Read Online Is It Really Too Much to Ask? by Jeremy Clarkson - Free Book Online
Authors: Jeremy Clarkson
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to work, send emails and come home again. If you look at the business leaders who accompanied Cameron on his trip to India, few of them run companies that make anything.
And that – that – has to be the starting point. Because it’s no good forging a special relationship with India or Finland or anywhere else if we have nothing to offer. It’s no good giving our ambassador to Slovakia a Ford Mondeo to travel the country as a salesman if he has no samples to put in the boot.
Now is the time to turn this around. People will lose their
jobs over the coming months and years. They should be encouraged to go into their sheds and make something. Because now you won’t need to worry about marketing. You have the ambassadors to do that for you. And you don’t need to worry about a shop front, either. Because it’s the British embassy in just about every capital city in the world.
The days of Brown and Blair are over. The days of patronizing, hectoring, ethical nonsense are gone. Britain is now back in business. We just have to work out what that business is going to be.
1 August 2010
Concussion is what holidays are all about
It’s funny, isn’t it? At home, you make sure your children wear cycling helmets when they go for a bike ride, you wear a high-visibility jacket when you are on a building site and you treat your fuse box like it may explode at any moment.
However, as soon as you go on holiday, you are quite happy to jump off a cliff and eat stuff that you know full well has spent its entire miserable life living on a diet of nothing but sewage.
We heard recently about a man who fell 150ft to his death while parasailing on the Turkish coast.
He looked like a normal sort of bloke who would take care when crossing the road and so on, so why did he suddenly think it was a good idea to be tied to the back of a speedboat, by a young chap, using a sun-ravaged harness, and then hoisted into the heavens?
You may think it was a freak occurrence. But if you type ‘parasailing accident’ into Google, you will quickly get the impression that no one has ever returned to earth at anything less than 180mph. Parasailing, it seems, is more dangerous than smearing yourself in Chum and swimming with some crocodiles. But will that knowledge keep me from the big blue yonder when I go on holiday later this month? No.
It gets worse. At home, I make sure my children are kept out of harm’s way as much as possible, but on holiday I once watched them being attached to some parasailing equipment by a man who actually had to put down his spliff so he could tie the knots. Well, when I say knots … Then, later, I put my
boy in an inner tube and towed him around the Caribbean at such enormous speeds that he fell out and was knocked unconscious. What was I thinking of? He is my son. He means everything to me. So why did I think it would be ‘fun’ to tow him across the sea, at 40mph, on his face?
Then we get to the question of vehicular transport when you’re on holiday. At home, you have your car serviced regularly and put through an MOT without complaint. You like to know it’s safe and that the brakes work.
But on holiday you are quite happy to rent something from a man called Stavros who makes you sign all sorts of forms you can neither read nor understand before you belch away in a cloud of burning fluids. Or you rent an amusing scooter that you ride much too quickly in shorts and a pair of flip-flops.
Would you let your eleven-year-old daughter ride about at high speed on such a thing? Of course not. It would be foolish, because if she fell off, she’d be peeled. Right, so why do you let her go on a jet ski? I do.
My youngest daughter and I have spent hours seeing how high we can jump over the waves and who can go the fastest while chasing the flying fish. And get this. When we’ve finished, I let her go snorkelling, knowing full well that the jet skis we’ve just climbed off are now in the hands of other
And that – that – has to be the starting point. Because it’s no good forging a special relationship with India or Finland or anywhere else if we have nothing to offer. It’s no good giving our ambassador to Slovakia a Ford Mondeo to travel the country as a salesman if he has no samples to put in the boot.
Now is the time to turn this around. People will lose their
jobs over the coming months and years. They should be encouraged to go into their sheds and make something. Because now you won’t need to worry about marketing. You have the ambassadors to do that for you. And you don’t need to worry about a shop front, either. Because it’s the British embassy in just about every capital city in the world.
The days of Brown and Blair are over. The days of patronizing, hectoring, ethical nonsense are gone. Britain is now back in business. We just have to work out what that business is going to be.
1 August 2010
Concussion is what holidays are all about
It’s funny, isn’t it? At home, you make sure your children wear cycling helmets when they go for a bike ride, you wear a high-visibility jacket when you are on a building site and you treat your fuse box like it may explode at any moment.
However, as soon as you go on holiday, you are quite happy to jump off a cliff and eat stuff that you know full well has spent its entire miserable life living on a diet of nothing but sewage.
We heard recently about a man who fell 150ft to his death while parasailing on the Turkish coast.
He looked like a normal sort of bloke who would take care when crossing the road and so on, so why did he suddenly think it was a good idea to be tied to the back of a speedboat, by a young chap, using a sun-ravaged harness, and then hoisted into the heavens?
You may think it was a freak occurrence. But if you type ‘parasailing accident’ into Google, you will quickly get the impression that no one has ever returned to earth at anything less than 180mph. Parasailing, it seems, is more dangerous than smearing yourself in Chum and swimming with some crocodiles. But will that knowledge keep me from the big blue yonder when I go on holiday later this month? No.
It gets worse. At home, I make sure my children are kept out of harm’s way as much as possible, but on holiday I once watched them being attached to some parasailing equipment by a man who actually had to put down his spliff so he could tie the knots. Well, when I say knots … Then, later, I put my
boy in an inner tube and towed him around the Caribbean at such enormous speeds that he fell out and was knocked unconscious. What was I thinking of? He is my son. He means everything to me. So why did I think it would be ‘fun’ to tow him across the sea, at 40mph, on his face?
Then we get to the question of vehicular transport when you’re on holiday. At home, you have your car serviced regularly and put through an MOT without complaint. You like to know it’s safe and that the brakes work.
But on holiday you are quite happy to rent something from a man called Stavros who makes you sign all sorts of forms you can neither read nor understand before you belch away in a cloud of burning fluids. Or you rent an amusing scooter that you ride much too quickly in shorts and a pair of flip-flops.
Would you let your eleven-year-old daughter ride about at high speed on such a thing? Of course not. It would be foolish, because if she fell off, she’d be peeled. Right, so why do you let her go on a jet ski? I do.
My youngest daughter and I have spent hours seeing how high we can jump over the waves and who can go the fastest while chasing the flying fish. And get this. When we’ve finished, I let her go snorkelling, knowing full well that the jet skis we’ve just climbed off are now in the hands of other
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