How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [18]
Frankly everyone seems to have forgotten one simple thing. If I choose to buy a bag of potatoes, and then I choose not to eat them for some reason, that is my lookout. It is my money that I’m wasting, not George Monbiot’s. And similarly it’s no good pointing a finger at supermarkets, saying that they throw perfectly good food in the bin every day. Yes, though that’s because they are forced to put ‘best before’ dates on everything to avoid being prosecuted by the government for giving some fat kid a bit of wind. I agree. They should be made to keep every vegetable until it starts to look like a Doctor Who special effect. But then what should they do? Many Africans are desperate, but not so desperate that they’ll eat food which has mutated into an enormous bogey. So it goes into the ground. Where – guess what? It’ll rot.
The best solution then is to worry about something more important – but sadly we are ruled by a government that will never pass up the opportunity for a bit more interference. If it could have an agent in every house, at every meal time, ready to prosecute parents for using too much salt and not making Johnny eat up his greens – trust me on this – it would.
Unfortunately, however, the civil service is too busy counting discarded potatoes for that – so instead our glorious leaders have decided to make the whole process of waste disposal so bloody complicated that you would rather eat everything on your plate, and consequently explode, than go to all the bother of remembering which bin to use. Round where I live we have green boxes for newspapers, plain white paper and green bottles. But not bottle tops. They have to go in the blue box, along with the shampoo, the junk mail and the paper that isn’t quite white. And it gets worse because there’s also a garden-waste bag into which you may put hedge clippings, but not food waste. What you’re supposed to do if you’ve eaten half your hedge, which technically makes the other half food waste, I don’t know. Happily, though, the council will provide a ‘field officer’ – called Standartenfuhrer Schmidt, probably – who’ll call round with advice and leaflets, which when you’ve finished reading them should go in the blue bin. Or is it the green one? Honestly, you need to be Mr Memory Man to stand a chance.
What I do to get round this problem is to feed all our waste – even the junk mail, the hypodermic needles and the peelings from the potatoes – to our chickens. It’s brilliant. The eggs they produce have actually started to come out in old HP Sauce bottles, which is handy. And I don’t have to tip the hens at Christmas.
If you have no chickens, don’t despair. You can either wait for the government’s exciting Compost Awareness Week, which starts on 4 May. Or you can live entirely on bars of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut chocolate. Because no one in recorded history has ever thrown one away.
Sunday 20 April 2008
I’d rather hire a dog than a prostitute
Ever since the invention of the saloon bar know-all, we’ve been told that when it comes to things that float, fly or fornicate, it’s better to rent than buy. Rubbish. If you have the money to buy a boat and choose instead to spend it on a pension plan, then you have a plebeian heart and a beige soul. The whole point of disposable income is that you have fun with it. And I’m sorry but you cannot catch 6 ft of air off the coast of St Tropez on a Pep. Whereas you can on a Fairline Targa 52.
The argument for private planes is even more vivid. Of course you can charter one. And of course this makes financial sense. I’m sorry, though; if you have a private plane – provided it’s a luxuriously appointed wood’n’leather jet, not one of those sit-up-and-beg propellered vans – you will have dramatically more sex than if you have a slice of the Norwich Union.
And that brings me on to fornication. Anyone who thinks it’s better to pay a prostitute than get married and have it on