How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [21]
It was bred to live in an aquarium because it suffers from what I call Hammond syndrome – an inferiority complex resulting from the fact that it’s about 6 ft short of being a shark. It is also tough and bright. Not only is it capable of dealing with the complexities of a U-bend, but it can also swim through several miles of Australian faeces just so it can get into the Pacific, where it is now decimating fish stocks, eating frogs and generally running around shouting: ‘You’re going home in a f****** ambulance.’
Are you bothered? Neither am I, really, but I am wondering. Why did a scientist get up one day, stretch and then say: ‘Hmm, I wonder if any aquarium fish have escaped into the wild today?’ And if he didn’t, did anyone pay him to find out? And why? Who benefits from all the newspaper coverage? Is it the Spanish, I wonder? Are they about to claim the world is running out of food because the sea is running out of fish? And that this has nothing to do with their giant aquatic vacuum cleaners that charge about the oceans, sucking everything smaller than a pea into their holds, and is entirely the fault of Bruce and Sheila who put their platys down the Armitage Shanks one morning.
Sunday 4 May 2008
Feed them, or they’ll slash all the seats
Last weekend, as I spiralled round an endless succession of identical ring roads in the Midlands, looking for somewhere to have lunch, I realized with a heavy heart that the global food shortage had reached Britain. Quite simply, there was nowhere serving anything that a human being might reasonably want to put into its mouth.
I had in my mind a white-painted pub, perhaps by a restored lock. I imagined pretty gardens, some brightly painted canal boats, a pint of frothing ale and a hearty ploughman’s with lashings of Branston and some crunchy pickled onions.
There were many brown signs with knives and forks on them, pointing down sun-drenched country lanes. Each one, though, led to a conference hotel that was invariably teeming with men in idiotic Oakley sunglasses, looking at flip charts. Or theme pubs with gardens full of purple dinosaurs with steps up the back.
My satellite navigation system was no help either. I asked it to list all the restaurants within 10 miles of the M6 and, after a silicon shrug, it came up with a cafe called something like the Wife Beater. And that was about it.
Most of the restaurants we happened upon were garish, neon-buffed, American add-ons to retail parks. Why? Who wants to make a day out of shopping? ‘We’ll buy a terrible sofa in the sales, and then before we go to get something that makes an unnecessary noise when we’re gardening (which these days is pretty much everything), we’ll have a slap-up lunch at the Harvester.’
Here’s something you might like to chew on. They always ask in these places if you’ve ever eaten at a Harvester before. And I bet no one has ever said yes. I have, which is why I found it so easy to drive right on by in search of my increasingly elusive canal-side pub. Eventually, though, the tummy-rumbling became too much, and so in Coventry – which bills itself as a city of peace and reconciliation but is in fact a city ruined by the bloody Germans – we ended up in something called TGI Friday’s.
A pretty girl, who was about eight, asked us to have a seat in an anteroom while our table was prepared; and here I noticed something odd. Why, in places where the menu features pictures of the food they’re serving, are all the seats in the waiting area slashed? Do people who buy noisy fence-paint sprayers have an inability to sit down for more than thirty seconds without thinking: ‘I know. I’ll take out my Stanley knife now and cut this chair into ribbons’? Perhaps this is why DFS does so well. Its customers cannot watch Traffic Cops Action Kill on Sky 457+1 without tearing their settees into small pieces with knives.