Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (19 page)

There is a terrible famine in East Africa, which is great news if you're a celebrity.

Because it means you can head off to Ethiopia for some nice PR and a spot of late-summer sunshine.

It's a great gig.

All you have to do is walk about on a rubbish tip, looking despondent, and then cuddle a baby with flies in its eyes while pulling your best kid-in-a-wheelchair charity face.

Bang in a couple of shots of you pretending to listen to a starving mum, plaster the finished film with a veneer of ‘Everybody Hurts' by REM and it's back to the hotel for a few beers and a sixth-form debate with the charity bigwigs on the injustices of the World Bank, Swiss drug companies, General Motors, climate change, McDonald's and the bloody Tories.

Meanwhile, back at home, everyone is bored to tears. Legend has it that Bonio once told an audience who'd come to hear him sing ‘Wiv or Wivout You' that every time he clapped his hands a child in Africa died, prompting one wag in the crowd to shout out: ‘Well, stop clapping your hands then.'

Deep down we all feel very sorry for the starving masses but the compassion is buried under the blanket of certainty that Africa is basically screwed. Russell Brand can walk about on a rubbish tip till the cows come home but it'll make no difference to the fact that the leaders are corrupt, violence is a way of life, the Sahara is getting bigger and there's not
a damn thing anyone can do about any of it. It's just a question of what wipes them out first: starvation or AIDS.

I've always felt this way. Bob Geldof may have it in his head that I went to Live Aid so that others, less fortunate than me, might have a happier life. Well, I didn't. I went because I wanted to see the Who. And despite constant denials, I've always harboured a deep-down belief that the money I paid for the ticket was used to provide the Ethiopian president's personal bodyguard with a new Kalashnikov.

Anyway, moving on, I have a strict policy with my children about their holidays. They can do their snogging and drinking in the Easter break but in the summer they have to go somewhere a bit more educational. Which is why, last weekend, my eldest daughter and I set off for a mini-break in Uganda.

A few facts. Half the population of this landlocked East African country is fourteen or younger and the gross domestic product is £11 billion or, to put it another way, about a tenth of what Britain spends on the National Health Service alone. It's very poor, but in Entebbe, which is used by the United Nations as a hub, the whole place looks like Surrey. Except for the shops, most of which are named after the baby Jesus. You have the Blessed Lord butchery and the Praise Be to the Almighty banana emporium. You also have a lot of roadside stalls selling double beds. No idea why.

The capital, though, Kampala? That's a different story. I've seen poverty in my travels. I once saw a woman in Bolivia having a tug-of-war with a dog over an empty crisp packet and in Cambodia you get the impression that pretty well everyone has had their legs blown off by landmines. But nothing prepares you for the jaw-dropping horror of a Ugandan slum.

We stepped out of the car, over the body of a man, and
moments later we were surrounded by solid proof that Dante completely miscalculated the number of circles in hell. We'll start with sanitation.

There isn't any. Well, there are a couple of public bogs, but since they cost 200 shillings to use, everyone simply uses what passes for the street. At one point we were taken to a 10ft x 10ft brothel, which in the rainy season floods to a depth of 2ft with raw sewage. This means customers have the opportunity to catch cholera and AIDS in one hit.

You may wonder why anyone goes there. Well, it's simple. In a two-hour walk I didn't see a single girl under the age of eighteen. ‘They don't survive,' said our guide. Which, when translated, means they are either raped and then murdered to shut them up or they are beheaded by witch doctors in the daily child sacrifice ceremonies.

Not that most of the boys seem to care very much since almost all of them are completely off their heads on solvents.

They lie there – some of them just three years old – entirely unaware of the fact they're in a puddle of someone else's piss.

You know the cupboard under your stairs? In a Kampala slum this would be considered a luxury house and at night it would sleep seven people. I could not see how this would be possible unless they all stood up. Which, when the rains come, is necessary anyway.

On the upside, we did find a lovely place for lunch. A few miles away from the slum, in the shadow of an amazing new hotel complex owned by the president's wife, was a Belgian restaurant where we had a Nile beer and an excellent beef stew. It cost more than most people in Uganda will earn in a lifetime.

Over coffee, which is delicious in this part of the world, we talked about the Lord's Resistance Army, which runs
about in the north of Uganda torturing, mutilating, murdering and raping pretty much anything that hasn't already died of starvation.

Over the obligatory corporate greed and climate change debate on what's to be done, we concluded that Live Aid didn't work. Live 8 didn't work. Nothing's worked. And, yes, while it's good that David Cameron has pledged to keep Britain's foreign aid at similar levels, we shouldn't forget that last year the Ministry of Defence spent £1.7 million on body armour and helmets for the Ugandan army which, honestly, isn't really what most people think of as ‘aid'.

All I know is that when you've been there, you feel compelled to do something. Appear in a charity video, walking about on a rubbish tip, wearing a compassionate face? Yup. Count me in.

