Mind you, although this ‘new’ car may be 15 years old, it’s still technologically light-years ahead of anything we’ve been used to up to now. It has electric this and that, a little computer to tell you when things are going wrong and a host of other refinements that are largely wasted on me. But this technical marvel did prompt me to cast my mind back to the first car I ever owned: a magnificent Fiat 500.

The Italian dream. And a car.

If time heals all wounds and absence makes the heart go fonder, the fact that it no longer hurts to think of the Fiat 500, and that I can even think of it almost affectionately, should suggest that my experience with this masterpiece of Italian automotive engineering was not quite as traumatic as it actually was.

I should digress at this point to say that I DON’T mean the new version of the Fiat 500, which has nothing in common with the original apart from the name. I mean, blimey, the new version even has a 1.1 litre engine and a top speed of 150 km/h!

And all in the best possible taste!

No, the car I’m talking about was called the 500 because it had a 500cc engine – and even this is a bit of Italian overstatement because it was actually 479cc, which made it, oh, about 9-and-a-bit times more powerful than a moped. Flat out, you could hope to reach the dizzy heights of 85 km/h. With the accent on hope.

Today, the Fiat 500, or Cinquecento as Fiat-lovers prefer to call it, is regarded as a ‘classic’. ‘Classic’, of course, is a polite way of saying ‘naff’. It means that the object – in this case a car – has a number of endearing quirks that were actually called design faults when the car was new, and resulted in endless frustration and annoyance. Now they are tolerated with a smile. Why? Because no one who is even remotely in his right mind would use a ‘classic’ Fiat 500 to get to work every day. It’s a fun car. A car for a sunny afternoon excursion to the shops.

A sunny afternoon.

The first Fiat 500 I owned (and a think I had 2) was vintage 1961. I bought it for £100 and it came with a large steel box full of spares. The previous owner even offered to throw in a spare engine, but as there was no room for this in the back of the car, I had to decline the offer. Looking back on it, this was a grave error.

Why did I buy a car that was so old? Was I interested in buying a ‘classic’? No. I was broke and it was the cheapest deal I could get. I was also totally ignorant when it came to cars so the idea of buying one with lots of spares seemed rather comforting. Yes, I know it was dumb. Yes, I know that buying a car with loads of spare parts thrown in should have awakened some suspicions as to its reliability. But I was young and stupid.

The sort of sign you obey when you're young a stupid.

One of the major selling points of the Fiat 500 was that it was so basic. Try selling a car on those grounds today! Would anyone buy a Ferrari if they were told “Well, it does have a light that comes on to tell you when you’re running out of fuel. No, it doesn’t actually have a petrol gauge as such. Temperature gauge? No, not really. Synchromesh? Oh, you mean changing gear without having to double de-clutch? Not exactly at this moment in time, no. It does have a heater though! Well, of course it works! It automatically takes all of the fumes straight off the top of the engine and distributes them evenly over the car interior. What more could you want? It’s lovely and warm, as long as you wear a gas-mask. Or alternatively, you can have the heater on and drive with the window open. Nice bit of cold fresh air never did anyone no harm. Radio/CD? What’s that? Never heard of it. But have you seen that lovely sunshine roof? Just take a look at that, will you? Gorgeous, innit? That’s quality, that is! Well, yes, it does leak a bit, admittedly, but you have to bear in mind that this car was designed for Italy, where it doesn’t rain so much…erm.”

And when it does rain, the Italians don't use a car anyway.

And there’s the basic point when it comes to the Fiat 500. It was designed for Italy. Moreover, it was designed for an Italy that was just emerging from the economic collapse following the Second World War. Nobody had any money. Few people could afford to buy an Alfa Romeo or a Lancia. The Fiat 500 was a true people’s car and provided ordinary Italians with mobility. And it did its job perfectly. In Italy. And it never really did much anywhere else.

I loved my Fiat 500, but I’m not so sure that it loved me. It was easy to maintain (to remove the engine, you simply supported it on a block and pushed away the car) but it was very heavy on maintenance. I think I spent more time under the car than I ever did in it.

Reverse gear.

There was the embarrassment of being overtaken by milk-floats and the odd over-enthusiastic cyclist. The feeling of worthlessness as people in Morris Minors didn’t even bother moving over to the other side of the road to overtake you. There was the stress of having to build up enough downhill momentum to be able to go uphill on the other side. There was that sinking feeling on winter mornings when you jerked the starter lever only to hear the car cough in apology and then remain silent.

I mentioned earlier that I actually bought two Fiat 500s. This is true. I actually bought the second one in the vain belief that it might furnish enough spare parts to make the first one driveable. It didn’t. But the scrapyard had the benefit of two wrecks instead of one.

Ever wondered why they don’t build ‘classic’ cars anymore?

I’ll be one of them. Not because I particularly like the music – in fact I most often hate the music – but for the sheer unpredictability and predictability of the contest. The Eurovision Song Contest is unpredictable because, with very few exceptions, it’s certainly not the best song that wins. Very often it’s the song that you marked down as a complete no-hoper that sweeps up all the points, while the song you were absolutely certain would carry all before it comes nowhere at all.

