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

by Jeremy Clarkson

  This is why our house is littered with toolkits, half-made model helicopters, easels, fishing rods, pianos and now a limited-edition replica of the double-bass Pictures of Lily drum kit as used by Keith Moon in 1967. It is massive.

  This, however, would never end up gathering dust because I had a mission. Richard Hammond plays the bass, James May is a classically trained pianist, and our producer fancies himself as a singer. So if I could learn the drums we could form the Top Gear band and have a Christmas number one with a cover of ‘Radar Love’. It was something that cheered Richard up. Something he could look forward to.

  But, immediately, there was a problem. Because it turns out that when you buy a drum kit you only get the drums. The stool, the sticks, the cymbals, the pedals that cause the two bass drums to make a noise and the hi-hat (whatever that is) are all extras.

  This is a bit like buying a model aeroplane and finding that the box does not contain the wings, the wheels, the cockpit canopy or the engines. And so it was a whole week before I was ready to sit down and start drumming. Right. Here we go. Er…

  I’ve seen loads of gigs over the years and I sort of assumed that you just writhe around and hit stuff, but after just a few moments I realised it wasn’t like that at all. So I rang a drum teacher who came round, introduced me to a drum score and gave me a lesson.

  It turns out I’m very uncoordinated. I can keep reasonable time with the bass drum but as soon as I move either of my arms my leg forgets what it’s doing and either speeds up or stops altogether.

  I sort of knew this might happen because once I tried to fly a helicopter and each time the instructor handed me the controls we started to crash. I kept thinking, ‘Look. Sarah bloody Ferguson can do this. So why can’t I?’

  But I couldn’t. It’s that whole rub your head and pat your tummy thing. Some people can do it easily. I usually end up punching myself in the face. But I’d paid the teacher for an hour’s lesson so we stuck at it and eventually I was doing something similar to four-four time.

  How in the name of all that’s holy, I thought, can drummers do this when they’ve just ingested half a gallon of heroin?

  By the end of the day, however, I was putting twiddly bits into the mix and two days after that I could do a passable imitation of Frank Beard’s drumming on ZZ Top’s ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’’.

  Three days in and I wanted to know what it’d be like to drum while someone was playing an instrument. Luckily, I live quite close to Alex James who, before he became a columnist on something called the Independent, was the bassist with Blur.

  And so there I was, jamming. And it was just tremendous. I have never felt so effervescent about anything.

  ‘So where are you going to look?’ said Alex after we’d finished ‘Smoke on the Water’.

  It turns out that drummers have to stare at something while drumming or they end up looking gormless. And I have an even bigger problem. When I drum I have to count out loud to keep time and that’s like watching someone move their lips while reading.

  Even worse, however, is the noise. I have installed my drum kit in a room with a powerful stereo system, but when I’m up there twirling the timber all 500 watts are drowned out completely. In some ways that’s excellent. It means I can go to Tottenham Court Road and buy a new and even more powerful hi-fi system.

  But it’s not so good for the children, who are trying to do their homework, or my wife, who is trying to have a nap. I know of one family in London whose son plays the drums. How can they face their neighbours of a morning?

  I now face a similar problem. Because Alex out of Blur announced yesterday that he wants to form a local band. And before I could draw breath to explain that I’d already been bagged by my Top Gear colleagues, he said he’d call Steve Winwood, who lives nearby, to see if he’s up for it.

  Of course, I couldn’t say yes, because this would be disloyal to Richard. The disappointment might even mean it takes him longer to get better. That would mean I’d have even more time off work…

  So, Steve, Alex and me, then.

  I’ll let you know the details of our first gig.

  Sunday 15 October 2006

  My designer dog is a hellhound

  Alarming news from the pet shop. If current trends continue, then at some point in 2007 more families in Britain will own a fish than will own a dog.

  Experts suggest this is because of changing lifestyles: children prefer virtual dogs on the computer, and working parents don’t want to leave a real dog at home all day, in case it eats the blender and ruins the Fired Earth natural organic carpet, which cost £47.50 a yard.

