How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [93]
Or rather it would be bliss, if only the man with the public-address system would shut up. I understand, of course, why village shows need such things. Lost children must be reunited with their mobile phones and it’s important to know when judging for the best hen contest is about to begin. You need to be there to see the unbearable sadness in Derek’s eyes when he’s beaten. Especially if the spotty youths are playing ‘Autumn Leaves’ at the time. Unfortunately, however, the people who volunteer to spend all day with the microphone do so because what they love most of all is the sound of their own voice. This means they are not capable of shutting up. For 364 days of the year, Ian is a forklift truck driver. But for one glorious afternoon, he’s the bugler. He’s the general. He can move 10,000 people from one side of the field to the other with a simple announcement. He can reunite families. He can sort out lost dogs. And by lunchtime the power has gone to his head. This is why I always take a pair of pliers to a village show. To dismantle Ian’s communication system.
Sadly, it’s illegal to use pliers on the other problem: the local lord who turns up in a crap suit with a walking stick to mooch about with a grumpy face, judging bonsai trees, cauliflowers and the face-painting competition. He looks like he’s hating it. He’ll tell his friends he hates it. But the fact is this: every year, he organizes his holidays around the show so that he can go. He loves it because for one marvellous day it’s 1850 again. He is not some moth-eaten old buffer in a leaky house. He’s the lord. He’s in charge. And he’s a prat for pretending it doesn’t make his heart soar.
I only intended going to the village show for an hour or so. But I stayed till I was so drunk I could barely stand up. I’d seen more emotion than I’ve seen in the past 100 Hollywood movies. I’d eaten horrible food, got a massively sunburnt face and laughed, really laughed, with my children at the sheep’s enormous testicles. It was, quite simply, the perfect day.
Sunday 2 August 2009
Nurse! The OAP mods are bashing the wrinkly rockers
We learnt recently that despite the best efforts of Herr Pope and Jude Law, there are now more old age pensioners in Britain than children under the age of sixteen. Many people have many theories on why this is happening: better medical care, better crumple zones in your car, less plague, fewer man-eating tigers, the invention of the high-visibility jacket and, of course, the increasingly zealous Health and Safety Executive with its bold remit that no one should die, ever.
There is, however, another, rather more serious reason for the general wrinkling of the general public that no one is talking about. It’s this. These days, few people have the time or the money to rear a child because they spend all their free time and all their spare cash buying hearing aids and mashing food for the toothless old crone that used to be their mum.
My mother has made it very plain that at the first sign of incontinence my sister and I are to wheel her over Beachy Head. Other mums – and dads, for that matter – are less considerate, and continue to sit about in their expensive inconti-panties, dribbling and insisting that The Antiques Roadshow is played at full volume, for probably twenty or thirty years.
I should imagine it’s jolly hard to make a baby with your husband if you spent the first half of the evening looking for your mum’s teeth and the second half trying to pluck them from the puddle of her wee.
And what for? At least, with a child, you are able to see the fruits of your labours grow into adulthood and become self-dependent. You lavish all that care and cash on a parent and all that happens is they get worse and worse until one day, when they are nothing but a bag of skin