Free 69 for 1 by Alan Coren

racing me to her. The
record of all this activity will be held at CCTV House, so that the Chief Constable will know where I have been, and how, and why, and also be able gleefully to pass the DVD on to the Department
for Jailing People Who Fasten Their Seatbelts After Moving Off.
    If rage-fuelled incaution makes me drive my £63 newspaper home at 30.1 mph, worse may happen: road humps may dislodge my bridgework, a MET helicopter report me for whizzing past
Regent’s Park mosque in a manner likely to unnerve armed response units secreted in the shrubbery, and a beak fine me £500 and shred my licence. Probably on the day my car is clamped
outside my dentist’s surgery. Or towed away from it.
    Do not ask if I ever drive out of London to go and live in a motorway jam, rather ask how happy I am to contribute to the £62 billion required to set up a pay-as-you-go system for the mugs
who do. And since, in my 50 years of driving to the Moon and back, things only ever got worse, how long can it be before just staring at the car below my window brings an ASBO to my mat?
    I sometimes wonder whether, if Mr Milward had said in 1957 that I couldn’t be excused, I wouldn’t be a happier man today.

Chinese Puzzle
    O H , really, Secretary of State? Mandarin, you say? Can you say it in Mandarin? Ah. Nevertheless, you, as Education
Education Education Secretary, have cheerily expressed your expectation that, by 2012, when the Chinese athletes arrive at the Olympic Village, lots of Britons will be able to chat with them. Asked
the way to the nearest Nandrilone r Us, our children will be in a position to give detailed directions, without pointing.
    Urn. Do you know how many teachers of French there are in Britain? Yes, you do, because I have just phoned your Department, and they know, so I know that you know. There are 23,000. Teachers of
Mandarin? 78. Something of a task ahead, then, if pupils are to drop French in favour of Mandarin: you will have to find 22,922 Mandarin beaks pretty sharpish.
    But first things first, because that is the way education works. Of the 200,000 children soon to take GCSE French, do you know how many will end up able to chat to French people in it? 12. Only
an educated guess, I admit – guesswork was my core curriculum – but I spend a lot of time in France, where I see a lot of Britons, most of them middle class and therefore
middle-educated in French, and do you know what I see them doing? Shouting and gesticulating. They are not doing it to pass themselves off as French, they are doing it because they can’t. If
they need something for the weekend, the only word the shopkeeper will recognise is weekend; he will have to rely on sign language to work out what the something is.
    I do not know why, when their own language is so complicated, Britons find simpler languages impossible, but has it not struck the Education Secretary that Mandarin might prove a little tricky?
To start with the alphabet, you can’t: there isn’t one. Where you start is with the first of 50 thousand different characters. Since each can be pronounced in four different ways to
articulate four different meanings, we arrive once more at the figure of 200,000: in other words, as it were, if each of the pupils currently struggling to learn French were to learn instead one
different Mandarin word each by 2012 (a big ask, I promise) they would all have to turn up in the Olympic Village if Britain is – how did the Secretary of State put it? – ‘to
raise our game, in order to compete in an increasingly globalised economy.’
    To which end he has a further vision, some might say one even more Olympian, of Britons flocking by slow boat to China to buy, to sell, to holiday, to settle, doing it all in fluent Mandarin.
Oo-er. Given that globetrotting Britons never use any accent but their own, even that extraordinary handful who have managed to learn a few Mandarin words will have been unable to master the
requisite ten