Clarkson's Sunday Times Columns

You're very welcome. Here's this week's opus:

The digital kids are all right; it's adults who need iSaving (Jan. 8)

It's obvious, when you think about it, that England would have something called a children's commissioner. We have commissioners for the church and the health service and the trees and every other damn thing, so naturally we are going to have one for the kiddies.

The job of commissioner Anne Longfield is to run an ethnically diverse operation, with a website featuring every different type of child from every type of background. There are photographs of N'boto, recently arrived from Somalia, and Araminta from Notting Hill and Piggy from Lord of the Flies and it's all too lovely for words.

But behind the pretty pictures there's a serious job to be done: making sure that children's rights are upheld and that their "views are taken seriously". So there you are, kids: if your mum and dad or mum and mum since this is 2017 won't let you watch Celebrity Big Brother, forget Childline. Call the commissioner.

Last week she was busy explaining to anyone who'd listen that the internet is not designed for children. Really? I only ask because so far as I can tell they are the only ones who can work it properly.

I've seen toddlers who can't even walk hooking up their parents' new smart televisions to the web, and kids so young that they are happy to sit in a puddle of their own making skittling about on the surface of an iPad as if they are trying to get the Starship Enterprise started after a particularly grueling battle with the Romulans.

Yesterday my son replaced his iPhone with a Samsung, which even I know can talk to each other in the same way a Frenchman can talk to a Danish pastry. I asked if he knew how to transfer his data across the great electronic divide and he looked at me as if I might be a bit simple.

The truth is, though, that when it comes to the web, adults are a bit simple. For months my telephone demanded that I update its innards and eventually I decided to comply, which means that every single thing is now unusual. My email chains are upside down, so I don't know who started them, my photographs are stored in albums that make no sense and my music is accessible only if I'm first of all prepared to spend a couple of hours rummaging around in Jennifer Lawrence's groin on the cloud.

This means I have to learn how to do stuff all over again and this is where adults have the problem. Most teenagers do not have a clue how to clean a gun or wire a plug or much of anything at all. Their heads are full only of thoughts about vodka and sex, which means there's plenty of spare capacity for apps and AirDrops and iMessaging.

My head, on the other hand, has spent 56 years absorbing stuff, which means that now it is full to the brim. So if I learn how to play my music through my car stereo, another nugget of information must be erased from the memory banks.

This is a worry. Because it could mean I end up learning how to put an interesting article in a box and post it on Twitter. But as a result forget where Germany is. Or that economy class on a plane is terrible.

The children's commissioner is very worried that kids are signing up to all sorts of stuff on the net without realising just how invasive the results will be. She says children don't read terms and conditions and wouldn't understand them even if they did.

I don't for a moment doubt that this is true. But does she think adults fare any better? I mean, if you sign up for Apple iTunes, the legal document, if printed out, would run to 56 pages. Nobody has the time to absorb such a thing, and even if they did, imagine how much other important knowledge would have to be ejected to make room.

I have literally no idea what I'm doing when I blunder about on the internet. I buy a film from iTunes that for some reason iTunes then keeps. I'm only allowed to watch it if I have wi-fi, and if I give Apple a password, which is never good enough so I have to get another, which is sent to my email along with an assumption that I'll be able to cut and paste it into the correct Apple password box.

You didn't get any of that when you bought a DVD from HMV. The shop assistant put it in a bag. You went home, put it in your machine and watched it. You didn't have the ghost of Steve Jobs asking you to prove who you were before you were allowed to enjoy what was legally yours. But is the film I've downloaded legally mine? I don't know because I haven't read the 56-page legal document. Which is why I'm still quite good at Pointless.

The children's commissioner says that if teenagers realised what they were signing up to when they joined Instagram they'd all run a mile. But my betting is that they wouldn't. Because how else would they send one another pictures of their parts? In the post? They are probably dimly aware that when they sign up to any site, or any app or any feature on the net, someone somewhere immediately knows who they are and where they live and what they like to do at weekends. And they are also probably dimly aware that this information could one day be hacked by the Russians.

And you know what they'd say to that? "So what?" Because who cares if Mr Putin knows they like to go to Topshop on a Saturday and that they're a size 12.

I guess it's the same story for all of us. The internet is a big bag of brilliance. But it comes with a downside. Soon, everyone everywhere will be able to find out everything you've ever done, thought, bought or said.

Sadly, however, if the government goes ahead with its new press regulatory ideas, the newspapers will be able to report none of it.

