If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Then, after we’ve pulled down all the flammable tower blocks, banned cheese, tomatoes, milk, cream, butter and anything else the Daily Mail says gives us cancer, shut down every KFC and Maccy D in the land, set up boot camps on the coast where we all do star jumps to keep fit and locked up anyone who may be a murderer, things will improve still further. Though I think that maybe it’d be best if the government simply made it illegal to die before you are 125.

  Threatening to lock up your children if you fall into some farm machinery or allow yourself to be tied to a bungee rope by a man who’s plainly been smoking weed would be a very good way of keeping us alive.

  Or, if you don’t fancy living in a walking-pace world of flower-arranging and poetry, you could just accept that we have to die at some point or the world won’t work.

  23 July 2017

  When I went to hospital, I was at death’s door. But a far, far worse fate awaited me

  In all my adult life I’ve never been ill. Oh, I’m sure my children have found me in a white-faced heap on the kitchen floor from time to time, and they must have heard me calling for God on the porcelain telephone, but they’ve never seen me in bed, whimpering and pleading for soup.

  I’ve led an idiotic life filled with smoking and danger and germs but, despite this, I’ve never taken a sick day. I’ve never had an antibiotic. I’ve never had food poisoning. I’ve never broken a bone, and I sure as hell have never spent a night in hospital.

  I’d always hoped that when the luck ran out I’d catch something exotic, something that would cause a doctor to harrumph, reach for his textbooks and then pull together a panel of great medical minds from all over the world to discuss in wonderment what might be done. About the chap with a supernumerary penis growing out of his forehead.

  But no. Instead I got a pneumonia, which is what my mum said I’d catch if I went outside without a vest. It’s pathetic.

  I was on holiday in Mallorca when I started to feel ill. And after three nights spent spasming in my bed I thought I ought to go and see the doc.

  He sent me for tests at the hospital, where I was put into a plastic dress with a slit up the back and told by a man in what looked like a swimming hat that I’d have to be admitted for at least a week.

  ‘Impossible,’ I snorted. ‘I have to go to New York on Tuesday and I’ve my columns to write; then on Friday …’

  ‘A healthy person’s CRP should be five,’ said Mark Spitz. ‘Yours is 337.’

  I had no idea at the time what a CRP was – it turns out to be something your body makes more of when you have an infection – but 337 sounded a lot.

  ‘If you don’t do as I say,’ he added, ‘you will die.’

  I did understand that.

  I’m sure many of you will have found yourself in hospital, not having planned to be there. But for me it was a new experience. And a weird one. Because I was in a room with nothing on the walls except wallpaper, and most of that was coming off. And I was in there for an hour, on my own, with absolutely nothing to do. The boredom was so bad I thought often about killing myself.

  But then an army of nurses arrived to wire me up to a drip, which meant for the following hour I was effectively fastened to the wall. If only I’d thought to be travelling with a baseball glove and a ball when I was captured, I could have managed more easily but, stupidly, I’d left them at the villa.

  I pushed the help button on my emergency panel and a nurse arrived. ‘I’m very bored,’ I said. ‘And I can’t find the remote control for my television.’ It turned out that these had to be rented at €30, or £27, a day. I’d have paid €3,000. But luckily, I didn’t, because all there was to watch was golf. In Spanish. So I summoned the nurse again and asked if she could get me a rock hammer and a big poster of Raquel Welch.

  Much, much later, the head honcho arrived. I knew he was the head honcho because I have seen Jed Mercurio’s medical dramas, so I know that head honchos in hospitals swoosh into the room followed by a team of fawning assistants.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked.

  I said yes.

  ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘That keeps me in work.’

  He then stroked my knee tenderly and left. And that was that. Consultation over.

  In the night I was shaken awake by a nurse, who was furious because I had been sleeping in such a way that the drip wasn’t working. Addressing me with the tone, accent and volume that a Vietnamese bar owner would have used on a GI who was attempting to leave without paying, she yelled for two minutes, hurt my elbow and then left.

