And Another Thing And Another Thing And Another Thing I’m a nobody, my jet-set credit card tells me so I suppose all of us were out and about before Christmas, pummelling our credit cards to within an inch of their lives. So, some time in the next week or so, we can expect a sour-faced government minister to come on television to explain that we are now borrowing more than we’re saving and that it has all got to stop. In the mid-1970s, shortly after credit cards first emerged, we owed £32 million. Now we’ve managed to get ourselves into debt to the tune of £50 billion, which works out at about £1,140 for every adult in the land. As a result, the economy is teetering on the brink of collapse and little old ladies are having to sell their cats for medical experiments. And children are being lured into prostitution and up chimneys. It’s all too awful for words. But there’s a darker side to credit cards. A sinister underbelly that is rarely talked about. I’m talking about the misery of not having the right one. We’ve all been there. Dinner is over, the bill has arrived and everyone is chucking their plastic on to the saucer. It’s a sea of platinum and gold. One chap has produced something with a Wells Fargo stagecoach on the front. Another has come up with an HM Government procurement card, just like James Bond would have. And then it’s your turn. And all you’ve got is your green NatWest Switch card. Socially speaking, you are about to die. Or are you? A couple of years ago I read an interview with some chap who’d got a fistful of cards in his pocket and claimed that the more shiny examples, specifically the much-coveted black American Express, gave him ‘certain privileges’. Obviously, I had to have one. So I lied about my salary, handed over 650 bleeding quid, and there it was, in a leatherette box, presented like a fine Tiffany earring. My very own passport to the high life. A few weeks later I was flying economy class to some godforsaken hell hole – I forget where – and found myself sitting in one of those oyster bars at Heathrow, fielding questions from men in nylon trousers about Volkswagen diesels. After a while I remembered the black ‘key’ in my wallet and recalled a bit in the booklet that said it opened the door to airline lounges around the world. So, I plodded over to the club class lounge with my cattle class boarding ticket. ‘I’m afraid not,’ said the woman cheerfully. ‘Aha,’ I countered, ‘but I have a black American Express card which affords me certain privileges.’ It didn’t. So I went back to the diesel men at the oyster bar. A month after that I was checking in at Blakes Hotel in Amsterdam when, again, I remembered the card and thought: ‘I wonder if this will get me a room upgrade.’ Joy of joys, it did. All I had to do was check into one of the emperor suites at £1 trillion a night and I would be automatically upgraded to a maharajah suite, with the enlarged minibar, at no extra cost. So, off to the economy broom cupboard I went. As the months went by, I kept producing the jet-set, jet-black Amex and the result was pretty much always the same. ‘Non.’… ‘Nein.’ And in provincial Britain: ‘What the f***’s that?’ Actually, I’m being unfair. It wasn’t only provincial Britain that was mystified. Pretty well everywhere east of New York and west of Los Angeles doesn’t take Amex, no matter what colour the card is. Some say this is because Amex charges too much. Others because the Americans are infidel dogs. Eventually, I found a fellow customer and asked what she saw in it. ‘Oh,’ she said, tossing a mane of pricey hair backwards, ‘it’s marvellous. Only the other day I needed 24 variegates and my local florist didn’t have them in stock. So I called the Amex helpline number and they got them for me.’ Great. But I have never ever felt a need to fill the house with variegates. More worryingly, I seldom have the courage to produce the black plastic on those rare occasions when I find myself dining in a restaurant that accepts it. Because what message would I be giving out? When you produce a black Amex, what you are saying is that you earn £1 million a year. Is the waiter really going to be impressed? And what about your friends? They either earn a million too, in which case so what, or they don’t, in which case they won’t be your friends for much longer. Having a black Amex is not like having a big house. That’s useful. And it’s not like having a big car. That’s more comfortable than a smaller one. The card exists, solely, to impress. It has no other function. If I were the sort of person who had clients, then maybe this would be useful. But a word of warning on that front. I lied about my salary to get one, so who’s to say that the sweating golfer who whipped one out over dinner last night didn’t lie, too. A. A. Gill has one, for God’s sake. As a result, I shall be getting rid of it. This will help Britain’s economy in a small way. But more importantly, it will do wonders for my self-esteem. Sunday 11 January 2004 Oops: how I dropped the US air force right in it Oops: how I dropped the US air force right in it Given the American military’s dreadful reputation for so-called friendly fire incidents, many people will not have been surprised last week when it was revealed that one of its F-15 jets had dropped a bomb on Yorkshire. I wasn’t surprised either, but for a different reason. You see, a few years ago, when I was flying an F-15, I inadvertently dropped a bomb on North Carolina. I was making one of those Killer Death Extreme Machine programmes which called for me to go very fast in a selection of different vehicles. So it was obvious I should hitch a ride in the fastest and toughest of America’s airborne armoury. The Strike Eagle. The unshootdownable F-15E. What you saw on the television was me flying it, and then me being sick. What you didn’t see – for reasons of time, you understand – was me trying to drop a laser-guided bomb on the ranges at Kitty Hawk. Now, you’ve all seen