11 September 2011

Every week we are presented with supposedly conclusive proof that Britain is broken. The summer was marked by riots; you get five minutes in jail for murdering a baby; our education system is worse than Slovenia's; and we're told that it's perfectly natural and traditional for travelling people to keep a handful of slaves in the shed. Meanwhile, register offices are full of people who've never met; your village bobby can neither read nor write; your MP is an imbecile; burglaries aren't investigated; the banks are back in cloud cuckoo land; and the rivers are all full of excrement.

Swim down the Thames these days and you really will be ‘going through the motions'.

Those who seek to make gloom and doom from all of this say that Britain was much better when everything was in black and white and we had the reassuring spectacle of
Dixon of Dock Green
on the television every week. But this is rubbish. Because back then everyone died of pneumoconiosis when they were twelve, immigrants were routinely poked with sticks, tea was considered exotic and Ronnie and Reggie Kray were running amok in the capital, nailing people's heads to the floor.

If you developed cancer in 1956, you'd had it and would welcome death's cold embrace with open arms because it was a ticket out of the grime and the misery and the unfunny television shows and the soot and the socialism.

The fact, then, is this: life's better now than it has been at any point in human history. It's better than it was ten years
ago. It's better than it was yesterday morning. Except for one thing.

You may have read last week about a young man called Sean Duffy, who took it upon himself to post revoltingly unkind internet messages about teenagers who had died. He superimposed the face of one, who had committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train, on to a video of
Thomas the Tank Engine
. And he put up pictures of the site where another had lost her life in a road smash with the caption: ‘Used car for sale, one useless owner.'

It's impossible to conceive how much anguish this caused the families, and that's why you were no doubt delighted to hear that Duffy was given the maximum jail sentence of eighteen weeks.

But hang on a minute: is he so very different from everyone else? Last week one newspaper ran on its website some photos of an actress who had been knocked down by a car. People in their droves left unbelievably unkind comments about her face and her children. There was even worse abuse for Jade Jagger, who had been photographed topless on a beach. She was described as ‘ugly', ‘fat' and a ‘spoilt rude cow'. Elsewhere, Elton John was ‘greedy', the Duchess of Cornwall was ‘lazy' and Simon Cowell's legs were ‘too short'.

If you plunge even more deeply into the darkest corners of cyberspace, you will find websites that show people with severed arms searching for the heads of their loved ones on the hard shoulder. People being eaten by tigers. People after they've jumped from the top of a skyscraper. And each is accompanied by amusing observations from the folks at home. If you die now, you'd better make sure no one has a camera, because if they do, the event is almost certain to end up on the web.

The internet is now just a receptacle for vitriol. It's malice
in wonderland. And that's before we get to Facebook – which, let's not forget, was set up as a place where men could go online to make judgements about a girl's appearance – or Twitter.

You may say this is a new phenomenon – another example of the sick society we've created – and that it's caused by the anonymity of the internet. But is it? Long before you had a domain and an email address, you would sit in the safety of your car, muttering abuse at other drivers. Which amounts to exactly the same as muttering cyberspace abuse at Cheryl Cole's hair from the safety of your home or office.

And even before people had windscreens to hide behind they would go home after a hard day down the pit and mumble about the shortcomings of their neighbours, their colleagues, their bosses, the government. This is the way we are. It's just that now the internet lets us grumble in public.

Time and again a mother has presented me with her newborn and I've wanted to say: ‘Holy cow. It looks like a smashed ape.' But I've been forced by my frontal lobes to
um
and
ah
until I can find a compliment of some kind. It's usually about the pram.

Once, I was taken backstage after an appalling play to meet the actress who had been simply dreadful in the lead. But, instead of saying she was dire, I cracked my face into a beam and said she'd been ‘amazing'. Which was also true. She had.

Then there was the time I interviewed Chuck Yeager, the sound-barrier-breaking former test pilot. I wanted to say afterwards that he had been, without a doubt, the most unpleasant man in the entire world and that he was living, breathing proof that you should never meet your heroes. But instead I thanked him for his time and drove away.

In her latter years my grandmother lost the brake on her brain and would spend her days in the local dress shop,
howling with derisive laughter at everyone who came out of the changing rooms. Secretly, I've always wanted to do the same. I bet you have, too.

Well, now the internet lets you. No longer do you have to sit in a fog of impotence during a television show that you dislike. You can get on your phone or computer and let the world know. Last week, for instance, Lily Allen saw a picture of me in the paper and tweeted one word: ‘vomit'.

The internet hasn't caused any of this. It isn't, as some would have you believe, another example of Broken Britain and a fractured society. No, the internet is just a tool, which has demonstrated that behind our smiles and our cleverness, human beings, actually, are fairly terrible.