  I was grateful for these moments, because here’s the thing. My right lung was more than half full of mucus. I was running one hell of a fever. I had almost no breath at all and even less energy, but all I could think was: ‘I am dying of boredom here. Literally dying.’

  Then my girlfriend arrived. To say she was going for lunch with friends on a superyacht. But very sweetly she did say she’d stop off in Palma to pick up some essentials for me. After I’d spent four more hours watching my wallpaper fall off, she came back with a beautifully soft black leather bomber jacket.

  Normally, when I’m bored, I smoke. Or drink. But both those things were out of the question. I just had my drugs. Thousands of them. There was one that caused lightning bolts to ricochet around in my toes and one that would apparently ruin my stomach and loads more I didn’t understand, but there was one that was – and remains – the highlight of my day. I was hooked.

  It’s called Fluimucil Forte, and its purpose is revolting. It’s designed to dislodge the phlegm and the gunk in my lung and bring it up in the sort of dark, meaty globules we haven’t seen since Mrs Thatcher shut down the mines. But holy sweet Jesus. It’s a taste sensation.

  You can forget the joy of a cold Coke on a hot day, or an early-evening sip of Château Léoube. This was in a class of its own. And pretty soon I was telling the nurses I’d spilled it and could I have another?

  Then my heart sang even more because my son arrived. After I’d spoken to him at some length about my new wonder drug, he got up and flew back to London.

  This is the problem with hospitals. People who stay in them become institutionalized and incapable of speaking about anything other than what nurse brought what drug at what time. Boredom turns them into bores.

  And when they get out, as I have, and there is nothing to do for two whole months apart from get better, things are even worse, because all I can talk about is my illness. And, as my dad used to say, ‘A bore is a person who, when asked how they are, tells you.’

  13 August 2017

  My foolproof recipe to kick the fags – chewing gum and a hideous chest infection

  Whenever you are interviewed by a medical-or life-insurance person, they always begin by asking if you smoke. You can tell them you like to spend your free time wrestling tigers while driving a burning motorcycle, and that despite your massive heroin addiction you work in the underwater explosives business, and they won’t care. Just so long as you have pink lungs.

  It’s much the same story at people’s houses. Ask your hostess after dinner if it would be all right if you fondled yourself, and she’ll say, ‘Yes, of course,’ and politely look the other way while you get on with it. But ask if it would be all right to smoke and there will be a lot of flapping and huffing, and pretty soon you’ll be puffing away in the back garden, in the rain.

  Smoking among adults is now more antisocial than murder but, apart from one brief pause a while ago, that’s never stopped me. I’ve smoked nearly 630,000 fags over the past forty-three years and, aside from the very first, there hasn’t been a single one that I didn’t enjoy.

  But then, as you may have heard, I got pneumonia while I was on holiday, and I was told, by everyone, that I had to stop. Immediately. I had no choice at the time because the blood poisoning was so bad and I was so racked with the resultant rigors that I couldn’t work a cigarette lighter. Also, I was fastened to the wall of my hospital room by an intravenous drip. And I couldn’t rea
lly breathe.

  So a week went by with no smoking. And then my daughter came to look after me as I recovered, and she’s very fierce so I didn’t smoke for that week either. And then after another week I came back to London, where an insurance company needed to know whether I was fit enough to return to work.

  This meant going to a hospital in west London and passing my credit card through the reader until it melted. In return, I was made to empty my lungs into a tube and then empty them some more. And then keep breathing out until I could feel the hairs on my head being sucked into my skull.

  Then I had to run up some stairs, and afterwards the doctor was horrified. I had 96 per cent of the lung capacity you would expect in someone my age. And I could breathe out harder and for longer than a non-smoking forty-year-old. Plus, after I’d run up the stairs, my blood was more oxygenated than it had been when I was sitting in a chair. Which is impossible, apparently.

  In short, getting on for three-quarters of a million fags have not harmed me in any way. I have quite literally defied medical science.

