How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [100]
So, what about sheep? There are many advantages to this, chief among which is that sheep are unique in the animal kingdom for having no sense of worth and no particularly strong will to live. You may think humans are imaginative when it comes to committing suicide. We jump in front of trains and off cliffs. We drive into Saigon and set ourselves on fire. Some of us even go to Switzerland. But when it comes to the art of killing ourselves, we are rank amateurs compared with Johnny Baa Lamb. Wales is a billion acres of pastureland but you must have noticed all the sheep hang around by the side of the road, choosing to saunter across whenever a motorcycle is coming. Sheep are the only animals in the world that like to garrotte themselves on fences and that can develop non-specific illnesses unknown to veterinary science. Given half a chance, a sheep will excrete its own lungs. That’s what those dangleberries are: internal organs they’ve managed to squeeze out of their own bottoms.
There’s another reason sheep fighting is sensible. They like it. When there are no cars to run them over, or fences to impale themselves on, they will run at one another and try to fracture their own skulls. You may have seen this on YouTube. It is very funny because, of course, it doesn’t work. They just end up a bit dizzy, and that’s funny too – watching a sheep walking round in circles and falling over because it’s just headbutted its best mate.
Quite rightly, televised dog fighting would be condemned, but televised sheep fighting would be the comedy smash of the decade. And with the viewers would come the high-rollers. Pretty soon, everyone would forget all about their pit bulls because the rewards from sheep would be so much greater.
There’s more good news too. Unlike dogs, sheeps don’t use their teeth and have no claws, so a death is unlikely. But if there were to be a tragic accident, the body would not go to waste. Unlike a dead dog, which is useless, a dead sheep can be garnished with mint sauce and eaten.
This is what’s missing from the legislature today. A bit of lateral thinking. Our leaders need to understand that we will never stop dog fighting with laws. But we will stop this heinous crime by offering its fans something better.
Sunday 20 September 2009
Up to the waist in Brown’s slurry on my new farm
Last week I bought a farm. Though financially speaking, it’s entirely possible I’ve bought the farm. But let’s look on the bright side. I can’t possibly make as much of a hash with the investment as the bankers made when they had the money.
Or can I? You might imagine it’s very easy to buy a farm. Unlike a house, you don’t need a surveyor to check on dry rot because a field cannot fall over, and rising damp is a good thing because it means free water. It turns out, however, that it’s actually very difficult, mostly because of the Georgians. Let me give you one example so you can see the scale of the problem.
There are a number of springs on the farm I’ve bought, one of which provides water to several properties in a nearby village. This arrangement was made when the land belonged to a fat man who had tea interests in India, and sealed in a document written with a quill, on bark. Fine. But what if the water supply dries up, or the pipe breaks, or everyone in the village gets lead poisoning and grows two heads? Common sense dictates this would not be my problem, but under New Labour’s legal guidelines, all landowners are in the wrong at all times. Especially when a little old lady with two heads is in court, sobbing and waving around a piece of bark from 1742. The legal fees for sorting this out have amounted to about £4.5 billion, and that’s before we get to the cost of trying