For Crying Out Loud! For Crying Out Loud! For Crying Out Loud! Mother knows all the best games Can we be honest for a moment. You didn’t have a good Christmas, did you? Your turkey was too dry, your kids spent all day glued to their internets, and you didn’t bother watching the Big Christmas Film because you’ve owned it for years on DVD. What you should have had to liven things up was my mother. She arrived at my house with a steely resolve that the Christmas holidays would be exactly like the Christmas holidays she enjoyed when she was a child. Only without the diphtheria or the bombing raids. My mother does not like American television shows because she ‘can’t understand what they’re on about’. She doesn’t like PlayStations either because they rot your brain. And she really doesn’t like internets because they never work. What she likes are parlour games. And so, because you don’t argue with my mother, that’s what we played. The kids, initially, were alarmed. They think anything that doesn’t run on electricity is sinister and a little bit frightening. So the idea of standing up in front of the family and acting out a book or a film erred somewhere between pointlessness and witchcraft. Strangely, however, they seemed to like it. Mind you, playing with a seven- year-old is hard, since everything she acted out had six words and involved a lot of scampering up and down the dining room, on all fours, barking. Usually, the answer was that famously dog-free movie with four words in the title, Pirates of the Caribbean. My mother, on the other hand, could only act out books and films from the 1940s, but this didn’t seem to curb the kids’ massive enthusiasm. They even want to watch The Way to the Stars now, on the basis my mother made it sound like Vice City. I loathe charades but even when I tried to bring a halt to proceedings by doing The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, they cheered me on with roars of encouragement. Other books I used to try to ruin the day were Versailles: the View from Sweden, which is nearly impossible to act out and even harder to guess. And when that failed, Frank McLynn’s completely uncharad-able 175g. Eventually, with my mother still chuntering on about Trevor Howard’s impeccable and unAmerican diction, and the seven-year-old still under the table barking, and me trying to act out If, mercifully, we decided to play something else. Not Monopoly. Dear God in heaven. Please spare me from that. I’m due in Norway on Thursday and if we break out the world’s most boring board game, I’d still be cruising down the Angel Islington in my ship. Happily, it turned out that in my mother’s world Monopoly is far too modern and that in her day you made your own entertainment. So out came the pens and paper. I can’t be bothered to explain the rules of the game she chose, but in essence you have to think of countries, or girls’ names or things you find in space that begin with a certain letter. It sounds terrible compared with watching The Simpsons or shooting an LA prostitute in the face, but you know what, the kids loved this even more than charades. The seven-year-old was so keen she developed a sudden and hitherto unnoticed ability to write. I’m not kidding. We pay £5 million a term to have someone teach her. She has a nanny. And we spend endless hours trying to get her nose out of Pirates of the Caribbean and into a book, but to no avail. She has never, once, written anything down that could pass for a word. But that day she wrote until her pen ran dry, and wailed like a banshee when it was time for bed. With the kids tucked up, I did what any sane man would do and reached for the television remote. But my mother had other plans. So we put a tablecloth over the jigsaw she’d been doing and played cards. What a buzz. It was a blizzard of smoke, wine, trumps and tension. There’s no television show, no internet site and certainly no PlayStation game that provides you with the same thrill as sitting there, a bit drunk, in a room full of lies, with a fist full of rubbish. A game of cards, it seems to me, provides everything you could possibly want out of life. It’s as exciting as any drama and as convivial as any dinner party. It’s also fun, free, environmentally friendly and something you can do as a family. What’s more, having discovered that my seven-year-old can write, I also discovered the next day during a game of Blob! that she can perform complicated mental arithmetic. She’s claimed for 12 straight months that she can’t count but she can sure as hell count cards. I swear to God that in the three days of Christmas she learnt more than in the last three years of school. There’s more, too, because I also swear to God that we had more fun as a family than could have been possible if we’d powered up the Roboraptor and turned on our internets. So, today, while you are stabbing away at buttons on your PlayStation, wondering why you keep being kicked to death, or watching a film that you’ve seen a million times before, only without