BATTLE FOR BEACH 8

Never sure how to take being trained. I’m just not comfortable around people whose sole purpose is to know more about something than I do. It makes me nervous. I guess I’m just out of practice. I think the last person who taught me something useful was my driving instructor. Everything since then - largely useless - has been picked up through trial and error. Mainly error. So it feels quite novel to be in a small boat in the middle of a harbour being shown how to make it go and, more importantly, stop, without killing everyone involved. 

We’ve hired a Yellow Boat for the day on the promise of accessing one of twelve Beautiful and Secluded Beaches just up the coast. Beaches that no one without a boat, or hooves, can reach. But first I - and my fellow trainee, a wiry cockney with a nicotine croak and scarlet polo shirt - need to learn the ropes.

I don’t much like our teacher. If Ben Affleck was asked to play a Greek sleazeball this is probably how he'd do it. I don’t think he likes me either. I suspect he’d just as soon drop me to the bottom of the harbour in concrete flip-flops as teach me how to use his boat. 

Anyway, unlike my co-trainee, I have prior boating experience. Which is why I’ve not bothered looking at the video before we came, and he has. We’re shown how to moor the thing off a Beautiful and Secluded Beach. I ask what happens if the anchor gets stuck. Scarlett lets slip that the video covered that and sends his eyes briefly skyward. Point made. He gets to drive the boat back to shore, I don’t. I take this as our mentor acknowledging my innate nautical aptitude. Or possibly he wants me dead.

GREEK LOAF

Our luxury villa has been laid waste, pulverised into little more than a pile of gravel on an arid hillside. Either that or the sat nav got it wrong.

"Ring the number."

"I’ve tried, it doesn’t work. Just goes to beeps."

Despite our best efforts we’re both thinking the unthinkable. That we’ve been taken in by people who dupe people far less intelligent than us. That we might have to go on the telly and sit side by side holding hands to relate our sad and tragic tale for the amusement and edification of people to whom this kind of thing never happens. People like us.

Nearby a goat bleats insensitively as if nothing’s happened.

"What do the directions say?"

"Turn left before the Shell garage." 

But this doesn’t feel like the kind of place you’re going to find one of those. In fact it feels like we're the first motor vehicle ever to pass this way. Other than the one that brought the gravel. 

STILL HERE

David went cos he lost. Nigel went cos he won. Boris went cos he won but can’t win thanks to Michael, who reckons he can win despite having won. Theresa lost but might win, even though no one who lost can. Jeremy won but, like Boris, can’t win, so he’ll be gone soon too - once someone who can win wins. Tony would probably have to go soon if it weren’t for the fact that he already went. So he’ll stay gone.

Meanwhile, the rest of us - winners and losers - aren’t going anywhere. Us amateur legislators don’t have the luxury of resigning, disgraced and discredited, because we never had a reputation to besmirch. Of fading back into the background, because we never stepped out of it. Of spending more time with our families because we spend too much time with them already.

MIND THE GAP

Today as I boarded a tube train I was warned to "mind the gap". Twice. And then, more specifically, to "mind the gap between the platform and the train". So I took a proper look at the gap for perhaps the first time in my life. And found it to be around 2.5 inches wide. Which left me wondering what danger such a gap could represent. Later at the airport I traversed a gap at least half an inch wider between the top of some stairs and an aeroplane. And no one said a word.

Is it because, when it comes to flying, falling fifteen feet through a 3 inch gap onto concrete is the least of your worries? Or does EasyJet just not care? Or can London Underground just not help itself trotting out the same old gap thing because it’s what it’s always done, and if it didn’t the tourists would complain? Even though no one really knows what they’re minding, and what it means to mind it.

But given the number of times it gets a mention, we can only assume the gap is insanely dangerous. So it seems strange not to be given more detail. 

CENTENNIAL BUG

As a rule, I think you should understand what something is before you commit to looking after it for the rest of its life. For example, last year the youngest wanted a pet so I bought him a Roborovski Hamster. On the misapprehension that anything with ‘hamster’ in its name would do the job. Turned out it's too fast to handle and sleeps all day. And keeps the rest of us awake all night by spinning its wheel at an rpm that would put a supercharged V8 to shame. In short, it’s very bad at being a pet. But that’s not its fault. Because, it’s excellent at being a Roborovski Hamster. And what more can you ask of any rodent - or anybody for that matter - than being itself, well. Undoubtedly the fault was mine.

