Now were for it: weve stopped behaving badly

Tag : Bed Skirts

Why is this a good idea? No one says of their friends, “Ichose them because they are all so kind to animals and they do goodworks.” We like people who like to laugh, to have fun, tobreak the rules once in a while.
Trouble is, it’s hard to find people like that any more . . .
In the olden days Private Eye was full of stories about journalistswho’d ripped off their employers for 40 grand and been in bedwith a hooker when the story they were supposed to be coveringbroke. Now, it’s just an endless parade of mild hypocrisy.Eighteen months ago the Daily Mail said this. And now it’ssaying the exact opposite. So what.
The maelstrom of expenses fraud and serial shagging has become agentle eddy of honest-to-God mistakes. And whatever happened to thelong lunch? Today, whenever I order a glass of wine in the middleof the day, people look at me as though I might be a Martian. Andthat’s before I step outside for a cigarette.
This brings me on to Amy Winehouse. Has it occurred to anyone thatshe might be having a jolly good time? In the 1950s and 1960s,before the world became so po-faced, the rich and the famous wouldgather in Mustique and the south of France for debauched,drug-fuelled orgies and no one batted an eyelid. Today we tutbecause Russell Crowe has thrown a telephone at someone. And lookwhat happens when an Old Etonian tries to make some governmentalalterations in Africa. Instead of a statue in Trafalgar Square hegets 34 years in the slammer.
Imagine if we had someone like Winston Churchill in power today. Asmoker. A drinker. A man given to Herculean bouts of depression.Under a hailstorm of criticism he wouldn’t last a week. Lookat poor old Charles Kennedy. Gone now and replaced with someonewho, I feel sure, would get a dopamine rush from taking his dog fora walk.
It’s the same for all of us. You can be ostracised by yourneighbours for putting your refuse in the wrong-coloured bin, youcan have your car vandalised if it has four-wheel drive and lastweek there were calls for cyclists to be jailed if they attemptedto enliven this ludicrous means of transport by getting a move on.
Worse, the town of Redruth in Cornwall has imposed a 9pm curfew onall under16s, which means that every 15-year-old boy must now be athome each evening with his parents watching Panorama. I fear theCornish courts had better brace themselves for a massive increasein cases of matricide.
I look sometimes at the microcosm that is my own life andit’s terrifying. Because in recent years I have beencriticised for bumping into a horse chestnut tree; I’ve beencalled a berk, on the front page of a national newspaper, for usingan iPod while driving. And only a couple of weeks ago I was“blasted” for enjoying a gin and tonic while at theNorth Pole.
There’s a constant bombardment for me to sit up straight, eatmy greens, comb my hair. It drives me mad. Honestly. Next timeJames May and I are at a Pole, we’ve decided he’s goingto mainline heroin and I’m going to shoot a baby polar bearin the face. For fun.
I fear for our future. I worry that bad behaviour is being erasedfrom society, and that unless the trend can be reversed somehowwe’ll all have to go through life on the Planet Stepford, arictus grin masking the boiling turmoil of desperation inside. Iyearn sometimes when I encounter a neatly stacked pyramid of tinsof beans to push it over. Don’t you? Wouldn’t it breakthe monotony of having to drive at 30mph and eating a wholefoodfair-trade sandwich at your desk.
Recently Annie Robinson and I dreamt up a TV show that would serveas an antidote to the endless parade of hectoring andfinger-wagging programmes we get today. Instead of running down thestreet after a cowboy builder who’d charged an old lady amillion quid to build a fireplace, we would go after the victims.
It was to be called Sucker and it would celebrate the ingeniouswhile pointing the finger and howling with laughter at the stupid,the gullible and the fat. Never has the nation needed such a showmore. And never has such a thing been less likely to getcommissioned. Unless, of course, we could get Max Mosley to presentit.