For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three

by Jeremy Clarkson

  There. That’s my manifesto. Still think I’m a good idea, Dave?

  Sunday 6 August 2006

  How to blow up a dead seal

  Last weekend the Sunday Times Home section devoted a lot of space to moving to the seaside and living for the rest of your life in a chunky polo-neck sweater and yellow wellies. It all looked terribly idyllic.

  But I have a cottage by the coast and let me tell you there are certain aspects of life by the sea that you might not have considered: like, for instance, what you are supposed to do when an 8-foot seal comes to the beach outside your house and dies.

  No, I didn’t club it. And nor had it become entangled in the £4-0 worth of fishing equipment that I lose in the oggin every evening. Global warming? Perhaps, but contrary to the teachings of Rolf Harris there is another, more common way for seals to die. It’s called old age.

  Whatever, it was dead and despite a limited knowledge about these things I knew that I had maybe two days before it would start to smell pretty bad.

  ‘Push it into sea,’ said one local. A fine plan, I’m sure, but such was the weight of the thing I think it would have been easier to push the sea onto the seal. God, it was heavy.

  And worse, while trying to manhandle it through the shallows, its eyes fell out.

  So now I’m standing up to my shins in water that’s being stained a sort of pungent reddy brown, and all around small fish and crabs are fighting one another to eat the eyes. This is something David Attenborough doesn’t show.

  The gruesome, cruel, revolting side of nature.

  I’m not ashamed to admit that after only a very short while I was prodigiously sick. And then the crabs start to eat that.

  Happily, I recently bought a special eight-wheel-drive vehicle for just such an emergency, so I reversed this on to the beach with a view to pulling the seal above the high-water mark. Carefully, I tied a rope to its flippers, and promptly pulled them off.

  Say what you like about seals, that they’re cute and so on, but I can assure you they are incredibly badly made. The slightest tug or nudge causes bits of them to come away.

  Anyway, after much revving and many arguments with my wife about what sort of knot would be best, we finally had the beast on dry land. But then what?

  Momentarily, I considered towing it to a nearby beauty spot where people were camping illegally. A rotting seal with no eyes or feet would soon clear them away. ‘No,’ said another passing local, ‘you should turn it into a coat.’

  This raises an interesting point. You might think you’re prepared for a life by the sea. You can probably paint, and arrange flowers, and make jam from kelp, but can you skin a seal? I’m willing to bet you can’t. And neither can I, so I decided to burn it.

  Of course, I’ve watched Ray Mears many times and I know that it’s easy to light a fire with nothing but patience and some dry wood. But this is the Isle of Man and I’d like to see him find some dry wood here. It all falls into two categories: damp or sodden.

  I collected as much of it as I could, along with half a ton of litter that’s always easy to find on a beach, and made what would pass for a Viking funeral pyre… and then went to the garage to buy a couple of gallons of diesel.

  Not since the wreckers were operating round these parts has the Isle of Man seen such an enormous blaze. All day it spat and crackled and I went to bed that night pleased that I’d found an appropriate and dignified way for the seal to be dealt with.

  But it didn’t work. The seal emerged with nothing more than a lightly singed coat.

  So I built an even bigger fire. This one was going to make the conflagration in Hemel Hempstead look like the pilot light in your boiler. I bought diesel, petrol, meths, engine oil, kindling and even a light sprinkling of gunpowder. Then I lit a match and knew immediately I’d overdone it. The pile didn’t catch fire. It exploded.

  The savagery was incredible. It looked like Beirut out there. Nothing within 50 yards was as it had been. Except the seal. It remained in one piece, only now it had a small gash in its stomach through which its intestines were poking. These smelt terrible.

  I therefore rented, for the not inconsiderable sum of£175 a day, a bulldozer so that I could dig a grave for the lightly singed, mildly split corpse.

  This is an expense you might not have considered when thinking about moving to the seaside.

