many men who think it's endearing and cute to be useless. It isn't, he says. ‘It's boring and everyone's getting sick of it.'

I should explain at this point that Mr May is fanatical about the workings of things. For fun, he will take a motorcycle engine to pieces, and for relaxation, he will countersink a screw. At night, he takes penknives or model trains to bed so he can, as he puts it, ‘look at them'.

Unfortunately, like all fanatics, he cannot understand the mindset of those who do not share his opinion or abilities. Me, for example. He is right because he draws outlines of all his tools on the wall so he can see at a glance when one is missing. I am wrong because I am confused by zips. He is right because he is organized and methodical and interested in the teachings of Michael Faraday and James Watt. I am wrong because I've got better things to do than read the instruction manual for a vacuum cleaner.

I drive him mad because I cannot see how things go together. Once, he spent fifteen minutes, in a state of increasing exasperation, watching me struggling to attach a strap to
a pair of binoculars I'd bought. Eventually he could take no more, snatched the rat's nest that I'd made away and did the job for me. And that is the point. If you cannot do something, then get someone who can to do it for you.

Mr May says children should be taught basic woodworking and needlework skills at school. I disagree. I was taught for many years how to do long division. I even had extra lessons in the hope that the secret of this arithmetic witchcraft could be unlocked. But it was all to no avail. I am now fifty and I still don't understand it. So when I need to divide one number by another, I fire up Mr Samsung and get him to do it on my behalf.

It was the same story in the school woodwork centre. So far as I could tell, every single tool in there seemed to have been designed specifically to puncture my lungs. Telling me that I had to learn how to use a lathe was like telling me I had to learn how to use a tampon. It was pointless. And painful.

And again, that still holds true today. Whenever I attempt even the simplest job around the house, we need scaffolding for eight weeks to put the place in order again.

Every day, at least three white vans with ladders on the roof will come to my house and disgorge men in bobble hats who chew pencils, listen to Radio 1 and mend stuff that's gone wrong. Stuff, Mr May says, I should have been able to mend myself.

But I really and genuinely can't. I can't ever find the end on a roll of Sellotape. I don't understand clasps. Plumbing is a dark art. My lawnmower is a vindictive swine that wants to kill me. The only good news is that you have to pull on a rope to make it begin. And this has never once, ever, worked.

I am not unusual. History is littered with the corpses of people who thought they could save a few bob by doing a job themselves. Lord Finchley, for example, who attempted
to mend an electric light – an endeavour that prompted the writer Hilaire Belloc to say: ‘It is the business of a wealthy man/To give employment to the artisan.'

Like Finchley, I am not wired up to understand engineering, which is why my respect for those who are is boundless. I can cook an egg, so I don't really have much admiration for Gordon Ramsay. I can write a sentence, so I don't fawn over Sebastian Faulks. But I cannot drill a hole in a wall without knocking it down. Which is why I go all weak-kneed over Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

And, to a certain extent, James May.

He's boring and pedantic and methodical to the point where you want to cut his head off. But we need people like him who can weld, in the same way as he needs people like me who can … er … I'll get back to you on that.

When he buys a gun, for example, he takes it into his workshop and inspects every detail of its design and construction. When I buy a gun, I take it outside and shoot the sky near where a pheasant had been moments earlier. And when the gun goes wrong, usually because I haven't cleaned it, I take it to the gun shop, where a man – who Mr May would put out of work – charges me a small amount to put it right again.

But back to Mr May's claim that basic woodwork and needlecraft skills should be taught in school. There are two problems with this. First, there's no point trying to teach someone like me how to make a bookcase. I can't. And second, we are no longer living in 1953.

Teaching someone how to rivet is like teaching someone how to do cave paintings – it's simply not relevant today. Woodworking is fine only as a hobby, and you should never trust a man who has a hobby. Hobbies are for people who were caught masturbating by their mums.

‘Stop that and go and do something useful.'

Today the only engineering a child needs to understand is electrical. How to mend a wireless broadband router. How to align a satellite dish. How to transfer iTunes from one computer to another.

And permit me at this point to let a little secret out of the bag. James May can do none of those things. He doesn't like electricity. He doesn't trust it. He even told me once that he doesn't believe it exists. So, when his router goes wrong, like you and me, he spends all day on the phone to a man in India.

7 November 2010

Last week Mr David Cameron breezed into China – where hardly anyone has heard of either him or the country he represents – and explained that it really is no good having a one-party state with censorship of the internet. I don't think this was a very good idea.

I realize, of course, that he has to make some noises about human rights, or the bleeding-heart liberals back at home get all angsty. But really. How would you like it if a complete stranger barged into your kitchen one day and explained that you are not bringing up your children properly?

