How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [78]
I get on with these little things quietly, because if I made a noise and a fuss I would be labelled an environmentalist. Which is a terrible, hideous, beardy label for unwashed communists.
Nobody wants that, and this highlights something rather interesting. If the eco-ists would only shut up, I wonder if the sound of their droning would be replaced by the sound of normal people fitting solar panels and making soup from nettles and twigs.
Sunday 17 May 2009
I’ll be right there, Sir Ranulph – must conquer the sofa first
Sir Ranulph Fiennes explained last week that he reached the summit of Everest by imagining it wasn’t there. He said he was prepared simply to ‘plod for ever’, never once allowing himself the luxury of thinking about where he was going, what he was doing or whether he was halfway to halfway yet. In other words, Britain’s greatest adventurer achieved his goal by adopting the mindset of everyone else. ‘Plodding for ever’ is what almost all of us do almost every day. We get up in a morning, we trudge through the day, with no sense of purpose or ambition, and then we die.
Just this morning, after an enormously long time, the lift doors finally opened in my London apartment block to reveal a middle-aged woman who apologized for the eternity I’d been kept waiting. ‘I like to go up and down in here,’ she said. ‘You sometimes meet quite interesting people.’
So while Sir Ranulph walks from pole to pole, goes to his shed to amputate bits of his body that have become a nuisance, climbs the world’s highest peaks, has a heart operation and then runs seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, we have a woman who amuses herself by going up and down in a lift.
I’m no better. I amuse myself by getting up in a morning, going to Guildford, driving round corners a bit too quickly, while shouting, and then driving home to bury whichever pet has died that day. On Tuesday it was the mouse. Or, to be more accurate, the tumour with a mouse growing out of it.
I envy Ranulph Fiennes. I envy his drive. I envy his questfulness. Certainly, I know for sure that if I were enraged by a big American movie company that dammed a trout stream to make a feature film about talking animals, I’d sit at home and do nothing except write imaginary letters to my MP. Fiennes, on the other hand, nicked some explosives from the SAS stores and attempted to blow the Americans back from where they’d come.
If I’d got frostbite by trying to retrieve my tent and cooking equipment from the jaws of the Arctic Ocean, I’d whimper and wait for the doctor to work his miracles. Fiennes simply broke out his saw and did the job himself. He did. He cut bits of his own hand off because ‘it was annoying me’.
The rest of us are so very different. I, for instance, want to learn how to play the piano. But that means buying one, getting someone to bring it round, finding a book full of tunes that I like and that don’t have too many sharps or flats in them … and, all things considered, I can’t be bothered. I want to start collecting butterflies, but that means reading books and buying a net, and, frankly, it’s easier to watch television instead. There are so many things I want to do, so many ways I want to push my body and expand my mind, but it’s always easier to carry on plodding.
Gardening is a classic case in point. Last year, in a flurry of square-jawed determination to do something worthwhile, I bought a tree. It was delivered on the back of a lorry, in a huge pot, and plonked by the garage. Which is where it sits now because it’s just too much of a faff to move it.
It’s much the same story with my fountain. Three years ago I arranged for a plumber and an electrician to do the groundwork, but then I decided that not finishing