Jeremy Clarkson- It takes immense skill to waste time

A report last week found that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is now the number one bedtime story for Britain’s children. But the findings also revealed that one in three parents do not read anything at all to their kids at night.

Experts say this is because grown-ups are now far too busy earning money for their metered water and their speeding fines to have much left over for the cultural needs of their young.

I’m not so sure, because last week I sat next to a thirtysomething chap at the barber’s who’d come inside, not for a haircut, but to have his hands manicured. He didn’t appear to be homosexual. In fact, because he talked at some length about his forthcoming family skiing holiday, we can presume he has young kids.

So what’s his excuse for not reading them a bedtime story? “Sorry, Octavia, there’s no Hungry Caterpillar for you tonight because Daddy spent half the day having his fingernails oiled.”

How un-busy do you have to be to think “It’s four in the afternoon on a Thursday, so I know: I’ll pop to the hairdresser’s and spend an hour or so having exotic creams rubbed into my thumbs”? And it gets worse because on the barber’s shelves, there were a million badger-hair shaving brushes. Who buys them? How empty does your life need to be before you think, “No, I won’t use a disposable razor and some foam from a can. If I use a brush, and whip up some lather of my own, I can make this shaving malarkey last for hours”? Later, in Jermyn Street, which for those of you in Arbroath is a street in London where you can buy tailored shirts and shoes made from the soft underbelly of a grey seal, I saw a prosperous looking man in a baker’s shop agonising over what sort of plumped up, crusty, almond-infused loaf he should buy. Plainly he wasn’t on a tight schedule.

Then we have a friend of mine who flew all the way to Siena to buy a selection of silk contrada flags that were then used as a lining in his next bespoke suit.

Everywhere you look these days you see people paying a fortune to waste time. It’s almost as though our lives are now so wealthy and so healthy that to inject a bit of worry and angst we trouble ourselves with the scent of the soap in the guest bedroom, or the breed of sheep from which our clothes are made.

There’s a shop near my flat in London that sells nothing but hand-knitted super-soft golfing jumpers. What moron gave the owner a loan for that? What did it say in the business plan, for heaven’s sake? “Yes. The rent is expensive in Notting Hill, but I believe there are enough people who will drive right across town, park, come into my shop, buy a £200 jumper and then go all the way home again.”

I would have told her to get lost. But someone didn’t and because the shop is still there after six months I can only presume she was right. There are enough people out there who are prepared to devote an entire afternoon to buying a jumper.

It’s not just London either. While perusing the Google Earth website the other day — it was more fun than reading the kids a bedtime story — I zoomed in on the house where I grew up. Now this is Doncaster. A town that we were told would wither and die when the mines closed.

I don’t think so, because the spy in the sky reveals that the parkland at the bottom of the garden has been converted into an 18-hole golf course.

So even there, among the out-of-work miners, there are people who have so much spare time in their lives they will spend half of it playing what’s essentially an expensive game of marbles. Doubtless in the £200 jumper they drove all the way to Notting Hill to buy.

There are now 2,500 golf courses in Britain covering half a million acres. That means golf takes up slightly less space in the nation than Carmarthenshire. And with 1.2m registered players, is about seven times more popular.

And shooting. Way back when the Tories were in power the only people who blasted away at pheasants were the idle rich and the blue bloods. Not any more. Now, for four months of the year, every wood in the land is full of people stomping about in the rain.

Today there are so many people with so much spare time on their hands that 569,000 own a shotgun certificate. And their hobby is now such big business it has created 40,000 jobs.

Then you have people who spend their free time doing surveys. One lot last week said they’d watched 168 hours of prime-time television and that gay and lesbian people were only featured for 38 minutes. How can your lives be so empty that you think this is a worthwhile use of the most precious resource you have: time? And what about the people who decided to find out why so many parents were not reading their children a bedtime story. And then came up with the wrong answer.

It has nothing to do with a lack of time, or a hectic schedule. And everything to do with the fact that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is the dullest and most stupid book in the history of literature.