Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (33 page)

There were calls last week for the Cabinet Office to hand over the honours system to an independent body in the hope that more lollipop ladies could be knighted and more OBEs awarded to those who have done voluntary work in ‘the community'.

Of course, this is yet another example of the drive to create a new people-power society in which the fat, the stupid and the toothless are encouraged to lord it over the bright, the thin and the successful. Already we are seeing its effects. A tiny number of morons decided that they would like very much to stroll through my garden, pausing a while to peer through my kitchen window, and now they can.

A noisy minority decided that Jonathan Ross should be driven from the BBC, and he was. And expensive public libraries are now kept open just because an infinitesimal number of internet-phobes from ‘the community', chose to dance about outside with placards.

We turn firemen into heroes if they get their trousers wet and treat single mums like round-the-world sailors. David Cameron is an idiot, Boris Johnson is a buffoon, Richard Branson is a spoilt child. But the man who empties your bins is as wise as an owl and must be given a CBE immediately.

Unless this nonsense is stopped, we shall become like America and, having spent a couple of weeks there recently, I can assure you that this would be A Bad Thing.

We begin the shoulder-sagging saga in Las Vegas, six floors below a party that seems to have made the papers. I wanted
to show my sixteen-year-old son how blackjack works, but although he was allowed in the casino, he was not allowed to stand near any of the tables.

The croupier had been issued with the power to enforce this law and as a result shouted, ‘Back up!' as my son peered over my shoulder. In an attempt to defuse what appeared to be a life-or-death situation, I asked the boy to reverse slowly until he reached a point where the lobster-brained croupier was happy. Quite soon I noticed that he'd reversed perilously close to the table behind him, and I pointed this out to the woman. ‘Okay,' she said, realizing the mistake. ‘Forwards. Forwards. Forwards a bit more. Stop.' He ended up about nine inches from where he'd started.

Obviously it's a good idea to stop teenage boys gambling but the idea of using a stupid person to enforce this law doesn't work at all. A point that had been made a few days earlier at a hotel near Yosemite. When my eighteen-year-old daughter joined me at the bar for a refreshing Coca-Cola she was told, very loudly, that she needed to be twenty-one to sit there, and that she would have to join the half-hour queue for a table. So let's just get this straight: you can sit at a table and have a Coke but you cannot sit at the bar, even though the two places are 2ft apart?

The shouty barman agreed the law was stupid and that it would be ridiculous to deny a bar stool to, say, a twenty-year-old soldier who had just lost a leg in Afghanistan. But said there was nothing he could do.

Yes, Bud or Hank or Todd, or whatever single-syllable name you have, that's the problem. There is something you can do. You don't spend your evenings peering into the barrel of your Heckler & Koch machine pistol. You don't eat stuff that you know to be poisonous. You have nous. You have at least some initiative. Use it.

When on the balcony of a hotel room in Los Angeles, I was told by a bossy cleaner that she ‘needed' me to extinguish my cigarette. Smoking on a balcony in Los Angeles is not allowed. But why? There was no one within 300ft. I was outside. I would place the butt in an empty beer bottle. But logic is a dandelion seed when the hurricane of state law is entrusted to someone with an IQ of four.

We went to an exhibition of Titanic artefacts. For reasons that are entirely unclear, all our cameras had to be left in a locker. But you can't use the lockers unless you can provide the idiotic ticket woman with photo ID. Can you think of a single reason why you need to prove who you are before being allowed to leave one of your own belongings in a locker? Me neither.

There was a similar problem with a zip wire my children wanted to try. Yes, they were tall enough and, yes, my cash money was acceptable. But before they were allowed to have a go I had to give written permission. And for that I needed photo ID.

What would photo ID prove? That my name was Jeremy Clarkson. But would that show I was the children's father? No, because they were not required by state law to prove who they were. The fact is this: ID was required because in totalitarian states such as Soviet Russia and North Korea and America it's important to know who is doing what at all times.

At one hotel we used there were two pools: a family pool that was full mostly of homosexual men, and a European pool where lady guests were allowed to remove their bikini tops. Strangely we weren't allowed to sit round the European pool even though we had photo ID to prove we were actually European.

After two weeks of being told by janitors, night watchmen,
cleaners and passers-by that we couldn't smoke near fruit machines, go barefoot in a shopping mall, park near a fire hydrant, drink in the street, take cameras to the Grand Canyon skywalk or make jokes to anyone in any kind of uniform, we kissed the tarmac at Heathrow and now see Britain in an all-new light.

