WHAT THE FOX ??

Let me make one thing perfectly clear here. Despite the efforts of Basil Brush, Tails from the 'Sonic the Hedgehog' games, Walt Disney and George Clooney, the fox is NOT, never has, and never will be a cuddly-wuddly, furry-wurry orange puppy dog with doe eyes and a waggly tail. What it actually is, is a rabid, disease-ridden wolf with the morals of a psychopath and the teeth of a great white shark.

I write this because a while ago now, whilst I was doing something unusual - watching a programme on Channel 5 - a whole bunch of people with furry facial fungus managed to single-handedly talk me out of a long-held belief that we should maintain the current ban on fox hunting with hounds.

I can't remember what the programme was called but I do recall vaguely fancying Kirsty Young, the Scottish presenteress. Anyway, amongst a studio audience a guest speaker was talking about whether it's right to chase furry-wurry widdle foxes and their babies in the name of both sport and tradition.

The pro-hunting group actually talked very sensibly and quite thoughtfully about how the fox was at the top of the food chain and that left to it's own devices, it would take over the woods, which they argued would end up looking like Stalag Luft III after Charles Bronson had been left alone with the gardening tools.

Farmers would have to end up spending all the money that Angela Merckel's EU quotas have left them with on huts that would require trained mice to act as sentries. Shooting may cause a cruel and painful wound. Poison could accidentally take out a baby hedgehog or someone's dog, and traps are best used for rats and mice. I found myself nodding in agreement but then … then … then it was the turn of the Weird Beards.

Surely, they'd come up with an equally constructive, well-written and a fair, unbiased counterpoint that would assertively present their side of the case, and would re-assert my views again ??

Err, no.

Instead, they barracked, shouted aimlessly and made loads of noise. They went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how the evil hounds tear the innocent fox apart limb from and that the people who indulge in this sport may have voted for UKIP.

In just a few minutes, they had made almost all of my bodily fluids come to the boil, my teeth had been ground to talcum powder and steam was pouring out of my ears and nostrils. I followed this up by ripping my settee to pieces and bit whole chunks out of my coffee table. My skin might even have begun to turn green.

If I see a fox now, I'm filled with an almost uncontrollable desire to run it down. Not kill it, you understand. Just give it a dig it for having the lousiest of human friends on Planet Earth.

It's much the same deal with cars. Looking through a list of what is coming out this year, any right thinking motoring person would have to say that things have gotten, and are getting, rather good.

The BMW M5, for example, has a 400 horsepower 4.4-litre V8 which enables it to accelerate from 0-60mph in 5.2 seconds. The Jaguar XJR, has a twin supercharged V8, comes with enough oomph to snap a bra strap at 200 paces. It reaches 60mph from rest in 5.3 seconds. And then the Porsche 911, after a major facelift has a water cooled flat six that endows it with a top speed of 170 mph. As well as this, Ford is soon to launch a Cosworth version of the Focus, so expect to see one break the windows of your neighbour's house soon.

Now obviously, the little boy in all of us will be excited by the motor industries relentless quest to headbutt the horizon but can I urge our careful side to emerge here. I live near some very traffic-heavy roads and I genuinely worry that someone will die one day, courtesy of someone speeding. Yet I have seen people going along at way over 40mph.

I dread the day when my eventual children (that is if I ever solve the interminable problem of finding someone actually willing to conceive and give birth to them) start riding bikes because they're going to have to mix it with people in what could well be barely sub-sonic Volvos, Honda, Fords and Audis.

Now, I love speed, the thrill of cornering at speed and driving quickly, but if I had to try and argue the case for high-performance motoring on a TV debating programme, I would be truly and utterly stuck, I mean, we’re living in an era where people are so quick to profess offence I'm amazed this blog hasn't landed me in Google+'s equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. It’s weird to be living in a world in which people are encouraging the police to arrest Katie Hopkins for something she tweeted.

And that is a very, very slippery slope. indeed.

And now that Top Gear is going to be presented by someone with the same hair colour as Mr Fox, this only means one thing.

Fox crossings.

The Earth is doomed …

THINGS I'VE LEARNED FROM TV ...

* During all police investigations, it will be necessary to visit a lap dancing club at least once.

* When they are alone, all foreigners prefer to speak English to each other.

* If being chased through town, you can usually take cover in a parade - at any time of year ...

* All beds have special L-shaped cover sheets which reach up to the armpit level on a woman but only to the waist level on the man lying beside her.

* The Chief of Police will almost always suspend his star detective - or give him 48 hours to finish the job.

* All grocery bags contain at least one stick of French bread.

