Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (13 page)

I wonder. Have we lost the ability in this country to rejoice in the good fortune of others? To be happy for someone else? Buy a big house and ‘it's all right for some'. Have the big house taken away and ‘it serves you right'.

Let us take the case of Kate Middleton's mum. Her daughter is marrying a prince and so we should be happy for her. But we keep being told that she's a social mountaineer who has been engineering this marriage since the days when Kate was a foetus. And that she used to be an air hostess. A bloody trolley dolly. Pushy cow.

We saw the same sort of thing when Judith Keppel became the first person to scoop the big prize on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Because she lived in Fulham and said ‘bath' properly, we were invited to despise her on a cellular level. Lucky cow.

And woe betide the celebrity who dares to take a stroll on the beach while on holiday. Look at her! She may have fame, success, money and a pretty face but her swimsuit is disgusting and she has cellulite and we hope that very soon she catches cancer and dies a screaming, agonizing death.

Have you ever looked at the comments left by readers on a newspaper's website? They're just a torrent of bile and vitriol. Protected by the anonymity of the internet and freed from the social niceties of physical contact, people go berserk. Lottery winners are particularly vulnerable, it seems. And Nigella Lawson? Fat cow.

No one can earn more than the prime minister, no one can
be better looking than Ena Sharples, and good luck to anyone who dares to appear on the television talking like Brian Sewell. Did your parents go to university? Well, you've had all the chances that life can afford, so you can clear off.

This unwillingness to be happy for others is now so acute that we don't even seem to be able to be happy for ourselves. I realize, of course, that people in Birmingham have suffered from this for centuries. Joy is not a Brummie thing. Everything, even if you've made it yourself, is rubbish. There is no word in the West Midlands for ‘wow'.

Now we're all in the same boat, a point that was proved exquisitely on the BBC local news programme that was transmitted in my area on Tuesday evening. It had been an absolutely beautiful day: cloudless, warm and awash with the scent of blossom. The sort of day that made you glad to be alive.

In the olden days, a local news programme would have shown us spring lambs frolicking about on their rickety legs and small children dribbling ice cream in the park. Not any more. Now you could see the news team desperately trying to persuade the water company that the good weather would mean a hosepipe ban very soon. And then when that failed, calling the local hospital to see if anyone had been admitted suffering from sunstroke. ‘Well, what about a malignant melanoma, then?'

Doubtless they will have scanned the
Daily Mail
to see if there is a link between warm spring sunshine and the arrival of more immigrants, or a catastrophic fall in house prices. And then the
Guardian
to see if it was yet more conclusive proof of global warming and that soon we would all perish in terrible heathland fires.

The news editor must have been tearing his hair out: ‘We can't tell people that it's been a lovely warm spring day. There
must be some danger. Some terror. Some death. Get me some misery.' And boy, oh boy, did one of the reporters come up trumps.

We were told that the warm weather may appear to be lovely but that there is a hidden menace out there: the tick. A perfectly healthy-looking woman was brought in front of the cameras to explain that she had been bitten by a tick two years ago and her life had been ruined as a result. Then a professor was wheeled out to say that the long warm spell followed by a late Easter would cause many more people to be out and about in the countryside and that we were facing a … please say ‘perfect storm'. She didn't. She said it was a ‘high-risk situation'.

It turns out that we've just had a Tick Bite Prevention Week – I'm surprised you missed it – during which people were advised what to do if they discover they are being bitten by a tick. First, you must not under any circumstances try to remove it, as this may cause part of the mouth to remain in your skin, spreading Lyme disease. Nor must you swat it with a rolled-up newspaper, as this may cause the arachnid to vomit into the bite wound.

There is, it seems, only one safe way to remove a tick that's in the process of gorging on your blood, and that's with a specialized tick removal tool. If you are one of the few people not to have such a thing handy when disaster strikes, a small pair of tweezers can be employed, if you know what you're doing. Which, let's be honest, you don't.

The best solution, however, is not to get bitten in the first place. Experts suggest wearing light-coloured clothing and recommend that, after you've showered in insect repellent, you tuck your trousers into your socks.

And here's the best bit. After you've been for a walk, you should thoroughly examine your entire body and get someone
else to ‘inspect the areas that are hard to see'. I am not making this up. These mongers of doom are suggesting that after you've been for a stroll in the wood, you should get naked and insist that your wife has a good ferret around in your undercarriage for evidence of tick infestation.

See what I mean? It's a lovely day. You fancy a nice walk. But there's misery out there not just for you but also for your nearest and dearest, who must spend the rest of the day snouting around in your dingleberries.

Still, in the spirit of what Britain has become, I'd like to finish off by saying this: last year, about 60 million people did not contract Lyme disease from a tick bite, whereas 3,000 came a cropper. And that, of course, serves them right for being ramblers.