Greece showing what 3,000 years of culture can do for you.

On the other hand, the contest is completely predictable in many ways. For example, you can be totally certain that all of the Scandinavian countries will dutifully vote for each other, as will all the countries of former Yugoslavia; the Greeks will give maximum points to Cyprus and vice versa. Great Britain, which dominated the contest for many years when British music was still acknowledged as the coolest around, may pick up a few points from Ireland but will otherwise do very poorly. This has nothing to do with the song, and everything to do with Iraq, which isn’t even in the contest.

Similarly, you can be fairly certain that Germany will give either 10 points or 12 points to Turkey. This is not a reflection of the military alliance of the First World War or a German fondness for kebabs. It’s simply because 2.5% of the country are of Turkish ethnicity and they all vote en masse for Turkey while the Germans themselves vote for hardly anyone – Germany has won the contest only once and that was in 1982.

1996 and the contest ends in a controversial tie for last place.

And then there are the French, God bless ‘em. In the early years of the Eurovision, they did quite well but they haven’t actually won it since 1977. Naturally, being French, they were a bit miffed at this and in 1980 they even pulled out of the contest completely for a few years declaring that it was “merde” or something equally Gallic. However, it has to be said that they have otherwise done their best to subvert the traditional Eurovision song, most notably in 1990 with Serge Gainsbourg’s song “White and Black Blues”. Gainsbourg should have known better really: a song about racial harmony is the last thing that’s going to win the Eurovision Song Contest (although it did come second).

So what is the typical Eurovision song? Well, it certainly isn’t “Waterloo”, which is a quality song however you look at it. As I see it, the Eurovision song is either a cheap exploitation of popular sentiment (Norway’s infamous “Brandenburger Tor” celebrating the downfall of the Berlin Wall, for example) or something mindlessly happy and bouncy (Spain’s highly complex exploration of post-modern angst “La la la” springs to mind).

2010 and the Spanish entry gives rise to rumours that his guitar may not be plugged in.

In fact, it’s well-known in the music world, and outside, that there is such a thing as the “Eurovision Song” – ideally a lumpen piece of Europap that will appeal in equal measure to the inhabitants of Belgrade and Bolsover. It is rarely, if ever, a reflection of current musical tastes and cuts neatly through the problem of lyrical complexity by resorting to the sort of words that most of us left behind at the age of three. This monstrosity is usually accompanied by inane dancing and costumes left over from an amateur version of Saturday Night Fever.

John Travolta

As if the musical content of the Eurovision were not bad enough, we have the presenters. Traditionally these are a man and a woman who, one hopes, are in no way representative of the population of the host country. To keep the French happy, they do everything in French and English, which gives the French-speaker a chance to show off and the English-speaker an opportunity to show why he or she could never make it in stand-up comedy. In fact if there is one thing worse than the Eurovision Song, it’s the Eurovision Joke, which was probably put together by a committee in Brussels from some spare jokes left over from the Second World War.

For many years, the only real saving grace of the Eurovision was the commentary by Terry Wogan. Terry, quite clearly enjoying the hospitality thoroughly on more than one occasion, seemed to be the one person involved in the Eurovision circus who actually knew what was going on. He knew when a song was drivel (roughly 90%) and when the presenters were complete idiots (possibly 95%). In 2001, he famously endeared himself to people everywhere by accurately calling the Danish presenters “Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy”.

Dame Terry Wogan having a good smile.

So why, you may ask, do I continue to watch the Eurovision Song Contest in spite of apparently detesting it? Well, I watched it as a child and loved it; I spent many years not watching it at all because it was uncool and I didn’t have a TV anyway; and in the mid-nineties I rediscovered it as the perfect kitsch entertainment that it so obviously is. It’s as much a contest as the Grand National is a boat race and the word “song” should not be taken too literally, but it remains riveting and at times hilarious entertainment. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Cor! Lovely bit o' pollen in 'ere!

The bumble bee also appears to be very short-sighted. Assuming that it’s mostly interested in flowers, why does it spend so much time buzzing around me? I don’t look remotely like a flower - not even in my best moments. It’s also, as far as I can see, very interested in various sorts of garden furniture.

Considering that the bumble bee is so work-oriented, why is it so fat? It’s so fat that it can hardly lift itself, never mind buzz effectively. Are we talking about the couch-potato of the insect world? Is the only reason why it gets up so early that it wants to get the tedious business of working over with as quickly as possible so that it can lounge on the sofa scratching its fuzz, watching reality TV and eating pizzas? Is this the chav of the insect world?

Oi! Who are you lookin' at?

But what really defines the bumble bee as stupid – if lovably stupid – is its total inability to come to terms with windows. Now there are many insects out there, some of them much smaller, that seem to have no difficulty with a window. Okay, I admit that there’s the daddy-longlegs that even has problems with a wall but most insects seem to recognise glass when they see it and try a work-around. Not so the lovable bumble bee that simply smacks into the window repeatedly in the hope that it will eventually dissolve. It will continue to do this until either the glass does indeed dissolve or it drops dead of exhaustion…

The bumble bee's arch-enemy: Southwark.

