The Last Piece of Paper On The Roll

Of all the poor girl’s faults, Gabby’s greatest failings are possibly her bathroom habits. Many is the time I visit the smallest room and find a single sheet of paper clutching precariously onto the roll.

‘You really have to stop this, Gabby!’ I told her this morning when I found a single layer of double-ply about to drift to the floor.

‘Pffft,’ she said and waved me away with the Driving section of The Sunday Times.

‘I won’t pffft,’ I said. ‘Is this what it’s like in Romania? Does everybody wipe their rum ends with a single sheet of Andrex? Or is it just part of your devious plan to avoid travelling all the way over to the other side of the bathroom, to get a new roll from the cupboard?’

‘You know where paper is,’ she replied. ‘So… it not problem.’

But it is a problem. And it’s a problem with this world of ours. Nobody cares a fig about who follows them into the bathroom or onto the planet. And nobody cares about a man with a thong around his ankles.

Take Live Earth. It was supposed to be the seminal moment when we all woke up to the damage we’ve been doing to Mother Earth. Not that the event was really about the planet, science, evidence, solutions, or even common sense. It was more Gayner than Gaia; more about wiggling our hips, having a good time and remembering to buy Madonna’s back catalogue. In my case, it was also about grinning and bearing it because Gabby loved every minute.

Her delight astonished me. Whichever way you swing in the environment debate, I would have thought that any reasonable person would have detested Al Gore’s latest attempt to prove he’s really the ‘People’s President’. Winning via the fawning media what he failed to win at the ballot box, Gore had assembled the Democratic Party’s celebrity militia to invade our homes for another crass evening of hang-wringing, tub-thumbing, and heartfelt excess.

A few years ago, Red was the colour when the stars came together and solved the problem of Aids. Before that, white was the colour when the stars came together and solved the problem of famine in Africa. This year’s colour is green. Somehow it seems sickly appropriate.

The only people who might have woken up to the green issue would have been the world’s morons, though even this is to be doubted judging from some of the comments from the crowd.

‘Gotta save the planet, man!’

‘This is the only Earth we got so we should look after it…’

You’d be excused for believing that stating the bleeding obvious was the message of the day.

Watching the faces of the massed numbskulls who attend these events is an entertainment in itself. Monied imbeciles nearly every one, they were the well muscled young men with sun glasses angled on the top of their shaved domes full of nothing but incredulous banality. Then there was the unending supply of enthusiastic Notting Hill debs waving their hands to James Blunt’s strangled warblings. Few knew much about anything except this was the next ‘big event’ and they just had to be there.

Only the presence of Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean did anything to save this from being the usual line up of in-crowd regulars. Tap were Tap and I was just glad to see the midgets dancing around the mini-Stonehenge. Beyond that, the show was relentlessly bad. My distain for Ricky Gervais grows every time his parks his substantial cheeks on a TV sofa. His self-parody no longer distracts me long enough to forget that the man has become a walking rash that has infected everything that once had class. He’s left a scar on The Simpsons, got his infected face into the usual ensemble cast in ‘For Your Consideration’, and last night, had to be the one to introduce Spinal Tap. I wait nervously for the moment that John Cleese relents and allows the BBC’s CGI department to work on ‘Fawlty Towers’ and replace Polly with darling their Ricky.

The Earth is at a tipping point, or so Terence Stamp told me last night. It’s time for us to wake up and act. Then they doused the non-essential lights at Wembley to make a point.

I wish they’d doused the whole non-event.