Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (31 page)

An Isle of Man-based company has stunned the nerd world by announcing that within three years it will be able to offer tourists a trip around the moon, and then onwards into bits of space where no man has gone before.

Passengers will be loaded on board one of four second-hand Russian re-entry capsules, and then blasted to one of two recycled Russian former space stations.

From here they will embark on an eight-month round trip through the final frontier.

Hmmm. Quite a few engineering types, including Sir Branson, are currently engaged in the development of space tourism and I'm not quite sure why, because almost everyone I ever meet says they'd rather spend their holidays in the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima.

They say space flight frightens them because if something goes wrong, there's no air. This, of course, is true but there is also no air in the sea and that doesn't stop anyone snorkelling. Plus space is not full of fish that will stick a spear through your heart, or inject you with a poison, or tear your leg off.

Also, space is not full of currents that will whisk you off to Venus, or people on jet skis who will run you down, or doped-up boatmen who will forget where they dropped you off and leave you out there until your tongue is the size of a marrow and you die a slow, agonizing death. Only a few humans have ever died in space. Plenty, however, have died in the sea.

I will agree that there are a few problems with space tourism. Cost is one. The Isle of Man round trip will be £100 million. And then there's the boredom. For a while the lack of gravity is undoubtedly fun. You can laugh at how everyone's hair is floating about like seaweed and spend an amusing few moments trying to convince your mates that the globule of liquid floating past their faces is tasty orange juice and not a drop of urine that somehow escaped from the lavatory.

But then what? On a cruise ship, you can stop off at the Virgin Islands for ‘romantic cocktails'. But you can't do that in space. There's no Jim Davidson, either. You can't even sleep with the captain. You just have to sit there looking out of the window, at nothing at all, for half a million miles, wondering whether a Russian spaceship that's been recycled in the Isle of Man, where they have not invented the diesel locomotive yet, is really the right vehicle for the job.

It certainly sounds preposterous. But, actually, when you spend a few moments sucking the end of your Biro and thinking, you can't help wondering: is it? John F. Kennedy told us back in 1962 that we chose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they were easy, but because they were hard. No one ever asked what the ‘other things' were because they were too busy absorbing the central message: space travel, it's tricky.

I, however, am not so sure that it is. Because NASA showed us in 1970 that it was entirely possible to get a leaking spaceship from the middle of nowhere back to earth, into the atmosphere and gently into the Pacific using nothing more than the electricity needed to power a toaster, a slide rule, some duct tape and the cover of a flight manual.

We were also told that to go into space you needed to be a brave young man with the stamina of an Olympic marathon
runner, the reactions of a cobra, the brains of an emeritus maths professor and the ability to hold your breath for seventeen weeks. Humans, they said, need not apply. For space travel you had to be superhuman.

But then in 1998, when the former Mercury astronaut John Glenn was seventy-seven years old, they put him up there without a second thought. And now we often find the International Space Station is full of portly middle-aged men and women who get frightened on a bus and who spend all day in the vast empty ocean, growing lettuces.

So, you don't have to be fit or clever and you don't have to be able to hold your breath for very long because the truth is that if something goes wrong, long before you suffocate, your blood will boil and your eyes will pop out of your head and your brain will burst.

However, there is one problem that does not seem to have been addressed by our friends on Fraggle Rock. It's a big one.

Had you been able to inspect the space shuttle as it sat on its launch pad, you might have noticed that the solid rocket boosters were carrying explosives.

The idea was that if something went wrong in the early stage of the shuttle's ascent and it was heading at several thousand miles an hour for downtown Miami, a man in a bunker at Cape Canaveral – a man who was never allowed to meet any of the people on board – would press a button. And blow it to kingdom come.

This, you see, is the trouble with rockets. Once they are lit, you cannot turn them off again. They run until the fuel is gone. So if something goes wrong with the guidance system and the rocket is heading back down to earth, there's nothing anyone can do. That's why NASA employed a man in a bunker.

If you watch footage of the Challenger disaster, you
will note that after the shuttle disintegrates, both solid rocket boosters spiral off and then explode at precisely the same moment. That's because the button was pressed to destroy them.

The Isle of Man government will have to think about this. And then it will have to employ a man whose only job is to blow up the spaceship and everyone on board. Because that's better than letting it crash into someone's house.

Although, I just have one request for the successful applicant. If it's heading for the headquarters of the Manx rambling association, leave it be.

