Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (11 page)

Guests who stay in our spare room imagine that having climbed a rickety back staircase in an adjoining barn, they are far away from the main bedrooms. But they are not. They are right next to where I sleep and I can hear every word they say.

This often makes for a frosty mood around the breakfast table the next morning. They sit there, not understanding why I am slamming their coffee cups down and telling them that if they think my culinary endeavours are so terrible, they can bloody well cook their own bacon and eggs.

Over the years, I've heard every conceivable complaint. My fireplace is hideous. My dog has a crotch fixation. And how I must surely be making enough money to provide a bit of central heating. It's jolly hurtful. But I can usually fight back by advising them that they'll never have children if they continue to make love like they did the night before.

Can you even begin to imagine how many friends you'd have left if they had been able to eavesdrop on your post-mortem analysis of their parties? Precisely. The world cannot function without secrets. And that's why I'm so disappointed by this WikiLeaks nonsense.

It is important that America's embassies around the world can provide candid reports to the power brokers back home about the sex life of French ministers, the temper of Gordon Brown and exactly what sort of parties Silvio Berlusconi is hosting. But if the sender knows his reports will be read by the person he is writing about, his observations will be next to useless. Obama Barack would be sailing along, imagining
Vladimir Putin is kind to animals and that George Osborne has a deep and booming voice with much gravitas and depth.

It goes deeper, too, because if everyone thought everything they said would be broadcast to the entire world, no one would say anything at all. It's hard to be a trade envoy to the Middle East if all you can do is smile and nod.

Silence can work in certain diplomatic situations – when a couple split up, for instance, it's always tempting to say, ‘I never liked her anyway. She was a witch and her bottom was massive,' but prudence requires that you pull benign faces and mumble platitudes because you know there's always a chance that two weeks later they'll be back together again.

However, when you are the British prime minister and you are asked by the American ambassador for your government's stance on Pakistan, mumbling just won't work. He needs to know the truth. And you need to tell him. And you need to be able to do so, safe in the knowledge that the Pakistanis will not find out what you said.

Those who believe that everyone has a right to know everything say that cables from US embassies around the world should be reproduced on the internet. Well, if that's true, why does the founder of WikiLeaks not simply post his location on Google Earth? If he thinks we should know everything about everybody, why – at the time of writing – is he in hiding?

Apparently, it's hard to see what law has been broken. The Americans are saying that if there is a loophole, then they must work fast to close it. But this is fraught with difficulty because you are rummaging around in the foundations of a democracy. Pretty soon, newspapers would be unable to run stories about footballers who've been sending inappropriate pictures of themselves to two-year-olds.

You need to be careful that by shutting the door on disgruntled
government employees whose stupidity could cause all sorts of international incidents, you are not also shutting the door on a journalist's remit to get to the truth. Which is why, once again, we must visit my idea for an all-powerful Ministry of Common Sense.

It was first mooted many years ago when a chap called Peter Wright planned to write a book about his time in MI5. There was much debate at the time about whether this should be allowed and, legally, both sides seemed to have a point. So, I decided what we needed was not an expensive recourse to law but to a government-appointed bloke in a jumper who would realize that, morally, it made no sense to publish the book and put a stop to it.

Since then, there have been many occasions when councils and health and safety zealots have acted within the framework of the law but outside the parameters of common sense. Again, victims should have been able to appeal to the minister. I like to think he'd be called Roger. In my experience, people called Roger are usually quite level-headed.

Roger's job, then, would be to sit in an office, listening to both sides of an argument before deciding what would be best. This week, for instance, he'd be asked whether Ann Widdecombe should be allowed to stay in the dancing programme. Some would say it's her right and that, obviously, the sort of people who can be arsed to vote wish her to remain in place. Others would say she's ruining the competition for people who can do hopping with one leg over their shoulder. And he'd decide that she should go.

Then he'd have to deal with Ray Wilkins, the Chelsea assistant manager sacked by Roman Abramovich last month. ‘Yes, of course you should have your job back.' And then he could turn his attention to the students who are keeping warm on these chilly days by kicking police cars. And then
you'd pop in to say you'd been caught doing 33mph, in the middle of the night, when no one was around, and he'd let you off.

In my life, I've been to court twice, and on both occasions I've been on the moral high ground. But, technically, I've been wrong and have lost as a result. This is why we need a minister of common sense. Because immediately he'd get to the bottom of this WikiWee business. What it is doing is in the public interest and probably legal. But what it is doing is also wrong.