  And yet, for reasons that are not entirely clear, I decided that, having done three weeks without smoking, I might as well keep going, so now it’s been a month. I’ve pushed it. I’ve got drunk. I’ve stayed up late. I’ve been to bars with smokers and sat outside in a cloud of their exhalations. And, so far, I haven’t cracked.

  I’ve been tempted, of course, usually when every single person I meet says, ‘Ooh, have you thought about giving up drinking as well?’ No. Why in the name of all that’s holy would I want to do that?

  Then there are those who think that because I’m not smoking I should take up running, or cross-country skiing. I was invited this weekend to the south coast so I could go swimming. Swimming? In the English Channel? I’m off the fags, for Christ’s sake. I haven’t gone mad. Swimming in British waters is something you should consider only if your Spitfire’s been shot down.

  What people who smoke don’t realize – and what people who don’t smoke realize even less – is that nicotine’s a fiend. Giving it up is really hard. It requires constant attention, and you can’t be distracted by changing your life in any other way.

  But there are a few handy hints I can pass on. You could move to Australia, where smoking is just about impossible. But that would mean living in Australia, which would be a bit dreary. So stay here and go to the cinema a lot. Or shopping centres. And go to bed early.

  The next handy hint I can pass on is Nicorette four milligram ‘original flavour’ gum. At £18 a pack it’s more expensive than smoking gold, and it causes you to hiccup sometimes, but it delivers the nicotine and that keeps you on an even keel. Because of it, I’ve murdered only three people in the past two days, and one of those was an Uber driver so that doesn’t really count.

  What’s more, I spend so much time chewing gum, I can’t eat and, as a result, since I gave up, I’ve lost a stone. True fact, that.

  Some say that vaping is the answer, but I’m not sure. Partly this is because that steamy stuff makes me cough until my lungs are hanging out of my mouth, and partly it’s because people with vapes look like complete idiots.

  The main trick, however, is to try to find a friend who’s prepared to give up at the same time. I spent the latter stages of my holiday with a woman who’d been forced by bronchitis to quit, and having her around, in the same boat, was a genuine source of strength.

  Mainly, though, it’s willpower. And to help with that, never say that you’re giving up for good, only for the week, or the morning, or whatever seems manageable. And then, when that time is up, and you’ve coped and you haven’t stabbed anyone, think of another time frame that seems achievable.

  And when it all gets too much, which it will, try to imagine how much damage each puff is doing. Which, of course, is my biggest problem, because tests have shown I’m going through all the pain and the misery for absolutely no reason. I may as well have given up sandwiches.

  27 August 2017

  Grab your hippie-hemp bag, the little shop of package-free horrors is open

  Often, when I tell the young woman on the supermarket till that I do in fact need a couple of bags to carry my shopping home, I get the sort of contemptuous look that leaves me in no doubt that I alone am responsible for the flooding in Houston and the plight of that idiotic polar bear we saw on the BBC last week trying to eat a walrus.

  I know I’ve been bad. I know I should have turned up with a reusable bag made from hemp or mud, and that the oil used to make the plastic for my new, use-once-and-chuck-away carrier bag would have been better employed in the engine of my Range Rover, or in Alan Sugar’s hair. I know all that.

  But I don’t shop like normal people. I drive around until I see a parking space and then I go to whatever stores happen to be near it. You go out to get washing powder and you come home with washing powder. Me? I never know what I’m going to come home with. It could be a new shirt or a stone otter or a Lamborghini. And I can’t possibly be expected to carry around a selection of hippie-hemp organic bags to cope with such a wide range of possibilities.

  I hate waste as much as anyone else. And I especially hate wasteful packaging. I hope there is a special place in hell’s sewerage system reserved for the people at Gillette, whose products are sold in such robust packaging that to get at the razor itself you need an axe and two hand grenades.

  The other day I found a parking space near Tottenham Court Road in central London, so I went into a computer shop and bought a memory stick thing. It was the size of a woodlouse but it came in a plastic display cabinet that was about 2 foot across. That made me angry.