Which seems to be a bigger story than the children's commissioner's worries about kids talking to one another on Snapchat.
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What do you want to bet the children's commissioner is as confused as Jeremy?
 
Health issues this week:

My body's a write-off in waiting, so why have all these repairs? (Jan. 15)

If you have chosen to do the dry January thing, you will have realised by now that every single drink that doesn't contain alcohol is either full of enough sugar to cause your heart to explode or so dreary that you'd rather die of dehydration.

If you've gone out at all, you'll have stood at the bar for an hour thinking: "I don't want a Coca-Cola, I've had enough elderflower cordial to have left an impact on Britain's hedgerows, I hate water and coffee will keep me awake all night." Then, much to the exasperation of everyone who was queuing behind you, you'll have given up and gone home, where your friends won't have called in, because why would they? They don't want to sit around with someone who's being sanctimonious and boring and who, by 10pm, would be finding none of what they have to say either funny or interesting.

And what's the upside? Yes. You'll have proved to yourself that you are in control of your own destiny and that you have a backbone. And you may even have lost an inch from your turkeyed-up waistline. But by February 4, after you've let your hair down again, you'll be back to where you started.

Plus, how do you know, as the long evenings crawl by in a cold, damp blur of films you've already seen, box sets that don't make sense and endless trips to the fridge to see if there's a cold chicken that you didn't notice the last time, that you aren't on the verge of a burst aneurysm or a heart attack? Or that one of your cells hasn't just decided to become cancerous? In short, how do you know that you're not going through a friendless, month-long hell for no reason? That's why before I started dry January I decided to make sure I wasn't already booked in for an appointment with the Reaper. So I went for a medical. There was a bit of running on a treadmill and quite a lot of lying in a hot, noisy tube, but mostly it involved the doctor manually checking my eyes, hearing, skin and prostate by putting his whole head in my bottom and having a look around.

It's really not fair. Women check themselves for cancer by playing with their breasts, which is a lovely thing to do. Whereas men have to allow another man to ferret about in their exhaust pipe. Which is not lovely at all.

But with crossed eyes and a slight sense of shame and regret I was told that, apart from a fat liver and some mildly bunged-up arteries, I'm likely to be around for a little while yet. So I went home, bought some elderflower cordial and poured the Chateau Leoube down the sink.

And then I decided that rather than concentrate only on my liver I'd sort everything else out as well. So, with my bottom still smarting from the medical, I went to the dentist, who hurt me even more using various Marathon Man prongs and some jets of cold air. This enforced pain revealed that I needed three root canals, two fillings, four crowns and a wisdom tooth removal.

Later that day, as I chewed idly on a piece of nicotine gum, trying to figure out whether "searing" was a good-enough adjective to describe the agony that lay ahead, a tooth that had been identified earlier as healthy broke in half. Which meant an emergency recall to the White Angel and the news that actually I needed four root canals, two fillings, five crowns and a wisdom tooth removal.

And a new nose. The blood vessel that's gone wonky on the top-left side is only a small thing at the moment but if I fail to get it treated, I'll end up with a port wine stain as big as a medium-sized town, which would be at odds with my newly thin liver and my sound mouth.

So I went to see a man in Harley Street, who shot me -- six times -- in the face with a space laser. Apparently it's the same sort of treatment ladies use to keep their gardens in check, and I'll tell you this: if I were a woman, it'd look like a 1970s welcome mat down there because, oh my God, it hurt. And I've to go back five more times before the blood vessel is dead.

Which will be tricky because I need to find time to do something about my numb thigh, my painful left shin, my gut and what I thought was a wart but isn't, on my right index finger.

I was also intrigued by a policy currently being pursued by my colleagues Richard Hammond and James May, who have both decided to become vegetarian.

At first I thought this was for health reasons and I was intrigued. But as they are sporting identical beards at the moment and have bought identical motorcycles, maybe the vegetablist thing is just some kind of weird bonding. Whatever. I have chosen not to go down that road.

It's for the same reason that I've decided not to accompany three friends on their annual trip to a clinic in Germany next week. They speak of the dried toast and the gruel and the misery, but they also talk -- quite a lot -- about the communal showers and the amount of all-male nakedness, and I'm not sure that's my thing.

Besides, with the teeth and the liver and the nose and the finger and the thigh and the arteries, I have quite enough on my plate already. So much in fact that I'm beginning to wonder whether what I'm actually doing is trying to shore up one of those clifftop houses.

