How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [17]
Of course, you may imagine that the giant economy that is America will ride in on a horse and save the day, but don’t hold your breath. They got through the sound barrier only thanks to us; they stole the computer from under our noses; and they got into space only thanks to the Germans, who knew about rockets only because our Spitfires had made mincemeat of their Messerschmitts. The Americans? Pah. Left to their own devices, I doubt they could build a pencil.
Sir James Dyson, who makes purple vacuum cleaners of such immense power that they can suck up rugs, mice and even medium-sized children, is so worried about the situation that he’s opening a new academy, which will be called the Dyson School of Design and Innovation.
Backed by Rolls-Royce, Airbus and the Williams Formula One team, it will be open to 2,500 fourteen–eighteen-year-olds in 2010. I’m thinking of enrolling my kids now, because – hell – even if they fail to come up with an alternative to oil and their time at the academy comes to naught, they can always make a fortune in life. As plumbers.
Sunday 13 April 2008
Potato heads are talking rot on food
A sinister government agency called Wrap (We Rape and Pillage) has spent vast lumps of our money to determine that, in Britain alone, we throw away 5.1m potatoes every day. Apparently this is so morally reprehensible that we should all commit suicide. Hmm. So we have one part of the government telling us that if we continue to eat too much we will become fat and everyone will explode. And now we have another part telling us that we have to finish everything on our plates because it’s wrong to throw food away.
Is it, though? Of course, eco-mentalists argue that rotting food gives off methane gas – a global-warming agent twenty-three times more powerful than carbon dioxide. So a potato, casually discarded because you had too many biscuits with your afternoon tea, will cause every polar bear to suffer an agonizing death, crying for its mother and thrashing about in boiling seas. Yes, an unused maris piper will kill the planet more quickly than a Chinese power station.
Funny that, because when I suggested recently that cow farts were creating more global warming than a flock of Range Rovers, environmentalists were quick to point out that methane breaks down so quickly it isn’t really an issue. Now, apparently, it is. Except, of course, it isn’t – because if you leave a potato in the ground it will rot. If you dig it up then throw it away the council will put it in a landfill site. Where it will rot. And if you eat it, it will come out of your bottom, go to a sewage works and end up in the ground. Where it will rot.
In other words the only way you can prevent a spud from turning into a huge poisonous cloud of suffocating gas is to call the US air force and ask it to carpet bomb the potato-growing flatlands of Lincolnshire with Agent Orange. Who knows? Maybe this is why the government recently announced a proposal to abandon Norfolk to the sea. As payback for the county’s farmers, whose produce is primarily responsible for the sea’s tempestuousness in the first place.
Of course if we ignore the environmentalists – and we should – an army of Fairtrade lobbyists then ride into the argument, claiming that all the food we don’t eat could be shipped to, oh, I don’t know – Biafra. I give them the same argument that I gave to my mother at meal times forty years ago. ‘How? In an envelope?’
In some ways, however, I’d quite like to see unwanted food being loaded on to ships by Fairtrade enthusiasts.