Clarkson on Cars

by Jeremy Clarkson

  I am fully aware every time I mount the mighty Raleigh that I am a guest in the motor vehicle’s territory and must learn to get out of its way.

  So do not expect a barrage of whinges and moans about how the Mamito Honi lot in their rusty Jap boxes couldn’t judge the width of their cars if you gave them a theodolite, a computer, a tape measure and six weeks.

  Nor should you think that this is to be a stream of abuse directed in the general direction of lightly warmed hatchback scramblers, who seem to think that they’re going backwards unless movement is accompanied by large quantities of wailing rubber.

  And I am not about to criticise the Archies and the Sids in their Maggie-wagon taxis who are too busy haranguing their fares about how ‘there are too many A-rabs in the country’ and how ‘Mrs Thatcher – Gawd bless ’er – has set the country on its feet again’ to notice cyclists – even when they’re 200 feet tall and 60 feet wide like me.

  I was going to lambast London Regional Transport for their inability to make a bus work without it leaving the sort of smoke screen the navy use in the heat of battle, but what the hell, they’ve got a job to do. And, like I said, the road is for motor vehicles, not for cyclists on an Alpen trip.

  I’m not all that bothered, either, about the drivers of artics who need an area the size of Wales to turn left. No, the breed I hate most while astride the Wayfarer are the breed I hate most when I’m driving my car. People in vans.

  There are always three of them in the front, and while I am an active campaigner for the abolition of all speed limits, I really do have to concede that they travel far too quickly.

  It seems sensible to make them forfeit one limb for every wing mirror they smash. The fifth offence should lead them straight to the guillotine. I mean, if they can’t steer their van through a gap without removing the mirrors from whatever it is they’re going between then they should either slow down or get spectacles.

  Do they not realise that little old me on the Wayfarer is a good deal less stable than a nuclear power station with Ray Charles at the controls? Can they not see that my centre of gravity is higher up than the tip of the CB aerial on their Transit and that, as a result, a sudden breeze or a momentary lapse in concentration could have me veering wildly from side to side like an SDP MP or, as has happened on six occasions to date, falling off?

  What I’ve learned to do when I hear the unmistakable sounds that herald the imminent arrival of a Garymobile – megabel stereo, graunching gears and 94-zillion-rpm engine – is to dismount and walk along the pavement for a while.

  Trouble is, if I encounter six vans in my mile-long journey, then I may as well not bother taking the Wayfarer out in the first place because I’ll spend most of the time pushing it.

  Anyway, all this is of no moment now because, last week, I came out from the pub and found two padlocks securing my steed to the railings. Since I’d put just the one on, it means that someone out there has a finely honed sense of humour.

  It took two hours and some seriously sophisticated cutting gear to free the beast, but the effort was to no avail. Last night it was stolen, so now I’m going back to walking.

  Unless someone steals my shoes in the meantime.

  Girls and Rubber

  The Kings Road, as usual, was at a standstill. There was a gardening programme, as usual, on Radio Four, and Capital, as usual, was playing the latest splurge from Kylie Astley.

  But things could have been a whole lot worse. It was a sunnyish sort of day, and the Kings Road shopperettes were out and about, competing with one another to see who could get away with wearing the least amount of cloth around their person.

  I just sort of fiddled with the door mirror to get a better view of the one in the suede mini skirt who’d gone into Fiorucci, and then slumped down in the seat so that I could see the one in the convertible Golf without her noticing the leer that was parked on my countenance.

  I even beckoned one over and reminded her that five years earlier we’d had a few dances together at a hunt ball. She wasn’t all that bothered.

  Neither was another one impressed when I told her that we’d once shared a table in Puccis.

  Now, this is one day in the life of the Kings Road. Go down there right now and you will see attractive women, hundreds of them, deliberately being pretty.

  So, what I want to know is why on earth those who choose models for calendars don’t use the location as a hunting ground.

  Let’s face it; a lot of real models are simply not pretty. Worse, a lot of real models look as though they may have spent the last eighteen years head butting bulldozers; yet if you turn to any page in some of the glossier mags you will see them, half dressed in some bizarre fashion undergarment, half not dressed at all.

