How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [86]
This is even more absurd, come to think of it, than the police spy plane. Certainly I feel sure that early man would not have embarked on the road to civilization if he had thought that, one day, humankind would arrive at a point where one man has the right to determine how much beer another man may take into a field in the middle of the night.
Then there’s the drugs business. Now, I’m not going to come here and defend the use of narcotics. But we learnt last week that there are now 1m cocaine users in Britain. Statistically then we can be assured that marching powder is being used in the House of Commons, in village halls, in business meetings, at dinner parties and even, perhaps, by pop stars.
So why pick on the druids? Why send sniffer dogs to their annual summer get-together? We know there will have been some dope and we know, because they’d stayed up all night, that some of the morris men will have got some marching powder up their schnozzers. But if it’s busts they’re after, Plod would probably have had a higher success rate if they’d had a snout about in their own locker rooms.
The fact is that despite the massive, and extremely costly, operation the police made only thirty-seven arrests, mostly for minor public-order offences. That’s thirty-seven from a crowd of 36,500. One in a thousand or thereabouts.
I’m not suggesting that the police ignore large gatherings of people. Whether it’s a football match or a bunch of Tamils in Parliament Square, the forces of law and order need to be on hand to give people directions to the nearest bus stop and break up whatever fights may occur. But I simply cannot understand why such large numbers were used to monitor a group of people who, by their very nature, pose about as much threat to the world as a flock of budgerigars. They hum. They make love to one another. They speak in Welsh. And they go home.
Certainly I can assure you that driving along while under the influence of a silly scare story about magpies is much more of a threat to the nation’s peace and tranquillity.
Sunday 28 June 2009
After three brushes with death in planes I want a parachute
Can you imagine what it must have been like on board that Air France aeroplane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean last month? Rather dreadfully, I can.
Admittedly, my first plane crash was a rather minor affair. The Vietnamese pilot had had several attempts to land the country’s only jet, and I sort of knew as we bumped towards the runway for the fourth that it wouldn’t go well. And it didn’t. We ended up in a field.
The second crash was in Libya. Or Chad. Or possibly Mali. The pilot wasn’t really sure where we were and, as it turned out, nor did he have any idea how to land. Because he was a bit drunk. Weirdly, he managed to get the nose wheel down first, and because it’s not really designed for that, it snapped off, meaning we skidded in a sparky, bouncy sort of way through the Sahara for a while.
The third was not actually a crash. But it was by far the most terrifying, because it really did look for several minutes like there could be no other outcome.
I had boarded a small, windowless twelve-seater on an island off Cuba for a short flight to Havana. The plane had been built by the Russians at some point in the 1950s and then used by the Angolan air force throughout the seventies and eighties before it eventually arrived in Cuba as a city hopper. Judging by the amount of oil that streaked along the wings and the smoke that belched from the Lada engines when they coughed into life, it had been built by people who couldn’t care less and serviced by no one, ever.
Shortly after takeoff the entire cabin filled with steam, which meant the pilots were unable to see the large thunderstorm that lay ahead. So they flew right into it. And moments later we were upside down. I want you to think how that might feel for a moment … You didn’t think about the lavatories did you? When the plane is the