  And that’s why my eye was caught last week by the antics of a former Manchester United footballer called Richard Eckersley. Actually, let’s be clear on this point. Although Eckersley did grace the subs’ bench at Man U on a few occasions, he later joined Burnley and spent most of the time being loaned to clubs such as Plymouth Argyle before ending up in defence at the powerhouse of international football – Toronto FC. Both of the Canadian team’s supporters remember well how he helped them to a big win over the Vancouver Whitecaps.

  Anyway, Eckythump is now back in Britain and has opened a shop in Devon where nothing at all is packaged. This fills my heart with joy, and I hope one day a nearby parking space is free as I drive by so I can pop in and buy some of his, er … well, that’s where the problems start.

  Mr Eebygum and his lovely wife, Nicola, are plainly very environmentally aware and wish to tread lightly.

  They have called their business Earth.Food.Love. And as far as I can see, all of what they sell is expensive, revolting or pointless.

  There’s toothpaste, for instance, that isn’t packaged. I’m not entirely sure how that works. And then there are bamboo toothbrushes, which Mr Eebygum seems to like a lot. He tells us they’re made by a German company that says, ‘We all need water … to live.’ Crikey. These eco-boys are sharp. Until the manufacturer goes on to say that ‘Every living being arises from a drop of water.’ Really? I thought it was sperm.

  Naturally, you can buy reusable sanitary towels that come from a community project in India and reusable sandwich wraps that are made by the inmates at a Scottish prison.

  And then we get to the food, and I’m afraid there’s nothing here for me at all. It’s beans, pulses, nuts, seeds, grains and various other things I wouldn’t even put in a budgerigar’s mouth. Apparently, the shop’s most popular feature is its ‘grind-your-own nut butter machine’. Honestly. You couldn’t be more right on unless you were serving delicate pieces of Diane Abbott wrapped in old copies of the Guardian.

  Now, I’m not daft. I know that there are many people who enjoy eating the same food as their pets. I stayed with a friend last week whose seventeen-year-old son is very thin. And when you looked in her cupboards you could see why. There was nothing in there a boy human would think about eating unless he was trapped in a desert cave and the only alternative was his arm.

  The trouble
is that mothers such as this, and lunatics in Islington and Mr Eckythump, are so earnest that even when they have a sensible idea, normal people, who drive cars and eat sausages and don’t buy organic carrots because they’re too hard to peel, put their fingers in their ears and hum.

  A shop where nothing is sold with packaging is a brilliant idea. But not when it only sells stuff that appeals to cyclists and squirrels. I would love to buy Frosties without a packet, and Vesta curries and butter. Smokers, I’m sure, would love to buy cigarettes loose rather than in a box covered in pictures of someone’s diseased throat. And much as I adore Nespresso coffee and the elegance of the machines that make it, I do despair at the sheer amount of effort and money and energy that’s gone into making and transporting those capsules.

  There’s another thing too. Because there’s so much packaging in our lives our wheelie bins fill more quickly. Now that might not be too much of an issue for you, but the drive to my cottage in the country is half a mile long.

  So, as I’m dragging the bin full of used coffee capsules over the cattle grids, which is not easy, in the rain and the wind, I have sometimes entertained the idea of taking one of those Nespresso machines and ramming it up George Clooney’s behind.

  3 September 2017

  While CND was blowing up red balloons, nukes were keeping us healthy and safe

  You and I both know that Kim Jong-un is not going to launch a nuclear attack any time soon. And that even if he did, his much talked-about KN-08 missile would wobble about in the sky for a few minutes and then crash into the sea. Or not take off at all.

  We also know that, while Donald Trump may be a bit bonkers, he isn’t going to launch the first strike. Nor will he retaliate if Kim makes the first move. Because why bomb someone who, in all probability, has just bombed himself?

  This is why we can all get up in the morning and go to work. It’s why we are not stockpiling food or making water filters from our central-heating boilers. And it’s why the government is not digging out the old Protect and Survive public information films to tell us about how our lives will be spared if we take the bedroom door off its hinges and prop it up against the kitchen table.