The question is as old as time itself: ‘Has the world gone mad?’
You hear it every other day. The world’s gone mad, some say, when the police investigate someone for doubting whether a man can become a woman. Or vice versa.
Others say it’s because we take Twitter seriously. Or because we invite an electronic gadget into our homes, call it Alexa and allow it to do what the KGB could only have dreamed of.
Or because of silly things like buying jeans with holes in them and paying extra for the privilege.
What’s actually happening is that snow is being moved from high mountains to lower ones where there isn’t any. They’ve been doing it in the Pyrenees with helicopters, which happen to be one of the most carbon-emitting forms of transport known to man
Or serious things like spending money on water in plastic bottles, even though it’s free from the tap and the plastic is destroying our oceans.
We all have our own irrefutable reasons for why the world’s gone mad. Maybe because it absolves us from any personal responsibility. It’s very easy to blame ‘the world’ rather than our own complicity.
But there is an example this week of such colossal folly that it surely justifies a category of its own.
We are now moving mountains so that people can slide down them more quickly. Is that mad or what?
Before I explain, a little background.
All sane people now accept that the world is getting hotter. That’s why Glasgow is preparing to host, later this year, the biggest conference of world leaders and assorted hangers-on there’s ever been. It’s called COP 26 and it’s meant to find a way to stop the world frying.
Did the people who ordered up the helicopters give even the slightest thought to its environmental impact? A child of three (let alone a schoolgirl of 17 from Sweden) could have explained it for them
There are many sceptics who believe it should be re-named COP OUT, given the tendency of some of the most polluting countries on the planet to justify their behaviour whatever the scale of the crisis.
America is not going to sign up because Trump wants to burn more, rather than less, fossil fuels. Brazil is not going to stop chopping down the rainforest.
China is not going to stop building new coal-fired power stations. In this country we are not all going to be driving electric cars in 15 years or whatever the Government promises.
So what has this to do with moving mountains? What’s actually happening is that snow is being moved from high mountains to lower ones where there isn’t any.
They’ve been doing it in the Pyrenees with helicopters, which happen to be one of the most carbon-emitting forms of transport known to man.
It’s been happening in Switzerland, too. They’ve also been destroying once beautiful lakes by sucking nearly all the water out of them to make horrible artificial snow.
And the reason they are doing this is to perpetuate one of the silliest sports humankind has invented. Skiing.
The snow has vanished from their resorts because of global warming. Global warming is happening because of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Skiing holidays are one of the causes
I grant you there’s another ‘sport’ that runs it close: Formula One, which has moved in these environmentally conscious times from being not just an insult to the intelligence — funny how the driver in the best car almost always seems to win — but an insult to the environment. It is environmental hooliganism.
My one grudging concession is that it’s unbelievably thrilling to be driven very fast around a race track by the best driver in the world. It happened to me once. Jackie Stewart was my driver.
I still remember screaming when we approached a deadly bend at absurd speed and I saw his foot move not to the brake but to the throttle. But watch it on the telly? Why would you?
Skiing, though, is in a category of its own. Posh skiing to be more accurate. It’s what the word ‘pretentious’ was invented for.
Smart, sleek, smug couples in Canada Goose jackets, expensive watches and winter tans below their mirrored ski goggles waiting to be carried in heated chair lifts to the top of the slope so they can whizz back down again.
If they’re really lucky and it’s a seriously swanky resort, they might bump into (maybe literally) a younger member of the Royal Family.
Prince Andrew’s even got a £13 million chalet he bought with Fergie. That’s another necessary item for the seriously rich skier: an ugly bungalow they call a ski lodge.
What is there to be said for skiing? Well, I’ve tried it a few times — mostly in the United States at the sort of resorts where parents take their kids for fun and where the snow drops from the sky.
I fell over a lot. I tried it in France once. I fell over a lot there, too. I tried cross-country skiing. Wonderful scenery. Great exercise. The only problem was the skis, which kept getting in the way.
So I got the message. It takes time to be any good at it — or you have to start when you’re about three years old.
And when I was a child my working-class family and friends were about as likely to go skiing as they were to stable a team of polo ponies in the back yard.
Maybe if I’d proved a natural at it I would have been less struck by its essential absurdity: strapping bits of plastic to your feet, getting hauled to the top of a mountain so you can slide down again.
And then doing it again. And again. It’s bonkers. There’s more dignity in cheese-rolling.
Or maybe my distaste for the silly sport is simply based on working-class chippiness. It is, after all, perfect for showing off — mostly posing on Instagram.
All sane people now accept that the world is getting hotter. That’s why Glasgow is preparing to host, later this year, the biggest conference of world leaders and assorted hangers-on there’s ever been
Rachel Johnson is far from being working-class — she’s the Prime Minister’s sister — and she’s done a bit of skiing in her time. But she, too, recognises the essential absurdity of it.
The headline over a piece she wrote three years ago after flying over mountains that were brown when they should have been white summed it up rather nicely — ‘God, what WILL the middle class do if we can’t waste a fortune on skiing?’
What they should not be doing, it goes without saying, is feigning ignorance of the massive harm their silly sport is doing to the world.
Did the people who ordered up the helicopters give even the slightest thought to its environmental impact? A child of three (let alone a schoolgirl of 17 from Sweden) could have explained it for them.
The snow has vanished from their resorts because of global warming. Global warming is happening because of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Skiing holidays are one of the causes.
The Japanese have just closed some of their biggest resorts because the usually reliable snow has not fallen. The same must happen in Europe. If not, then yes, the world really has gone mad.
Immigrants learning street-talk English? LOL!
Much argument this week about the new immigration measures the Government is proposing to introduce.
One of the ways potential migrants can add to the points they need is the ability to speak English.
Fair enough, but it raises an intriguing question. Should they be taught to speak like the older or the younger generation?
Obviously, language must adapt endlessly, but what’s fascinating is the way young people adopt expressions that seemed to have gone away. One example: ‘It is what it is.’
I’ve been hearing it everywhere recently and it’s slightly worrying when it’s used as a catch-all excuse for bad things.
A teenage drug dealer talking to the BBC this week defended himself by saying: ‘It is what it is.’
The good news (maybe) is that the hideously ugly ‘Know what I mean?’ with the ghastly glottal stop may be on its way out.
Daniel Finkelstein, who helped David Cameron write his autobiography, pinpointed the danger of apeing young people’s abbreviations.
Cameron had written to him after Daniel’s father died. He ended his sympathetic words with ‘LOL’. He thought it meant ‘Lots of love’.
You and I know differently. Don’t we?
One of the ways potential migrants can add to the points they need is the ability to speak English. Fair enough, but it raises an intriguing question. Should they be taught to speak like the older or the younger generation?