Free Is It Really Too Much to Ask? by Jeremy Clarkson

downside to my new game is that you will miss more often than you hit. And this means a great deal of glue ends up on your furniture and your computer. But trust me. The satisfaction of seeing a wasp suddenly stop flying? It’s worth ruining your house for that.
    Unfortunately, this is a seasonal pastime and soon the wasps will be gone. Then what? No, really. What do you do to fill your days when you are old and there are no insects and no work? You die, really, because having tried it for a whole day, I’ve decided that thinking of things to do is far more exhausting than getting up and doing them.
    15 August 2010

Naughty bits & melons – I learnt it all in Albania
    Every year, I tell my children, with a serious, Dickensian face, that they may have a fun holiday at Easter but in the summer we must go somewhere that will expand their minds. Cambodia. Alaska. Bolivia. These are the places I always have in mind. Unfortunately, I’m always too busy to enforce these rules, which is why, this year, we ended up in Kassiopi in Corfu. And all you can learn there is how not to catch chlamydia.
    And so it was on the third day I decided that the kids must put down their vodka shots and their new Italian scooter friends and come with me on an expedition to Albania. We would go to the ruins at Butrint. And we would learn about how the Romans invented mortar.
    Sadly, though, the ferry to Albania is almost certainly the slowest moving vessel in history. It does half a mile an hour and I couldn’t help noticing it had a funnel made from cardboard and gaffer tape. It was the
Herald of Not So Free Enterprise
.
    I therefore decided, in a strident way, that we would charter a boat, and so it was, after a complicated exchange with Greek customs, during which there was much blowing of whistles, we pulled into the Albanian port of Saranda in a 68ft Ferretti motor yacht. There was nowhere to park it, so we tied it to the coastguard’s boat, which had sunk – in about 1956 – and went to have our passports checked in what appeared to be a Russian public swimming baths, only with more smoking.
    We then hired a guide called Fatso and he was delighted. ‘British. Very good comedy,’ he said. ‘Norman Wisdom. Mr Bean. And number one funny show:
Top Gear
. In Albanian, word for man organ is pronounced “car”. You make show about cocks,’ he said, poking me in the chest and roaring with laughter.
    It wasn’t quite the education I’d had in mind, but no matter. Off we set through what looked like a cross between Odessa, Miami South Beach and Benidorm in 1969. If you can imagine such a place.
    All guides who grew up with communism like to give you facts and figures that prove their country is better than yours. This was a point picked up deliciously by Sacha Baron Cohen, who famously pointed out that Kazakhstan is the ‘world’s number one exporter of potassium’.
    Fatso, however, made Borat look like an amateur. After explaining that there were now two roads to the ruins – two! – and how much each of them had cost, and how Saranda is the sunniest place in all of Europe, he suggested we stop off at a nearby spring. ‘Albania has more water than any other country after Norway,’ he explained, before revealing how much water, exactly, is produced by the spring in question. ‘It’s 375 cubic metres every second,’ he said, thumping the steering wheel of his van with joy. ‘That is 1.35 million cubic metres every hour. And that is 32.4 million cubic metres a day. Albanian water, too. Best water in world.’ He was nowhere near finished. ‘In this region we produce 45,000 tons of watermelons every year. Second best region for watermelons in all of Albania,’ he added, grabbing his heart and blinking to stop himself crying with pride.
    My son, annoyingly, wasn’t interested in these remarkable statistics and asked if there was a shop where he could buy an Albanian football shirt. Fatso was overcome with rage:
‘Albania football