How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [34]
Four hours later. God, I hate cyclists. But where was I? Oh yes. Shafts of sunlight scream out of the leaden sky, piercing the endlessly swirling might of the ocean. No, sorry. What I mean is: for many years Australia has stood alone on the question of immigration, as immune to the body of world opinion as … the cheeky stonechat that’s just landed on my gatepost.
Um. I’ve just been for a walk. I would never walk at home, but here it’s different. I can pick samphire to fry up with a bit of butter. It goes well with the lobsters we catch. The powerful flavour helps to mask the taste of the twelve-year-old’s arterial leg juice.
The people from the Top Gear office just called to talk about the interview in tonight’s show. They’re uncertain about whether we should go straight from the shot of the horse to the bit where Richard Hammond falls over. I told them I’d seen a minke whale. They weren’t very interested.
What interests me most of all right now, much more than whether Australia really is full or whether there’s a bit of space left over for most of Somalia, is whether to take all the children we have staying to Laser Blast this afternoon or whether we should stay here and play Risk.
Everyone’s falling out over the issue. This is the problem. It’s unfair, really, to drag your children away from their friends every summer, especially if you, like us, won’t let them bring their PlayStations because they should be outside in the fresh air, cutting their legs off. So we ship their friends over here too. Hundreds of them. This means it’s impossible to concentrate on the plight of Australia’s Vietnamese boat people when there are only six Crunch Corners left and Isobel wants them all. And Arabella doesn’t like anything green. And Tom will eat chips only if they are the shape of a 1973 Ford Mustang. And Dan’s retching because of the samphire.
In an office in EC1, none of this ever happens.
You should see the cargo ship that just trundled by – its huge diesel engine drumming the beat of international trade as its bluff prow waged an endless game of shudder-me-rivets with …
Sorry. Australia. Immigration. Er … I don’t care. I’ll worry about it when I get back to work. Here, by the seaside, I am on holiday, which is not the same thing. I’m therefore off for a beer.
Sunday 20 July 2008
By ’eck, our funny accents are the envy of the world
As I write, a team of researchers at Leeds University is working its way through £460,000 of our money, preparing a language and dialect atlas of Britain in the twenty-first century. Good. This is an excellent and important use of public money.
I can understand why the world started on the rocky path to civilization with so many different languages. Thousands of years ago, before the internet came along, it was extremely unlikely that a tribe in New Guinea would come up with the same word for a carrot as a bunch of Basques living in the Pyrenees. I can also work out why languages die. There is simply no point speaking a tongue that’s shared by only four other people. It’s a waste of paint on the signposts.
That said, I do not understand why English, which has been around since the Saxons put down their axes, has so many regional variations. And, more important, why those regional variations are still with us today, now that we all watch the same television programmes whether we live in Durban, Detroit, Darwin or Dunstable.
My youngest daughter, who seems to spend half her day watching pink animated crap from America, is part of the generation that thinks you dial 911 if you want the police and that ‘colour’ has no ‘u’. You’d expect her therefore to sound like Paris Hilton. And yet when she opens her mouth, it’s as though Joyce Grenfell isn’t dead after all.
Then there’s estuary English, concocted from a base of cockney and enlivened with constant use of the word ‘like’, which comes from Los Angeles, and the word ‘fink’ instead of ‘think’, which is a