Quite. Well, that's undoubtedly what the Chinese thought of Mr Cameron's lecture. Who are you? Shut up. And would you like to buy some training shoes?

The purpose of Mr Cameron's visit is to make the Chinese aware of British business in the hope that after we've bought 25 billion pairs of their nasty shoes, they would perhaps like to buy a packet of Prince Charles's Duchy of Cornwall biscuits.

So why begin with a spot of light criticism? When you walk into a boardroom, hoping to sell the assembled buyers your wares, your opening gambit should not be ‘I don't like your carpet very much'. It's for this reason my local greengrocer does not collar me as I walk past his shop with the words, ‘Oi, fatso, do you want to buy some potatoes?'

Let's gloss over this mistake, though, and move on. By 2015 Mr Cameron hopes to have almost tripled Britain's exports to China from £7.7 billion a year to a whopping
£18.5 billion. God knows how. The Chinese have already said they are not interested in our telecom, insurance, banking or media. So, what's left? I assume that's why George Weston, boss of British Associated Foods, was there, too. Because if Mr Cameron wants to do that much trade, the prince's biscuits on their own will not cut it. He must be planning to sell some Ovaltine as well.

I like this about Mr Cameron. He seems to understand that doing business around the world will make everything a bit better at home. But, again, I sense a mistake. He was accompanied by three big-hitters from the cabinet and a selection of business leaders. There was the aforementioned Mr Weston, with his malty mug, and more than forty others.

But, foolishly, he did not take the pin-ups from his newly created pool of commercial ambassadors – Anya Hindmarch, who makes a living selling handbags to my daughter, and Tamara Mellon.

The
Daily Mail
printed a picture of the latter naked last week, and pointed out her dad was once linked to Diana Dors and she used to dabble with drugs. This may or may not be true but, either way, it's irrelevant. What is relevant is that she started the successful Jimmy Choo shoe business and is, how can I put this, easy on the eye.

Johnny Chinaman may not care much for Mr Cameron – especially when he was probably expecting Winston Churchill – but I can assure you he would have listened to what Ms Mellon had to say. And Ms Hindmarch, who has beautiful eyes.

There was some debate last week about the television programme
Countryfile
. It seems that when the show moved to a primetime slot, four presenters were relieved of their duties because, it is claimed, they weren't pretty enough.

This, from their point of view, is very sad and I hope they
do well in their new careers. On the radio. But the fact is this: most people prefer to be spoken to by someone who is attractive, and so, given the choice of two equally qualified TV presenters, it makes sense to employ Julia Bradbury. Especially on a chilly day.

And so it goes in the world of business. If an ugly man comes to my office trying to sell stapling machines, I will probably not listen to a word he says. But if the same company sends a pretty girl, I will probably buy half a million. Please, do not hold that against me. I can't help it. I was born with a scrotum and it messes with your head.

Of course, I'm not suggesting Mr Cameron should have gone to China with a selection of girls from the pages of
Razzle
, but I do think that when British business is being sold on the world stage, it is important we hold our hosts' attention.

President Nicolas Sarkozy can rock up with his lovely and clever wife, Carla Bruni, who can help keep everyone awake when the speeches have gone on a bit, and Silvio Berlusconi usually has a tribe of weathergirls in tow. This has been a problem for British prime ministers in the past. Without wishing to be mean, Audrey Callaghan was not exactly Michelle Obama. And Cherie Blair, by all accounts, could be awfully bossy. Samantha Cameron would appear to be the perfect combination, except that she's not really interested in going to China and selling Prince Charles's biscuits. Which is where Jordan comes in.

Jordan, or Katie Price, is best known for having massive breasts and too much make-up. But peel all that away and you are left with a surprisingly pretty girl who is extremely clever. She must be. She has amassed a small fortune by simply not getting into cars very carefully.

Then you have Victoria Beckham, who's bright enough to
have stayed famous by simply not eating very much. She'd be a tremendous trade envoy because she's sharp and pretty and can talk about football.

Britain, in fact, is awash with women who could sell the nation's biscuits. There's Alice Temperley, who is a dress designer; Helena Bonham Carter, who is an actress; and Jemima Khan, whom the papers call a ‘socialite'. Sprinkle a bit of Helen Mirren into the mix, garnish with a generous portion of Konnie Huq, and you have a world-class sales team. Send that lot in to bat and the people of Poundbury would be in employment for a thousand years. I bet they could even flog Rolls-Royce jet engines to the Australians.

