Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (27 page)

Throughout history you were a child, and then you were an adult. You went from ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' to Brahms in an instant. But then in the early Sixties the word ‘teenager' started to appear in dictionaries and a whole new species was created. A species that had money, but no mortgages to worry about or children to feed or bills to pay.

The creation of the word ‘teenager' probably opened up the greatest marketing opportunity since Jesus rose from the dead.

Because now, between ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' and Brahms, there was a yawning seven-year gap into which some boogie-woogie could be inserted, along with a burger and Coke and maybe a pair of Levi's.

The trouble is that today every possible way of exploiting a teenager's naivety has been explored. As a result, some bright spark in a pair of thin designer spectacles and a polo-neck jumper has decided that it is time for a new type of customer to be created, a new breed that needs feeding with a whole new range of stuff it didn't know it needed. So he has come up with a concept called ‘men'.

Up to now, it has been fairly simple being a man. Eat. Sleep. Mate. The only real complication was knowing which days you were supposed to make a lovely quiche lorraine and which days you were supposed to come home in a bearskin coat and engage in some rough-and-ready grunty-pumpy over the Aga. Certainly you never had to worry about what was written on the waistband of your underpants.

You do now, though. You are also expected to rub mud
into your hair, polish your nails, buy things to make your teeth shiny and white, and join a gymnasium to stay in shape. And gone are the days when you bought a wristwatch so that you could see what time it was.

Open any glossy magazine and it's full of chisel-jawed men advertising watches while doing something heroic and outdoorsy. Wear a Breitling and you are no longer Gareth Cheeseman from accounts. You are Clint Thrust and at weekends you race your Confederate Hellcat round the pylons in the Nevada desert. Wear an IWC and you are a deep-sea diver. Wear an Omega and you are George Clooney.

Arrive at a film premiere these days and some silly little girl with a microphone will ask: ‘Who are you wearing?' I'm not wearing anyone, you idiot. I'm wearing what was on the floor next to the bed.

This doesn't work any more, though. A man is expected to be sharp, to know how many buttons he should have on the cuffs of his suit jacket and not to wear a shirt with a breast pocket.

It gets worse. On a recent British Airways flight I plunged into the in-flight shopping magazine, where a note from the editor said that because spring was in the air I should treat myself to a new fragrance. There were many from which to choose.

At work, apparently, I should use Acqua di Parma, which enables me to smell ‘clean, fresh and professional'. What!? How can you smell professional? It's not a concept that has any known aroma. It's like smelling shy, or indifferent, or sad.

Then there's Eternity for Men, which is ‘ideal' for rugged types as it smells of the sea. What sea? The Mediterranean? The Caspian? Or the little pool outside my holiday cottage? That's full of sea and has the ability to induce nausea from a distance of a thousand yards.

Perhaps we would be better off with 212 VIP Men, which is warm and sweet with sexy notes of vanilla, sandalwood and tonka bean. What is a tonka bean? Well, I've taken the trouble of looking it up and the news is not good. It's banned by America's Food and Drug Administration, it causes liver damage in rodents, it is worshipped by practitioners of the occult, bits of it stop your blood clotting and it is used to flavour tobacco.

You want to wear that to impress the ladies at a nitespot in Peebles? Go right ahead.

But count me out. In fact, count me out of all this tosh. The BA magazine explains that I should layer my fragrances, starting with shower gel and then applying deodorant, aftershave, balm and eau de parfum. I don't have time for that. And I don't need a handy cut-out-'n'-keep guide on the differences between eau de cologne and eau de toilette because I don't want to smell like a German or a bog. I want to smell of whatever I've eaten or done. I'm a man, and scent is for women.

Shopping is for women, and that's what our friend in the thin spectacles seems to have forgotten. I realize, of course, some men like to waste their free time mooching about in town, having their hair cut and buying silly clothes. These people are called footballers, or restaurant critics. They have scrotums but they are not men, really.

A proper man would have to think long and hard if offered the choice between selling his children for medical experiments and going into a cubicle to try on a pair of trousers. Trying on trousers is, without any question or shadow of doubt, the worst thing that can happen in a man's life. It is waterboarding dentistry with added cancer.

Look at a man in a supermarket. He is a fast-forward blur of activity, buying only what he needs at that precise moment,
and then getting the hell out of there. Supermarket shopping for a man is like pulling off a plaster – it's best done as quickly as possible.

How many men have you ever seen in the Bicester shopping village in Oxfordshire? None. This place is a little slice of heaven on earth for women, but for me it's one of the circles of hell – a street full of stuff that doesn't fit.

So the marketeers can push as hard as they like with their idea of getting men to waste their time and money on sandalwood and mousse and fabric and handbags. But really they'd be better off targeting dogs. Men will only shop for noise-cancelling headphones. And we have some of those already. So leave us alone.