Not that this stops bumble bees from trying every means possible to gain entrance to your house. In the summer, it’s wise to leave no gap open to the outside world because as sure as oeufs are oeufs the bumble bee will find its way through. And what will it do when it gets its way through? Yep, smack into the windows until they dissolve or it dies of exhaustion. Not a wise career move for a couch-potato, I think you’ll agree.

The bumble bee lives in a nest with other bumble bees. However, lacking the architectural skills and social organisation of the honey bee, much less the ant, he has never managed to build anything that will house more than about fifty bees at a time. Not that the bumble bee would actually want to live together with more than fifty other bumble bees anyway. In fact, if it were possible to live entirely alone or, at the very least with the wife and couple of kids, the average bumble bee would leap at the chance.

Female bumble bee - click for actual size.

You see, the bumble bee is essentially a loner. You never see a couple of bumble bees pass the time of day with each other, let alone sit down for an in-depth conversation. This may explain why they repeatedly smack into windows – because no other bumble bee has ever bothered to explain that it’s a waste of time. On the other hand, because no bumble bee has ever explained the facts of life to another bumble bee, every day is probably a voyage of discovery, with totally new things to explore and enjoy. And because the bumble bee has a poor memory – as in no memory at all – the totally new things of yesterday will certainly be the totally new things of today and tomorrow too.

I imagine that living in a bumble bee’s nest is probably like living in an old people’s home but having to get up unreasonably early and go out to work every day. You return home in the evening to sit with other bumble bees, chewing your gums and saying nothing. Occasionally, one of your fellow bees will have an unfortunate encounter with a window and not return to the nest but no one seems to notice.

A hive on a day out to Blackpool.

In fact, apart from a deeply rooted work ethic, there’s not a lot that gets a bumble bee excited at all. The main object of its life is to find flowers, by a slow process of elimination, and then extract the nectar. It has a sting, but can’t really be bothered to use it.

So next time that you see a bumble bee smacking into one of your windows, do spare a thought for those less fortunate than ourselves, and gently help it on its way. But before you do so, be sure to explain to it thoroughly exactly what glass is. You won’t get a word of thanks, of course.

I’m sure there are many of us who have met a person to whom we are really very much attracted but whose name we have difficulty in remembering. That’s bad enough, but it’s much worse when you do remember the name – well, sort of – but are unable to pronounce it. So, I solved the problem by calling her Tom. And so that she wouldn’t feel that I was picking on her, and also to cover up for the fact that I couldn’t pronounce her name, I called everyone else Tom too.

A beach. Well, just a beach really. Not in Greece or anything.

Unexpectedly, this caught on. I guess there were other people on the beach with a similar problem. For the rest of the holiday, quite a large number of people called each other Tom on a more or less regular basis. Unwittingly I had stumbled upon a revolutionary idea and one that I feel will certainly have a massive impact on society as a whole: Tomism.

You might be forgiven for thinking that Tomism is just about calling everyone Tom. Well, actually it is but it’s the effects of Tomism that are important and not the name. The name might just as well be Dick, Harry or even Lucinda and the overall effect would be fairly similar. But not the same. You see Tom is a name that it is not only impossible to mispronounce but also very egalitarian – you find Toms at all levels of society. Admittedly not many of them are women but that will soon change.

A real Tom.

Call everyone Tom and you confer on them a shared responsibility. This responsibility may be positive or negative. In other words, you are taking an active share in humanity’s successes but also its failures. Who painted the Mona Lisa? Tom. Who started the Second World War? Also Tom. Who ended the Second World War? A load of Toms.

However, Tomism not only means that you’ll suddenly excel in general knowledge quizzes but also that we’ll finally have the answers to all of those nagging questions that have plagued us for generations. Who invented the wheel? Who invented sliced bread? Who was the first person to set foot on the American continent? Who will be the first person to set foot on Mars? You see, you can simplify history and predict the future at the same time.

Tom.

In an economic sense, Tomism will solve the problem of world poverty. Just got an unexpectedly large bill that you don’t know how to pay? Simply find the richest Tom in the neighbourhood and pop it in his post box! Wars of conquest will become a thing of the past. After all, why go to the trouble of invading a country that you already own?

But it’s in the question of religion that Tomism really comes into its own. Who created the world? Tom did. Let’s not go into how long it took him or how he did it – the name is the most important thing. If all adherents of every religion in the world worship a deity, or multiple deities, called Tom, there’s absolutely no point in arguing about who’s got it right. They’ve all got it right. Naturally the leader of the forces of evil is also called Tom which will shed a new light on Manichaeism.

On a more mundane, practical level, we shall finally see the end of name-dropping. “As I was saying to Tom the other day…” will lose its force entirely.

Tom.