At great expense I'm putting in new foundations and building tidal barriers and inserting sturdy new props, but the sea is coming and it is going to win and one day -- no matter what I do -- I'll wake up at the bottom of the cliff and it'll be cold and black and endless.

Would it be better, I wonder, to abandon the policy of raging at the setting of the sun and embrace it? Over a nice plate of cholesterol and a bottle of Chateau Minuty?
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Thinking of relocating?

Sure, you'll get by on ?85,000 a day but the family won't (Jan. 22)

It seems that Diego Costa, a charismatic and brilliant footballer who scores many goals for Chelsea, has been offered nearly ?600,000 a week to sign with a club in China.

This raises an interesting question. How much would I have to be paid to pack a suitcase and start a new life in Beijing? And I think the answer is: "There isn't enough money in the entire world."

I once saw half a dog in China. From its nose to about three-quarters of the way down its ribcage it was completely normal, with sticky-up ears and a doggy face, but at some point in its life it had obviously been run over by a steamroller, which meant that its back end, its tail and its hind legs had been converted into what looked like a weird rug.

It was going about its business as though nothing was wrong, scavenging in bins for food and using its front legs to pull its wafer-thin rear end around.

I'm not saying all dogs are like this in China, but the mere fact that this poor creature had had the time to come to terms with its significant disability meant that over a period of several months or even years no one had had the presence of mind to put it out of its misery. They'd seen it, noted it and then moved on.

We are told that China is a technological powerhouse and that it is home to the brainiest and best-funded scientists in the world, but none of them had seen the half-a-dog and thought: "Hmmm. Tonight I shall fit its back end with a set of steerable wheels."

That's what would have happened in Britain, and we'd have seen the results in a tear-jerking film on Blue Peter.

There are other things in China that are odd. For example, on my most recent trip I ordered sushi and was presented a few minutes later with a fish that was still alive.

It was flapping around on the plate, which would have been fine, except that one whole side of it had been carved into thin slivers that were still attached. The waiter explained that I should simply tear the strips off, one at a time, and eat them.

Well, now, look. I appreciate that sushi should be as fresh as possible, but I feel fairly sure that if the fish had been killed in the kitchen before it was carved up, my taste buds wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. Nothing's going to decompose noticeably in 60 seconds.

Other things. Well, pop socks are seen as some kind of fashion highlight, the smog is bad, the traffic is worse and the weather is nuts. The first time I went to Beijing it was a hundred degrees and pouring with rain.

Plus I wouldn't be able to go to the cinema because I wouldn't understand what was going on. And there wouldn't be enough legroom.

And I wouldn't be able to tell the time because after two days the second hand would have fallen off my new Rolex, indicating that it wasn't really a Rolex at all.

Most important of all, though, I'd get home every night and sit in my sumptuously appointed apartment all alone, trying to make my television work and then giving up because it wasn't really a proper Sony. My bank balance would be swelling at the rate of ?85,000 a day, but I'd have no one to spend it on. Because that's the next thing you have to think about when you are offered a big-money deal to move to the other side of the world: your family.

You'd have work to keep you occupied, and therefore a reason for getting up in the morning. But your wife? Your children? It's fairly safe to assume that if they tagged along they'd be so bored they'd be sniffing glue by week two, just for something to do.

And it's not just China. It's everywhere. If you were offered ?30m a year to move to Los Angeles, where the fishes are dead before you eat them and there are patrols to remove halved dogs from your line of sight, you'd be off in a flash. But what would your family do while you were lunching at the Ivy in LA with your new colleagues? In your mind they'd be invited round for tea and buns by Cameron Diaz and they'd spend all day at the beach, sharing ice creams with George Clooney. But that wouldn't happen. They'd know no one, they'd have nothing to do and as a result they'd all be alcoholics and drug addicts by the middle of March.

There are many places in the world that I truly love. The south of France is right up there. I'm always overcome by a tidal wave of joy when I land at Nice airport. I think it is completely impossible to be unhappy if you are in St Tropez ... unless you actually have to live there.

Because how many games of boules can you play? How many bits of raw cauliflower can you eat at Le Club 55? And how long would it be before you gave up pretending that you weren't looking at breasts on the beach and just gawped openly like a lunatic? I'm not a lunatic, so I'm not going to pretend that money is the root of all evil and that you'd be happier with nothing more than an orange and a piece of string.

But we must face facts and accept that while money enables you to do all sorts of stuff, it is no good on its own; you need something else as well. You need your friends. And the fact is: they're here.

