Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (28 page)

So, would I ever emigrate? Well, if I were given limitless funds, the morals of Silvio Berlusconi, a large house full of lesbians on the Italian lakes, a private jet to shuttle my friends back and forth, some skin that didn't burn every time the sun came up, a sudden effortless gift to speak foreign languages and a capacity to deal with extreme boredom, then, yes, I would be delighted to leave Britain and spend the rest of my days under some wisteria, drinking wine and eating cheese.

However, last week a survey revealed that very nearly half of British people would be willing to up sticks and emigrate with nothing more than what they had in the bank and a stick or two of Ikea furniture.

Frankly, I find this weird. Of course, there are one or two minor irritations with Britain and one big one – the smoking ban – but as a general rule it's a country that works pretty well. We have a climate of such miserableness that we don't spend all day at work wishing we were at the beach, we have free healthcare, our friends are here and, unlike any other nation in the world, apart from South Africa, we have mains sockets that don't zap us every time we want to charge up a mobile phone. Why, then, is 48 per cent of the population either actively planning to emigrate or seriously considering it?

The answer, I think, is to be found on
page 141
of a new book called
What It Is Like to Go to War
. It's by a chap called Karl Marlantes, who was educated at Yale and Oxford before joining the US marines. In Vietnam he was awarded the
Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two navy commendations for valour, two Purple Hearts (some kind of Love Hearts, I presume) and ten air medals. His first novel,
Matterhorn
, is by far the best book I've ever read.

In his latest effort he talks about loyalty, saying he obviously had none for the men under his command since he was asking them to follow idiotic orders to charge a hill. So why did he stand up and say, ‘Let's do it'?

He reckons his loyalty was to a mythic projection called the unit. ‘It has a thousand specific names,' he says. ‘It's the Marine Corps, the legion, the 82nd Airborne, the Gordon Highlanders and the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.' In short, he ordered his men to charge the hill because of ‘all those flags, all that history, all that dying'.

I think he makes a very good point. Because we can be sure that, while flying combat missions over Libya last year, Tornado pilots from the famous Dambusters squadron will have wanted to do a good job for the benefit of their senior officers, the Libyan rebels and their political masters.

But I bet that in the back of their minds they mostly wanted to do a good job to honour the ghosts of Guy Gibson and those bomber boys who smashed the Möhne and Eder dams and made the squadron famous.

We don't just see this loyalty to history in war, either. You sense when you watch Wayne Rooney play for Manchester United that he wants to win for the fans, himself, the lovely Coleen … and all those who died in the Munich air crash.

When I turn up for work at the BBC, somewhere not quite at the back of my mind is the need to do a good job for the spectre of Lord Reith.

Of course, when you are working, fighting or playing for your ‘unit', you need to have a sense of pride about what that unit has done in the past. You don't dwell on its failures.
Rooney does not start every match remembering a far-distant 7-1 drubbing by Accrington Stanley. When I think of the BBC, the first thing that comes to mind is not
Nationwide
's skateboarding duck.

But this is exactly what we are told to do when we think about Britain. We are a country that raped the world in the name of greed. We sent the Cossacks back to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. We enslaved a continent. We starved the Irish. Every time Tony Blair stood up, it was to apologize on our behalf for some heinous crime of two centuries ago. US marine commanders don't do that. They don't spur their men on by saying, ‘We got our bottoms kicked in Vietnam.'

That's what happens here, though. What are the battles that we all remember most clearly? Hastings. The charge of the Light Brigade. The American war of independence. Arnhem. Notice a common thread? They're all battles we lost.

Then there's the whole issue of what it means to be British. For hundreds of years that was the easiest question of them all: we were polite, fair-minded and aloof. We went to work on big red buses, in bowler hats. We had a queen and beefeaters, and when times were hard, we didn't grumble.

What are we now, though? How would you define our ‘unit'? It's pretty tricky. We're a nation of bankers, Simon Cowell, football hooligans, royalists, Muslims, tea shops, benefits cheats, Elgar, pearly queens and Polish plumbers.

The French work tirelessly on maintaining their spiritual history and their ways, which is why most people in France are proud of their country. You don't get Nicolas Sarkozy campaigning for re-election by saying, ‘We are the surrender capital of the world!' It's the same story in America, where you can be black, white, rich, poor or Donald Trump – it doesn't matter because everyone subscribes to the American
way. And as a result, the only American who has ever emigrated is Gwyneth Paltrow.

At the Olympic opening ceremony, I bet you any money there's not a single thing we recognize as being typically British. We don't even know what ‘typically British' is any more. We're a unit embarrassed by our past, uncertain about our present and frightened by our future. Which, I presume, is why nearly half of us would rather be Australian.