advertisements, might I suggest you flip the trip switch on your fuse box, light a fire and break out the playing cards, the pens and the paper. Just avoid the charades. Because that’s just nature’s way of explaining why you never made it as an actor. Sunday I January 2006 For Crying Out Loud! On your marks for a village Olympics While watching the absolutely breathtaking New Year’s Eve firework display in London I finally formed an opinion on the question of Britain hosting the Olympic Games. I should explain at the outset that I don’t much like athletics. Running is fine when you are late for a train, or when you are nine, but the concept of running in a circle for nothing but glory seems a bit medieval if you ask me. Speaking of which, the javelin. In the olden days when men ate bison and Mr Smith had not yet met Mr Wesson, I should imagine that a chap with an ability to chuck a spear over a great distance would end up with many wives. But now, I don’t really get off on watching a gigantic Pole lobbing a stick. It’s the same with the hammer. When some enormous Uzbek hurls it into row G of the stadium’s upper circle, do we think he is the best hammer thrower in the world? Or the best hammer thrower among those who’ve dedicated the past four years of their lives to throwing hammers? With the best will in the world, that’s not a terribly big accolade. No matter. The Olympic Games are like Richard and Judy. Whether you like them or not, they exist and they are popular. The question that’s been vexing me these past few months is whether I should be pleased they’re coming to London. I think Lord Sir Pope Archbishop Earl Duke King Seb Coe should be richly rewarded for having secured a British win. He was employed to beat the French and by wearing a beige suit and talking about multi-ethnicity he did just that. Good on him. Now, though, the staging of the event will be handed over to those who built the dome, run the National Health Service, operate Britain’s asylum system, manage the roads, set up the Child Support Agency, invaded Iraq, guard Britain’s European Union rebate and protect the nation’s foxes. So if we spool forward to the summer of 2012, to the opening ceremony of the London Games, what are we likely to find? A perfect ethnic blend of London schoolchildren prancing about in the nearly finished stadium wearing hard hats and protective goggles lest they are exposed in some way to the Olympic flame. But no swimming pool because health and safety thought it was a ‘drowning hazard’. That’s then, though. What’s worrying me most of all are the next six years as we struggle under the global spotlight to get the infrastructure built. To me, good design and cost are the only considerations. But I’m not in charge, health and safety will be. And they’re going to spend every waking moment fighting with those who want all the seating to face east, to keep the Muslims happy, those who have found a rare slug in Newham and would prefer the village to be built elsewhere and those who want all the electricity to come from the wind and the waves, because of global bloody warming. All Olympic Games since Los Angeles in 1984 have either made a profit or broken even. But I bet Britain shatters that record. Because unlike the Americans and the Australians, and especially the Greeks, we’re obsessed with save the whale, feed the poor, green ideology. And we’ve got it into our heads that even on a construction site no one need ever be injured. And if people are prepared to waste our money on hi-vi jackets and organic prayer mats, then think how much they’ll be prepared to waste quenching the greed of those who live and work on the proposed site. Already I’ve heard businessmen say the compensation they’re being offered to move their hopeless company somewhere else is nowhere near enough. They can smell the money and know that all that stands between them and a retirement home in Spain is a bunch of woolly-headed liberals who couldn’t balance the books at a village tombola. So, what’s to be done to avoid this cataclysmically expensive fiasco? Well, we could hand the whole job over to the French. Or the army. But since, on balance, I want the Olympics to come here, how’s this for a plan? We take the Olympics back to its roots and host the whole thing at my kids’ school. No, really, I was walking across the playing fields the other day and found myself wondering what more the Olympic bods might need. At the annual school sports day they can simultaneously stage six sprint races, four games of hockey and several swimming events in the full-sized pool. There’s even a nearby river for Matthew Pinsent. Work needed to make this an Olympic venue would involve nothing more than an enlargement of the long- jump sandpits. And I know a local builder who could do that, with no danger to his workforce, and no impact on global warming, for about £250. I’m not really kidding here. If you log onto Google Earth, you will find that despite the best efforts of John Prescott to build houses on every school