How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [76]
Because it’s always been made that way.
I was examining some photographs of Sandringham House this morning and, oooh, it’s a monster. It should be pulled down immediately and replaced with something much more attractive. But can you even begin to imagine the hullabaloo if Mrs Queen even mentioned such a thing? Even when change comes, it’s half-arsed.
I mean, look at the House of Lords. Mr Blair, the great modernizer, decided it was unfair to have the country ruled by people whose only qualification for the job was a great-grandad who’d killed lots of Turks. So did he abolish it? Did he hell. He just replaced the Bufton Tuftons with a bunch of people whose only qualification is a hatred of meat and a chip on the shoulder. And what plans are in store for London’s next bus? Why, it’s a bloody Routemaster.
A particular bugbear for me is the red phone box. It was cramped, draughty, prone to vandalism and used mostly as a lavatory. So we should have rejoiced when mobile phones made it redundant. But oooh no. You can’t get rid of London’s red phone boxes.
And there’s the problem. If we form an emotional attachment to every single thing that comes into our lives, pretty soon the whole country will become clogged up with stuff that doesn’t work any more.
Woolworths was a classic case in point. When it went out of business, everyone ran around saying it should be saved because it was ‘traditional’. No it wasn’t. It was a terrible shop, selling awful things that even ghastly people didn’t want to buy. Woolworths was useful only for sheltering from a Second World War bombing raid.
You should look around your house for more examples of this stupid sentimentality. For sure, your dining-room table may have originally belonged to your grandfather. But if the legs have woodworm and the surface contains traces of diphtheria, then why not replace it with a new one? Just because something is old, it is not necessarily good. The Victorians, for instance, couldn’t paint horses. They always looked like Devon Loch, with their legs sticking out all the wrong way. So why have a Victorian hunting scene in your lavatory when Hallmark can sell you something that is better for less? Of course, I would not suggest we erase all of history from the British landscape. And certain things that should be preserved cannot be displayed in a museum or encapsulated well enough in a history book. Burford, for instance, or the Queen. But we, as a nation, must stop getting teary-eyed about the death of something we hold dear. The wet British summer. The traditional ketchup bottle. The long-playing record. The busby.
With that in mind, I think there should be a national referendum, maybe with an accompanying TV show, where participants are invited to nominate one thing from British life that should now be put in the dustbin. I’d like to kick things off by nominating the Labour party.
An apology: last week, I said the tortoise was an ideal pet because it costs nothing to keep and will never upset your children by dying. Unfortunately, on Monday, perhaps because we spent nothing on it, ours did just that
Sunday 10 May 2009
Okay, you’ve got me bang to rights – I’m a secret green
Last week, in this newspaper, I was outed as a recycler, a man who composts his tea bags, eats wasps and spends most of his days tutting in supermarkets at the Day-Glo orangeness of the carrots. Or, to put it another way, a damned hypocrite.
Well, I’m sorry, but if the newspaper is going to publish these accusations, then I am surely allowed to reply. Yes, I do recycle. Yes, I do eat wasps, if they’ve burrowed into my apples. And yes, I do get so angry in supermarkets that often I leave my half-filled trolley in the spices aisle and come home empty-handed.
There’s more. On Wednesday I spent most of the morning demanding to see the manager of a restaurant in which each individual sugar lump was wrapped in its own plastic sleeping bag. ‘Why,’ I wailed,