As with any good idea, there are, of course, one or two slight drawbacks. Such as “Where’s Tom?” for example. This question now shifts from the geographical to the philosophical; the correct answer being “Who do you actually mean by Tom?” But, as you can see, it now encourages us to describe that person in more depth. Paradoxically Tomism now presents us with a lot more information about the person in question, such as “The female Tom with the squint who was born in 1977, lives in Salford, Greater Manchester, England, and had two kids with the Tom who worked in the builder’s yard and another with the Tom who was Undersecretary of State for Education in Tom’s last government”. Beats Sharon Philips every day.

Crime, of course, will virtually disappear. We have already successfully dispensed with the profit motive by popping unwanted bills in rich Tom’s letter-box and anyone wishing to gain notoriety will be doomed to disappointment. Crimes of passion become pretty meaningless when your partner has been having an affair with…you. Naturally there will be the odd fully dysfunctional Tom but it’s not a perfect world. Yet.

Another Tom.

And the more you think about it, the more benefits to Tomism there are. Want to go on holiday? No problem. All the tickets are made out to Tom, as are all the passports. Want to be an Olympic Gold Medal Winner? Forget about the training – you already are one. You can win an Oscar, be a best-selling writer (after all, every writer is now a best-selling writer) and even win Mastermind by answering questions on “Famous people”.

And finally, when you meet someone new on holiday, you no longer need to rack your brain to remember their name, much less pronounce it. We’re all Toms. Easy.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Which is not exactly cheerful, but old Andy did have a point: with the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe, it’s not a bad idea to take a look at what you might conceivably do in the few years left to you. After all, wouldn’t you like to leave some mark on the world before you pop your clogs? When you’re finally pushing up the daisies, wouldn’t you like someone to say “Well [your name here] was a total waste of space as a human being but he/she did invent [your choice of invention here].

Of course, finding something really worthwhile to do with your remaining time is no easy matter, so to make the choice a bit easier for you, I’ve come up with ten suggestions of things to do before you die. I’ll admit that ten is a fairly arbitrary number – it could just as well have been a hundred or even a thousand – but you can always look at it as a starting point. So here goes.

1. CLIMB MOUNT EVEREST. Yes, I know it’s a classic but it’s still worth doing anyway. Apparently climbing the highest mountain in the world is now so popular that there’s a waiting list and traffic jams at base camp so all the more reason to get cracking before they install a lift. Naturally, it helps enormously if you have some sort of physical defect or are prepared to do it backwards, barefoot or waving an inflatable banana.

Mount Everest - vastly overrated.

2. FIND OUT WHO INVENTED MAYONNAISE. The Majorcans say it was them, the French, as always, claim that they did it. The Germans have been quiet on the subject, which is unusual, while the Italians couldn’t care less as long as it’s made with extra virgin olive oil. Find out who did it, acquire the copyright and sue Heinz for millions.

3. LIVE. All right! I know! It sounds easy but there are very few people who have mastered the art. What it really boils down to is that whatever you choose to do before you die should actually have been done much earlier.

4. DISCOVER A CURE FOR SOMETHING. It doesn’t matter what – there are plenty of useful diseases out there so you can more or less take your pick. It doesn’t even have to be an effective cure as long as it will fool people for a few hundred years (the placebo effect is a great ally in this). Personally I’d play safe and go for something that is not life-threatening, such as athlete’s foot, for example.

Python Foot - also worth a try.

5. INVENT A NON-ESSENTIAL GADGET. Let’s be honest – most of the essential things have already been invented so that only leaves the non-essential ones. As they’re non-essential, the field is fairly open here. But whatever you choose to invent, be sure that when it comes to naming it you stick an ‘i’ in front, as in the iAutomaticHamsterBacksideWasher. You’ll probably get sued by Apple but that can be another claim to fame and will use up all the dosh you made after copyrighting mayonnaise (that will teach you).

6. BECOME AN OLYMPIC ATHLETE. Tricky at first glance but it’s really dead easy. All you have to do is choose a sport that your country is useless at and register yourself as the only competitor. Examples that spring to mind are the Ethiopian cross-country skiing team or the Vatican City marathon team. After all, who’s the Winter Olympics athlete that everyone remembers? Yep, Eddy “The Eagle” Edwards!

But the Vatican synchronised luge team is not to be messed with.

7. WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE. Now some might argue that you actually have to be good at something to do this but nothing could be further from the truth. Finding out who discovered mayonnaise might help but the smart money is on the Peace Prize. If Jimmy Carter and Al Gore can win it, you must be in with a chance. Failing that, you could do worse than the Nobel Prize for Literature. Just write something incomprehensible and mention ‘peace’ a few times and you’ve got it.

8. WRITE A MILLION-SELLING ALBUM. Easy-peasy! If Alanis Morrissette (who’s as wet a Canadian as ever drank a litre of Perrier) can do it, so can you! 33 million copies of Jagged little pill? You must be joking! It takes 33 million jagged little pills to listen to it! So buy a guitar and learn a few chords. And you can use the earnings to discover who invented mayonnaise and then give all the profits to Apple.

Alanis Morrissette disguised as a rubbish bin (extreme right).

9. SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF WORLD POVERTY. This is not quite as easy as it sounds as it calls for a bit of investment. Namely in plane tickets and a gun. Make a list of all the offshore tax havens, go to each one and go into each bank. Hold the gun to the head of the manager (don’t worry, he’s used to this – he gets it all the time from his customers) and ask him to empty out all the safe deposit boxes, etc. and send the proceeds to the Third World. The only catch is that it will probably end up back in the offshore tax haven. But the Third World is not a perfect world.

10. HAVE THE LAST WORD. Ever been frustrated because that snappy comeback occurred to you 3 hours after the confrontation with the rude sales assistant? This is for you. It is perhaps your greatest challenge and one that cannot be left to chance. Clearly the whole thing will have to be carefully engineered and stage-managed. Invite a select group of friends around to your place, work to a script and make sure that no one opens his or her mouth after you have spoken. And make sure you have that snappy, off-the-cuff comeback prepared days in advance. Canned laughter is a nice touch.

This is strange indeed because if you so much as mention the name Igor to most people, they will immediately think of a goggle-eyed hunchback who opens large, iron-bound doors with an ominous creak and says something like “The master was expecting you” in a vaguely East European accent. Yes, everyone seems to remember Igor the character, yet few remember Igor the actor.

What makes this truly sad is that, in the course of a career that started way back in the 1920s, Igor portrayed a huge variety of leading and supporting actors ranging from an anonymous bit-part player in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Bela Lugosi, to Marty Feldman and even, in a spectacular bit of type-casting, to Charles Bronson. And that is to name but the obvious few.

Charles Bronson

In fact, Igor has played a huge variety of roles including Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Sylvester Stallone and, more recently, Keira Knightly and Hugh Grant. And yet no one even knows his last name.

I think you’ll agree that to play so many very different parts, calls for acting ability of the highest calibre. But who, in fact, was Igor? Who was this master of accent, idiom and - let’s be frank – disguise? Who was this man who was never honoured in his own right by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts or even the National Transylvanian Academy of Retired Igor Players?

Igor was born in obscurity to a family of low-paid goggle-eyed hunchbacks in the town of Weissenberg in 1907. His parents, Mr and Mrs Igor, worked as mouse-stuffers for the local taxidermist. It was hard, grinding work – particularly the legs – and there was rarely meat on the Igor’s table. Well, no meat that wasn’t ground mouse anyway. To relieve the burden on the family, little Igor ran away to join a company of travelling insurance brokers.

Summer in Transylvania

It was while selling third-party, fire and theft car insurance in the villages of Transylvania that Igor discovered a talent for acting. Light comedy appealed to him in particular and he joined a succession of local drama groups. It was while playing in a production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (he played the fan) that he was spotted by the roving impresario and theatrical agent Leonid Brezhnev.

Broadway was soon to follow. Igor shone as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town but finally got his big break playing a piano in The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly. In a review of the production, the New York Times said: “Ruby Keeler was a stand-out as the third chorus girl from the left but the true star of the production was Igor the piano. I particularly loved the moustache”.

Igor as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town

The lure of Hollywood proved irresistible but playing a door-stop and a piano on Broadway was no immediate guarantee of success. Igor joined the thousands of wannabes queuing at Central Casting and kept hunch to back by checking that the users of public lavatory cubicles were still alive. Finally, in 1925, he got his first big break in a Mack Sennett comedy called Sneezing Beezers in which he played a goggle-eyed hunchback. After years of playing inanimate objects, this was a true breakthrough. Unfortunately these were still the years of silent movies so Igor’s one line, “The master was expecting you”, appeared in text with a scroll border and a few major chords from the pianist.

Small though his part was, Igor had caught the eye of directors and producers. Sneezing Beezers was followed by a number of Mack Sennett one-reelers. Soon his popularity was such that audiences would virtually ignore stars like Ben Turpin and Billy Bevan, waiting in anticipation for the goggle-eyed hunchback.

It was time for a makeover

By 1928, the days of the silent movies were over. Talkies became all the rage. Not that Igor noticed very much of this as he never went to the cinema. This was not because he feared the adulation of the public but more that he could never get into a position that allowed him to see the screen.

1931 saw the first real high-spot of his film career: Frankenstein. Unfortunately, these were definitely the days of type-casting and Igor was cast as a mad hunchback called Fritz. Determined to show the studios what he could do, he subsequently made Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein, in which he expanded his repertoire by playing Bela Lugosi.

This gave Igor an idea. He set to work reinventing himself. While many stars of the 1930s were indulging in wild parties fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, Igor could usually be found working out at the local gym and hammering his hunch with a wooden mallet. He solved the problem of his goggle eyes by simply sucking his cheeks in, which was so successful that he landed the part of Katherine Hepburn in Morning Glory, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Katherine Hepburn

We can fast-forward over the years that follow. Suffice to say that many of our favourite actors were, in fact, Igor. His versatility was astounding. Here are just a few examples: Humphrey Bogart and a reprise of Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot, Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, R2D2 in Star Wars, Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Gollum in Lord of the Rings, Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean…

Sadly, Igor passed away on September 17th 1840. In spite of winning an enormous number of awards for his work, his oeuvre has never been appreciated in its own right. It is time to redress this balance.