25 March 2012

Presumably because no one from Foster's or Strongbow has thought to give the Conservative party a suitcase full of money, the government is drawing up plans to end the sale of cheap alcohol. This will make super-strength cider more expensive than petrol, vodka more pricey than myrrh and gin, quite literally, a mother's ruin.

Hilariously, people in V-neck jumpers think this new law is designed to combat the hordes of young girls who go into Cardiff on a Saturday night and wake up in the morning with heart disease, chlamydia, fat thighs and twins. But I'm afraid they've got the wrong end of the stick.

The law is designed primarily to prevent the downtrodden masses from getting so drunk that they fail to turn up for work the next day at the munitions factory. It was always thus. When the breathalyser was introduced here in 1967, an Old Etonian acquaintance of mine was overheard on a pheasant shoot, speaking to his local chief constable. ‘It's a bloody good idea,' he said, before adding, in a nudge-nudge way: ‘Of course, you won't be stopping anyone in a dinner jacket, will you?'

Frankly, the end of cheap alcohol and two-for-one strong lager offers will do nothing to prevent the passage of the port decanter clockwise around the M25 but it will make life just a little bit more complicated on either side of the M8. Because, unable to afford the traditional passport to inebriation, poor people will simply start making their own booze.

It'll be like prohibition in America, and that's a worry
because have you ever tried moonshine? No, of course not. You wouldn't be sitting there, reading this now. Unlike many other extremely powerful drinks, it is very moreish. And that's a problem because after two sips you start to hallucinate. I had a small glass in North Carolina last year and can report that if it catches on here people will be going to work imagining they are on the bridge of the Battlestar Galactica. I know I did. After another small glass I became convinced Richard Hammond was a Cylon and tried to kill him.

There's another problem, too, which came crashing through my front door last weekend. Our hayloft has no hay in it. Instead, we have vats in which thousands of sloes spend several months being marinaded in gin. Then, last Saturday, while you were out in the garden annoying your neighbours with your new strimmer, we were decanting gallons of the resulting pink refreshment into pretty little bottles we buy from the internet. It's one of the things the
Guardian
has not yet discovered about Chipping Norton: it's twinned with Tennessee.

Anyway, the discarded fruit was deposited on the compost heap, friends were invited over and the drinking began. It was a wonderful night with much laughter and, later, a Chinese takeaway to try to soak up some of the sick. Unfortunately, as we enjoyed life in the kitchen, our dogs were out in the garden, snouting around for tasty treats. A rabbit, perhaps, or their favourite snack – a nugget of horse poo. This time, though, they caught a whiff of something even more interesting and delicious than manure. It was coming from the compost heap, so off they trotted and – joy of joys – it was like the pudding counter at a Harvester. Thousands of wonderful sloes, all gooey and soft. They ate the lot.

Have you ever seen a drunk dog? It is funny beyond belief. A drunk human sort of knows why he can't climb a simple
step but a dog does not. A dog cannot understand why its legs have stopped working properly and why it has four noses. You can see the bewilderment in its sad little eyes as it lurches about, leaning on trees for support, walking backwards and wagging its head. I laughed so hard that some of my spleen came out of my ears.

Unfortunately, while you may be tempted at this juncture to fill your dog up with Cointreau to see what happens, I must point out that this is police state Britain and you would be contravening Section 7 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006. A few years ago a Bristol man was given 150 hours' community service and banned from keeping warm-blooded animals for a year after he was found guilty of giving his bull mastiff two-thirds of a can of Stella Artois.

The reasoning's simple. You can take away half your average Brit's liver and three weeks later it'll be as good as new. But dogs are like Native Americans. One sip and you will be faced, as I was, with an invoice from the vet for the use of his stomach-pumping facilities.

The problem, however, is that I did not feed my dogs alcohol. They stole it. And now that cheap alcohol is going to be banned, I suspect that vets will be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing. Because at present beer is either sealed in a tin or sealed in you.

Furthermore, a bottle of gin has a screw top that would defeat the most determined dog. But when people are boiling up sacks of potatoes and every garden shed in the land is a steaming still, booze will not be sealed. It'll be in buckets and bathtubs, an easily reachable treat for the family pet.

So a ban on cheap booze will have several effects. All of them unpalatable. The poor will be forced to stay at home on a Saturday night, drinking potato juice from an oil drum. This means the pubs, kebab shops and nightclubs they used
to visit will close. And there'll be no upmarket replacements because the rich won't dare go out in case they're attacked by a drunken dog.

As I've said many times before, it is the job of a government to erect park benches and replace the bulbs in street lamps. If it tries to do anything else, such as deciding who puts what in their mouths on a Saturday night, the moonshine-addled poor will go mad, the rich will be eaten, the country will become peppered with ghost towns and your West Highland terrier will end up with an ASBO.

