How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [97]
I genuinely do not understand this. When an eighteenth-century carpenter tacked together two small pieces of mahogany, he could reasonably expect that they’d remain conjoined until the end of time. And yet fencing, which is held together by massive 6 in nails, falls to pieces, all on its own, every fifteen minutes.
Why does this happen? And what do you do when it happens on a bank holiday Sunday? There was no possibility of ringing for help, which meant I would have to fix the damn thing myself. This, I worked out, would require some nails and the tool of the gods – a hammer. But, astonishingly, the only hammer we have in the house is the sort of gaily painted little thing Jane Austen might have used to pin a picture of Little Lord Fauntleroy to her bedhead. So I decided to use the butt of my AK-47 instead.
Have you ever tried to nail two pieces of fence post together? It is literally impossible. The nail goes in well to start with but then, as you up the tempo and the vigour of your strokes, it gets a kink in the middle and all is lost. Once a nail is bent, it can never be made to go straight. You need to start again.
I started again many thousands of times until, eventually, the nail went all the way through the first piece of wood and was ready to penetrate the upright. Which, I should explain, was a solid post, set in concrete. You’d imagine, then, that it would not flex at all. But it did. Each time I hit my nail with the AK, it simply boinged backwards, out of the way, until it fell over. So now the gap, which had been just about big enough for a desperate donkey to get through, had become wide enough for a main battle tank.
I’m not a man given to tears or tantrums, but as darkness began to envelop the scene, I felt close to both. And that brings me on to the thrust of this morning’s missive. In the olden days, friends would have laughed at my hopelessness. They would have enjoyed my inability to knock a nail into a piece of wood. It would have been amusing. But these days we are no longer permitted to mock the afflicted.
If a child is dyslexic, it is no longer made to wear a dunce’s cap. Indeed, it is allowed extra time in its exams. And there’s more. I heard last week that if a child has hyperactivity problems, you don’t smack its bottom. In fact, if it has hyperactivity problems at Thorpe Park it is allowed to jump the queues. We live in a time when the playing field is levelled out for everyone: when the rich and the privileged are rejected by the universities they’ve selected, while the weak and the ginger are given a leg-up at every opportunity. And yet nothing is being done to help people like me. People who are spanners.
You, reading this, can clear your drains. I cannot. You can service your lawnmower. I cannot. You can knock nails into wood and mend your fence.
I ended up parking my car across the gap until I could find a professional. And now the horses have wiped their sweet-itch-ravaged backsides all over my Mercedes.
Don’t you think, then, that if we are going to have a world where legislation erases all foibles and shortfalls, it should apply to everyone? In a society that’s truly fair, I think I should get free plumbing and fence repairs. Or am I missing something?
Sunday 6 September 2009
Forget Antigua, 007 – all the real action is in Acacia Avenue
We’ve always known that in reality, not one of Britain’s secret agents has ever successfully fought a shark or garrotted Robert Shaw on a speeding train. In fact, we are told, over and over again, that most of what our secret agents do is boring; that instead of trying to stop Spectre from stealing our nuclear bombers, they actually spend most of the day trying to stop their wives checking Max Mosley’s hair for nits. To hammer the point home, they even advertise for new agents these days in the Guardian.
And to reinforce the view that it’s all nasty coffee and budget meetings with flip charts, we should remember what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. Instead