the news footage of such weapons being fired through the letter boxes of various baby-milk factories, so you know how they’re supposed to work. The man in the back of the plane – that would be me – lines up the camera on the target and releases the bomb, which goes to wherever the cross hairs are pointing. These cameras have a phenomenal range. The distance they can ‘see’ is classified but I noticed the range dial went up to 160 miles. That means the plane which bombed Yorkshire could have been over Sussex at the time. On my first run, the pilot, Gris ‘Maverick’ Grimwald, said he’d come in low and fast, jinking wildly as though we were under attack from surface-to-air missiles. In the back seat, I tuned one of the three screens to give me a picture from the plane’s belly-mounted camera, which you then steer by moving a toggle on top of the joystick. I’d had two days of training and figured it would be like playing on a PlayStation. And so it is. But can you imagine what it would be like trying to operate a PlayStation while inside a tumble dryer? Because that’s what it’s like trying to operate a remote-control camera in an F-15. More realistically, have your children tried to play on their Game Boys while being driven in the back of a car? And that’s at 60 mph in a vaguely straight line. Grimwald was doing, ooh, about 600 mph no more than a few hundred feet off the deck, and to make matters worse he was flinging the plane from side to side so that one second the screen showed the faraway Appalachian Mountains and then the next, fields screaming past in a hyperspace fast forward blur. By the time I’d finished being sick, we were over the sea doing a six-G turn to get back to the starting point again. ‘This time,’ said Maverick (or ‘Bastard’, as I liked to call him), ‘I’ll make it easier. We’ll go a little higher, a little slower and I’ll be less violent.’ It didn’t help. I saw the river where they filmed Deliverance, I saw the swamp that bogged down Jude Law in Cold Mountain and then I noticed the waterfall behind which Daniel Day-Lewis had hidden in The Last of the Mohicans. And then we were over the sea again and I was bringing up some cake that I’d eaten on my ninth birthday. Bastard was not pleased. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that each time we do one of these runs we’re costing the American taxpayer $7,000 in fuel?’ Do you know what? I don’t care about the American taxpayer. So there was no way I could summon up a tear from the back seat of a jet that was, at the time, pointing straight at the sun. We were 90 degrees nose high, climbing vertically at a rate that you simply wouldn’t believe. Let me put it this way. The lift in the BT Tower is fast. It gives you a ‘funny tummy’ as it climbs 600 feet in 30 seconds. So imagine what it’s like in an F-15 that climbed 17,000 feet in 11 seconds. This was a cosmic zoom, made real. It’s the F-15’s party piece. Because there’s so much thrust from its two Pratt & Whitney turbofans, it can not only do 2½ times the speed of sound and carry 9,000 lb more than a Eurofighter, but it can also accelerate vertically. We’d gone high for the third run so I’d have plenty of time to locate the target with the camera, release the bomb and then hold the cross hairs in place as it fell to earth. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And yet somehow I still managed to make a hash of it. Frantically I swivelled the camera around but could see nothing resembling a target, so I thought: ‘I know. I’ll drop the bomb anyway, because by the time it reaches the ground from this height I’m bound to have the cross hairs in place.’ I didn’t. Bastard felt the plane twitch as I pressed the release button and said: ‘You have the target?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, swivelling the camera some more. But I didn’t, and to this day I have no idea where that bomb went. It certainly didn’t hit the target. I’m not even certain it hit North Carolina. So who knows? Maybe the bombing of Yorkshire wasn’t incompetence. Maybe it was payback. Sunday 18 January 2004 Sorry, Hans, brassy Brits rule the beaches now Sorry, Hans, brassy Brits rule the beaches now When package holidays began, all of a sudden we could experience life at close quarters with people from other nations. We thought the Germans were the most ridiculous people on the beach. As Monty Python pointed out years ago, they pinched the sun beds and barged into the queues and frightened the children. And if you weren’t at the buffet spot-on seven, Fritz had wolfed all the sausages. But with the advent of the Boeing 747 came the long-haul holiday and we realised that the Germans were country mice compared with the Americans. No shorts were too large, no thong was too small. What’s more, Hank does not like to sit on the beach and read a book. He likes to shout and play volleyball. When the Yanks are around, it’s like being on holiday in a primary school playground. For years the Americans were in a class of their own, but then the Berlin Wall fell down and, as a result, from the Indian Ocean through the Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, Boris and Katya were making all the running. In many ways the Russians are like the Americans. They’re either far too fat or far too beautiful. There’s no middle ground. And again, like Uncle Sam, no part of the body is immune from man-made enhancement. The Americans go for surf-white teeth; the Russians for alarming special forces tattoos. And neither seems to see anything wrong with breast enlargement. I saw one Russian woman on the beach in Barbados the other day who had the body of a walnut and a chest that put Antigua in the shade. However, where the Russians move into an easy lead is beach attire. For the men it’s the traditional Speedo, while the women seem to get their fashion pointers from internet porn sites. I haven’t yet seen anyone strutting down the beach in stockings and suspenders but it’s only