  Have you ever tried digging a grave on a shingle beach? It can’t be done. Shingle is the geological equivalent of the Hydra. You scoop 10 stones out of the way and immediately 10 grow back to fill the cavity.

  By the time my 24-hour bulldozer rental period was up, the hole was just about big enough for Willie Carson. But not a big dead grey seal, so I’m afraid there’s no happy ending. It’s still out there, making the whole postcode smell like Cambodia’s killing fields.

  I thought that a life by the sea would be relaxing. I thought it’d be nice to work here.

  And it is, although I must say this is the first newspaper column I’ve written while wearing a gas mask.

  Sunday 13 August 2006

  The Royals, a soap made in heaven

  So, Prince Harry has been photographed in a nightclub squeezing the ample right breast of a pretty young blonde. Good. I wish he’d gone further, caught a spot of syphilis, and then driven home in a bright red Ferrari at 150 mph.

  For years people have argued about whether or not we should have a royal family, and that if we should, what kind of role it should play in today’s world.

  Should it be old and stuffy, a moth-eaten metaphor for the Britain that once was? Or should it have a more meaningful role than opening hospices and asking visiting dignitaries from Bongo Bongo land if they’ve come far?

  And if it does have a more meaningful role, what should it be? I mean, how can you move something along when it has the millstone of history around its neck?

  You can’t, so how’s this for a brilliant idea I’ve just had? You simply cut those irksome ties with the past and move the royal family into the most modern arena of them all…

  We have a craving for soap opera in this country. Coronation Farm and EastEnders are watched by millions of people every night. We can’t, it seems, get enough of who said what to whom, and what the ramifications of that might be. Other people’s lives.

  Other people’s trivia. We lap it up.

  And now we’re drinking from the saucer of Big Brother as well, which when you think about it is just another soap opera only with no storyline, no plot and no actors. Just a lot of very clever editing to make these dreary non-people look interesting.

  And boy, does it work. So desperate are we to keep abreast of their fortunes that even today, several years after she left the Big Brother house, Jade Goody, who is part woman and part scientific blunder, is still unable to go to the gym or pop to the shops without being papped.

  Is there room for more? More Love Island? More I’m in a Jungle?

  More soap. More bit-part nobodies to feed the insatiable hunger of the British red-topped tabloids and the legions of readers?

  Yes, of course there is, and so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… The Royal Family. We turn the whole damn shooting match into a reality soap opera, stripped across the week’s TV schedules with late-night updates and a big publicity machine to feed the morning papers.

  At present the cost of the royal family to each taxpayer in Britain is 6op a year.

  That looks like bad value when all the key players ever do is open stuff and talk to vegetables. But 6op a year for a five-times-a-week soap opera. That would be the best-value television in the world.

  We already have the cast of characters. There’s Miss Ellie, in the shape of the Queen. Quiet. Dignified. And always in charge. Then you’ve got Wills as JR, Harry as Bobby, and Charles, who had no equivalent in Dallas but only because they never thought to include an eco-mentalist uncle who talks to his food and gets cross with buildings.

  Of course, we’d also need a Cliff Barnes. A bit of a joke. A bit
of a loser.

  Someone with a real and genuine grudge against the Windsors. And I know just the man: Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son died in a car smash in Paris with the eco-mentalist uncle’s first wife. Jesus. What scriptwriter could have come up with a plot line as good as that?

  We even have a modern-day interpretation of Pam in the increasingly gorgeous shape of Zara Phillips. She’d pop up from time to time in dresses with lower and lower necklines, on the arm of her boyfriend, who plays rugby for his country.

  Do you see what I’m getting at here? That the story’s already been written. That the characters are already in place. So no clever editing is necessary. That we have the house – several houses actually – and best of all that the family, with the possible exception of Philip, and maybe Anne, would leap at the chance to have their currently rather silly lives given some meaning and purpose.

