How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [72]
So now you’ll have Street-Porter, some glue-sniffers with paint cans and all of the League Against Cruel Sports in your garden. And, as a result, you won’t dare go outside to shoot the magpies that have been such a nuisance of late.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. You may not kill rabbits or badgers or foxes or crows but the vegetablists announced on Thursday, just a day after Mr Batt was lambasted for killing Hazel and General Woundwort, that they want you to kill as many magpies as you can. Bag a bunch and the RSPB will send you a special achiever’s badge.
Confused? Oh, you wait till you try to find a post office or a bank. Or just try popping into Burford to try to buy something you might actually need. They can sell you a teapot in the shape of a Norman church and some local shortbread. But a packet of bog rolls? Some cat food? Not a chance.
Then there’s the problem of socializing in the countryside. Because there are no buses, no taxis and no trains, you are faced with two options when you go out at night. Drink bitter lemon or drive home drunk. The only good news if you choose to drink and drive is that you won’t get caught by the police – because there aren’t any. And you’re more likely to find a dustman than a doctor.
Other problems? Well, yes, a few. You won’t be able to hear the birdsong because of all the motorbikes, your view will be ruined when a masonic handshake seals the deal on a light industrial unit at the end of your garden and every time you go for a walk you will come home dead, having been run over by a drunken yobbo in a Citroën Saxo.
And your dog won’t fare much better because it will have been shot by a farmer.
Pretty soon, then, you will do what most people do in the countryside at some point: commit suicide.
Still, it could be worse. You could have ended up in Gaiole, the Tuscan town that Forbes reckons is the best place in Europe to live. Here you will be woken at four every morning by some walnut-faced peasant with a strimmer and driven mad all day by barking dogs. And then you will come home one day to find that your wife has put on 3 stone, grown a moustache and decided to spend the rest of her days cleaning the front step.
Sunday 19 April 2009
What a difference now I’ve stopped drinking fish fingers
As we know, the government has been waging a campaign of hate against the middle classes for many years. It’s never the fat and the lazy, with their ancient cars and their unlagged lofts, who are targeted in the war on climate change. No. It’s people with Agas and Range Rovers and patio heaters at their second homes in Gascony.
It’s the same story with obesity. In my experience it’s the dim and the gormless who have become enormous in recent years, but rather than telling Colleen and Lee to walk to the working men’s club every night and stick to orange juice, our glorious leaders have produced a guide on how you can provide your dinner party guests with less alcohol in such a way that they don’t notice. Mainly, it involves serving what I like to call beer-free beer and not topping up everyone’s glass quite so frequently. They also provide some handy cut-out-’n’-keep recipes for low-alcohol cocktails … which will ensure that at midnight the few remaining guests will still be talking about property prices in Fulham and school fees.
Plainly all this advice from Mr Brown’s taxpayer-funded dinner party advisers is rubbish but to make sure we all understand the need to lose friends and alienate people, they recently announced that one glass of Chablis contained the same