a matter of time. Today, though, a new contender has come along and blown the old favourites into the seaweed. The title of Most Stupid People on the Beach has gone in 2004… to Britain. We were designed to make Spitfires and Beagles. We’re supposed to be in a shed, in gloves, inventing stuff. We therefore do not look good on a beach. We’re piggy white and if you expose us to the sun, we turn into Battenburg cake. We’re designed for bracing walks along the front in Scarborough and wet camping holidays in Scotland. But our newly discovered wealth means we can now go to the tropics. Because it’s new money, we really have no idea what to do with it. Women are the worst offenders. On the beach they have a swimsuit, a watch and a pair of sunglasses. Not much, in other words, to show other holidaymakers that they are ‘considerably richer than yow’. It doesn’t stop them trying. Obviously they don’t go for the American thong or the Russian nipple tassels, but bikinis are held together with ludicrous gold clasps, sunglasses have absurd hinges which look as if they’ve come from a maharajah’s front door and as for the watches, they’re more like carriage clocks with straps. At lunchtime things get worse because now there’s an excuse to cover up. So out comes the T-shirt telling everyone that you’ve been somewhere else and the bejewelled sarong. I had to ask my wife where on earth these women buy their clothes, and she knew straight away. Dress shops. Specifically, dress shops in provincial towns that have been bought by husbands to stop their wives sleeping with the binmen. So where do the dress shops get their stock from? She was stumped. Not Armani, that’s for sure, or any designer anyone outside Leicester has ever heard of. You’ve never seen chintz like it. And whatever happened to the simple flip- flop? Now it cannot be considered footwear unless it has a flower on it and some high heels. Then we get to the question of these women’s teenage daughters, who strut around with the word ‘Sex’ on their bikini bottoms. Or ‘Peachy’. This is unnerving. Try to read a book about steamships of the nineteenth century when you’ve got a 15-year-old advertising her backside nine inches from your face. It’s especially unnerving for the Russians in their tight, revealing Speedos. Something must be done, so I’ve come up with a plan. When you’re in a shop buying an outfit for your holiday, apply this simple test: have you ever seen Victoria Beckham in anything remotely similar? If the answer is yes, put it back on the peg. If this doesn’t work, the government must step in. Again, I have an idea. Airports already have the technology to screen luggage for nail scissors and tweezers, so surely it can’t be that hard to look for, and then confiscate, gold slingback shoes, overly complicated sunglasses and any swimsuit with adornments. I don’t mind what provincial British women wear in their own homes. But abroad they’re not just letting themselves and their families down – they’re letting the country down, too, and that has to stop. And men: the Burberry baseball cap. No. All right? Just no. Sunday 25 January 2004 Learn to kill a chicken, or you’ll get no supper Learn to kill a chicken, or you’ll get no supper When children from St George’s middle school in Norfolk went into the playground at break-time recently, a shoot at the nearby Sandringham estate had just begun and as a result it was raining dead and wounded pheasants. This was a perfect opportunity for the teachers. The children could have been marshalled and shown how the birds should be plucked. ‘Right, now gather round, everyone. You, Johnny – put the pheasant on its back and stand on its outstretched wings. Now pull the legs firmly…’ It would have been a marvellous illustration of how animals get from their natural habitat into a lovely casserole. Sadly, this didn’t happen. Instead, the teachers ran around wringing their hands. The children all cried. And letters were sent to the estate managers at Sandringham asking that birds are not shot while the children are outside. This way, the little munchkins will continue to believe that burgers grow on trees and that Coca-Cola comes from natural springs in Wyoming. After the incident, a woman in the Daily Mail said that she objected to organised shoots because the birds are bred specifically for slaughter. So how do you think bacon happens? Few people keep pigs for fun, you know. I am becoming increasingly depressed at the way we’re trying to insulate ourselves from the reality of the food chain and the wonders of the natural world. Last week a 55-foot sperm whale that had beached itself in Taiwan was being transported on a lorry when it exploded in Tainan city. Passers-by, buildings and cars were drenched by 50 tons of blood, goo and blubber. It can’t have been a pretty sight. And doubtless there will now be some kind of legislation banning biologists from taking dead whales through a built-up area. Why? When an animal dies, or a human for that matter, the stomach fills with methane gas. Sometimes the pressure becomes so great that the carcass goes off like a bomb. I’d like to think this explosive power could in some way be harnessed. I don’t want to get lavatorial, but the cows in New Zealand produce 900,000 tons of methane every year. It’s one of those little facts that I keep in my head for emergencies such as this. Anyway, it would be nice to think that we could get milk from their udders, meat from their legs and electricity from their bottoms. But I know that in this day and age people would be reluctant to switch on the lights at home if they thought that the power was coming from Daisy’s farts. We are seeing this kind of nonsense on the current series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! The contestants, with their man-made lifestyles – and in some cases their man-made breasts – are absolutely incapable of dealing with the jungle wildlife. Do they really believe that the producers