Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (23 page)

The Ministry of Defence is said to be worried because the computerized simulations it uses to train squaddies in the art of warfare are not as realistic as the commercially available games that most of their teenage recruits play at home.

Really?

I only ask because I am something of an expert in the
Call of Duty
PlayStation games that allow the player to rush about in various locations around the world shooting down helicopter gunships and planting mines on Russian submarines. I am very good at it.

Sometimes, when I play against my fifteen-year-old son, I can last for three or four seconds before he comes round a corner and stabs me in the heart.

However, this is the problem. After he has stabbed me in the heart, we are treated to a slow-motion replay and then we simply press restart and begin again. That's not how things pan out on a real battlefield, I should imagine.

What's more, when we are playing against computerized enemies, we can be shot with heavy weapons probably seventy times before we are made to go back to the beginning. Hmm. I once shot a railway sleeper with a single round from an AK-47 and it split clean in half. So it stands to reason that if you are hit with seventy rounds from such a weapon, the medical description for your condition would be ‘dead'.

Yes, the graphics in the
Call of Duty
games are beyond reproach, but for training to be a soldier, they are about as useful as Lego. I mean it. In my own sitting room, I am an
accomplished diver but when I go underwater in a real scuba suit, my ears hurt, my mask fills up with water and I get in a bit of a panic.

It's much the same story when searching house to house for terrorists. In the game, you run into the room, get shot seventy times, and still have the wherewithal to kill the bad guy. In real life – and I've actually done this with proper soldiers – they clipped so many things to my belt that by the time I arrived at the house I was extremely out of breath and my trousers were round my ankles. Then an enormous sergeant threw me out of a window.

Training to be a fighter pilot is rather less tiring. Yes, the equipment used by the RAF on raw recruits is in no way comparable to commercially available computer games. There are no graphics at all. No realistic noises.

In fact you begin your training with a piece of equipment first designed in the Fifties to train London bus drivers. It's made from wood and brass and you have to weave a pointer round a route, taking into account a delay between any input you make and what happens as a result. It's very tricky.

If you can master this, you are allowed on to the next stage. This is very modern. It even uses electricity. In short, you have four dots moving across a screen. When the green one passes behind a green bar, you hit the green button. When the yellow one passes behind the yellow bar, you hit the yellow button, and so on. It's a bit like Space Invaders for the terminally ham-fisted and it's very easy.

However, while you are doing this, a combination of ten letters and numbers flash up in front of you. A few seconds after it disappears, while you are still obliterating dots, four more ten-letter combinations appear and you have to say which matches the one that had flashed up earlier.

That makes the game a bit awkward. But what makes it
absolutely bloody infuriating is that at this stage, the dots are getting a bit faster, the combinations are flashing up constantly and you are being asked multiple-choice general knowledge questions that you have just three seconds to answer. It is nowhere near as much fun as
Call of Duty
and it's nigh on impossible for someone like me to get right. Apparently, only about half of those who take this multitasking test emerge with a pass. Doctors call these people ‘women'.

Next up is the centrifuge. You are strapped into a large metal egg that is mounted on the end of an arm in a circular room, and then you are whizzed round and round at extremely high speed until sick starts to come out of your mouth.

Weirdly, I was quite good at this. An extremely fit nineteen-year-old cadet who went before me passed out at 3g whereas I took 4g in my stride, no problem at all. This is because I am what medical experts call a ‘smoker'. And that means my arterial route map is so clogged up with fat and nicotine my blood is less likely to pool in either my head or my feet. I am therefore less likely to go unconscious.

Annoyingly, the women who pass the multitasking test usually fall down badly when exposed to g. Because according to one man with whom I chatted, the womb is not fastened in place very well and can, when exposed to sustained g, come detached.

So far, then, your training has been nowhere near as much fun as an afternoon in front of the television shooting Russians. Plus, your womb's come off. But then you get to the Eurofighter simulator. And let me tell you this: there is no game on earth, no fairground ride, nothing, that is half as much fun.

In the middle of a giant dome, you sit in an actual
Eurofighter cockpit and in front is a screen that fills all of your peripheral vision. It is showing Britain in minute detail and your job is to fly under bridges in the Lake District, bomb the houses of people you don't like and shoot down other Eurofighters, which can be given Luftwaffe symbols, if that's what you want.

I spent hours bombing Piers Morgan's house and it was so much fun that I had an idea. Instead of spending a fortune making better graphics for wised-up gamers, the MoD should think about doing things the other way round: making a fortune by licensing its Eurofighter simulator to people who have wombs and a tendency for nausea if they ever had a go in the real thing.

