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

In a main park in Amsterdam, officers are advised to turn a blind eye, provided the coupling is fairly discreet. Want a joint while walking through Amsterdam? Well, you can’t. It’s illegal. But provided you don’t bother anyone else, the police won’t bother you.
    We have a word for that here, too. Well, two, if we’re honest. Common sense. And I wonder what would happen if it were applied; if you could make a phone call in a car if you were in a traffic jam at the time, or you could smoke indoors if everyone else wanted to smoke as well, or if you could read poetry at a summer festival without having to buy a licence.
    Imagine it. The police could worry about crime that does matter and ignore crime that doesn’t. The savings would be huge and the increase in efficiency dramatic.
    Of course, this would require some discretion from the policeman at the scene. And that could be a problem. I know plenty of Plod I’d trust with the job but, equally, my life in Fulham in the 1980s was ruined by an overzealous constable who really would have done me for ‘walking on the cracks in the pavement’ if he’d thought he could get away with it.
    So here’s what I propose. We adopt the Dutch system – if such a system exists outside the football-addled mind of my friend – only we give it a little tweak. If the case is brought to court and the magistrate deems it to be a waste of his or her time, then the arresting officer is made to pay – out of his children’s piggy bank if necessary – the cost of getting it there.
    4 July 2010

Burial? Cremation? Boil-in-the-bag?
    As we know, death is a great leveller; communism in its purest form.
    Your family may choose to remember you with a giant pyramid on the outskirts of Cairo, or they may choose to mark your passing with a bunch of petrol-station chrysanthemums, crudely tied to the railings on a suburban dual carriageway. But you’re still dead.
    It’s much the same story with the bodies of those brave First World War soldiers that were recently exhumed from their mass grave in France and buried with more dignity elsewhere.
    Now, their families can pay their respects in quiet reverence, which is very nice. But the soldiers themselves? Still dead, I’m afraid. I write about death a lot. It bothers me. I don’t like the uncertainty of not knowing how or when it will come. Will it be tomorrow and spectacular or will it be many years from now with a tube up my nose? And what happens afterwards? That bothers me, too.
    In my heart of hearts, I know that nothing happens. But of course I could be wrong. We may come back as mosquitoes – in which case I will find Piers Morgan’s house and bite him on the nose just before he becomes Larry King. Or we may come back as lions. In which case … I’ll do pretty much the same sort of thing.
    Or there may be a heaven. If there is, I shall remind St Peter that Christianity is based on forgiveness, say sorry for not going to church, ever, and demand that I’m allowed in. And that – that is really what bothers me most of all about dying.
    They say that we leave our body behind when we’re dead, but what if we don’t? What if there is a next life and we go into it in the same carcass that’s transported us through this one? It’s why I don’t carry a donor card. Because I shall be awfully hacked off if I am gifted an eternity of milk and honey but I keep bumping into things because some bastard back on earth has my eyes.
    It is for this reason that I have made it plain that, when I go, I wish to be buried and not cremated. Because you’re not going to have any fun at all with the angels if you arrive at the Pearly Gates looking like the contents of a Hoover bag.
    I’m bringing all this up because last week some Belgian undertakers announced that they will soon be offering the dead a ‘third way’. A burial? A cremation? Or would sir like to be dissolved in caustic potash and then flushed away down the sewers? No, sir bloody