22 April 2012

Alarming news from the pointy bit of London. According to various financial wizards, millions of fiftysomethings will have to stay at work until their arthritic fingers are bent double and their whole face is one giant liver spot.

Pensions experts say that if you want to enjoy a reasonable standard of living in your retirement, you need an income of around half your gross working wage. For a man thirty years ago, that typically meant keeping your nose on the grindstone until you were sixty-four. Today the average retirement age for men is sixty-five.

But because of all the gloom, analysis suggests that people will soon have to stay at work until they are at least seventy-seven. And at that age what jobs, exactly, are these poor victims of the system expected to do?

Certainly I don't want a surgeon to operate on any member of my family if he arrives in theatre on a mobility scooter, with a worrying wet patch on the front of his trousers. Nor would I put a seventy-five-year-old in charge of a deep-fat fryer. Bomb disposal is right out as well.

The human body is now a longer-lasting item than at any point in history, but by the time it is seventy-seven years old, chances are that there is something wrong with it. And I'm sorry, but how would you feel if your trial judge were suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's? Or your computer repairman had Parkinson's? Or the ref turned up at Old Trafford with a guide dog?

It is great if a hale and hearty septuagenarian with a fine
mind and bouncy legs wants to work as a lollipop lady, but forcing someone who is tired and ill and a bit mental to go out and earn a crust demonstrates to me that the whole system is properly broken.

After forty years of commuting and dealing with office politics and bringing home the bacon, it's only right and proper that people should be able to put their feet up. I cannot imagine for one moment how horrible it would be for me still to be earning a living by driving round corners too quickly and shouting when I'm seventy-seven. It'll be a young person's job by then, and rightly so.

I have dreamt for some time now of the day when I can wake up without an alarm and spend my hours pottering about in the greenhouse, killing insects and wearing a jumper with holes in it. No more deadlines. No more five a.m. starts. And, best of all, no more James May.

However, today I'm not dreaming about it any more. For reasons that are far too dreary to explain, I'm not actually working at the moment. I'm in a period of temporary retirement. And it is without any question or shadow of doubt the worst thing in the world.

I spend all day inventing things to do, and then inventing reasons why it's better to do all those things tomorrow. I look in the fridge every half an hour to see if by some miracle I missed a plate of cold sausages on my previous sixteen visits. I look at stupid things on the internet. I read instruction manuals. And I thank God for the Leveson inquiry. I've watched it so much I've even developed a crush on the girl who sits over Robert Jay's right shoulder. Each morning I speculate on what she may be wearing that day.

It's not just the boredom, either. It's the expense. Yesterday I thought it would be a good idea to have the interior of my car retrimmed. Then I went out and bought some garden
furniture. I spent most of this morning looking at old Mercs on a website, and unless someone gives me something to do soon, I know I'm going to buy one.

Then there's the drinking. If I'm out, I'll have a glass or two of wine with lunch. But I've no one to go out with because they're all working. So I have a glass or two on my own. Then, since there's no reason not to finish off the bottle, I do. Then I go back on the internet and buy something else that I neither want nor need.

It's no good expecting to survive on half your usual earnings when you are retired. You will need ten times more than Bill Gates just to make it through till lunchtime.

Of course, it is possible to keep busy without a chequebook. Mostly this involves going for a walk. And pretending to be interested in all the things that you see. On my last foray into the countryside I spent fifteen minutes examining the latch on a gate. Then I photographed a flower that I'd found so that I could look it up on the internet when I got home. It's just ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, as a wise man once said.

Naturally, for me, this period of inactivity will end and I'll go back to work. But in a real retirement you are simply filling time until a doctor shoves a tube up your nose, looks at his chart and uses the worst word in medicine: ‘riddled'.

Retirement may conjure up visions of lemon barley water and grandchildren and a nicely tended garden by the sea, but actually it's a period of catastrophic boredom that has only one ending: death.

You should bear that in mind tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off and you have to trudge through the rain to the bus stop so that you can spend all day dealing with broken photocopiers and emails from people who have electronic diarrhoea.

You may imagine on the way home, when you are forced to sit next to a lunatic on the train, and it's late and you've spilt jam on your suit, that it would be nice to put your feet up one day. Well, mine are up now – and it isn't.

We should therefore rejoice at the economic turmoil that means we now have an excuse to keep at it until we are seventy-seven. Because even if your job is emptying the lavatories at an Indian army base in the tropics, it's better than not having a job at all.