Unfortunately, from Chelsea football club's point of view, Diego Costa's friends are not here. They are in Brazil, which is where he was born. So from his point of view London and Beijing are exactly the same. Neither is home. So either will do.
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Jezza does not seem to have considered that it's possible to make new friends.
 
Well, not only that but, what if you just want to go somewhere else for the sake being able to? The fact that, as long as you understand local dialects and way of life, why not move around?
 
I was a kid in the 80s. Would you like to come and sniff some glue?

 
This one rambles a bit...

Cut a Brexit deal? We can't even find the knife drawer (Jan. 29)

Shortly after the people of our great country decided that we should leave the European Union, it became very clear that this was going to be easier said than done. Who, for example, when they put their mark in the Brexit box, had heard of the customs union or article 50? As the full range of problems began to unfurl, many people began to voice concerns that the whole process would be just too overwhelming and difficult. And then came news from the Supreme Court that the people's vote, as Cilla Black would undoubtedly have called it, was irrelevant and that a decision of this magnitude could only be made by much more intelligent people, such as Tom Watson, in parliament.

Still, we've been able to stay calm because we have a sense that behind the scenes Whitehall is full of people with supercomputer minds who are churning through the process, and that the diplomatic corps is working in full cup-of-tea-and-genuflecture mode to ensure that some jumped-up Latvian doesn't get all snarky about our decision to leave and withdraw all our strawberry pickers.

We always do this. We sit around thinking: "Well, I couldn't do that." But we sort of know by which I mean "hope" that somewhere, possibly in the grounds of a little-known stately home, the government has employed a gang of modern-day Alan Turings to work it all out. This helps us relax. But the trouble is: I'm not sure we're right.

I've come to this conclusion after many years of staying at people's houses. You know the form. You wake up before they do in urgent need of some Nurofen and a cup of coffee, so you toddle downstairs into their kitchen, which you discover, after about an hour, has been laid out by an imbecile.

First of all, there's the coffee machine. It's complicated and has many buttons, and so you need some kind of instruction manual, which obviously is going to be in a nearby drawer. But it isn't. It isn't anywhere, in fact, so you stab away at various buttons until the machine spurts a jet of scalding brown waste all over the floor.

This means you need a mop, which will be under the stairs. Or in a tall cupboard next to the fridge. But it turns out to be as hidden away as the instruction book that caused the problem in the first place. Eventually, though, when the puddle has cooled to boiling point, you can once again approach the machine in your bare feet, and soon you'll figure it out. But then you need a mug. And there isn't one. Anywhere.

All you can find in the cupboard next to the coffee machine is a selection of unused wedding presents, including a fine bone china sugar bowl, so you use that as a mug, and now you need some actual sugar. Is it in the cupboard with the flour and the salt and the two-month-old garlic clove? Nope. It's in a drawer, with the napkins and the Christmas decorations.

Teaspoon? That's in another drawer, under the cooker, with the pans and the colander and the clingfilm. And by the time you've located it, the coffee you made has gone cold. And your head is hurting and you really need a Nurofen and you've looked everywhere.

You've found the drawer for drawing pins, which is nowhere near the chipboard frame that houses all the amusing skiing-holiday photographs, and the phone book, which is on the opposite side of the room to the actual phone, and the washing-up liquid, which is in the Welsh dresser, 15 feet from the sink. And then you find the mop, which is in the pantry. Obviously.

The headache pills, you eventually learn, are in the third drawer down in the hall table with the unopened sex toy and the bank statements. And by the time your hosts finally surface at about 11am, you've decided they're weird and stupid and broke and you never want to see them again.

Actually, you'll have pretty much come to that conclusion the night before when you asked after dinner if it'd be all right to have a cigarette. They'll have said yes while pulling a face that said no and then gone on a harrumphing search for the lone ashtray. "I know we have one somewhere," they'll have said, before locating it in a linen chest on the landing.

For the next 10 minutes they'll have stared at you as you puffed away, before suddenly remembering they smoke too.

Which means at about 11pm your supply of fags will have been exhausted, so someone will have had to go to the nearest petrol station, which will have meant finding the car keys that, invariably, are kept with the dog food in the cat basket.

No one has a sensibly laid-out house. The bread is always half a mile from the butter, the dustpan is six cupboards away from the brush and every conversation you have with anyone at the dinner table is a potpourri of half-formed thoughts and mild amnesia. No one knows the names of their godchildren or what their kids are studying at school or who was the third member of the Jam. No, not Bruce Foxton; the other one.