sports pitch in the land, the south-east of England is still littered with a mass of sports facilities. There are enough swimming pools in Surrey alone to keep Mark Spitz going for 40 years. This, then, is my vision: not to host the safest, least offensive, most globally cooling Games of all time. But the smallest. And then we could spend the savings we make – about £5 billion – on the most important part of the Olympic ceremony. The fireworks. Sunday 8 January 2006 For Crying Out Loud! We’re all going on a celebrity holiday We learnt last weekend that the government in Sardinia is planning to impose punishing wealth taxes on billionaire visitors who come to the island in their enormous gin palaces or their onyx aeroplanes. I’m sure this went down well with those of a Guardian disposition. In essence, those whose boats are more than a mile long will be hit where it hurts most, in the wallet. And second homes within 200 yards of the coast will attract a special council tax that will cause the owners to go cross-eyed. And the excitement doesn’t stop there because, get this, the leader of the government, Robino Di Hood, says the money raised – and it could be £550 million a year – will be spent on baby foxes and mending the ozone layer. Of course, delicious though the scheme might sound in eco-socialist circles, I doubt very much the super-rich will pay up. Sardinia is a pretty little place for sure, but there are many other pretty little places they can go to instead. So they will. And losing them will kill Sardinia off as a tourist destination more quickly than news of some poorly chickens. Let me explain. A friend of mine returned recently from a break in Jamaica. ‘So how was it?’ I asked, expecting to hear about the food, the hotel, the beach and how many times he’d had his arms cut off by crack-fuelled Yardies. But no. Instead he told me he’d seen Helen Fielding, Laura Bush and the entire Eastwood family – with the disappointing exception of grandaddy Clint. This is now how we judge holiday locations. Not on what we see, but on who we see. And on that basis, Reykjavik knocks Jamaica into a cocked hat because last year, on a family holiday in the land of fire and ice, I trumped Helen Fielding and Laura Bush with Dame Kiri Tiki NikiWara and then trumped the Eastwood family by seeing Clint himself, checking in while I was checking out. News of this enthused another friend so much that he went to Iceland for a winter holiday and returned to say that yes, the nightlife was very jolly and the volcanoes very active, but that the highlight had been sharing a ride in the hotel’s lift with Quentin Tarantino. This is what always made Sardinia such a tempting destination. Forget the emerald waters or sandy beaches. It was the chance you might catch a glimpse of Princess Caroline and Roman Abramovich raving it up in one of the Aga Khan’s bars. That’s why Sardinia has always been better than Corsica. Yes, the French island is more visually stunning than its Italian neighbour, and historically way more interesting as well. But it has always been let down by the quality of the celebs. On numerous holidays there, the only people I’ve ever clocked are Zoe Ball, Mick Hucknall and Jeremy Paxman. Mind you, that’s better than Dubai. On my last visit I found myself sharing a hotel with Chris Tarrant, Grant Bovey and Anthea Turner. It was like being stuck in a warm and fuzzy ITVdaytime chat show. All I needed to complete the saccharine picture of harmlessness and syrup was television’s Richard Hammond. Barbados is a fine case study here. It’s one of the most populated countries on earth, the terrain is fairly non-mountainous and many people with tattoos holiday in the south. So why go? Well, obviously, there are direct flights and many fine restaurants, but it’s who you see in those restaurants that empties Cheshire so comprehensively. At somewhere like the Cliff, it’s possible to spot Gary Lineker, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Ulrika Jonsson on the same night. That’s a triumvirate to make anyone’s holiday complete. Think about it: confirmation that your taste in food and islands coincides perfectly with the doyens of football, home improvement and er, being Swedish. And I’m not being snobbish either. I know plenty of cool and trendy media people who go on holiday to Tuscany every year in the desperate hope that while they’re shopping in San Gimignano for some fair-trade, organic pesto-flavoured, nuclear-free South African peace crisps, they might bump into John Mortimer. The celeb syndrome now affects pretty well everyone and pretty well every lifestyle choice we make. I mean, are you going to spend £1,100 on the egg-yellow alligator-skin diary featured in last week’s Style supplement? Not likely. Unless of course Gwyneth Paltrow is papped with one while out shopping. Then you’ll happily trade your children’s health to get one. It’s why people will wait 200 years for a table in the Ivy. It’s why people are salivating at the prospect of sending their children