24 June 2012

If you were put in charge of a brand new country and told to organize a whole new system of government, you probably wouldn't come up with the House of Lords. ‘Right. We've got some elected members in the Commons and now, to make sure they don't do anything stupid, we shall have another tier, which we shall fill with religious zealots, chaps whose great-grandads won a battle and various other odds and sods who only ever wake up when their bedsores start to weep.'

However, even though it makes absolutely no sense at all, the House of Lords has worked well for centuries.

It even continued to work when some of the inbreds were replaced by Muslim whales. It works so well, in fact, that Nick Clegg, who is the deputy prime minister, wants to change it. He's even made some suggestions that come straight from paragraph one, page one, chapter one of a book called
How to Let People Know You Are Mad
.

In short, he wants to cut the numbers in the Lords from 826 to 450, most of whom would be elected to represent a specific region. So far, then, he's just come up with a direct copy of the House of Commons. But since the elected representatives won't have the power to make law, what exactly will the job advert say?

‘Wanted: a man or a woman – or a whale – to waste their lives listening to adenoidal dullards drone on about waste management on the Isle of Sheppey. The successful applicant must be willing to have his or her private life picked over
in microscopic detail by journalists. On the upside, you'll get paid. But not much.'

I know exactly the sort of people who'll sign up for a slice of that. They're the people you find in any large organization, the sort who go to a lot of meetings and when there eat all the biscuits. They're people who never once in their whole joyless, friend-free, celibate lives contribute anything meaningful, constructive, imaginative, daring, fascinating or worthwhile.

They go on marches but half the time have no idea what they're marching for. They get involved in action groups. They wear protest T-shirts over their anoraks so they look stupid. They enjoy regional news. They disagree with shampoo. A lot have cats. All of them are a waste of blood and organs. Many are called Colin. And Nick Clegg wants to put them in the hot seat.

And it gets worse. Because when you've elected your Colin, you're stuck with him for fifteen years, which … let's do the maths … is pretty much adjacent to forever.

Naturally the costs involved are humungous and, frankly, how many elected representatives do we need? Because if his harebrained scheme goes ahead, we will have to vote for people to sit on a parish council, a borough council, a county council, the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the European parliament. We will be spending most of our lives in polling booths, choosing between candidates who are only united by their utter uselessness.

Suffice to say, I have a better idea. It goes like this. Instead of filling a House of Colins with a bunch of biscuit-eating nonentities, who left to their own devices would struggle to wire a plug, we use the computer that's used to pick premium bond winners to select eight people at random each week from the electoral roll.

Of course, it will be a nuisance for them to take a week off work, but on the upside, they will be brought to London and put up in a swish hotel. And all that will be asked in return is that they have a quick look over the bills being discussed in the House of Commons to make sure none involves reintroducing slavery or invading Portugal.

Humourless people in suits will suggest at this juncture that the second tier of government is rather more complex than that. And they may have a point. But it can't be that difficult because for hundreds of years the House of Lords has been run by a squadron of dribbling infantile buffoons who think they must be right because they talk more loudly than anyone else. And they managed just fine. Many managed even when they were fast asleep, dreaming – and not in a good way – of their old nanny.

Seriously. Who would you rather have doing the job: a man who thinks it's perfectly acceptable to wear a fur scarf on a hot day or your mate Jim from the builder's yard? Quite. We trust randomly selected juries on the important business of a person's liberty so, on the basis that most people can tie up their shoelaces and not get run over while crossing the road, why wouldn't we trust a similar system to apply the checks and balances in government?

A few moments ago I put this idea to Alastair Campbell who popped round for a cup of tea. I know. Strange. And what he said was, ‘You're talking about a focus group.' As though this were a bad thing.

It isn't. These days, focus groups choose what we eat, what we drive, what we read, what we watch and how we furnish our houses. Almost nothing makes it on to the market without being presented first to a small group of people selected at random. Occasionally they let something daft through the net, such as cherry-flavoured Coca-Cola and the Toyota
Prius, but for the most part the observations they make are reasonable. Business trusts them. Shareholders trust them. So why shouldn't we?

Certainly I'd rather have a government's ideas checked for idiocy and recklessness by a small, cheap group of ordinary people than by 450 expensive Colins. Although, truth be told, the solution I'd most like to have is the solution we have now.

I understand, of course, why David Cameron allowed his tea boy Clegg to go off and work on House of Lords reform. Because if he's doing that, he's not mucking up something more important. But now that we've seen what Cleggy has in mind, it's probably a good idea to take his mind off it with another idea. Can't he be made to clean the silver or something?

1 July 2012

Last weekend all the tabloid newspapers were full of huge headlines wishing Andy Murray well as he prepared to become the first British man to win Wimbledon for 3,000 years.