Everyone is disorganised and hopeless, and over breakfast which is bacon and then eggs, because the eggs, when the bacon was ready, were still in the chickens, which were in the fox because someone forgot to lock them up the night before you learn your host is on a government panel, advising ministers on how to negotiate a new financial services treaty with the other 27 EU member states. Or is it 25? He's not entirely sure, and he can't really concentrate, because he's trying to open the post, and it turns out he keeps his letter opener in the attic.

This is the important thing to remember. All the people currently trying to extricate us from our European bonds live in a house full of missing teaspoons and out-of-date cheese. They're just like we are. Which is why, sooner or later, we must accept that we are all doomed.
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It's shorter than his usual pieces.
 
MWF said:
It's shorter than his usual pieces.
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It's about the same size as the previous column but feels longer because most of it consists of Clarkson fumbling around in someone's kitchen. Nevertheless, anyone who writes a good weekly column is performing a heroic task, so I don't terribly mind an occasional clunker.
 
I blame the wider monitor in the office. ;)

The fumbling and rambling go together. I can sympathise, I've been in similar situations.
 
You people call that a ramble? Me complaining about any kind of governement services....that's a fucking ramble.
 
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Well, compared to what he described I can see that I have a well organised kitchen. He would be able to find things here. Except the ashtray, because I don't have one. Although I can't help thinking that having Jeremy Clarkson to stay would not be in my Top Ten Enjoyable Experiences. Should I be organising the Brexit then?
 
Animal Rights this week:

We weep for the trafficked chimp, then sell a puppy (Feb. 5)

Like everyone else, I was mortified when the BBC broke away briefly from telling us Donald Trump is mad, to say it had smashed a ring of Ivory Coast smugglers who were selling baby chimpanzees as pets to wealthy people in the Middle East and Asia.

We were shown a heartbreaking close-up of a rescued baby ape as it sucked gently on a banana. And then, at the police station, we saw the handcuffed trader who'd taken it from the wild and was preparing to sell it for about ?10,000. "Bastard," we all screamed at our television sets.

Later we were told that his arrest was the culmination of a 12-month BBC investigation and that when they become old the chimps are put down. And then, as we screamed "Bastard" again, we went back to the studio so Fiona Bruce could tell us once again that Trump may be mad.

None of us was listening, though. We were too consumed by the vision of that doe-eyed chimp with its almost human hands, wondering how anyone could be so cruel as to take a small creature from its mother and then sell it, for profit, to a family in Abu Dhabi.

But then, as the BBC went live to Washington for more reports on Donald's madness, I started to think. And what I thought was: "Hang on. I once took nine puppies from their mother and sold them for a handsome profit to various strangers who'd replied to an advertisement."

One of them was a rock star who may or may not have used the puppy he selected as an amusing platform from which to snort cocaine. What is certain is that in eight or nine years, when the puppies became fat and farty, all of them would be taken to a brightly lit room in the nearest town and executed.

So what's the difference? Why is it considered normal to sell a baby puppy dog to a stranger for money but morally indefensible to sell an ape? And there's more. It is also considered acceptable for dog traders to cross-breed various types of dog so they can create a new breed that can be sold for a vast profit simply because it has a sweet or interesting name. Labradoodle, for example. Or cockerpoo.

Soon someone will mate a bulldog with a shih-tzu and sell the puppies for thousands of pounds because everyone in Notting Hill will want to tell their friends in the wholefood shop that they have a "bullshiht". And then someone will get an Anubis into the back of a saluki and ... oh, you work it out.

Genetically modify a piece of wheat and you'll have half of Greenpeace in your fields, rolling around on the ground and chanting. But genetically modify a dog and everyone says: "Aaah. Sweeeet." And buys it.

And who makes sure the dog's being treated properly once it gets to its new home? Elsewhere in the world there are stringent checks. In Germany there's a dog tax. In America licensing is compulsory in most states. In Italy all dogs must be chipped unless you give the government inspector 10 Euros and a bottle of nice chianti. But that wouldn't wash in Britain.

There was a time when you had to have a dog licence, which cost 371/2p. But that was phased out in 1987, having first been reduced to 37p in 1984 when someone realised there was no such thing as half a pence any more. So today you can buy a dog and use it for medical experiments and no one's going to stop you.

We have it in our minds that the Middle Eastern gentlemen who are buying chimpanzees for a laugh will snort a gram of rhino horn and then use their pet as a football, but we heard last week of a wealthy Saudi who flew his 80 falcons on a passenger jet to a hunt. Even though they were perfectly capable of flying there themselves.