  I’m not joking. Being born into a ‘soap opera’ is no more stupid really than being born into a ‘royal family’. And I do think that at a stroke it would make Queen Victoria, and the Queen Vic for that matter, look hopelessly out of date.

  We wouldn’t ask them to do anything different to what they do already. But instead of being shocked when Harry drives his small hatchback through Wiltshire at 60 mph, we’d be dismayed that he wasn’t doing twice that, in a Lamborghini.

  And when he leans over to fiddle with the bosoms of a blonde, we won’t wonder what the country’s coming to. We’ll hope that shortly after the picture was taken, and under the glare of the watching cameras, he slipped into his Hermann Goering outfit, bent her over the DJ’s deck and gave her a damn good seeing-to.

  Why not? At the moment everyone is screaming for contestants on Big Brother to make jiggy-jiggy, so why would it be any different for Harry and Wills, and the delectable Zara?

  Will they oblige? Well, that’s just the point. That’s the fizz. Because we just don’t know. Of course, we could employ scriptwriters, but no matter how good they might be they’d never come up with what the royal family manages all by itself.

  Sunday 20 August 2006

  I’m calling time on silly watches

  After many years of faithful service, my watch has gone wrong. It just chooses random moments of the day to display meaningless times which, speaking as the world’s most punctual person, is a nuisance. Especially as I shall now have to go to a shop and buy a replacement.

  Yes, I know I could send it to the menders but, because I really am the most punctual person in the world, what am I supposed to do while it’s away? Use the moon? For me, going around without a watch is worse than going around without my trousers.

  Of course, I have a back-up. My wife bought it for me many years ago with her last salary cheque and it’s very beautiful. But, sadly, my eyes are now so old and weary that I can’t read the face properly. Which means I turned up to meet an old friend one hour late last week. And that, in my book, is ruder than turning up and vomiting on him.

  It also brings me on to the biggest problem I’ve found in my quest to find a new timepiece. There’s a world of choice out there but everything is unbelievably expensive and fitted with a whole host of features that no one could possibly ever need.

  I have flown an F-15 fighter and at no point in the 90-minute sortie did I think: ‘Damn. I wish my watch had an altimeter because then I could see how far from the ground I am.’ All planes have such a device on the dashboard.

  Similarly, when I was diving off those wall reefs in the Maldives I didn’t at any time think: Ooh. I must check my watch to see how far below the surface I have gone.’ Thoughtfully, God fitted my head with sinuses, which do that job very well already.

  You might think, then, that my demands are simple. I don’t want my new watch to open bottles. I don’t want it to double up as a laser or a garrotte. I just want something that tells the time, not in Bangkok or Los Angeles, but here, now, clearly, robustly and with no fuss. The end.

  But it isn’t the end. You see, in recent months someone has decided that the watch says something about the man. And that having the right timepiece is just as important as having the right hair, or the right names for your children, or the right car.

  Over dinner the other night someone leant across to a perfect stranger on the other side of the table and said: ‘Is that a Monte Carlo?’ It was, apparently, and pretty soon everyone there was cooing and nodding appreciatively. Except me. I had no idea what a Monte Carlo was.

  Then we have James May, my television colleague, who has a collection of watches.

  Yes, a collection. But despite this he has just spent thousands of pounds on a watch made by IWC. Now I know roughly what he earns and therefore I know what percentage of his income he’s just blown on this watch and I think, medically speaking, he may be mad.

  It turns out, however, that his IWC, in the big scheme of things, is actually quite cheap. There are watches out there that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. And I can’t see why.

  Except, of course, I can. Timex can sell you a reliable watch that has a back light for the hard of seeing, a compass, a stopwatch and a tool for restarting stricken nuclear submarines, all for £29.99. And that’s because the badge says Timex.

  Which is another way of saying that you have no style, no sense of cool and that you may drive a Hyundai.