This was odd. Normally tabloids are extremely good at judging the mood of the nation but on this occasion they were well wide of the mark. Because I couldn't find a single person, in real life or on Twitter, who wanted the miserablist-in-chief to win. There's a good reason for this. He'd had the bare-faced cheek to plough through the entire tournament playing nothing but tennis.

There had been no hopping, skipping or clowning around of any kind. He was a man with the personality of a vacuum cleaner and in post-match press conferences the sparkle of an old man's brogue. That's why we were all rooting for the man in the monogrammed blazer.

When the final was over and Murray had lost, I was praying he'd express his anger and disappointment by high-fiving his opponent. In the face. With a chair. That's what I'd do if I were ever to lose a game of Boggle. But what he actually did was blub, whimpering and mewling like a hysterical little girl whose puppy dog had gone missing. It was pathetic. And guess what. All of a sudden he became a national hero.

Why? We live on a solid little rock in the north Atlantic. It's cold. It's wet. We admire the bulldog spirit. We keep calm and carry on. We get a grip. Crying? It's like eating a horse. Something foreigners do.

In America a stiff upper lip is something that only ever happens when intimate plastic surgery goes wrong. There is no American word for ‘stoic'. Americans cry more often than they don't. The smallest breath of wind and they're all on the news, tears streaming down their blubbery faces as they stand beside their fallen-over wooden houses, explaining between heaving sobs how the good Lord has deserted them.

Even Germans cry, a point that was demonstrated by the enormous and manly Carsten Jancker, who broke down and wept when his side were beaten by Manchester United in the 1999 Champions League final. Finns? Yup. The former racing driver Mika Hakkinen took himself off for a little weep when he thought a mistake had cost him the world championship. And Italian men cry a lot, too. Probably because most of them aren't actually men.

Here, though, things have always been different. A man could come home to find his wife in bed with the plumber, his dog nailed to the front door and his business a smoking ruin, and still he could be relied upon to put on a brave face and think of some suitable understatement to make it all seem not so bad.

It is impossible, for instance, to imagine a tear in the eye of Nobby Stiles or W. G. Grace. I bet Earl Haig had no tear ducts at all. Or Arthur Harris.

And certainly when my father-in-law was surrounded by overwhelming German forces at Arnhem, there is no suggestion that he broke down and wept. He just blew up another tank.

In Britain lachrymosity has always been seen, quite rightly, as a sign that you are not really a proper chap. That you may be someone who bowls from the other end, or a colonial. But, oh dear, that's all changed now.

Every night on the news in recent weeks fat people who've watched far too much American television are to be found standing in front of their moist sofas sobbing as they explain how the flood waters came all the way up to their knees. It's sick-inducing and should be banned from the airwaves. People aren't allowed to bare their breasts on the news. So why should they be allowed to bare their souls?

It gets worse. Nick Faldo wormed his way into the nation's hearts by crying after he won a stupid game of golf. And the only reason we feel sorry for Paul Gascoigne is that he let us see his feminine side during a football match against Germany. Nowadays a little tear on television can win you not just the love of a nation, but also a lucrative advertising deal and a lot of sex with women who think you are all gooey and nice.

Well, that's what they say. They argue that the tear-stained face of a man is a sign that he likes to eat celery and that he gives half of his salary each month to a home for distressed kittens. They say that this is a good thing. They also say they don't want us to come home at night in a bearskin and demand our wicked way. And that isn't true, either. Women want a crybaby in the house in the same way that men want their wives in a pair of Y-fronts.

That said, I can cry. I cried in
Born Free
when Elsa was released into the wild, and I'm told by my mother that I was inconsolable in a film in which Norman Wisdom went to bed with a horse. But as an adult? Well, when our pet Kristin Scott Donkey died I had to go for ‘a little walk', and I'm afraid I get quite sniffly in
Educating Rita
. But that's it.

And rightly so. Because, as Britain changes, it is very difficult to think of one single defining national characteristic. We don't wear bowler hats any more. Benny Hill is dead. And our army is now smaller than the Padstow Tufty Club. All we have left is a stiff upper lip.

Which brings me on to the citizen test that all new boys have to pass if they want to become British. At present it's full of irrelevant questions about the number of parliamentary constituencies, what quangos do and who is allowed to vote.

There should be one question only.

When is it acceptable for a grown man to cry in public?

a) Never.

b) Whenever he is upset by something.

Anyone who ticks b) should be taken directly to Heathrow and put on the next flight to abroad.

15 July 2012