I'd like to bet that if he owns a chimpanzee it'll have its own throne and walk-in wardrobe. Which is more than can be said of various dogs that end up locked in northern council house kitchens while their slobbish owners go to the crystal meth lab.

Last week the government announced the biggest shake-up in pet ownership for more than 20 years and said puppies could no longer be sold until they were eight weeks old and that anyone who sold three or more litters a year would need a licence.

That's good. It'll put a stop to dog-breeding centres round the back of scrapyards in Barnsley. And it'll stop the unscrupulous doing a Dr Mengele genetic experiment and trying to breed a Great Dane with a cockatiel. But it won't stop owners being lazy and careless.

Figures just out show that a third of all dogs in Britain are now classified as overweight. They are never taken for walks and are fed on a non-stop diet of human treats such as crisps, biscuits and lard. They just spend their days lying on the floor, getting fatter and fatter until they explode. Or their farting gets so bad they are taken to James Herriot and killed.

And insisting that dog breeders, even part-timers, are licensed will cause them in all probability to start breeding other pets. Such as iguanas. Which are covered by only the most vague laws about giving them water and making sure they're happy.

Which would be a hard thing to prove in court. "Sir, I put it to you that your iguana, on or about February 2 this year was miserable ..." Even the most hopeless defence lawyer is going to make mincemeat of that with a simple retort: "How do you know?" I've always wanted to give someone I don't like a baby iguana as a present. Because they can grow to 6ft in length and have the double whammy of unpleasantness: razor-sharp teeth and a terrible temper.

But in the meantime we need to get this chimp trade in perspective. Yes, it's wrong. But is it any more wrong than the trade in any other animal?
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Yes, for obvious reasons. The chimp is listed as a Threatened Species, unlike the ubiquitous dog. Chimps are also mankind's closest relatives and therefore more intelligent and more "human" than any dog. And unlike the dog, the chimpanzee is not a domesticated species bred to be a pet--there have been cases of chimps literally ripping off their owner's faces. One can only hope those Sheiks will suffer the same fate.
 
Big syringe, nurse. It's cruel to let the NHS suffer like this (Feb. 12)

There was a terribly dispiriting BBC television report last week about an NHS hospital in Liverpool. It's rated, apparently, "good", but from where I was sitting, "horrible" would have been nearer the mark.

There was a dot matrix sign in A&E telling everyone the current waiting time was 13 hours. Grey-faced patients were queuing up in corridors. The doctors all looked seriously worn out. And every few minutes another ambulance would unload yet more people with axes in their heads and three elbows and hideous sores, and after we'd all seen enough, an important-looking man in a suit said the whole system needs more staff and more space. Which is a polite, English way of saying "more cash".

We're told, quite often, and by everyone, that the NHS is the most deserving of all the government's causes. Ministers can reduce the size of the army and cut benefits and turn off the motorway lights, and we all nod and accept, regretfully, that such things are necessary. But if there's even the slightest suggestion that the NHS is being starved of funding, everyone runs around as though they've got a poisonous snake in their trousers.

I wonder, though. How much longer can we behave like this before someone stands up and says, "Look. We are a small country. We've left the EU. Our financial services have all moved to Frankfurt. Our stupid Speaker has upset the world's most powerful man. Gordon Brown sold all our gold for sixpence, and I'm sorry but we simply cannot afford to provide free healthcare for everyone any more"? When the NHS was introduced, medicine was fairly straightforward and cheap. There were casts for people with broken arms and aspirins for those with a headache. Today, though, there are MRI scanners and breast implants and machines that go "ping", and tomorrow another million-pound piece of diagnostic kit will be invented and every hospital in the land will have to have one.

In the olden days everyone reached the age of 34 and then succumbed to an illness of which the first symptom was sudden death. As a result, there were no old people cluttering up the wards with their broken hips and their weird bulges. What's more, no one was fat and only a few deranged authors took heroin.

Today, as the television report from Liverpool showed, it's a different story.

Because it was the BBC, there was a Nick Clegg slant to the whole thing (I'd like to have been more topical with the name but I can't remember who's running the Liberal Democrats these days), so it showed us pictures of young mums with cute babies and teenagers with no hair.