Yesterday I was overtaken by a man in a sports car who had an unrestrained golden retriever in the passenger seat. And I rejoiced. Then, this morning, I applauded when I saw a cyclist jump a red light. And I have thoroughly enjoyed sitting with my children outside the Plough in Kingham, smoking and drinking and having a nice time. This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government's petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don't.

2 September 2012

We return this morning to a subject I've talked about before. It's a subject close to every man's heart: the sheer, unadulterated, trudging misery of shopping for clothes.

I buy my shoes at Tod's on Bond Street in London. Its window is always full of many attractive designs, and if I have a few minutes left on the meter I will sometimes pop in to buy a pair. But they never, ever, have anything in a size 11. The lady always comes back from a lengthy trip to the storeroom brandishing a pair of size 5s, asking cheerfully if they will do instead.

Which is a bit like someone in a restaurant ordering the vegetarian option and being asked if a nice, juicy T-bone steak will do instead. No, it won't. And now, thanks to this time-wasting, I have a parking ticket.

Shops never keep shirts in the size I want either, and every single available jacket would only really fit Ziggy Stardust. Trousers? Don't know, because I'm way too big to fit in the overheated postbox the retailer laughingly calls a changing room. However, if by some miracle you do find something in your size that you like, your problems are far from over because you have to pay for it.

When you buy £100-worth of petrol, you put your card in a machine, tap in your code and seconds later walk out with a receipt. When you buy £100-worth of trousers, you must stand at the desk while the sales assistant inputs what feels like the entire works of Dostoevsky into her computer. And then she will want your name and address so that you can be
kept abreast of forthcoming clothing lines that won't be available in your size either.

And you can't get round the problem by going somewhere else because these days there is nowhere else.

This is my new beef. Every single high street and every single shopping centre in every single town and city is full of exactly the same shops attempting to sell exactly the same things that you can't buy because they don't keep your size in stock.

A recent trip to San Francisco has demonstrated that it doesn't have to be this way. I took my children to Haight-Ashbury so that I could talk to them about the summer of love and how Janis Joplin was about a billion times better than any of the talentless teenage warblers on their iPods.

At first I was a bit disappointed to find that the whole area had been turned into a vast shopping experience. The kids weren't, though. And soon neither was I.

The first shop was rammed with Sixties clothing and accessories. Purple hippie sunglasses. Vietnam Zippos. Joss sticks and curious-looking chemistry sets. There were posters of Hendrix and CND badges and I bought more in there, in ten minutes, than I've bought in Britain in ten years.

Then I found a shoe shop. It was selling shoes and boots the likes of which you simply would not find anywhere in Britain and it had in stock every single size you could think of. I bought many pairs. Then I bought two jackets that fitted, and then we decided to visit one of the many coffee shops. None of which was Starbucks.

Not a single one of the shops wanted my name or address when I bought anything. They had no intention of sending me exciting product information and they did not expect me to hang around while they updated their stock figures.

You hand over your card, provide the inevitable photo ID, sign your name and leave.

Of course, you may imagine that all of the hundreds of tiny independent shops in the area are being run by free-love people who arrived in San Francisco in June 1967 and who are therefore not interested in profit. You might imagine that as long as you worshipped at the altar of peaceful protest, you could barter for one of the chemistry sets with beans.

There was plenty of evidence to suggest this might be so. One shop was being run by a chap in his sixties. He wore his hair in a ponytail, with a pair of John Lennon glasses, a poncho and a set of groovy loon pants. Later, though, I saw him locking up his shop and climbing into a brand new Cadillac Escalade.

So why, if there's money to be made, have the big boys not moved in? Bloody good question.

Because that's exactly what's happened on the British equivalent of Haight-Ashbury: the King's Road in London. Back in the day this was a mishmash of small shops selling individually made items to Mick Jagger and Johnny Rotten. Now it's WH Smith, HMV, Marks & Spencer. It's exactly the same as Pontefract and Pontypool. Genesis has gone all Phil Collins.

The trouble is that there are only a few streets in London where the big multinational retailers want to be. This means the rents are six times higher on the King's Road than they are on Haight Street in San Francisco. One American chain called Forever 21 paid almost £14 million in key money to HMV to take over its lease on Oxford Street. And against that sort of financial clout, a slightly off-his-head jewellery designer with a fondness for growing beans and a laissez-faire attitude to payment is going to find himself priced out of the market.

The good news is, however, that I'm by no means the only person who shivers with despair at Britain's one-size-fits-nobody attitude to shopping. I'm not the only person who fumes with rage over the sheer length of time it takes to pay. And how the financial pressure to make every square foot count means stock and changing rooms are smaller than most lavatory cisterns.

Which means that one day the Starbucks and the Forever 21s and the Banana Republics will be brought to their knees. And the streets of our towns will be handed back to Ronnie Barker, who'll open all hours, sell us things we like and let us pay at the end of the week. In beads.

