How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [16]
But to make the Barbie Boys give up, we must ensure there’s a united front up here in the developed half of the world. That means Jean Claude, Iueeaneuauun, Mick, Leonardo and William Wallace coming together, united as one, and reminding our Australian friends that if it weren’t for Nigel they’d still be scorpions and snakes.
Sunday 23 March 2008
Time to save the world again, lads
You may imagine as you sit back this morning all toasty-warm, thanks to your underfloor heating, and sip on a cup of freshly ground coffee that you want for nothing; that everything that can be invented is already in the shops, on sale for £4.99.
You have a telephone that can send pictures to your sister in Australia.
You have a thing for removing the stubborn lid from a jar of pickled onions. You have pills for when you have a headache and pills to keep you unpregnant when you don’t.
Certainly, if I were a modern-day Caractacus Potts and I were sitting in my shed wondering what to come up with next, I’d be suicidal with despair. And a bit murderous every time I thought of that bastard Trevor Baylis, with his bloody wind-up radio.
Maybe I would eventually hit upon the idea of turning someone’s foreskin into a spare pair of eyelids, but guess what? Someone’s already come up with that as a method for helping burns victims.
When we have reached a point at which a human ear can be grown on a mouse’s back, and we have built so many bridges that we are reduced to connecting the tiny Humberside villages of Barton and Hessle just to give the construction companies something to do, it’s easy to sit back and relax. In fact, though, we are about to enter an age when engineers, designers and men in sheds everywhere will be needed more than ever before. Because one day soon the oil and gas will run out – and the only alternatives being suggested right now are coming from people who smoke way too much cannabis. Like the tide, man. And, you know, the wind is totally, like, sustainable.
If we want to keep the world warm, lit and moving, this is genuinely alarming. Especially, as I discovered last week, when 351,000 engineers are qualifying every year in China, and India is churning out a further 112,000. Meanwhile Britain is producing just 25,000. And most of those have names like something from the bottom of a Scrabble bag and a ticket on the next plane to South Korea.
You may wonder why this is relevant. I mean, if there is going to be a replacement for oil, who cares what country is responsible? Certainly it’s hard to imagine people sitting around in Budapest saying that unless Hungary gets off its arse the world will die. So why should we be worried in Britain? Why don’t we let Mr Ng or Mr Patel get on with the work while we get back to what we’re best at these days? Hiding our kids under the bed, mostly, and stabbing one another in pubs.
Hmmm. This is all well and good, but unfortunately Mr Ng and Mr Patel couldn’t invent a brown paper bag even if you gave them 300 years and a million billion pounds. Oh sure, I’ve heard the stories about how ancient China had rockets and went to the moon 5,000 years ago, but I’ll let you into a little secret. It’s all a big bag of rubbish. They haven’t even discovered the chair yet so I doubt very much they’re even halfway to particle-collector shields in space.
Then there’s India, which I can’t take seriously until its air force has some planes with fewer than three wings. Yes, they have nuclear missiles – but could they actually hit Islamabad with them? ‘I very much doubt it,’ said an Indian professor chum of mine recently. ‘I’m not even certain we could hit Pakistan.’
The fact of the matter is this: while the Germans can claim to have come up with the car, the Italians with electricity and the French with flight, everything else that has ever mattered in the whole of human history has come from a man in a shed in Britain. Everything. The internet, penicillin, the mechanical computer, the electronic computer, steam power, the seed drill, the seismograph,