24 April 2011

The National Trust announced last week that the public will soon be allowed to look round the Oxfordshire house of William Morris. It will, says the Trust, be a marvellous trip down Memory Lane, since none of the contents has been touched since the motor industry magnate's death in 1963.

It will also be a trip into the soul of a truly great man. Because although Morris was Britain's richest self-made man, visitors will note that the carpets in his bedroom were offcuts from his factory in Cowley.

Closer examination of the wardrobe will reveal a collection of Phillips Stick-a-Soles, suggesting he liked to repair his shoes rather than buy a new pair.

Morris, then, did not spend much money on himself. But, my God, he lavished a fortune on others. He gave away more than £30 million of his fortune to worthy causes – that's equivalent to about £700 million today. He funded Nuffield College, Oxford, and during the polio epidemic of the 1940s and 1950s he paid for 5,000 iron lungs to be distributed around the Commonwealth.

My great-grandfather was similarly generous. While researching my family tree for the BBC's
Who Do You Think You Are?
TV programme I was amazed – and a bit distressed – to discover that he gave millions of pounds to the Methodist church. If you worship today in a chapel up north, be aware that the windows, pews and roof … well, to be blunt, they're mine.

Of course, a lot of people today ask what happened to the
spirit of philanthropy. There was even an editorial in Her Majesty's
Daily Telegraph
lamenting the fact that the attractive combination of personal prudence and public generosity seems to have gone out of fashion.

There's a very good reason for this, I think. It's because in the days of Morris and my great-grandad there really wasn't much you could actually buy. In the 1930s there were no Sunseeker yachts or Ferraris or time-share opportunities in Portugal.

We were told last week that Kate Middleton's brother is on course to make ‘serious money' from his upmarket cake business. Upmarket cakes? There's another drain on the resources of today's rich. Another temptation that was not placed in the path of Morris.

He was able to buy all those iron lungs because his wife was not sitting at home thumbing through OK! magazine and wondering if she should have a new pair of Christian Louboutins because Amanda Holden's got some. Nor would he have been invited to spend £750 on a haircut.

When you make a few quid today you are inundated by a horde of oily Uriah Heeps who arrive in your inbox, genuflecting like seaweed and offering you a service that can provide a dozen black orchids at three in the morning anywhere in the world. Would my great-grandad have been so generous if he'd been tempted by the private-aircraft salesman from NetJets? And if Morris had been shown a watch with a button that summons International Rescue should he be in distress, would he, perhaps, have provided only 4,999 iron lungs?

The other day, at a swanky London restaurant, I ordered a pot of tea for four and the bill was £78. I have framed the receipt and it sits on my office desk as a constant reminder that the world has definitely gone mad.

Then there was a friend who said to me: ‘I tried to buy
some cheese at Daylesford this morning. But I only had £162 on me.' Ridiculous? Perhaps. But at the Gloucestershire greengrocer it seems £162 barely gets you a beetroot.

Last week I needed a coffee table, so I went to a coffee table shop and discovered that prices started at £600. Of course, it's always been possible to spend a vast fortune on furniture but very few people actually did. Now, though, the coffee table shop is rammed full of women with £500 Nicky Clarke hair and £200 sunglasses spending four grand on a chair. To go in a room they don't use, in a house where they don't live.

There's no space for philanthropy in a world where the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of greedy men. Men who think: ‘Yes, I could let that silly woman spend her money wisely but instead I'll get her to think that she ought to buy a coffee table for £600.'

In many ways I am one of those silly women. I recently bought a farm. I didn't need a farm and I don't know anything about farming, a point made very clear by the vast swathes of red ink in the accounts book. The only pleasure I get from it is walking through the big wood, thinking: ‘This is my tree.' I really am a tragic, pitiable waste of blood and organs. And so are you if you've got an iPad. Or a whirlpool bath. Or anything you don't really need. Which is pretty much everything you own.

The problem is, of course, that we think everything is necessary. We've got it into our heads that the eggs from a chicken won't do and that they must come from a gull or a quail. We think people will laugh if our phone is a year old. We know that we need a holiday cottage. And we think the wanton excess is okay if we turn up at a charity fundraiser once a year and buy a signed rugby ball in the auction.

Look around your house this morning. Look at your coffee machine and your fridge with the ice-making machine in the door. How much pleasure do you get from these things, compared with the pleasure you would have got if you'd spent the money instead on an iron lung for someone else?

I know a man of fairly modest means who funds two schools in Africa and the Philippines. Then there's the footballer Didier Drogba, who, it seems, runs what's left of Ivory Coast's education department single-handedly. They are philanthropists, and I would suggest that ultimately their investment is going to make them a damn sight happier than the man who spent his cash on a new pair of breasts for his wife.