5 December 2010

Earlier this year, various people – including David Cameron – started to wonder out loud if it would be a good idea to stick with British Summer Time all year round. It seems a fairly harmless suggestion but it met with considerable hostility.

Those who rise early say that, in fact, we would be much better off sticking with Greenwich Mean Time all year round.

And then you have those who say that we should have British Summer Time in the winter and then double British Summer Time in the summer. This is what happened during the war.

But this argument seems to find little favour with Europhobes. ‘No. We can't have the clocks going even further forward than they do now because then we'd be in the same time zone as the Hun and the bally Frogs.'

You even have Cornish people saying that, under the present system, they have midday when it's still only 10.30 in the morning. And that any change would cause noon to fall between their bacon and their eggs. And in Scotland, of course, where it's permanent daylight in the summer and constantly dark in the winter, it makes more sense to dispense with time altogether and become a hedgehog.

Naturally, road-safety organizations are particularly vocal on the issue. They say that year-round lighter evenings would make it safer for ‘kiddies' coming home from school – and this is probably true. But on the downside, it would surely increase the number killed while fumbling their way to lessons in the pitch-black mornings.

I know this probably hasn't occurred to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents – an organization that endeavours to prevent an incident that, by its very nature, cannot be foreseen – but if I've got to be hit by a bus, I don't really care whether it's in the morning or the afternoon. I do, however, care about the question of time. My life has become so hectic in recent years that I did not even have time yesterday to go to the lavatory. And the day before, I was so busy I missed the office party.

I'm sitting here now with a dull ache in my groin. This has nothing to do with the picture I've just seen of Gwyneth Paltrow in her amazing new dress. It's been throbbing for weeks. I suspect it's a hernia. But I do not know for sure because I have not had a moment even to telephone the doctor for an appointment.

I suspect I'm not alone, either. I bet thousands of people die every year because they simply didn't have the time to get better.

We're all in the same boat. It used to be easy to meet friends for a drink or dinner. Not any more. Now, they are always chained to their laptops or stuck in a meeting. And woe betide the man who suggests ‘one for the road' at the end of the evening. Because everyone has to be up at five to fly to New York.

Never mind British Summer Time. Hosts now need flexible British Party Time to accommodate those who are popping in after work because they need to be up early and those who have been in the office till gone midnight. You are just finishing serving one lot with coffee and mints when the next batch arrive and want a prawn cocktail. This means you can go next door and get jet lag.

I don't understand why this is happening. I have exactly the same job now that I had five years ago. All my friends have
exactly the same jobs, too. And, thanks to electronic communication, those jobs should be easier. Even allowing for the fact that we must set aside two hours of the day to root about in a cupboard, trying to read the serial number of the Wi-Fi router so it can be fixed by a man in Mumbai, we can still deal with stuff far faster than we could in the days of ink and stamps.

There's more. In the past, we needed to go into a town and park if we wanted to do some Christmas shopping. Now, we can do it all online. Cooking? No need. I just move the mouse around a bit and in a matter of moments a motorcycling Pole is at my door with a steaming pile of pad thai.

In my kitchen there is a tap that delivers boiling water from what feels like the centre of the earth, so that I don't have to stand around waiting for a kettle to boil. Coffee comes instantly from the wall. The air is conditioned so I don't need to step outside for a breather.

All of these things should mean I now have several free hours in the day to ruminate on John Prescott and write thank-you letters and do stuff with the kids. And yet. My son broke up from school six days ago and I have not seen him once. Not even fleetingly. Because I'm so busy, I'm getting up just as he's thinking about maybe going to bed.

My mother says often that I should slow down. I bet yours does, too. But this is not possible. If I had chosen to spend the past few hours making daisy chains, this column would not have been written. Which would have made me very sacked. This, therefore, is the problem we need to be addressing. Instead of listening to a few racist Corns and Jock McSheep-Fan, we need a whole new strategy.

At present, it's a nuisance changing all the clocks in your house twice a year, so here's what I propose. For eleven months of the year, we have British Work Time, when we do our jobs and mend our routers and have heart attacks.

And then, every August, we have British No Time, when the speaking clock is turned off and Big Ben is covered with a tarpaulin. You get up when you feel like it, sit in the garden until it's too chilly and go to bed when you are tired. They have a similar system in France. It's one of the reasons they all live to be 147.

There's another, too. They understand that time is useful only if you're doing something useful with it.

19 December 2010

Poor old David Cameron seems to be struggling to explain what he means by the ‘big society'.