to Marlborough. A fine school, of course, made so much finer these days by the attendance of Eugenie York. It’s why the village of Barnsley in Gloucestershire has become so expensive. Yes, it sounds a bit whippetish for sure, but having Kirsty Young, the Five newsreader, as a regular in the local pub makes you out to be a player. If, however, you find all this too ghastly and you’d rather eat your own nose than share a holiday hotel with Jade Goody and Nick Knowles, then don’t despair. Try Sardinia. Because, if this tax plan comes to fruition, it’ll be full of no one at all. Sunday 15 January 2006 For Crying Out Loud! The worst word in the language Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can’t really use these words any more and yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those in the travel and hotel industries to pepper their conversation with the word beverage. There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. And the biblically awful ‘gift’. I also have a biological aversion to the use of ‘home’ instead of ‘house’. So if you were to ask me round to ‘your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta’ I would almost certainly be sick on you. But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hung-over, is ‘beverage’. Apparently, they used to have ‘bever’ days at Eton when extra beer was brought in for the boys. And this almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Boris Johnson would understand. Therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hotels have got it into their heads that the word beverage, with its Eton and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing a customer. Now look. The customer in question is almost certainly a businessman, and the sort of businessmen who take scheduled planes around Europe and stay in business hotels are fairly low down the pecking order. You think they turn their phones on the instant the plane has landed because the Tokyo stock exchange is struggling to manage without them. No. The reason they turn them on so damn fast is to find out if they’ve been sacked. Honestly, you don’t need to treat them like you’re on the set of Upstairs Downstairs. They do not spend their afternoons cutting the crusts off cucumber sandwiches. And they do not say grace before dinner. They’re called Steve and Dave and you know what they’re doing on their laptops in the departure lounge? Organising a backward hedge merger with GEC? ‘Fraid not. They’re looking at some Hooters Swimsuit pictures from the internet. For crying out loud, I’m middle class. I went to a school most people would call posh. But if I came home and said to my wife that I wanted a beverage, or asked her to pass the condiments, she’d punch me. When I travel, I don’t need to be treated like Hyacinth Bucket. I want you to understand I speak like you do and that I’ll understand perfectly if you say there’s a kettle in my room. You don’t have to say there are ‘tea and coffee making facilities’. And please, can you stop saying ‘at all’ after every question. Can I take your coat at all? Would you care for lunch at all? Or, this week, on a flight back from Scandinavia, ‘Another beverage for yourself at all, sir?’ What’s the matter with saying ‘Another drink?’ And what’s with all the reflexive pronoun abuse? I’ve written about this before but it’s getting worse. Reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and the object of a sentence are the same person or thing. Like ‘I dress myself. You cannot therefore say ‘please contact myself. Because it makes you look like an imbecile. If you send a letter to a client saying ‘my team and me look forward to meeting with yourself next Wednesday’, be prepared for some disappointment. Because if I were the client I’d come to your office all right. Then I’d stand on your desk and relieve myself. I’m not a grammar freak – I can eat, shoot and then take it or leave it – but when someone says ‘myself instead of ‘me’ I find it more offensive than if they’d said ‘spastic wog’. Before embarking on a sentence, work out first of all what’s the shortest way of saying it, not the longest. There seems to be a general sense that using more words than is strictly necessary is somehow polite. That’s almost certainly why, on another flight the other day, I was offered some ‘bread items’. We see this most conspicuously in the catering industry, where I am regularly offered a ‘choice of both Cheddar and Brie’. No, wait. I’ve forgotten the pointless adjectives. I should have said a ‘choice of both flavoursome Cheddar and creamy Brie’. ‘Are you ready to order at all, yourself, sir?’ ‘Yes, I’ll have the hearty winter-warming soup and the nourishing bowl of pasta, topped with the delicious dew-picked tomatoes, thanks. And to follow, if yourself can manage it, a plate of gag-inducing, nostril-assaulting, bacteria-laced Stilton.’ It’s all rubbish. Why is a bowl of pasta more appealing than a plate of pasta? And why not simply say pasta? Because don’t worry, I’ll presume it’ll come on