Read it in the Sunday papers
And on the seventh day God said, Let’s just give it a rest, boys.
So, it has come to be that on this Christian version of the Sabbath most of us get up late, potter around the house in tatty pajamas or expensive silk dressing gowns, eat a healthy leisurely breakfast (or crap like muesli) and feed our cat or talk to our favourite fish (who is a bit under the weather right now but who might improve – or explode - if he swallows his medicine like the good little boy he is…)
…and read the Sunday papers – rejoicing whenever we see that our favourite columnists have come up with another handful of highly entertaining set pieces.
So, yes, it’s time again to do another round-up of some of the eminent Brit columnists working for the online Times.
First off is Caitlin Moran, who discusses yet another TV travel programme. I have no idea who the person is she uses as her personal scratching post but I’m sure glad I’m not him, reading this:
To be both blunt but also, I feel, totally fair, Boorman comes across as a copper-bottomed, ocean-going, 24-carat prick. The unsuccessful actor son of director John Deliverance Boorman, Charley is the kind of spoilt, charmless boor whose self-satisfied bull-honking floats down from first class on transatlantic flights, and actually makes you glad to be poor.
In the first episode alone, Boorman departs on his epic journey despite his wife being in hospital with pneumonia and a collapsed lung; is questioned by four policemen at Gatwick after telling an air stewardess that he has a bomb; and cuts up rough when McGregor’s wife – who is, let us not forget, left at home with the kids for three months while her husband burns rubber in the Dark Continent – says she wants to join the trip for just ten days.
“I want to protect the experience, and keep it real,” Boorman says, sulkily, standing next to his branded SUV, being filmed by a TV crew.
Ouch.
Still, however satisfying it may be when our columnists get down and dirty and extremely personal, it is also nice to read how our favourite writers would solve all sorts of tricky problems in one fell swoop. Here’s Chris Ayres’s suggestion of what president Bush could do to give the Iraq war a happy ending:
When America’s railroad workers went on strike in 1946, Harry Truman (a Democrat) came up with a simple yet effective plan to get them back to work. He drafted them into the Army.
A radical move, yes. But, by God, it worked. In fact, Truman was only halfway through his speech to Congress announcing the legislation when someone passed him a note confirming that the strike had been settled, “on the terms proposed by the President”.
I mention this because Hollywood is preparing for its own strike: the first in 20 years by the Writers Guild of America (WGA). The walkout is expected to begin next month, when the WGA’s contract with the TV companies and movie studios runs out.
It is, of course, in both sides’ interest to reach a deal. Then again, if the situation gets really desperate, President Bush could always do a Truman and send the striking Hollywood workers to Iraq. Sure, it wouldn’t go down very well in LA. But, who knows, with Steven Spielberg in place of General Petraeus, perhaps the war would finally get a Hollywood ending.
Right, enough world saving for now. Back to the personal abuse. Here’s Rod Liddle, writing about a certain French icon:
Bardot, at 73, is still as breathtakingly magnificent as she was in And God Created Woman, although in a rather different way.
How do you like your sex kittens to age? Gracefully and with the aid of botox injections and prosthetics, so that she can still turn in the occasional dignified cameo appearance in some Hollywood blockbuster as the vaguely glamorous matriarch?
Or as mad as a box of frogs, with the appearance of a scorched bag lady on methamphetamine, surrounded by hundreds of yapping stray dogs and supporting Jean-Marie Le Pen’s facist Front National.
Finally, A.A. Gill finds himself part of the travelling book signing circus and muses upon the many strange reasons that people buy books:
Books are bought not to be read, but to be given. “Would you make it out to Tony? He’s my son-in-law.” There is the bat-squeak inference that Tony is an uneducated oik, who spends too much time down the pub and could do with a book to keep him at home.
Students get them, too, though why someone who already has a reading list longer than the Yellow Pages would want a collection of Sabbath journalism is beyond me.
I suppose worried parents can’t give undergraduates the same things that everyone else gives them: crabs, chlamydia, cold sores and skunk-induced psychosis.
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