18 September 2011

There are many reasons why people choose to own a pet. To stop a daughter's endless nagging; for companionship; as an excuse to take the occasional walk; or because you won it at a fair and it seemed cruel to flush it down the waste disposal unit. Cruel, and difficult, especially if it was a horse.

However, according to a recent survey, 39 per cent of pet owners say they invested in their furry friend to replace a husband or wife. And I'm sorry, but I find this a bit alarming, because how can a pet possibly do that? It can't cook, or iron, or clean the air filter on a 1973 Lotus Elan.

And if you try to use it for a spot of jiggy jiggy, you can be fairly sure the police will want a word.

The trouble is, of course, that we all love animals a lot more than we love people. And the animal we love most of all is the dog. Dogs make us soft in the head.

In the disaster movie 2012, thousands of Chinese people are killed by a tsunami. But that's okay because we are treated to a close-up of the heroine's King Charles spaniel boarding a rescue ship in the nick of time. Then you have
Armageddon
, in which giant meteorites wipe out half of New York. But this is no problem because when the destruction is over, we see that the dog that we thought had been killed is in fact perfectly all right. Phew. It was only people that got flattened and blown up.

Such is our love for the dog that there are now 1.2 million Pakistanis living in Britain, 154,000 Nigerians, about a million Poles and 7.3 million dogs. Many of them live in my house.

On the face of it, it's an excellent idea to keep a pooch. It will bark at burglars and sit by the fire in the evenings, looking all sweet and cuddly. And all it demands in return for its sweetness and its Group 4 policy on security is a handful of biscuits and a bowlful of tinned meat from a company that did somehow work out how to push a horse through a waste disposal unit.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work out like this in reality. Let's take my West Highland terrier as a prime example of the problem. She is very cute and has fully jointed ears that swivel about when she is excited. On the downside, she is very violent. In the past two months alone she has eaten the lady who delivers the papers, the postman and the man who came round to mend my computer. She's like Begbie from
Trainspotting
.

Then there's a labradoodle, which is about the same size as an elephant. This means that no matter how high the shelf on which we put leftover chops and joints of lamb, he can get at them no problem at all. He also manages to look fantastically indignant when you tell him off.

There's also an elderly Labrador, who is now blind, deaf, arthritic and bald. Technically, she isn't really a dog any more. And then there's a young Labrador, who recently had her first period. This drove the labradoodle stark staring mad. He became a sex-crazed elephant-wolf who spent his entire time trying to put his ridiculous dog lipstick into the back of the stricken Lab, until eventually we had to send her away to the kennels.

This made things worse because he was now cut off from the target of his lust. So he began to mount everything else. The dishwasher, the keyhole in the front door, me, my daughter's friends and the exhaust pipe of my bloody car. At one point he attempted to rape the newspaper columnist Jane
Moore's dog and didn't seem to realize that a) it was male and b) he'd accidentally climbed on to the damn thing's face.

We locked him in a fenced-off part of the garden and he tried to eat a metal gate to get out. And then, with blood pouring from the wounds he'd inflicted on himself, he scampered off to the hen house. Nobody in human history has ever thought, ‘Hmmm. I fancy a go on that chicken.' But he did.

Meanwhile, the housekeeper's Lab had been similarly affected and had tried to mate with the cat, my wellington boots and the lawnmower. Six months from now I won't be at all surprised if one of my donkeys gives birth to a dog. It's been like living in an inter-species free-love commune. Only with added howling.

You don't think of any of this when you are buying a puppy. You think the worst thing that could happen is that it will unravel the occasional loo roll. Nobody at Battersea Dogs Home ever tells a prospective customer that one day the scampering little mite in which they're interested will try to have sex with the vacuum cleaner.

My wife suggested that we really ought to relieve the pressure by, ahem, giving the maniacal labradoodle a helping hand, but I'm sorry, no: that's up there with morris dancing and incest. And so we took him to the kennels and brought the bitch home.

When she had finished filling the house with what to a doggy nose is Impulse body spray we brought him back and were looking forward to some peace. But no. Because while he was away, he had caught something called kennel cough. It doesn't sound so bad, does it? You think you could live with a coughing dog. Well, you can't, because a more accurate name for the disease would be ‘explosive vomiting'.

So now he helps himself to a leg of lamb that we'd stored on top of a pylon, and just a few minutes later it shoots back
out of his mouth all over whatever it was he broke last week by trying to have sex with. This upsets the Westie, who decides to bite another visitor, and when you tell him off he has the cheek to look affronted.

This is the reality of dog ownership. Fluids. Mess. Stolen food. Expense. Savaged paper boys. No post. Vets' bills. Broken vacuum cleaners. Ruined washing machines. Chewed shoes. Unravelled bog rolls. Endless barking, and then terrible, aching sadness when they die.

I can understand, therefore, why they make such an ideal substitute for a husband or a wife. There's no real difference.

25 September 2011