  To justify the enormous prices charged these days, watchmakers all have idiotic names, like Gilchrist & Soames, and they all claim to make timepieces for fighter pilots and space-shuttle commanders and people who parachute from atomic bombs into power boats for a living. What’s more, all of them claim to have been doing this, in sheds in remote Swiss villages, for the last six thousand years.

  How many craftsmen are there in the mountains, I wonder? Millions, by the sound of it.

  Breitling even bangs on about how it made the instruments for various historically important planes. So what? The Swiss also stored a lot of historically important gold teeth. It means nothing when I’m lying in bed trying to work out whether it’s the middle of the night or time to get up.

  Whatever, these watch companies give you all this active-lifestyle guff and show you pictures of Swiss pensioners in brown store coats painstakingly assembling the inner workings with tweezers, and then they try to flog you something that is more complicated than a slide rule and is made from uranium. Or which is bigger and heavier than Fort Knox and would look stupid on even PufFDiddly.

  I think I’ve found an answer, though. There’s a watch called the Bell & Ross BR 01-92 which, according to the blurb, is made in Switzerland from German parts by a company that supplies the American military and is used regularly by people who make a living by being fired from the gun turrets of Abrams Mi tanks while riding burning jet skis.

  Who cares? What I like is that it’s very simple and has big numbers, but what I don’t know is whether it’s reliable and whether people laugh at you because of it at dinner parties. Anyone got one? Anyone know?

  Sunday 27 August 2006

  Amazing what you can dig up in Africa

  Not that long ago a chap from the town where I live took his metal detector for a walk in some local fields and found a hoard of coins, one of which revealed the existence of a Roman emperor who was not mentioned in any of the history books.

  It all sounds jolly exciting, but I suspect that for every man who finds gold at the end of his garden there are about a million who devote their lives to the search for buried treasure and end up with a collection of old Coke cans and the gearbox from a 1957 Massey Ferguson.

  That’d be like devoting your whole life to DIY and never once erecting a single usable shelf.

  Nevertheless, last week I joined an archaeological search party on the Makgadikgadi saltpans in Botswana. And guess what? Within just four hours we’d unearthed an early Iron Age burial ground. That’s like taking up alchemy and making gold on your first attempt.

  Our guide, quivery with excitement, stepped from his quad bike and told us in a hushed whisp
er, as though he might disturb the scene with sound waves, that we must go lightly in case we trod on what might turn out to be an important artefact.

  Pretty soon he was on his hands and knees piecing together what had plainly been a rather badly made bushman vase, and my children were bringing him beads fashioned from bits of ostrich shell.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he wailed. ‘Do you know what these are? These beads! They’re the dawn of art. They’re the first example anywhere of early hominids decorating themselves. You can draw a direct line from these beads to the Renaissance.’

  Well, I looked at one as hard as I could, but so far as I could tell it was a small piece of ostrich shell with a hole in the middle. Not exactly Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I’ve seen better in Ratners.

  Then he found some fossilised wood and I honestly thought he was going to burst.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he wailed excitedly. ‘It’s only the third piece of fossilised wood ever found out here!’

  Well, I examined all the angles and couldn’t see why this was important in any way. If it was just a piece of wood, then so what? This tells us that many years ago there were trees. I sort of knew that. And if it had once been part of, say, a chair, then what does that tell us? That Iron Age man had a grasp of carpentry? Well, he would.

  I should explain at this point that many years ago some archaeologists dug a huge hole in my school’s grounds, claiming they’d discovered the most important Viking site ever. Every day they went in there with their toothbrushes and their nail files, and every night I’d leap in there in my cowboy boots, because the whole site was strictly out of bounds. This meant it was a tremendous place to have an undisturbed cigarette. Archaeology, then, has never really floated my boat.

  And what’s more, it turns out I’m not very good at it. I wandered about with my hands in my pockets failing to see anything even remotely man-made. Perhaps, being tall, my eyes are too far from the ground, but whatever, in the whole day I didn’t unearth a damn thing.