* It's easy for anyone to land a plane providing there is someone to talk you down.

* The ventilation system of any building is the perfect hiding place - no one will ever think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building undetected.

* Police departments give their officers personality tests to make sure they are deliberately assigned to a partner who is their polar opposite.

* The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window in Paris.

* If you need to reload your gun, you will always have more ammunition, even if you haven't been carrying any before now.

* You are very likely to survive any battle in any war unless you make the mistake of showing someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.

* Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to speak the language - simply using a German accent will do.

* If your town is threatened by an imminent natural disaster or killer beast, the mayor's first concern will be the tourist trade or his forthcoming art exhibition.

* A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.

* When paying for a taxi, don't look at your wallet as you take out a bill just grab one at random and hand it over. It will always be the exact fare.

* Kitchens don't have light switches. When entering a kitchen at night, you should open the fridge door and use that as a light instead.

* If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises in their most revealing underwear.

* Mothers routinely cook eggs, bacon and waffles for their family every morning even though their husband and children never have time to eat it.

* Cars that crash will almost always burst into flames.

* All telephone numbers in America begin with the digits 555.

* A single match will be sufficient to light up a room the size of Wembley Stadium.

* Medieval peasants all had perfect teeth.

* Any person waking from a nightmare will sit bolt upright and pant sweatily.

* It is not necessary to hello or goodbye when beginning or ending phone conversations.

* Even when driving down a perfectly straight road, it is necessary to turn the wheel vigorously from left to right every few moments.

* It is always possible to park directly outside the building you are visiting.

* A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.

* It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts - your enemies will patiently attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out all their predecessors.

* When a person is knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, they will never suffer a concussion or brain damage.

* No-one ever involved in a car chase, hijacking, explosion, volcanic eruption or alien invasion will ever go into shock.

* Once applied, lipstick will never rub off - even while scuba diving.

* You can always find a chainsaw when you need one.

* Any lock can be picked by a credit card or a paper clip in seconds - unless it's the door to a burning building with a child trapped inside.

DIGITAL GENYSYS

When I edited my workplace's old company newsletter, I once wrote a column entitled "I HATE MACS".

No, it wasn't about my bias against plastic rainwear, and whilst I might have called it a column, it was actually an unbroken 800-word rant against Steve Jobs. I claimed they were "glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work."

And so this went on: "The better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them ... I don't care if every iPad comes with a magic button on the side that makes it vomit 24-carat gold coins, styles my hair for me and plays Elvis Presley songs on the bongos. I'm not buying one”. And so on and so forth.

They supposedly make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the brushed aluminium finish, the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold a Macbook shut - it's serene. Untroubled. A bit like being on Valium.

Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn't want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn't on your side. It doesn't even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.

Here's a scenario: you've got a spanking, shiny new iPhone with loads of music on it. And you've got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your new phone. But you can't just hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other software and device in the known bloody universe.

Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.

Microsoft gets a lot of stick these days for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of that annoying animated paperclip, they never hurled out anything as abominable as iTunes - a hideous online binary carbuncle that really takes the jam out of my doughnut, transforming the sparkling world of music into a bleak, stark, un-cooperative spreadsheet.

Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven't been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about "syncing" one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it.

Why ?? It won't tell you. It'll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like a robot butler that can't understand why you're crying more than a “Britain’s Got Talent” contestant. No one uses terms like "sync" in real life. Not even C3PO or the Daleks. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, what will I end up with, two copies of “Santa Claus the Movie” ??

Using iTunes is like trying to fire a piece of limp spaghetti through a keyhole from a cannon whilst wearing a pair of boxing gloves and listening to white noise though headphones.

The "sync" malarkey is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it's actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of money. So rather than risk that, they'll choose - every single time - to restrict your options, without so much as blinking.

Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue by using third-party software, but doing so requires a degree-level knowledge of faff and brainwork akin to solving that famous children’s logic problem about a farmer ferrying a load of grain, a fox and a chicken across a river without it all ending in blood, feathers and death.

And even if you find it easy, it's a problem Apple doesn’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to remember to breathe.

Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it's a superficial friendship. They won't even give you a lead long enough to use your phone while it's charging, so if it rings you have to crawl on your hands and knees like a dog. This is why I have a Samsung MP3 player, a Sagem mobile phone (which BTW is so old it runs on coal and is charges via means of fossil fuel and an old brass boiler called “Bessie”) and a Windows PC.

Sure, I could easily have an iPhone or a MacBook Pro, and could very easily love them. But I would never feel like actually I own them. More like I'm renting them, from Skynet ....