And I'm not surprised because, in the five seconds allocated to politicians on the evening news, it's difficult to outline a seismic shift in the way we all think and behave and live.

To most people, the big society means that if you cut your leg off in some farm machinery, instead of expecting to be saved by a government-funded ambulance driver, you should sew it back on yourself. Many find this idea unappealing.

What's more, Margaret Thatcher once said there was no such thing as society. So now the Conservative party is telling us it wants a big version of something it used not to believe existed at all. Which means that, all of a sudden, the atheist wants to build a cathedral.

To try to get a handle on the subject, I took the trouble of reading a big society speech Mr Cameron made last week and I'm afraid I'm none the wiser. He seems to be saying that we have to expect less from the government – which is what Mrs Thatcher said – and that if we are not happy with our local school we should simply get together with our neighbours and build a new one. Which is broadly what everyone on the corner of Haight and Ashbury was saying in 1967.

I'm not sure I'd know how to go about building a school. And I'm not sure my neighbours would be much help, either, because last week one of them died. And the other one's a bit busy because he's the prime minister. So, all on my own, I'd need to find some teachers and make sure they weren't
kiddie fiddlers, which is likely to be more complicated in future. And then I'd need loads of bricks and cement. I think it would be easier – and cheaper, frankly – to hoick my kids out of the school I didn't like and send them to Eton.

The trouble is, however, I like the smell of Mr Cameron's idea. I don't understand the details and I don't like anything with the word ‘big' in it – it sounds like a promotion at a sofa shop. But I can catch a whiff of what he's on about and, in short, it's this: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for yourselves.' And that brings me on to the Oxfordshire town where both Mr Cameron and I live, Chipping Norton.

In 1932 the people of this hilly outpost got together and bought themselves a fire engine. And then, after the war, they sold it to the newly established, government-run fire brigade. The money raised from the sale was used to pay for a football pitch, a cricket field and some tennis courts.

Plainly, this sense of independence was still going strong in 1963 when the townspeople came together once more to raise money for a swimming pool. This lido was subsequently built, and eventually the cost of running it was taken over by the West Oxfordshire district council.

However, in 2002, the council announced that it could no longer afford to run a heated outdoor pool, especially as it had just opened a new leisure centre, and that, as a result, it would be closed down. Nothing unusual in that. The
Jeremy Vine Show
is rammed with people saying they now have to swim in puddles and skips. Swimming pools are closing faster than pubs.

However, in the fine town of Chipping Norton a handful of locals decided that instead of ringing the
Jeremy Vine Show
and moaning, they'd form an action committee to keep the pool open.

And pretty soon this committee decided to hold a fundraising auction.

I remember it well. The old town hall was stuffed to the gunwales with people who'd donated prizes. There were hundreds of them. I know because I was the auctioneer and it went on for hours. ‘A jar of home-made jam, sold to you, sir, at the back. Two bags of dung. Who'll give me a tenner?'

It was a fantastic evening.

There was lots of hub and tons of bub, and at the back there were shifty-looking people from the council thinking, ‘Oh no, we're going to lose our seats,' and that spurred us on.

It was like a scene from an Enid Blyton book. The butcher bid. The baker bid. The candlestick maker bid.

My daughter, who was only seven at the time, couldn't quite understand why we were there. ‘Why do we need to save the town's pool?' she said. ‘We have our own.' But even this budding Thatcher soon got into the swing of things and helped her dad by bidding for things that wouldn't sell. We went home with a puncture repair kit and six signed copies of my own book.

From memory, the evening raised £12,000, which was – with a bit of help from the town council – enough to keep the pool open for a year. So, twelve months later, we were back to do it again. And we've been back every year since.

The result? Well, the pool is still open, providing local people with a nice place to go on a summer's day. But, more than that, the fundraising evening means the man from the pub who donates a free dinner with wine gets to meet the man from the bookshop, and the woman from the florist gets to meet the kids from the local school band. When I pop into the town now to buy a packet of fags, the people I see are no longer strangers, and that makes it a happier place to live.

I intensely dislike the word ‘community' because it is constantly misused in news reporting. What is the Muslim community? The very idea that every single Muslim in the country has exactly the same opinion about everything makes me feel queasy.

There's no such thing as the Chipping Norton community, either. It's a town full of different people who think differently about many things. But now, thanks to the swimming pool and the fundraising efforts needed to keep it open, there is a community spirit.

It's not a big society. It's better than that. It's a small society, and I urge you all to give it a bash where you live.

20 February 2011