And it looks like I’ve never understood my children either. Because an article in the paper has just told me what they actually are. Turns out we’re not the same species, which accounts for a lot. They’re something called Centennials; 21st century super beings descended from late breeding Generation X’ers (like us) and our beloved successors, the Millennials. 

Who have had their day it would seem. Fine by me, never liked them anyway. Moping around with their suspicious-looking tubs of homemade super juice. Nibbling bird seed and whinging on about terrorism and not being able to buy a house. 

Anyway, now they’ve got something else to worry about. They’re about to be outclassed by Centennials, and I’ve got two of them.

POP GEAR

So 4.4 million people tuned in to watch Top Gear. What does that tell us about how good the show was? Absolutely nothing. They didn’t tune in because they liked it, they tuned in because deep down they knew they wouldn't, but wanted to be proved wrong. Unfortunately, and inevitably, they were not.

Imagine if James Bond walked off the set of the next Bond movie and vowed never to come back. Not Daniel Craig mind you, James Bond. What would the producers do for the next movie? Make a Bond film without Bond in the hope nobody notices? Fooling themselves into thinking that international espionage and the inner working of the British Intelligence Service are what people actually watch Bond movies for? No, they’d probably call it a day.

Which would have been a very good idea when Clarkson went last year. May and Hammond knew the show couldn’t work without the three of them so they left too. The BBC probably knew that as well, but had no choice but to give it a go. So they pretended people watch Top Gear to see people - any people - dicking about in cars, and re-booted the show. 

KILLING TIME

Passing gallstones hurts, but passing time hurts more. Especially if you’re eleven and waiting to play Star Wars Battlefront on your brand new Xbox One.

First the box needs updating. Cue two hour wait with mid-strength teary tantrum. But we get there ahead of time, and suddenly there’s hope. The Microsoft account works. Good. The Xbox profile copies across. Good good. We get out the new game - on a good old disc God bless it. No more of this interminable downloading nonsense. 

But guess what, it turns out the game isn’t finished. The bloke who was supposed to have finished it must have nipped out for a vape and left it on his workbench where the bloke who was supposed to put it in a case and take it to Amazon mistakenly put it in a case and took it to Amazon.

FREE LUNCH

The youngest is contemplating his plain cheese burger, the eldest his burrito. The youngest’s friend is contemplating his chicken nuggets and I’m contemplating him. He’s small with specs and ginger hair. Quite cute looking I suppose you could say. Which makes it all the more difficult, because I’m thinking about the most humane way of disposing of him.

To be clear, this isn’t the kind of thing I do on anything like a regular basis. In fact I can’t remember the last time I disposed of a child - let alone a small, relatively cute one with ginger hair and specs. But fate has dealt young Reginald a cruel hand, because he’s standing between me and £100,000. 

GOD AWFUL ADVERTISING

Funny how the laws of advertising don’t apply when it comes to God. You’d think a once all-powerful worldwide movement trying desperately to hang on to the last remnants of credibility would try a bit harder.

You can imagine God’s brand people briefing the agency:

"Okay, so the challenge we have is that people are repulsed by our use of meaningless cliches, antiquated language and constant references to insanely cruel and sadistic ancient torture techniques." 

And the agency goes away, gives it plenty of the old blue sky, and comes back with this:

At which the brand people pop a bottle of bubbly, give each other a hearty pat on the back and brace themselves for an unprecedented surge in church attendance and a complete reversal of society’s encroaching secularism. 

PROXIMITY MAN

"Nice dog," I observed as we swung into a parking space. "What is it, Spaniel or something?"

“Labradoodle," came the correction from the dog experts in the back.

"Oh. Nice though."

The dog was emptying itself from the car in front of ours, controlled by the smallest and palest of three children who, in turn, were controlled by a couple who looked like they too were on the way back from a relaxing self-catering holiday in an idyllic corner of Scotland, i.e. tense and irritable.