But in the background we could see the real problem. An endless parade of drug addicts and enormously fat people who couldn't breathe properly. And then, at night, when the doctors and nurses should be able to catch up on the kids with the hurty wrists and a bit of light paperwork, it was mayhem because the whole place filled up with drunks and people who'd taken some dodgy ketamine and youths with beer bottles sticking out of their necks.

And when you are presented with images like this, you really do have to ask yourself a question. Is it fair that you and I have to pay for these people to be patched up and made well? Already it's been mooted by the Cleggies--I still can't remember the new man's name--that smokers should be turned away at the hospital door. And it won't be long before someone else suggests that drinkers and motorcyclists should be excluded as well.

But where does this end? If the NHS won't treat those who've ended up in hospital as a result of their own behaviour, then surely it will have to turn away the farmer whose arm has been severed by something on the back of his tractor, and the vet whose suicide attempt has failed.

I don't think we can differentiate. If you are going to have a free healthcare system for everyone, then it must be for everyone. You can't have bouncers on the hospital front door saying: "No, not you."

But we can barely afford to do that now, and soon, unless we scrap the armed forces, double the borrowing, abolish benefits and end free schooling past the age of seven, we won't be able to afford it at all.

The Cleggies and the Corbynistas say that this can all be solved by squeezing the rich until they have been turned into actual diamonds. While the Hammonds and the Mays (no, the other ones) say that all will be well if Nigerians are prevented from landing at Heathrow and going directly to St Mary's Hospital in Paddington for a new liver. Both arguments, however, are rubbish.

Taxing Anthony Bamford until he becomes coal or making Johnny Nigerian cough up 800 quid in advance is like putting a My Little Pony sticking plaster on a shark attack victim. The only solution is to accept that the NHS worked well in the 1940s but that it simply cannot work in a world where endless scientific breakthroughs mean it's now possible to do a head transplant.

We have a problem with tradition in Britain. We hate change. We launched the Mini in the 1950s and we were still making it 40 years later. The Land Rover lasted longer than that. And remember the howls of protest when someone suggested we do away with the red telephone box. "Why?" they wailed. "We like the smell of stale urine and the draughts and the jammed coin slot."

Today, though, everyone has an iPhone and we can all see it's a better way of communicating. And that's what we need to do with the NHS. Scrap it completely and come up with something that actually works today.

But we can't even begin to think of what that "something" might be so long as we continue to convince ourselves that the concept of free healthcare for everyone cannot ever be challenged.
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Some of this doesn't sound cogent. Scrapping something before you devise a replacement is reckless and against the spirit of conservatism (then again, Clarkson is a reckless libertarian). I'm presuming Clarkson is saying everyone should pay for health care, but if we live in a world where "it's now possible to do a head transplant," one where there are million dollar machines that go "ping," then this also means health care has become far more expensive for the unprotected consumer. I don't like the idea of working class people going bankrupt to pay for cancer treatments. Not everything health-related needs to be free, but if you go too far in the opposite direction you leave people to the mercy of insurance companies.
 
Mr. Clarkson, I dare you to try out the reality that you seem to be describing. My dare to you is that you buy a house and live in the United States for a minimum of 6 months to experience our pay system. Coincidentally, our system is supposedly in the midst of a big rethink, as Trump and the Republican Congress wish to do away with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

So there is my challenge to you, Mr. Clarkson. Should you choose to accept it, there could also be a documentary in there.

Edit: Here is a dated video that may be able to help to give this some perspective
 
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Revelator said:
(then again, Clarkson is a reckless libertarian).
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I wonder how he reconciles his libertarianism with his desire to remain in the EU and under the control of their never ending regulations.
 
Well, I can partially see his point. Yes, there are people that abuse the system and that's no good but, how do you regulate that? If you refuse care, you potentially turn away somebody who's actually requiring care instead of just using the healthcare as a bandaide because you have no self control with your addiction or you're lonely and need to talk to someone. Due to the way humans are, you will always have people that use and abuse good things that actually do help improve life. Should cancer treatment be free? Absolutely. What about flu or other fairly seasonal illness'? Perhaps? But, things like that are a known regular occurrence and probably increase the strain on healthcare workers who could be doing much more. Now, if you were in a massive crash and require surgery to save your arm that should also be taken care of. Chances are, you didn't intentionally hurt yourself. Shit happens. I think it would help if more routine items would require payment. I'm not talking about things like inhalers.
 
After a week's absence, Jezza returns:

No Kardashian nude teasers here just real facts laid bare (Feb. 26)

I read the other day that social media are how people consume their news these days, and if that's so, then we should all be worried. Happily, however, it isn't, because I read it on social media. Which means it's nonsense made up in the mind of a madman.