Happy new year to everyone.

1 January 2012

Alan Titchmarsh said last week that he had little time for politics because it was always changing. One minute you have the third way and then it's the big society and it's hard to keep up and stay focused. Gardening, he says, is much more important because it always stays the same.

Now when it comes to deadheading and hoeing, I am not really in a position to argue with the son of Yorkshire. But I will have a go anyway. Because, in truth, gardens have changed hugely even in my lifetime and the main reason for this is – drum roll – Alan Titchmarsh.

Every week for many years he told us that our gardens should incorporate stainless steel and other materials that would have been wholly unfamiliar to Peter Rabbit. Then a woman with no bra would make a water feature and someone with sturdy shoes would put up a pergola. None of these things would have been found in any British garden until 19 September, 1997 – the day
Ground Force
was first broadcast.

I can even give you some numbers. B&Q reported that in 1997 it sold about £5,000-worth of timber decking. After
Ground Force
's love affair with the stuff, the figure had leapt to £16 million. That's a lot of dug-up lawns. And, after a shower, it's also a lot of sprained ankles. It's a lot of change.

But Mr Titchmarsh goes on undaunted, claiming that, in general, views in the countryside haven't changed all that much in the past 200 years. That may be true if you are the
Duke of Marlborough or Prince Charles, but the rest of us? Once again, Alan, I'm afraid I disagree.

Two hundred years ago Britain was a green and pleasant land because cows lived on a diet of grass. However, a cow that has spent its whole life eating turf doesn't look or taste so good when it's reduced to its component parts and displayed in jigsaw form at the supermarket.

We like fat. Which means feeding our cows on foodstuff made from oilseed rape. And that's why Britain is now, mostly, a yellow and pleasant land full of people sneezing and asthmatics searching their pockets for Ventolin.

Our love of fat has had another effect. When I was growing up, the woods were full of children building dens out of twigs and roasting scrumped apples in bonfires made from stolen wheelchairs. That's what I did, anyway. Now the children are all at home eating fat and sitting in front of computer screens.

All you ever hear in a wood these days is the wind caressing the nearby eco-windmill and the occasional blast from a drunken businessman's twelve-bore.

Not that there are many woods because most trees have died of one disease or another over the centuries, or they've been chopped down and turned into decking to feed the trend started by Alan.

There's more. Two hundred years ago the country was crisscrossed with millions of miles of hawthorn, blackthorn and possibly hazel hedgerow, some of which would have dated back 8,000 years. Then along came the tractor and with it the need for bigger fields. Today the countryside where I live looks like the Nullarbor. Only there's more wildlife in that Australian plain.

Despite the best efforts of Kate Humble to convince us
that Britain's yellow bits are teeming with interesting birds and other animals, the fact of the matter is they aren't.

There's plenty of evidence that woodland creatures live on my farm, but thanks to the way we live today they won't be around for much longer.

The badgers will have to be shot because they are killing all the cows, the squirrels because they ruin the trees, the deer because they eat the saplings, the crayfish because they are like aquatic neutron bombs and the pheasants because they are delicious.

So what of the buildings? Yes, the planners do their best to make sure they are broadly similar to how they were 200 years ago, but it's a lost cause. Because a barn conversion, no matter how sympathetically it is done, never looks like an actual barn.

The biggest change to the countryside is the people who live in it. Two hundred years ago the fields were full of people in smocks with nasty teeth, moulding mud into small mounds. Today the only people you see in fields are ramblers. The teeth are the same but the motives are different: they aren't there to make a living; they are there to make sure someone else can't.

They do this either by tearing up crops with which they have a political issue, or by staking a claim to the land, or by walking up and down on footpaths that haven't been used or needed since the invention of the bus.

Then there are the villages. Back in the time when George III was running around Windsor Castle imagining that he might be a hovercraft or a parsnip, most small settlements in Britain were full mainly of terrible debilitating diseases. Now they are full of investment bankers and lovely children called Sophia. Today the average hen is treated more kindly than
most people were in the nineteenth century, and you're more likely to have an SUV than an STD.

Mead has become Mouton Rothschild. Bread has got bits in it. Pigs are pets. People think they are clinging on to the olden days by having an Aga, but in fact this wasn't invented until 1922. There is absolutely not one thing that the people who live in the shires today have in common with the people who lived there 200 years ago. Nothing.

The truth is that Alan Titchmarsh got things the wrong way round. The views from our kitchen windows have changed beyond all recognition in the past couple of centuries. Whereas in politics they still have a black rod, a mace and a room full of men making silly noises. BBC Parliament is where you go for traditional values. The countryside? It's just a patchwork of fads.