14 November 2010

Like many people, I enjoy settling down on a Sunday evening to watch
Countryfile
. It's so peaceful and right. No badger ever has tuberculosis. No one ever rips their face off on barbed wire. And all the presenters are so attractive. There are no old boilers messing up the lovely pastoral views, apart from John Craven, obviously. But mostly he's marooned back at base these days, flogging calendars with deer on them to old ladies. In last week's show, after they'd introduced us to the man who invented walking in Ireland and shown us a boat that went on a river, they presented an item on foraging.

It was great. Lots of extremely attractive middle-aged women went into the countryside with wicker baskets where they picked leaves and weeds and kelp. And then they all gathered in an agreeable barn to cook and eat what they'd found.

It looked fantastic. And it sounds idyllic, doesn't it, taking your family out on a crisp, frosty morning to forage for breakfast? Indeed, a few days earlier a group of Londoners had decided to descend on Hampstead Heath to pick wild mushrooms. Unfortunately, that expedition made it into the news because it infuriated local environmentalists.

Jeremy Wright, who does something green and worthy at a college in London, was quoted as saying he'd seen one person stuffing a hessian sack with fungi. And then said that if everyone picked wild mushrooms on the heath, there would be none left. Plainly, he would rather our mushrooms were flown into Tesco every morning from Israel.

I had a similar problem recently while out picking samphire at my holiday cottage. Even though it was in my garden, a local eco-ist informed me sternly that I was killing tigers or bears or some such nonsense and that I must stop immediately. Which I did … n't.

Now, obviously, anything that enrages the green movement is a good and worthwhile thing, but before we all sally forth, it is important to make a couple of points on the mushroom front. Because we live in a police state, it is illegal under the Theft Act of 1968 to pick fungi for commercial gain. And later in the day you will almost certainly suffer an agonizing death. Either that, or you will suddenly find your toaster hysterically funny.

The problem is that there are thousands of varieties of mushroom – there are 340 on Hampstead Heath alone – and many are either hallucinogenic or fatal. The parents of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit went west after eating mushrooms they'd foraged. And he must have been mentally affected, too, otherwise why would he decide that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees? And the boiling point 212?

It is impossible here to tell you what danger signs to look out for. There are simply too many. But I can tell you when you'll be safe.

If the mushrooms are a pale, er, mushroom colour and come ready-cleaned in cellophane in a big shop with fluorescent lighting, all will be well.

On a foraging expedition, however, the message is simple: beware. So what else is there?

Well, on
Countryfile
, they were uprooting just about everything, as though the whole of England is one giant snack. But trust me on this – it really isn't.

According to the Safe Gardening website, you will die badly and in great pain if you eat the berries from Boston ivy,
English ivy, lantana, Virginia creeper, yew, privet, the castor oil plant, mistletoe, holly and – weird one this – potatoes.

Now, I know what a potato looks like, but all the others? Haven't a clue. Only today, I was out walking with my dogs when I encountered a bush laden down with what I thought were sloes. And since I'm partial to a pint or two of fruit-infused gin before bed, I thought I'd pick some. But were they sloes? Or were they berries from deadly nightshade, which, apparently, are the same colour? I shan't know until I'm hunched over the lavatory one night, vomiting my own spleen out of my nose.

What about apples, then? Well, in the olden days, foraging for these used to be called ‘scrumping' and would earn you, at worst, a clip round the ear from the local bobby. In my garden, though, it's called ‘theft' and the lead poisoning you will receive from my Beretta will do you no good at all. The same goes for my crab apples and raspberries.

So. Not mushrooms, then, and not fruit. Which leaves us with what? Well, according to our man on
Countryfile
, you can pick pennywort, which he says is great in salad. Do you know what pennywort looks like? Nope? Me neither. And the same goes for sorrel and all the other things he plunged into his basket. So far as I'm concerned, it's all just wide grass.

There's another problem with foraging.

A problem that became blindingly obvious on
Countryfile
when the yummy mummies served up all the food they'd picked and cooked. The assembled throng did their best to look like they were dining on peach and peacock but it is impossible, even if you are Robert De Niro, to pretend that something tastes delicious when, in fact, it's a nettle garnished with seaweed.

Oh, they made all the right noises about nature's larder and the bountiful green and pleasant land but each time they
spooned what they'd found into their mouth, they really did look like a bunch of bulldogs chewing on wasps.

So, there we are. While foraging may appeal to the thrifty, nature lovers and people who just want to enjoy the simple things in life, you must know before you set off with your trug and your rosy-faced children that, at worst, you will not survive the day and, at best, what you come home with will taste absolutely disgusting.

Happily, though, there is a way round this. It's called Waitrose.

28 November 2010