How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [85]
How empty must your life be to think of such a rule? How pointless and stupid? It genuinely baffles me because if you reach a point in your existence where you start to worry about whether men should be allowed to wear a hat while eating lunch, then you must have considered and done everything else that life has to offer. Up to and including what it would feel like to put a shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger.
All a dress code such as this does is encourage the orange and the dim to come along and pretend that they are posh for the day. Meanwhile, the wicked and the interesting are doing something else. In a pair of jeans.
Sunday 21 June 2009
I’m not superstitious, Officer, but it’s bad karma to harry a druid
I have only ever given my children one piece of advice. Other parents I know talk solemnly about drugs, sex, pregnancy, work, manners and the importance of good A-level grades. But all I’ve ever told my kids is this: ‘No matter what, never salute a magpie.’
I don’t know when I got into the habit. Or even why. Maybe it was peer pressure. Maybe it was boredom. But one day, while driving along, I saw a lone magpie hopping about on the grass verge and I saluted it. And that was that. I was hooked. And now, I know for sure that if I fail to salute even a single one of them I will catch cancer within the hour.
This is a huge problem in Milton Keynes, where, for reasons known only to Bill Oddie, there are one trillion magpies, all of which hang around by themselves on the endless sponsored roundabouts. I’d love to know how many people die on the town’s roads each year because the driver was warding off bad luck. I bet it’s millions.
All superstition is mumbo jumbo. I know that. As a result, I will happily walk under a ladder, and I know that if some bees come to my house it will not burn down. I realize too that a black cat will give me just as much asthma as a brown one and that if my left ear feels warm it’s because it’s a sunny day. And yet I have this magpie thing going on. It makes me very angry as there is no methadone. There is no clinic. There is no cure.
Still, it could be worse. I could believe in the power of ley lines, the magic of dance and that I have the ability, through deep concentration, to become a dog or a cow, so that I may experience life from its point of view. In short, I’m awfully glad I’m not a druid.
Last week they were at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice. Apparently, 36,500 poor souls got up in the middle of the night and were dragged by their beliefs and their little Citroëns to a field in Wiltshire, where they were forced by custom to mark the disappointingly cloudy dawn by chanting and pretending to be King Arthur.
As a saluter of magpies, I have every sympathy with these people and I wish them well. I like having hippies in the world. They bring a richness and a calm, and while they like to wear hoods, they do not beat up old ladies.
And that brings me on to the point of this morning’s column. What in the name of whatever god you hold dear were the police doing using an unmanned spy drone to fly around, taking pictures of these people as they swayed gently in the stillness of morning? Can you imagine the hullabaloo if Dixon of Dock Green used similar tactics during a Catholic church service? If the smells and bells were drowned out by the relentless buzz of a spy plane? And let’s be honest, shall we? On the crime-o-meter, Johnny Pope’s merry little gang of bachelors is far more likely to be involved in serious wrongdoing than some dizzy druid bird with flowers in her hair. I can see why the army might need a spy drone in Afghanistan. But how on earth could the Wiltshire constabulary justify the purchase of such a thing? To catch crop circlists? It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.
And why were revellers limited to taking just four cans of beer each on to the site? This means there must have been a meeting at which a busybody in a trouser suit will have said ‘two’ and then a fat man