29 April 2012

I'm sure you will be interested to hear that at a glittering ceremony in London last week a herd of food enthusiasts announced with much trumpetry that the best restaurant in the world is a place called Noma in Copenhagen.

Not as far as I'm concerned it isn't, because I went to have lunch there last month and it was shut.

So we ended up at another top restaurant, where, for starters, we were given Kilner jars full of steam. How loony is that?

Another restaurant to feature high up the list of excellence is Mugaritz, in San Sebastian, where, provided you are not blown to pieces by a Basque on the way, you are served ‘edible stones'. This is ridiculous. Of course all stones are edible, except perhaps for the ones that you find in Donald Trump's kidneys. But I can't see why you would want to put one in your stomach. Or pay for it.

There is a madness in the world of restauranteering at the moment. I've been a few times to Dinner, Heston's services in Knightsbridge, and while I think the food is absolutely unbe-grigging-lievable and the service even better, it is bonkers to make meat look like a tangerine and to make ice cream with nitrogen.

It's photo-opportunity food, really. Fun once in a while, but it has as much to do with reality as those split-to-the-crotch frocks that actresses wear on the red carpet.

So, to bow down before the genius of Heston Blumenthal, or a man who has the balls to make people pay for steam
or stones, is absolutely fine if you are a food enthusiast or a silly rich person, but why publish a list of best restaurants as though it were somehow definitive? Because if you are working on the tills in the Dunfermline branch of Asda, it sort of isn't.

Those who compile the list may turn round at this point and say: ‘Aha. But you, Mr so-called Clarkson, work in an industry that spends half its life giving out awards.' You're right. I do. And giving awards for cars is daft, too.

This year's European car of the year is a hybrid called the Vauxhall Ampera, and while I agree that it's a fine and noble choice if you are a climate-change fanatic with no sense of style, it is emphatically not fine if you are Elton John.

Film awards make no sense either. This year the Oscar for best picture went to
The Artist
, which I enjoyed very much indeed. But a fifteen-year-old lout with a fondness for vandalizing headstones and stealing cars would probably describe it as ‘a bit boring'.

Every single night of every single year the Grosvenor House hotel in London is filled with Jimmy Carr, who is presenting Geoff Stokes with an award for being the best fertilizer salesman in the north-west. Geoff isn't, though. It's just that his company has bought more advertising that year from the organizers.

BAFTA, or to give it its other name, the Islington Appreciation Society, seems to reckon that
Made in Chelsea
is better than
Downton Abbey
.

But surely that depends on whether you are an elderly snob or a teenage airhead. Choosing between the two is like trying to decide whether you would rather be a petrol pump or a tree.

The fact, then, is this. Apart from the Rose d'Or television festival, which is usually wise with its choices, all awards are
a senseless waste of human endeavour. But at least with cars and television shows and films everyone is eligible to chip in with their ten penn'orth. Because we are all exposed to these things every day, we can listen to what the experts say and then make up our own minds.

Eating out, though, is different. Being told that the best restaurant in the world is in Copenhagen is of absolutely no use if you live in Swansea, it's 7.30 p.m. and you're feeling a bit peckish. Then the best restaurant in the world is the kebab joint round the corner.

The food revolution is getting completely out of hand. Steve Hackett is about to start a tour of Britain, which is huge news, but it's lost in the hubbub of chitchat following reports that someone called Ferran Adria, who used to have a caff in Spain, is about to open a tapas bar in London.

Similarly, we are expected to pause for a moment to reflect solemnly on the news that Danny Meyer is thinking of setting up shop in Britain. So what? He's a bloody cook, for crying out loud, and he will probably charge you £400 for a bit of limestone served on a bed of steaming helium.

The problem, I think, is that these days far too much emphasis is placed on the food. I know one well-respected restaurant in London where everything tastes and looks like something else.

You order pigeon because you like pigeon. It arrives at the table in a banana fancy-dress costume and tastes like rabbit. And I want to grab the chef by his swarthy Latin mutton chops and ask him why he has ruined my dinner.

Now I just order something from the menu that I don't like, knowing there's a good chance it'll taste like something I do.

It gets worse. I ate at a restaurant the other day where the menu said, ‘Chicken, flattened by a brick.' Seriously now. Do
we really need to know how the creature died? ‘Pheasant. Shot in the face by a drunken Freemason.' ‘Deer. Run over by a Toyota.' Is that what you want?

My point, I suppose, is this. Food is only a small part of what makes a dining experience great. Acoustics are just as important. So is lighting, especially if you have an ugly date. But by far and away the most important thing is the company.

The best restaurant in the world, then? It may be in Denmark. That's what the experts say. But really it's the one where your friends go.

6 May 2012