  Rubbish. We read last week about a Scottish hill farmer who suffered a stroke while out in the glens, and was saved from certain death by his faithful collie dogs who snuggled up with the stricken chap to keep him warm, and then ran around barking when they saw the search and rescue helicopter circling nearby.

  This would not have happened if he’d been up there with Shep and Rover, his trusty sheep-fish.

  And when you hear a noise in your house at 3 a.m. you are entitled to feel frightened if all you have downstairs is a brace of carp. Whereas, if you have a huge dog with big spiky teeth, you can roll over and go back to sleep. Dogs bring peace of mind, then, whether you are being burgled or if you’ve had a stroke.

  Nevertheless, between 1985 and 2004, dog ownership in Britain fell by 26 per cent and now fewer than one in five households has one.

  I have three. There’s a mother, a quiet and wise old thing, and a daughter, who’s stupid and yellow and who spends half of her time at the local rugby club, eating whatever she can find in their dustbins. And the other half bringing it all back over my organic natural flooring.

  She swallowed some slug pellets when she was younger and after a £74.0 stay at the vet’s emerged as a cabbage patch dog. I feel sure that if I were to have a stroke while on the moors, she would eat me. And then regurgitate my wallet through a burglar’s letter box.

  Despite this, and the dog-logs they leave in the yard, and the incessant barking, and the smell, I find it comforting to have dogs around the place, so when my daughter said she’d like a new one for her birthday, obviously I said yes.

  Things, however, have changed. Not long ago, you bought a dog for 40p, taught it to sit and fed it a tin of diced horse once a day.

  Not any more. Because now, in addition to the usual array of normal dogs, there are all sorts of hybrids, usually with a poodle in the mix somewhere. I don’t know why. Poodles are horrid, vicious things. But anyway, you can have a cockerpoo or a pekeapoo or the one chosen by Tiger Woods, Graham Norton and my daughter, a labradoodle.

  Do you have any idea how much such a thing costs? Go on, take a guess. Nope: you’re miles off because the price of what is basically a mongrel is £950. And I’m sorry, but how can something discovered accidentally in Australia possibly be worth more than a 1991 BMW?

  Of course, it arrived as cute as cute could be but, alarmingly, within 15 minutes had become the size of a small mule. Now, eight weeks down the line, it has to duck when it comes through the door, and it doesn’t chew my wellies, as you’d expect from a puppy; it swallows them whole. Some people think we may have accidentally bought a poodlephant.

  But no. Stroke it and you quickly realise that what we’ve actually got is a massive bath mat draped over a skeleton. This is the world’s first meat-free dog.

  When he’s wet, he completely disappears. It’s spooky.

  He is also, I’m afraid, the subject of some bitter controversy in dogdom.

  Both the poodle owners’ club and the labrador society – normally sworn enemies, I presume – have put out statements saying that the labradoodle is a wicked piece of interracial designer dog experimentation built only to quench the thirst of ungodly media luvvies. They wonder what disease and madness may result.

  Labradoodle owners, therefore, have been driven onto the web, arranging secret dogging locations where they can dog quietly, away from armed
vigilante groups of labradors and poodles.

  It’s terrible. We’re now on a Kennel Club blacklist, we’ve had to tune the house to accommodate our labracow, my wellies have been eaten and we’re £950 worse off.

  And this is just the start. Because if you’ve spent that much on a dog, then it’s wise to get it insured, and they will insist that in addition to the collar it has a microchip inserted in its skin, so it can be tracked by satellite. And this, it turns out, annoyingly, cannot be inserted by an electrician. You’ve got to get a vet, which costs another million pounds.

  I haven’t finished yet. You’ve also got to factor in the fact that designer children’s designer dogs like designer food, which is made from panda bear ears and the lightly fried scrotum of a fin whale, and they need vitamin supplements and holistic liver oil from a cod. And a fully machine-washable bed, made from myrrh.

