JEREMY PAXMAN T oday was yet another that began with a
wake-up call from my boss at Newsnight. He usually rings to say that I can go back to sleep: there's no need to go to Washington because the presidential pantomime has wrapped itself up in some new legal shenanigans. Perhaps by the time you read this the whole thing will be over; or not. It has been like watching one of those terrible old Whitehall farces in which increasingly improbable figures step out of wardrobes.
Een so, there has been something tremendously entertaining about the specta- cle. The British manage to count 30 million ballots overnight and to install a new tenant in Downing Street before lunchtime the next day. The finest democracy in the world has already taken nearly three weeks to ascer- tain the preferences of a few thousand Flori- da bluehairs. It is a splendid indictment of voting machines and proof that Keynes was right when he said that when the Mayflower left Plymouth, it was obviously loaded to the gunwales with lawyers.
erican friends find these sorts of comments fantastically irritating, coming from a country that considers something as bizarre as the House of Lords an adornment to the constitution. I never tried to defend the Lords in the old days, but I simply can- not see how the new place is any more legiti- mate: at least there used to be the possibility of unpredictability by accident of birth. In the New Year we shall hear who has passed the vetting procedure to become a People's Peer. We shall then have a second chamber made up of a few dozen people whorn are there by ancestry, a lot who are there by patronage of party leaders, some extinct political volcanoes, and a selection of busy- bodies who want a role in governing us with- out the inconvenience of getting elected. It's almost enough to make you pine for the Florida system, where the electoral presid- ing officer is a political crony of one of the candidates.
Before my first visit to the Washington panto, my last foreign excursion, in September, had been to Bulgaria to launch the local edition of my book on the English. I do not expect huge royalty cheques, but the British Council had organised a work- shop with local journalists on how reporters might deal with politicians. It all seemed to be going swimmingly, and I sailed through a couple of hours of chat about this and that before going off to have a look at the astonishing murals in a church just outside Sofia. I returned to the city to find a jour- nalist with a question that was obviously troubling her. `Mr Paxman,' she asked anx- iously, 'you think is possible to be journalist and secret policeman same time?' 'A bit of a conflict of interests,' I answered, then thought that she must have been winding me up. She was joking, wasn't she? 'Oh no,' she replied, 'is very common in Bulgaria.'
Ifeel guilty telling the story, because poor old Bulgaria is such a victim of its geography and of its disastrous, if understandable, political misjudgments, such as deciding to side with Hitler in the last war. Then, doing my homework for Start the Week, I came across a remark from the Irish scholar Luke Gibbons that Ireland is a first-world country with a third-world memory. We are all, even the United States, prisoners of our history. But the current state of the railways in Britain strikes me as evidence that we live in a third-world country with a first-world (mechanical) memory. First, there was an attempt to travel to Lichfield last week, where, after much keyboard punching, I was advised by the rail inquiry line to take a train that turned out not to exist. Then came this conversation with the First Great Western ticket-office. I report it verbatim: 'I'd like to book a ticket on a train from Reading to Swansea at about four-thirty tomorrow afternoon.' Which train, sir?' asked the clerk, clattering his keyboard. 'Anything between four and five in the afternoon.' I can't do that, sir. You need to tell me which train you want to travel on.' One at about four-thirty.' There isn't one at four-thirty.' 'Well, whichever train is closest to four-thir- ty will be fine.' I can't make a booking unless you give me a train time.' But I don't have a train time. Anything around four- thirty.' You'll have to ring the rail inquiry line for that.' You mean you don't have a timetable for your own trains?"No, sir.' 'Well. supposing I said I wanted a ticket on the four-thirty from Reading to Swansea?' I can't give you a ticket on that train, sir. It doesn't exist."Well, whichever is nearest to four-thirty.' You'll have to ring the rail inquiry line to find that out, sir.'
Mercifully, not all of Britain has yet succumbed to this idiocy. My discovery of the year has been one of the last true coun- try pubs in England. It is in a village I will not name, in Shropshire. From the outside it looks like another tumbledown cottage, and inside there is no bar, just a small, bare room with three or four benches. Flossie, the landlady, sits in the middle of the room, cradling a whisky and wearing a pair of sur- gical stockings. Informed local guesses put her age at 90. When you want a drink it is one of the half-dozen regulars who takes you through to the kitchen and draws the beer from barrels lying on the stone floor. There is no cash-register, just jamjars for different denominations of coins. The only food is a pot of eggs, which Flossie pickled several moons ago. In the main room, the conversation among the regulars turns to favourite dinners. There is general agree- ment on the pleasures of a rook supper, and mild quibbling about the delights of squirrel — the taste is marred by the fact that they look a bit like fricasseed babies. Judging that we are all serious eaters, a voice from behind issues a conspiratorial invitation: `Way's plannin' a badger sup- per.' I must be there.
My agent, a woman who claims that the only thing she can get into in Top Shop is the changing-room, rings. 'I'm stuck on my crossword,' she says. 'The clue's "Over- loaded postman".' I pause for a moment. 'How many letters?' Bloody hundreds.'
Previous page