9 September 2012

As you probably heard, the government announced recently that during the month of what it's calling ‘Stoptober', it will run a nationwide campaign designed to make every smoker in the land stub out their last cigarette and quit.

I don't remember that being in the manifesto. And I certainly don't remember giving my permission for the Department of Star Jumps and Push-Ups to spend vast lumps of my money on a series of bossy television advertisements designed to make my life less pleasant. So, in protest, I decided to give up drinking.

Most nights, like many people of my age, I drink a bottle of wine, and this means that most mornings I have a bit of clutch slip until after I've had some coffee, a couple of Nurofen and some quiet time with the papers.

I'm comfortable with that. But I'm not really comfortable with the effects the booze has had on my stomach. Visually, it's a bit silly. It looks like I have the actual moon in my shirt. It's so vast that when I bend over to tie up my shoelaces, it squashes into my lungs so firmly that I can't breathe.

And when I run, it turns into a giant pendulum, sloshing from side to side so vigorously that sometimes I get the impression it may actually break free from its moorings. I needed to get rid of it, and if in the process I could stick a finger in the eye of a hectoring government, so much the better. I therefore decided to give up booze.

So the first night. I felt no need for wine. I'm not an alcoholic in the true sense of the word. But my hands felt a bit
fidgety, like they'd been made redundant. They wanted something to do. They wanted a glass of something to nurture but what could I put in it?

Milk? Lovely. My favourite drink in the whole wide world. But even more fattening than wine and at seven p.m. it seemed wrong. Water? No. The stupidest idea in the world. It's just liquefied air. Something fizzy? Too carcinogenic. I thought about tea but I'm not old enough yet, and then discounted tomato juice on the basis that its primary function in life is to cure what I wouldn't be suffering from any more.

I went to the supermarket, where I discovered that all of the non-alcoholic ‘beverages' are aimed either at people who want to stay awake, or who are four years old. It's row after row of idiotic lime-green labelling and contents that appear to have come from the props department of
Doctor Who
.

I was in despair until, at the last moment, I discovered a bottle of Robinsons lemon barley water. The taste of my childhood; Dan Maskell in a bottle. I took it home and it was like drinking the sound of a wood pigeon and a distant tractor. I was very happy.

The second night, I was going out and it transpires that no bar or restaurant stocks Robinsons barley water. So I had to think of something else.

I was still thinking several hours later, by which time my friends were unsteady on their feet and very garrulous.

And suddenly I discovered the biggest problem of not drinking in a society that does. When everyone else is drunk, they look stupid, they sound stupid, they laugh at things that aren't funny, such as a fart, and you start to hate them on a cellular level.

You begin to wonder what they would look like without heads, and because you are sober, the imagery is frighteningly clear.

Turning up in polite society and asking for a soft drink is like turning up and sobbing. It puts a damper on proceedings.

A meeting of friends is supposed to be light and filled with laughter. The last thing a group of happy people wants is one person sitting in the middle talking about the trauma of Syria.

If I was going to keep this non-drinking lark up, there is no doubt that the moon in my shirt would start to shrink. But, on the downside, I would lose all my friends and I would have to come to terms with the fact that never again would I have a great night out. No, really, I mean it. Can you think of a single memorable evening you've ever had when you weren't absolutely blasted? Nope. Neither can I.

In fact, you won't really have a night out at all because such is the pressure to drink, to join the herd, to find a fart funny, that it's a thousand times easier to decline the invitation and stay at home. Which is why for the next four nights I did just that, with my barley water, watching television and enriching my life not one bit.

I learnt something else as well. It is possible to suffer from hangover envy. In a morning, as you're doing a bit of light skipping, you see your friends clinging on to trees and street furniture, looking like a pile of laundry, with faces the colour of ostrich eggs.

This should be uplifting. It should make you feel good as you
boing
along the street with a zip in your step and sparkling eyes. But, in fact, it makes you crestfallen. Because at four a.m., when you were asleep, which is the same as being dead, they were very much alive. They were making memories in police cells and on inappropriate girls, and you were at home snoring the snore of a dullard. Waking up feeling fresh is like dying with a clear conscience and a healthy bank balance. It means you've wasted your life.

So here we are, ten days into my non-drinking regime. It's nine p.m., I have a glass of wine by the laptop and some friends have just invited me over – I'm going and I don't plan to be home till two. So when
Top Gear
returns to your screen, know this: yes, it will look like I've got a planet in my shirt, but I will be smiling the smile of a man who's happy with his life. I will be smiling the smile of a man who's had a drink.

16 September 2012