  That’s why the fish is about to overtake the dog as Britain’s number one pet, because these days running a dog is more complicated and more expensive than running a nuclear power station. And, of course, when a dog dies, you can’t really flush it down the lavatory.

  Sunday 22 October 2006

  The ideal pet? Here, nice ratty

  Last week I wrote about my daughter’s new designer dog which, in eight weeks, has grown to the size of a garden shed and is now costing £1 million a minute in food and satellite-tracking devices. Small wonder, I concluded, that the people of Britain are now replacing their dogs with pet fish.

  The thing is, though, that ever since I wrote that, it’s been bugging me. Sure, I can understand that a dog is jolly expensive, but replacing it with a fish is like replacing your house with a potato.

  I have two and they are utterly, utterly useless. They don’t come when they’re called, they don’t bark at strangers, they won’t fetch sticks, they’re not cute and, being fairground goldfish, I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t be delicious either. Honestly, it’d be more rewarding to own a pet rock.

  And don’t think things improve if you move up the evolutionary scale and go for a koi carp. My dad did that, and spent many happy hours watching them gliding around his garden pond, gorging on the psoriasis flakes that fish call food.

  Then one Christmas I bought him half a dozen ‘ghost koi’ which looked very splendid in the tank at the pet shop. Unfortunately, in my dad’s pond we learnt why they are called ‘ghost’ fish. It’s because they are completely invisible. And what’s the point of a pet you can’t see?

  Sadly, I also discovered that in the fish world they are the SAS among carp, approaching their prey silently and killing without pity or remorse. So within a day, all my dad’s beloved orange fish were upside down on the surface, leaving him with a pond full of apparently nothing at all.

  My advice, then, is simple. If you want a fish, get it from the chip shop.

  If you want a pet, look elsewhere.

  Happily, I’m able to give you a few pointers because, over the years, I’ve owned, loved and inadvertently killed nearly every animal on the planet.

  One little thing I can tell you straight away is that you should never name a brace of animals after a famous pairing.

  I did this as a child and after Gilbert and Squeak died, I ended up with Bubble and Sullivan.

  I became so fed up with all my pets being killed, in fact, that I eventually bought a couple of tortoises, which came with a hardened outer shell and a life expectancy of 2,000 years.

  Sadly, however, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, given that they had a top speed of one mile a year, they managed to escape into a field of wheat that was then harvested. Even to this day, I open each packet of Rice Krispies with fear and trepidation.

  Of course, this endless cycle of life and death taught me a great deal about the ways of nature and I was keen that my children should be similarly educated. So I recently bought them each a cute little guinea pig.

  Just a week later, however, I came home to find them gone and a fox-sized hole in their cage. I should have told the kids the truth, that they’d been torn apart, for fun. But I didn’t have the heart. So I invented a pathetic story about how they’d escaped and gone to live near a stream in the sunshine, with some water voles.

  Great. But the next day I found half of one of them in a hedge and fearing the children might find the rest of him, or his mangulated mates, I had to call in a team of helpers to go through every bush and thicket within a radius of two miles looking for legs and arms.

  We failed and I’m still frightened that one day, when they’re playing hide and seek, there will be a shriek as one of the children discovers a severed head, and, in doing so, exposes my sunshine and water vole story as a lie.

  I wouldn’t mind but I loathe guinea pigs unless they’re on a spit. And rabbits.

  Rodents of this type are just fish with fur. They’re utterly, utterly useless too.

  The best pets I have are my donkeys. Unlike my wife’s horses, which break down all the time, and lose their shoes, and are frightened by puddles, and plastic bags, my donkeys are totally reliable in all weathers, they come when you call them, and they hee-haw when they see a burglar.

  But that said, there are some drawbacks, compared to dogs. If, for instance, you invite them inside to sit by the fire on cold winter evenings, they do take up a lot of space and, of course, they can’t be house trained.

