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Saturday 22 November 2008

Homer’s cure

Jeremy Clarke on his Low Life

This morning, when I woke up, I reached out and pressed the button on my bedside radio and the first word that came out of it was the word ‘tolerance’. The radio was tuned to the Today programme. It isn’t the first time that the first word I’ve heard has been ‘tolerance’. For the past few weeks I’ve been keeping a mental record. I’ve heard ‘tolerance’ three times as I’ve pressed the button, ‘Muslim’ three times and ‘community’ twice.

Then I came downstairs and looked at the newspaper. Starving millions, an overheating planet, polluted skies and oceans, scarcities, extinctions, wars, rumours of wars — it was grim reading. And that was just the advertisments. There was also a load of comment and speculation about the credit crunch and the collapsing property market and the potentially disastrous commodities bubble. A pundit warned that until liberal capitalism acknowledges that the earth’s resources are finite, we’re all doomed.

Am I anxious? I am not. Did starting the day with the politically tainted word ‘tolerance’ depress me? Not in the slightest. On the contrary, I’m in a state of euphoria. For this morning the postman finally delivered the Homer Simpson talking bottle-opener I’d won on eBay.

I hope nobody takes a blind bit of notice of that newspaper columnist and liberal capitalism stays as it is. Under which other political system would I be able to buy a Homer Simpson talking bottle-opener? I’m not a devotee of the Simpsons TV show. I saw it only once, on a wet afternoon in a caravan in north Cornwall, with two children, who gave me no choice in the matter. But I’m a big fan of the merchandise.

The talking bottle-opener looks like an ordinary bottle-opener with a fat plastic handle. Lever the cap off a beer bottle with it, however, and you hear Homer Simpson having a weird conversation with wife Marge. She says, ‘Beer makes Homer go cray-zee.’ Then Homer yells, ‘Don’t mind if I dooo!’ Then, out of his mind with excitement at the prospect of a beer, he proves Marge right with a succession of mad animal noises. If, as some contend, alcohol addiction is caused by demonic possession, I can imagine an alcoholic’s resident demon celebrating every drink with a similarly diabolic hooting and babbling.

More articles from: Jeremy Clarke | this section

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