How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [71]
Sadly, I fear that in the coming months, as deflation takes hold, a great many people will begin to wonder if life wouldn’t be happier on the sunny side.
I urge you all to think carefully. Even if they’ve taken your land and your homes, they cannot take your friends. Or your family. And no matter how infrequently your children drop by now, you can trust me on this: if you live abroad, you’ll probably never see them again. Ever.
You will sit there in a bar, in your stupid Hawaiian shirt, pretending the waiter is a friend, reading the barcode on a two-year-old copy of The Week, trying desperately to convince yourself that you are happy. But you won’t be, because abroad is where you go on holiday. Britain is home.
And you know what? Yes it’s cold. Yes it’s run by idiots. And yes, I wasn’t bothered about Jade Goody either. But at least we don’t throw our donkeys off tower blocks and we don’t cook our food in the garden.
And because it’s always 57 degrees and drizzling, we are less inclined to sit outside all day getting sloshed.
Sunday 29 March 2009
It’s pure hell in the mountainous Cotswold region
Forbes, which is a magazine for American people who wear loafers with no socks, has said that the best place to live in Britain and, indeed, the sixth-best place to live in Europe is the pretty Cotswold market town of Burford. They reckon it’s better than Barcelona, better than Paris, better even than Rome. Its reasons for suggesting this are that it lies in a ‘mountainous region’ and that it’s home to a wealth of celebrities including the Tory leader, David Cameron, Kate Winslet, Kate Moss and various members of the rock band Radiohead – a group of people who, interestingly, are linked by one common bond: none of them lives anywhere near Burford.
Whatever. The result will infuriate my colleague James May, who has stated very often that the RAF should be instructed to wipe Burford from the map. Burford, in fact, is about the only word in the English language that can make him even remotely excitable and animated. He loathes its tweeness, its gingham-lidded, horse-brass-and-knick-knack, backward-looking smugness and maintains that its haywain, ‘Morning, vicar’, low-ceilinged, ‘pint of best’ pace of life belongs on a postcard, not in a modern society. Sixth-best place to live in Europe? May would argue that it’s the sixth circle of hell. And he’s right. But for the wrong reasons.
A lot of people would imagine that living in the countryside is easy now that there are tarmac roads, no tithes and no plague and you can’t be executed for being a witch. But actually it’s harder now than at any point in history.
The first thing that will happen if you move to a land of clean air and big skies is that, immediately, some ramblers will come and sit in your kitchen claiming that they’ve done so for twenty-one years without let or hindrance and that, if you complain, you will have to spend all your life savings in legal fees.
Eventually you will lose and Janet Street-Porter will bring all her mates round to sit by your Aga, explaining that it churns out six tons of carbon dioxide every year and you are a murderer. But you won’t notice because you’ll be too busy attempting to rid your garden wall of slogans urging you to go back to London and thus free up property in the countryside for the glue-sniffing, pimple-faced locals.
You might try pointing out that no one ever complains about the army of country folk who come to the capital every year and buy up all the flats that could have been used to house inner-city kids. But I wouldn’t recommend this unless you want to know what it feels like to be hit in the face with a shovel.
Next, we should look at the case of Mike Batt,