  So what, then, with my wealth of experience of the animal kingdom would I recommend if you don’t want a dog any more? Well, not a cat, obviously – despicable animals, the four-legged equivalent of a footballer’s wife: pretty, well groomed and clean but, fundamentally, only after your money.

  You want something that loves you, something scary for thieves, something that doesn’t make too much of a mess and something, above all, which costs almost nothing to buy and run. Well, how about a rat?

  Rats get a lot of bad press. Sure, they did kill half the world’s population once but it wasn’t their fault. It was the fleas that lived on their backs and it was a long time ago.

  Today’s rat can be taught to respond to its name, if you go for a male, it will clean up after itself and it will be very loving. And what’s more, you can use a rat’s back to grow yourself another ear.

  Sunday 29 October 2006

  The conspiracy not to cure the cold

  I am extremely ill. I have a runny nose, a sore throat, a nasty hacking cough and every few minutes my eyes fill with water: all the ingredients you need to make a convincing Lemsip commercial for the television. So of course all you women out there will now expect me to claim that I have flu. But I don’t. I have a cold.

  Flu, I’ve always thought, is a working-class invention designed specifically as an excuse for not going down the mine that day. ‘I’m not coming to work today because I have a cold’ sounds a bit wet and homosexual. Saying, ‘I can’t come to work because I have flu’ sounds more manly and butch.

  But you may as well say you aren’t coming to work because you’ve caught cancer. If you have flu, the American navy will come round to your house, inject you with plasma and take samples of your liver to their biochemical-warfare centre in Atlanta.

  And when they’ve gone away, men in nuclear-spillage boiler suits from our own Ministry of Defence will want to know if you’ve had any contact with Chinese chickens or Vietnamese swans or German soldiers. And then, when they’ve gone away, you will die. Flu is nasty and claiming you have it when all you have is a cold makes you look ridiculous.

  Mine, of course, is the worst recorded cold in the whole of human history and I am defying medical science by being here, at my computer, writing this column.

  Technically, I am dead.

  Legally, you would be allowed to remove my organs and give them to a poorly child.

  And as I sit here, shivering and tense with a headache and a tickly cough, I can’t help wondering why there is still no cure. And whether or not we might be on the brink of creating one…

  For hundreds of years people tho
ught the cold was caused by being cold. ‘You’ll catch your death out there,’ people in eighteenth-century blizzards would say.

  It was in the 1920s that we understood the cold to be a viral infection, a nasty little blighter that invades your body, multiplies and then causes you to sneeze so that millions of its brothers can shoot up the noses and through the eyes of everyone within five feet.

  Since then, we’ve been to the moon, invented the personal stereo, devised the speed camera and created the pot noodle. But still no one knows how to keep the cold virus at bay.

  Aids came along and within about 10 minutes Elton John had set up his charity and was rattling the ivories from Pretoria to Pontefract so that now, while there’s no cure, there is a raft of drugs to keep the symptoms and effects at arm’s length. But the cold? Not a sausage.

  In 1946 the British government began something called the common cold unit, based close to Porton Down in Wiltshire. It conducted endless experiments until in 1989 it was shut down. And sitting here with two bits of kitchen towel rammed up my nostrils, I rather wish they’d kept it going.

  The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is an immensely well-funded organisation. It’s here that they work on ebola and proper flu and all the really nasty viruses that could wipe out the world if they ever got on an aeroplane. And do you know what advice they have for those who don’t want to catch a cold? Wash your hands with alcohol.

  I’m beginning to wonder if the sort of scientists who might have been engaged in defeating the cold are now being swallowed up by the exciting and glamorous green movement; that the very man who might have developed a cure for the cold is, as we speak, sitting on an ice floe off the coast of Canada watching bloody polar bears.

  Or perhaps he was thinking about taking up medical research but thought that rather than spend his life in a chilly lab in Cardiff with nothing but a pot of viruses for company he’d be better paid and happier if he went to Soho instead to be an ad man for Lemsip.