How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [50]
Furthermore, offering helpful hints at the top of your voice will irritate the ref, who may at some point come over and ask you to be quiet. This – and I’ve seen it happen twice – can end in a fight. And no one wants to see the divisional manager for a supermarket chain rolling around in the mud trying to punch his son’s history teacher in the face.
You can always tell when people are likely to behave like this because they will be supporting the other team and will have taken a day off work and driven hundreds of miles to be there. This means the person in question is extremely enthusiastic – and that means he will suddenly lose track of what you are saying to him and start jumping up and down shouting ‘Man on’ and ‘Face the ball’ and other unintelligible things. And the next thing you know, he’ll be wrestling in an undignified middle-aged way with Mr Jenkins from IVb.
If you find that someone has come from far away, walk off and talk to one of the women who turn up without a spouse in tow because they will be grateful for the company. I know this because any man who puts ‘supporting my son in rugby matches’ below the line of things he’s prepared to do in the way of parenting is plainly hopeless as a husband. And therefore his wife will want to have an affair with you. This is why almost all women on the touchline at rugby matches are dressed up to the nines.
However, and this is critical, when you have become engaged in small talk with a pretty mother and you are arranging to meet for tea afterwards, do not get so distracted that you miss your child scoring a try. He doesn’t want you there. He doesn’t want you to make a noise. But trust me on this: he wants you to be watching at his moment of glory. So pay attention.
Now for the tricky part. When it’s your own child who’s put the team in front, for Christ’s sake, keep calm. Do not shout, ‘That’s his eighteenth of the season so far,’ because everyone will hate you. What I do is claim that it’s his first-ever try and then, to hammer the point home, pretend to faint. One day I’m hoping this will make the pretty mother I’m invariably talking to give me the kiss of life.
Of course, this might irritate your boy if he were to turn round and find his dad being snogged by Fortescue minor’s mum. But since just standing there will annoy him anyway, you may as well give it a try.
Sunday 16 November 2008
I’m a Tigger, he’s a Piglet, and you must be a Pooh
Genetically speaking, you are almost completely identical to every other living thing on the planet. I mean this. If I could break into your house tonight and alter your DNA by just 2 per cent you would wake up in the morning as a cauliflower or a mighty Scotch pine or a worm.
At one end of the human spectrum you have the Polynesians. At the other you have the Basques. And all of us, all 6 billion of us, fit in between. Which means we cannot all be different. There simply cannot be 6 billion permutations of human being, any more than there can be 6 billion permutations of a cocktail stick. We know there are not 6 billion, or even six dozen, ways of being a hunting dog.
David Attenborough tells us this all the time. He says hunting dogs do this and hunting dogs do that. And then he goes under the Pacific Ocean to tell us that all salmon find the spot where they were born, and have sex and die. There is never a salmon swimming the other way, smoking a cheroot and wearing a big