Mind you, a lot of actors will be out of work.

Igor and his mother relaxing in the sauna

You must admit, it’s a slightly unusual word.

You might conceivably be forgiven for thinking that it refers to one of the many burgeoning alternative sports. You know, the sort of thing that gets relegated to late at night on the Xtreme Sports Channel. This time involving a man wearing shorts and gloves who gets up from the canvas following a countdown from 10 to 1 and then hits another guy in the fist with his chin. A bit like untennis and the untriplejump. But then with blood.

And that's a straight belly to the fist from McManus!

You would be wrong.

It could also refer to the practice of going shopping and refusing to get things wrapped. “No I’ll take it unboxed please. And while you’re about it, I’ll have some unboxed pastrami and a couple of unboxed bagels.”

Wrong again.

Unboxing is the increasingly popular practice of taking things out of boxes. Notably on YouTube. Naturally, the objects that are unboxed do not include pastrami or bagels but are usually some piece of soon-to-be-obsolescent hardware that the unboxer can’t wait to get his hands on. Although he can certainly wait long enough to set up a high-definition video camera and film the whole business.

To leave you in no doubt about what I mean, here’s an example:

I’m sure you didn’t watch that until the bitter end, and that’s unfortunate as it gets really exciting in the last 5 minutes. But don’t think that this video is in any way unique. The only thing that’s unusual about this one is its length – a full 25 minutes of monotone commentary on something very few people could care less about.

Which brings us to the point of why anyone in his or her right mind would want to make a video about taking something out of a box and then post said video on YouTube. After all, although I’ve seen much worse footage on YouTube, in terms of sheer boredom value the unboxing video positively streaks ahead of the opposition. But why do it? I’ve thought long and hard about it and the only conclusion that I can come to is that this is the last resort of people who desperately want to post something on YouTube but have no idea what.

Nothing ever happens in their lives. There are no hilarious and possibly fatal accidents involving children or pets. No UFOs hovering over the back yard. No idiot riding a shopping trolley into a canal. Not even a gang of international terrorists kidnapping their grandmothers. At least none when the video camera is handy.

Nothing not happening nohow.

It’s not even that many of the unboxers seem particularly enthusiastic about unboxing. Some of them even claim to not know what is in the box in the first place, which is fairly difficult to believe when you consider that they bought it, and paid the transport costs. No, they stumble along in their boring monotones, sometimes exclaiming “well, will you look at that” with all the excitement of an archbishop commentating on a chess marathon.

I’ve also noticed that many of the presenters of unboxing videos tend to be a bit disrespectful to the contents of the box. Accessories are tossed casually aside one by one with words like “And we have a hard drive and a standard USB cable” as if they don’t really matter at all. And in fact they don’t. The product is nothing; the unboxing experience is everything.

Mind you, in terms of production costs, unboxing videos tend to be very cheap entertainment indeed. Props usually consist of a table and a knife, although scissors have been used on occasions. Script writing too tends to take a low priority. There’s a lot of ad-libbing in the style of “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much foam padding” or, more prosaically, “So let’s see what we have in the box” or, more bizarrely, “Let’s do the smell test”.

Unboxing smell-testing equipment (here seen on dog).

More worrying to people with an ounce of sanity is that some unboxing videos have pretty high production standards. There’s a snappy intro with upbeat music. A presenter – typically a voice only – who achieves a certain degree of rapid-fire articulacy. There’s quite clearly a flourishing market out there for people who want to see objects removed from boxes.

And even more worrying is the fact that in today’s consumer society, the box is gaining in importance over its contents. Manufacturers wised up to this a long time ago - Apple, in particular, has become well-known for its elegant, stylish packaging. In fact, if you buy high-tech goods online, you’ll often see a photograph of the box along with one of the product. Does the box tell you any more about the product than what you’ve already read about it? No. But the box is still important. After all, when you’re actually using your tiny mobile phone, can anyone really see what brand it is? Of course not. The defining moment of ownership of a high-end device begins and ends with the box.

Fortunately I foresee a rosy future for the unboxing video. Splice them all together and play them back-to-back on the TV in your bedroom. A guaranteed cure for insomnia.

The Norwegian Karma Sutra.

But then, of course, that’s precisely what rules are for. They are there to be broken. If nobody ever broke the rules, there would be no point in having any. What is more, hundreds of thousands of lawyers across the world would be instantly out of business. And, believe me, there’s no one more likely to break the law than an out-of-work lawyer.

One should also bear in mind that lawyers are only the very visible tip of an immense legal iceberg that includes judges, justices of the peace, recorders, solicitors, actuaries, notaries, clerks of the court, ushers and, of course, policepersons. Ergo no laws equals mass unemployment. The Norwegians, being a sensible, well-adjusted people recognise this fact and make it their business to break every law in the sex manual.

Not that breaking the law is exactly difficult to do. Our modern society is now cluttered up with so many of them that breaking a few is no longer a question of existential choice – it’s an absolute inevitability.

Moses delivers the first traffic regulations.