1 May 2011

If you were to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature, you'd be very proud and, consequently, you'd want to hang the certificate somewhere prominent. But not so prominent that it looks like you're showing off. Not on the outside of your front door, for instance: that would be poor form.

People face a similar problem when they are photographed meeting Mrs Queen. They want everyone to know that this has happened, but hanging the picture in the hall? No. That's too soon. It's the same as saying: ‘Do come in. Would you like a drink? Oh and did you know I once met Her Maj?'

There is only one room, in fact, where it is possible to place evidence of your accolades and achievements. And that's the downstairs lavatory. I was at a friend's house last weekend and you simply wouldn't know from anything about him, his family or the main rooms in his house, that he used to be pretty famous. But pay a visit to the bog and, holy cow: every word that's ever been written about him, every glowing review, every gong. They're all there, strutting their stuff in front of what, let's face it, is a captive audience.

He's not alone, either. There's a well-known British comedian – you know who you are – whose whole demeanour says, ‘I'm just an ordinary bloke doing an ordinary job. Nothing to see here.' But go for a pee in his house and all of a sudden it's, ‘I'm GQ's Man of the Year!'

Check this out. Next time you are at someone's house, excuse yourself from the dinner table, go into the hall, past the black-and-white pictures of the kids when they were
blonde and lovely, turn left at the skiing montage and have a look in the bog. It'll be crammed with letters from Henry Kissinger and faded reviews from the
New Musical Express
. It's entirely possible you may even have to move a Bafta to close the door.

People may argue that they put all this stuff in the bog precisely because they don't want it to be seen by visitors. But if that's the case, why not put it in the attic, or the laundry cupboard? Or even your own bathroom? You know full well that at some point everyone who comes to your house will go for a pee. Which means you know full well they are going to learn that back in the Seventies, before you became an accountant, you were in a band that Julie Burchill quite liked.

I bet that this weekend hundreds of couples are sitting around their breakfast tables thinking: ‘Where on earth do we put this picture of us going into Westminster Abbey for the royal wedding?' And all of them will come to the same conclusion: ‘Let's take down the unfunny Victorian shooting cartoon from above the cistern and put this up instead.' They can convince themselves that no one will see it there while basking in the warm glow of satisfaction that, in fact, everyone will.

However, there's another issue here. I have a photograph of me being hugged by Cameron Diaz and, obviously, that goes behind the bog itself, because it's a picture I want men to see while standing there, with their old chap in their hand.

But if I'd been at the royal wedding? That's different. That would need to go on the wall facing the bog so it could be seen by girls while they were sitting down.

You in earnest conversation with Lord Carrington? Behind the bog. You sharing a joke with George Clooney? Facing wall. You out for dinner with Kate Moss? Hmmm. Top of the loo seat, probably.

Downstairs bogs are a portal to a man's ego. I know a man
whose khazi walls played host to a £5-million Degas. Where's he going with that? What's he saying? Frankly, you don't need to be a head doctor to work it out. He's saying: ‘Oh, that old thing.' Which is what people say when they turn up at your house in a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.

People were speculating all last week about whether or not Obama Barack should release the pictures of Osama bin Laden's body, to prove to a sceptical world that he really is dead.

I still can't quite believe we've arrived at a time when the president of the United States goes on television to say the world's biggest terrorist has been killed and we all think: ‘Yeah, right.' But that's by the by.

It was eventually decided that the pictures could not be released for fear they would be used as a rallying point for the disaffected and the daft. So what will become of them? Obviously Obama cannot place them on top of his piano or on a worktop in the kitchen. Putting framed pictures of a Muslim who's been shot in the face among the holiday snaps would look a bit weird. But neither can he simply put them in a drawer in his office. When he's old, he wants people to say: ‘Oh my God, were you in charge when they shot bin Laden? Tell me more about how you succeeded where Bush and Clinton failed, oh mighty one.' He wants them to be seen by people, but only if the people in question think they were not meant to be seen. It's definitely the bog, then.

Or is it? Because Obama – as we now know for sure – is an American. And I'm not sure Americans are very concerned with the bothersome business of modesty. You can rest assured that Margaret Thatcher has the
Sun
's ‘Gotcha!' headline from the Falklands war hidden away in the smallest room, whereas if she were an American it would be projected each night on to the front of her house.

You walk into a British doctor's surgery and you may well spot a small certificate on the far wall, behind some cupboards, saying that he's qualified. In America it'll be in a huge gilt frame on his desk.

I bet you any money, too, that nearly every Oscar ever awarded to an American lives in their sitting room, with its own spotlight. But where do you suppose Colin Firth put his? Next to the bog brush, I should imagine. Whereas the picture of him coming out of the lake? Facing wall. Definitely.

8 May 2011