8 January 2012

If you get a job as a lion tamer or a shark juggler or an Australian, it is reasonable to assume that at some point in your career you will be eaten.

But it turns out that the people most likely to be gobbled up by a savage animal are British postmen.

According to a man called Dave Joyce, who is the health and safety officer for the Communication Workers Union – jobs just don't get better than that – millions of postmen are savaged by dogs every year. One had his arm torn off, and six have lost fingers in the past eight months alone.

How long will it be before there is a fatality? Well, according to American research, probably not that long. Over there 2 per cent of the population is bitten every year and the number of deaths averages out at about twenty-six a year.

In Britain we have the Dangerous Dogs Act, which forces the owners of various types of dog to keep them in a straitjacket whenever they are out and about in public. But now David Cameron is saying this legislation should be changed because it's racist. And he's right.

How dare someone suggest that a dog is going to nick your wallet just because it's a pitbull? Or that it's likely to walk into an airport check-in zone and explode just because it's a Japanese Tosa?

The fact is that the most dangerous and violent dog I've ever encountered is my West Highland terrier. Aesthetically, she is the canine equivalent of a nine-year-old girl in a nativity play. She looks unbelievably cute, and when she pricks up her
ears, you are filled with an overwhelming desire to pick her up and give her a damn good tickle.

But I don't recommend this because, despite appearances, she is a weapon dog. So far she has attacked the milkman, the postman, the gasman, the poor old dear who delivers the papers and the man who came to fix my computer.

When she encountered a pack of hounds the other day she dived straight in and all of them were driven away. She will not leave a wood until every creature in it is dead, and there is no point cowering in a burrow far underground because she will dig you out and rip you up.

It could be that she suffers from SDS (small dog syndrome), but, whatever the reason, she makes Begbie from
Trainspotting
look like Miss Jean Brodie, and it's only right and proper that she should be given one of the government's proposed ‘dogbos' – canine ASBOS. Although I suspect she would simply trot over to Mr Cameron's house – he lives quite nearby – and shove her ankle bracelet up his bottom.

I realize, of course, that I should try to stop her doing these things, but whenever I remonstrate with her, she looks at me as though she is imagining what I'd look like without a head.

She's terrifying. And anyway, the Dangerous Dogs Act says that a dog is entitled to behave in any way it sees fit at home or in the garden.

And this brings me on to phase two of the government's proposals. Because it has just announced that soon owners who fail to control their dogs, even on their own property, will be committing an offence. In extreme cases the local authority could order that the dog be executed in front of its family.

Doubtless, Postman Pat will welcome this news with open arms – if he has any left. But I'm a bit worried because ministers
are expected to ensure that dogs will still be free to attack burglars and protect their owners from violent assault.

So your dog will be expected to know the difference between a man who is bringing your electricity bill and a man who has come to help himself to your wallet. Which amounts to the same thing, really.

How on earth is that possible? We all know that dogs can be trained to sit, lie down, offer up a paw and round up sheep. But how do you train a dog to work out what someone does for a living?

And, what's more, how long would it take the nation's burglars to realize that if they dressed up as postmen, in high-visibility jackets and shorts, their victim's dog would give them nothing more than a good licking as they crept about in the darkness, helping themselves to various knick-knacks and items of jewellery?

I've no doubt Mr Joyce, the health and safety man, would suggest dogs that are prone to violent behaviour should be locked up when visitors arrive at the house. Sounds reasonable, but these days, thanks to internet shopping – and the inability of the utility companies to specify when their men will come round to read the meter – it would mean keeping the dog locked up between nine and one, when the man from Tesco is due, and from one till June, which is when British Gas is sending someone round. In other words, your dog would be locked up constantly.

And how long are you able to do that before someone from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals comes round with a warrant, a serious face and a stun gun?

It is probably easier to accept that dogs are animals, and that animals sometimes behave in strange ways. A killer whale will loyally take fish gently from the hand of its trainer
for fifteen years and then one day, for no obvious reason, it will bite off her arm instead.

A tiger will be used as a prop in a Las Vegas variety show for decades until one day it decides that it wants to liven things up by killing its owner.

And a dog, even the most mild-mannered Labrador, will occasionally turn into a great white shark with the teeth of a hippo and the morals of a Hellfire missile.

This, of course, provides no comfort for Postman Pat, but I think that on this front we can all do our bit to help. Whenever possible, we should use emails and internet banking so we remove the need to have postmen in the first place.

15 January 2012