Even the sweet, grey-haired, lovable granny so beloved of Disney films can hardly set her Zimmer frame over the threshold without immediately breaking a few rules. In fact, she’s probably more likely to do so than younger people, because she simply doesn’t know that the rules exist in the first place. However, as any out-of-work lawyer will tell you, ignorance of the law is not a defence.

You see, it’s all about social control. The thinking behind this, if there is any thinking, seems to be that the more we are controlled the easier society will function. There will be fewer disputes because there are rules in place to resolve these disputes. However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the more rules there are, the more disputes there are likely to be.

Take a local by-law – which I’ve made up – against washing your car on a Sunday. You might well feel irritated if your neighbour washes his car every Sunday but you’re unlikely to do anything about it. After all, it’s a free country and if he wants to wash his car, there’s nothing to stop him. But pass a law forbidding people to wash their cars on Sundays and you’ve immediately got grounds for making a complaint. And not just any complain either but an official one that could lead to a sanction for the offending washer. And which will certainly lead to a bad relationship with your neighbour thereafter.

So the law has created a dispute instead of resolving one.

Young police cadets unwashing a car.

A lot of the rules and regulations that govern our behaviour seem to aim at ridding our lives of minor annoyances. Typical of this is the “Do not walk on the grass” sign. The annoyance in this case is presumably the one experienced by the parks department who have to keep the grass looking nice. But why do they have to keep it looking nice? Since when was grass there to be looked at? Of all the vegetation that has been put to the service of parks and gardens, grass is certainly the most practical. It’s there to be walked on. Or played on. It’s not designed to be stared at.

It’s when it comes to traffic regulations that the rules get truly barmy. And then for really bad craziness, we have to look further afield than Norway. In San Francisco, elephants are allowed to walk down the street, provided they are on a leash, however it is forbidden to wipe your car with used underwear. In Denver, Colorado, it is prohibited to drive a black car on Sundays. But if you think it’s always the blacks that get a raw deal, in Minneapolis it’s forbidden to drive a red car down Lake Street. Tennessee very rightly forbids driving while asleep.

No leash, eh? Sorry but you're nicked, sunshine!

And just in case you thought that the United States has the monopoly on mad traffic laws, in Greece you can have your licence revoked for being unwashed or badly dressed. The Russians are a little more sensible: you can be as unwashed as you like but it’s illegal to drive a dirty car. In China, drivers who stop at pedestrian crossings risk a fine while the Turks take a rather opposite view of road safety that fits this blog completely: drivers must carry a hygienic body bag suitable for carrying a corpse weighing up to 120 kilos. Failure to do so will result in a fine and a possible 6-month jail sentence.

That's 6 months in a gulag but with 3 months off for a clean windscreen.

One of the most popular absurd general laws comes from my home country of Great Britain. It refers to the – admittedly small – possibility of a whale being washed up in London. In such an event, by law, the head belongs to the King and the tail to the Queen. I don’t suppose many of you have had first-hand experience of washed-up whales but, by all accounts, they tend to be ever so slightly niffy. In fact, they stink. And because they’re big, they stink big time. Now I’ve tried to think of some logical reason for this law but the only one I can come up with is either that nobody knew what to do with said cetacean and therefore called on the highest authority in the land to dispose of it, or that it’s some sort of veiled insult to the monarchy – and particularly to the Queen.

To conclude, I refer you all to my old pal Charles Dickens, who famously said the law is an ass. And you can take that any way you want.

This is a complete misuse of the term. It also suggests that we are all morons who can’t even take a tour around a supermarket without returning home with enough food to feed the population of a third-world country.

A shopping trolley on a diving holiday in Sharm-el-Sheikh

What I understand by ‘defensive shopping’ is returning home with exactly what you wanted to buy, in an acceptable time frame and without losing your sanity in the process.

On the face of it, this seems easy and occasionally it even is. However, my experience is that in the vast majority of cases you are likely to spend far too long in the shop, fail to get what you want and return home in a thoroughly bad mood. And why? Well, in some cases the shop itself definitely has something to do with it. Take my local supermarkets, for example. Almost without exception, they have a weird pricing policy. When it comes to ‘normal’, run-of-the-mill products, there’s no problem but it seems that whenever they stock anything out of the ordinary – like moose steak for example – there’s no price in sight. There’s no price on the meat and there’s no price on the shelf either. As there’s also no barcode reader, and you don’t want to wait for ages while an assistant contacts the moose department to find out the price, you have to resign yourself to a lamb chop instead. The moose might have been delicious but you’ll never know.

Moose steak. It really is. Scan it and see.

This is where defensive shopping comes in. There’s your moose steak, there’s the checkout. So relax. Just go ahead and put the moose in your basket. You see, the checkout does have a barcode reader. So when a price is displayed that you don’t want to pay, you just say “Good grief (or an expression of your choice) I’m not paying that much!” And you leave the moose to deteriorate at the checkout.
Of course the disadvantage of that is that you now have no dinner, but you will also know what to avoid buying next time.

