Free And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson Page B

my complaint, campanology would be outlawed immediately. And after a second letter, all American tourists arriving at Heathrow would be turned away. How long do you think Bill Oddie would last in a world like this?
    And not just Bill, either. I’m sure that the Queen, with her palaces and servants, upsets and annoys someone somewhere so let’s ban her, too, and her family. And while we’re at it, I know a handful of people who don’t like that enormous new gherkin building in London, so let’s pull it down, along with the British Library and Preston.
    Cats give me asthma and I find their bottoms offensive, so everyone would have to put their beloved moggy in a sack and bash its head in with a croquet mallet.
    Providing, of course, croquet hadn’t upset someone in the meantime. In which case you’d have to use a frozen leg of lamb. Or, more likely, a nut cutlet.
    Oh no, wait. Nuts can make some people swell up. So you see, already we’ve run into a problem. You’ve got your cat in a sack but no way of killing it.
    I’m struggling to think of anything which would be permitted in a world where nothing was allowed to cause offence to anyone. Cars, condoms, Christianity.
    Everything would have to go, except perhaps Michael Palin and maybe David Attenborough.
    You probably think this is silly but I’m afraid it’s not. When you go to the cinema these days, you’re given a synopsis of the movie before the MGM lion has roared.
    ‘This film contains scenes of flashing lights and strong language, and there’s a bit of mild violence when the German’s goggles fill with ketchup. Oh, and there’s some semi-nudity when we see Susannah York in her stockings and I’m afraid there’s a dog called Blackie.’ This is because the audience may contain nuts.
    And let’s not forget, shall we, where this whole thingstarted. Following just two complaints – that’s two, not 2 million – the ASA has asked Sloggi to be more careful in future about where it places posters featuring girls in their underwear.
    Happily our great leader, Tony Blair, is still a beacon of hope in this sanitised world. A million people complained, in person, about his plans to bomb Iraq, but he paid not the slightest bit of attention. We should all take a leaf out of his book.
    Sunday 13 June 2004

Put the panic button down now and walk away quietly
    A friend called last week in some distress to say that his VAT bill was a little larger than expected. Then I had lunch with somebody who spent the entire meal agonising over which school is best for his daughter.
    Meanwhile, in Lambeth Palace the Archbishop of Canterbury is to be found, pacing his sitting room, wondering whether or not to make a guest appearance on
The Simpsons
. It’s not exactly up there with Thomas à Becket’s problems, is it?
    The trouble is that, after about four billion years of worrying about sabre-toothed tigers, the plague, having your heart ripped out by religious zealots and being bombed by the Germans, we’ve been left with an inability to stop worrying when actually everything’s fine.
    We worry today about the onset of baldness and cellulite with the same intensity as people in 1665 worried about the Great Plague. Today, for instance, the sun is shining, the sky is a cobalt blue, the thermometer is nudging 75°F, I have received an unexpected windfall from a video distribution company, there are three parties lined up for the weekend and the children are well. Yet I’m sitting here worrying about the amount of junk there is in space. Only the other day a French rocket was destroyed when it hurtled into a partially eaten hamburger left in orbit by one of Neil Armstrong’s mates. Or it could have been a speck of paint.
    There are apparently 100,000 pieces of flotsam and jetsam whizzing round the Earth; and soon, experts say, somebody will be killed when his spacecraft crashes into a spanner dropped by some clumsy Russian, back in 1969.
    I’m also worried that my