1 April 2012

I've been to church. I've seen
Mamma Mia!
, the musical. I've played Monopoly. I've sat through a double chemistry lesson. I've even been to Lord's. I am therefore an expert on boredom and how deeply it can affect a man's ability to be rational.

Some people are able to fall asleep when they are bored. But in me it triggers a reaction in the liver, which starts to produce bile. This brings on a dull ache in the pit of my stomach, and then, if the boredom doesn't stop, the pain spreads, coursing around my arterial system like a superheated river of fire.

This is known as impotent rage. Inwardly, I curse at the man who dreamt up the periodic table and the idiot who thought it would be a good idea to turn Abba's songs into a story on the stage. How dare they steal my time from me like this? I am not given to violence as a general rule but when I am bored I can survive the agony only by imagining how the person responsible would look without a head. This is why I am not capable of going on a guided tour of an art gallery.

Once, I went to see the
Mona Lisa
at the Louvre. Then, having seen it, I decided it was time to go to the Zinc cafe for lunch. The guide, however, had other ideas and for thirty minutes talked non-stop about the bloody woman's smile. Then we moved on to the background and why Leonardo da Vinci had made it all wonky. ‘Because he wasn't a very good artist?' I suggested. She didn't hear because she was droning on about every single detail of every single thing that ever happened in Italy in the sixteenth century.

I suspect this is why the
Mona Lisa
is guarded by bulletproof glass. To stop bile-fuelled visitors smashing it up to silence the guides.

I don't mind a bit of art. I once spent an enjoyable thirty seconds looking at Picasso's
Guernica
when it was still at the Prado in Madrid. And a full minute enjoying Turner's
Rain, Steam and Speed
. I must say that Diego M. Rivera's epic mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts is very good. That sustained me for a full five minutes.

What I cannot abide, though, is how art is intellectualized and analysed to the point where I want to club someone to death. Why is the Mona Lisa's smile smudged? Oh for crying out loud. Maybe his brush skidded. What was on Constable's mind when he was painting
The Hay Wain
? Who cares? Being promoted to sergeant, probably.

All of this brings me on to Damien Hirst, whose retrospective exhibition opened in London last week. I quite like his stuff. I have some of his butterflies and I enjoyed his diamond-encrusted skull enormously.

However, those of an artistic disposition plainly don't like Hirst at all. Every report I've seen about him starts off by telling us how much money he has made and how this is disgusting. Why is it disgusting? Who says an artist is not allowed to be successful until after he is dead?

I know the whole country has become infected with a terrible hatred for anyone who is successful, but the loathing reaches new heights when the person is an artist.

‘Look at you in your big house, you bastard. Why aren't you in a squat, eating LSD and cutting your ear off? You're not an artist. You're a businessman.'

Arty types also ask whether what Hirst produces is art. I do not know the answer to this but if the experts are reduced to gibbering wrecks by a can of soup or a woman with a
smudged smile, then why is a cow's head covered in flies not worthy?

I think
The Hay Wain
is a terrible picture. It may work all right on an old lady's coaster but I'd rather have one of Hirst's chemist shop displays on my wall than a £2-billion Constable Turner greetings card any day of the week. And I'm sorry, but in my mind the Ferrari 275 GTS is an easy match for anything Rembrandt ever did.

Watching serious arts people dismiss popular efforts is like listening to some dismal mouse of a woman who has written about life in a Burmese laundry claiming that what Jilly Cooper does is not literature. It just is.

Then we get to the big issue. How much of Hirst's work is actually Hirst's work? This is the snide aside we are asked to ponder after we've been told the rich bastard is just cashing in on other rich bastards.

Apparently, Hirst has a workshop in which a team of craftsmen – and, I presume, butchers – is called upon to produce his stuff. This is a terrible con, we're told. But is it?

I only ask because, back in the Renaissance, Leonardo started out helping great artists of the time with difficult bits of their work. And when he became a master himself, he also used people to do the stuff that was boring.

Strangely, this brings me on to what many believe was the world's first electronic computer: Colossus, the machine that was used to help break the Nazis' Lorenz code. It was built by an engineer called Tommy Flowers, who worked at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, London. Heard of him?

No. But I bet you've heard of his fellow codebreaker Alan Turing. Today he is revered as a genius. A bit of the Manchester ring road is named in his honour and some like to believe the Apple logo is a homage to the man who,
persecuted for his homosexuality, took his own life by biting into a poisoned Granny Smith. Steve Jobs, Apple's late boss, once said: ‘It isn't true but, God, we wish it were.'

This is the thing about Hirst. Did he apply every single diamond to the skull? Did he cut that cow in half himself? Did he kill the shark? Probably not. And does it matter? Does it matter how rich he is? Do you care whether it's art or not? If you like what he dreams up, no.

8 April 2012