And then of course there are the large stores that are laid out in such a way that you have to walk for miles past every single product they sell in order to buy that one thing that you entered the store specifically to get. The worst culprit for this in my experience is IKEA. IKEA stores are designed by the same people who make those ‘escape from Castle Wolfstein’ computer games. Typically you enter the shop at the top floor, but the exit is on the ground floor. You want a bookshelf and indeed there are bookshelves on display wherever you look. Along with lots and lots of other things. So your first task is to locate the bookshelf that you saw in the catalogue or the Internet site without getting sidetracked in the bathroom department and without using one of those very large blue bags that can hold up to 100 small, dispensable gadgets. Then, having found your bookshelf, you now have to note the number and track it down in the warehouse section, which is on the ground floor via kitchen equipment, soft furnishings, candles, picture frames, lighting…. and is signposted by small blue signs in very unobvious places. You see the name of the game here is to keep you in the shop.

No need to panic. We have all day.

Shopping defensively at IKEA is a major challenge. But it can be done. You see, what most visitors don’t realise is that at IKEA it is actually possible to enter the shop on the ground floor. Obviously this isn’t very well signposted but have a look around and you’ll probably find an automatic sliding door that will let you straight into….well, not the warehouse as that would be too much to ask but pretty close to it anyway. Now armed with the product number that you got from the catalogue or website, you can track down the bookshelf and go straight to the checkout. (And don’t join the queue of morons at the regular checkout –go for self service and scan your own barcode). If you’re lucky and a fast walker, you can do IKEA in 10 minutes.

But the mention of IKEA brings me to the most terrifying force confronting defensive shoppers: other shoppers. IKEA is a great example of this. You see, IKEA wants to make visiting their shop a family event. You can park your kids in the children’s corner, spend hours meandering aimlessly around the shop and then finish off the (by now extremely expensive) visit with a meal of Swedish meatballs. Haven’t these sad people got anything better to do than spend an afternoon at IKEA? Like going to Sweden, for example. And worst of all are the families who don’t park their kids in the children’s corner but take them on an exciting tour of furniture and bathroom accessories. It’s bad enough having to negotiate your interminable way through a herd of browsing shoppers without an even bigger herd of screaming kids darting in front of you at every turn.

How did that parsley get in there?

Defensive shopping strategy: if you want something from IKEA, try to go there when everyone else is at work. Okay, it will mean taking time off but it’s worth it.

But IKEA is not alone in breeding the shopper from hell. Far, far worse is the local hypermarket on a Saturday afternoon, for ‘tis then that the dreaded shopping businessman makes his appearance. This man is a captain of industry and is used to giving orders and generally being in charge. Unfortunately he has been obliged to accompany his wife to buy the week’s groceries. That’s all you need: an over-inflated ego in charge of a shopping trolley. As a captain of industry, he has a God-given right to monopolise all of the space and be first to the special offers. If he knows where they are. Typically he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t know where anything is and tends to stare off vacantly into space looking vaguely angry.

Defensive strategy: either behave like a captain of industry who knows where everything is, or avoid the hypermarket on Saturday afternoons.

Hey look, honey! An egg!

And of course, there are the pensioners. Those sweet, elderly people with the killer instincts of a piranha giving up smoking. Very often, these are the same people who, understandably, refuse Meals On Wheels because they are independent and can look after themselves. However, this does not stop them from playing the Age Card when it comes to being first in line. They have mastered the art of the shopping trolley, holding it parallel to the shelf at arm’s length so no one else can get near. They painstakingly count out their small change at the checkout so that they match the bill exactly, while the rest of us wait. They stand in front of the milk shelf for hours on end, even though the choice is only full fat and skimmed.

Defensive strategy: either limp, in which case they will defer to someone less able than themselves, or pretend to be mad – old people can’t take that.

However, sadly, the best defensive shopping strategy appears to be to stay at home and order everything by the Internet.

Note to picture editors: It's supposed to be night, you idiots! And dark. And preferably a bit stormy too! Island is fine though.

“It was a dark and stormy night, and the Captain said to Jim, “Jim, tell us a tale!” So Jim began.”

Big improvement. Now, which one is Jim?

“It was a dark and stormy night, and the Captain said to Jim, “Jim, tell us a tale!” So Jim began.”

Are you trying to tell me that this chicken is called Jim? This is supposed to be an old-fashioned tale of sea-farers, not some weird farming fantasy.

“It was a dark and stormy night, and the Captain said to Jim, “Jim, tell us a tale!” So Jim began.”

Right. So I take it that this Chinese policeman is probably called Captain Jim. Great. Not exactly Jack Sparrow though, is he? And if you dare to post a picture of a sparrow, you're all fired.

“It was a dark and stormy night, and the Captain said to Jim, “Jim, tell us a tale!” So Jim began.”

Alright. Now what? Oh, I get it. It's spelt 'tale' you morons, not 'tail'. How can you tell one of these?

“It was a dark and stormy night, and the Captain said to Jim, “Jim, tell us a tale!” So Jim began.”

I grant you that it's a captain of sorts, and I appreciate the fish reference, but it's still not quite what I had in mind.

“It was a dark and stormy night….”

Oh shut up.