In the olden days Twitter was a big thing. I'd post a pithy remark of some sort and immediately my phone would swell like a balloon as my 6 million followers responded with some misspelt, unfunny retort.

Today, though, it's a different story. The flood has dwindled to a trickle. The responses have become countable on one hand. No one has deleted the app, but, as far as I can tell, the only people still using it are Piers Morgan and Gary Lineker, who are staging a good-natured battle in front of no one at all, and various newspapers that show you half a bosom in the hope you'll visit their site to see the rest of it.

I understand Donald Trump uses Twitter to try to bypass the media, but what the poor, deluded fool hasn't realised is that the only people responding to his thoughts are the very journalists he's trying to swerve.

Posting a tweet these days is like standing on a soapbox at what you think is Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. But you haven't read the map properly so you're actually in Regent's Park and no one's there. If you had read the map properly, you'd realise that these days most people are using Snapchat.

I do not use Snapchat, so I asked my son what was on it. "Well," he said. "I use it to post pictures of the poo I do every morning." I'm not sure this is something I want to see.

I'm equally baffled by Facebook. I'm aware that everyone has a wall on which they can post messages such as "I'm having a cup of coffee" or "My dog just pulled a cute face". However, beyond that, it seems to serve no purpose at all, which is why, I'm told, it is now unused by anyone under 25.

So what about Instagram? Well, that's an endless parade of other people having more fun than you are, and their dogs. And YouTube is full of people falling over and more dogs. Which leaves WhatsApp, which is a secret messaging service so that people can send one another pictures of their genitals. And their dogs. And possibly their dogs' genitals.

As a source of news and information, then, the big guns of social media are hopeless. Because even if you do manage to skirt round my son's poo and someone's dog and half of Kim Kardashian's left breast, and you do happen upon a missive from the front line in Syria, how do you know it's true? Only the other day I chanced upon an official-looking site called the European News Digest, or something like that. It had a crest and a date in the distant past saying when it had been established, and I must say it all looked very official. Apart from the fact that one of its stories was about how I'd campaigned vigorously for Brexit and was thinking of joining Ukip. Which had happened only in the mind of the man who wrote it.

Last weekend we had another site--I can't recall which one--that told us the former prime minister Ted Heath had definitely been a paedophile and may well have been a murderer also. And that's not true either.

Social media are awash with stories that are made up. There are diets that don't work, psychiatrists who have no qualifications, wars that aren't happening and TripAdvisor, which just seems to be a place for the bitter and twisted to settle scores. You could thrash about in binary-land for a week and not encounter a single fact.

The problem is that every single web page has exactly the same credibility as all the others. The medical views of a doped-up herbalist operating from a loft in Brighton carry the same weight as the medical views of an actual doctor who has spent years in libraries doing research. And you don't really know which to believe.

Then we have this "fake news" business. A disgruntled civil servant goes online to say Theresa May doesn't wipe her bottom properly, and pretty soon that'll become a story. And then it'll be a fact that she has to deny. And her denial will give it credence. And then she'll become known as Theresa the Unwiped. And Instagram will be filled with pictures of dogs with dingleberries and it will all have started on a boozefuelled whim.

I'll be honest with you. I have no idea what Donald Trump's foreign policy is. He always gets distracted when he tries to explain, so it's interpreted by experts. But I don't know whether the "experts" are Democrats or Republicans, so I don't know whether they are grinding axes or trying to make a serious point.

Jeremy Corbyn, who apparently leads something called the Labour Party, said last week (reasonably) that we can no longer believe the polls, which show he is deeply unpopular, and should instead believe social media, where he is greatly loved. He knows this because he's seen Gary Lineker's tweets. But where does that leave us? In the dark, that's where.

The only solution I can see is to follow organisations that employ only trained journalists: people who know how to tease out a story and then how to report on it correctly. And to ensure these journalists don't get carried away with their own agendas, they should be monitored by editors and lawyers. And maybe there should be an independent regulator of some sort that would be on hand to deal with people who have been treated unfairly. And that could force the errant editor to print apologies and clarifications where necessary.

But, of course, you already know this.

Which is why you are sitting at your kitchen table this morning, reading The Sunday Times, rather than rummaging around on social media, looking for the non-existent pearl in the made-up sea of dogs, poo, and Kardashian lady parts.
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F'ing bloody brilliant, this one is. Finally someone who has the current state of social media (& fake news) sussed out.
 
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