  Some of the fat slobs who man the ironmongery stalls in provincial market towns would make better subject matter. For heaven’s sake, I could do a superior job with those things you see on the Readers’ Wives pages in Paul Raymond’s Menshouse Clubnational Only Boy.

  Only last week, I was in Honfleur in Northern France where they were shooting the sort of picture you’ll find in a subsequent issue of Harpers and She.

  The photographic equipment, all three lorry-loads of it, was set up in a smashing little bar and on a table by the window they’d carefully placed a crushed Disque Bleu packet, a half-eaten croissant, a half-cup of French coffee and a model.

  Wearing the sort of coat you would more normally associate with a cartoon char lady, she had the figure of a garden hoe and the face of a long-dead turbot.

  And the problem was compounded because she was wearing bright scarlet lipstick and a layer of mascara so heavy her eyelids kept closing under the strain. Finally, she had a facial complexion and colour that reminded me of unbaked pastry.

  Thumb through any women’s magazine and occasionally you come across the sort of person you’d eat dung for, but mostly they’re the sort that would have you leaving with sonic booms.

  Never has this phenomenon been more keenly obvious than in the 1989 Pirelli calendar.

  While Unipart and a host of other component manufacturers do their level best to make their calendars sell in the face of fierce competition from the Sun and Penthouse, Pirelli claim to be in a class of their own.

  Now 25 years old, this titillatory publication was a British invention and, even now, is orchestrated from London. Top models have appeared in it, big-name photographers have been selected to shoot it.

  And each year since the whole caboodle began, the makers have kept the contents of the calendar a closely guarded secret until publication – though from whom, God only knows, so few copies are ever produced.

  Few, in 1988, means 40,000 – which, say Pirelli, is way, way down on demand.

  Oh yeah? Apparently, liberated 1960s parents are now writing to Pirelli for copies of the earlier efforts to give as presents to ‘maturing offspring’.

  Of course, all this is pure hype, designed to generate mystique and consequently foster a desire to own something which is actually no more out of the ordinary than salt water.

  Certainly, it isn’t ‘acknowledged as the most potent status symbol in the world’.

  I can hear Richard Branson now: ‘Oh yes, I own several jetliners, an island in the Caribbean, a collection of beautiful hotels, a couple of boats, a number of fine cars, a hot air balloon and more houses than Barratt have ever built – but most of all, I treasure my Pirelli calendar.’

  And even if he really does get off on past efforts from the eyetie rubber boys, I doubt whether he’ll think too much of Possessions – which is what they’ve called the 1989 edition.

  Firstly, it’s shot by a woman. Now, women are forever telling me that I do not understand the bond of motherhood and appeal of babies, so let me tell them something for a change: they do not understand what men want from pictures of naked ladies.

  We want heaving chests, white beaches, glistening coconut oil and as much subtlety as you get at a Guns ‘N’ Roses concert.
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br />   We do not want to spend fifteen minutes searching for a nipple that might or might not be in shot. And we don’t get turned on by buttocks, because we have them as well. Well I do anyway.

  And great store has been made this year of the photographer’s decision to use Polaroid film.

  I cannot tell the difference. You will not be able to tell the difference either.

  Anyway, what’s so great about using a film that always fades to nothing four seconds after you pull it out of the camera and is about as accurate at reproducing living colour as the male half of Peters and Lee.

  And instead of using months of the year like every other diary and calendar ever made, Pirelli have used astrological signs instead. I do not know when these are. Next year, I will go everywhere either a month early or seven months late.

  On the 3rd of Capricorn next year, for instance, I am going to a party. When should I go?

  Finally, there’s the women. They’re all ugly to varying degrees and one or two don’t even have nice figures. One’s got nipples like dinner plates.

  And another has a bottom so baggy it looks just like two sacks of King Edwards.

  I suppose though that, for the first time, Pirelli cannot be accused of exploiting women. They cannot be accused either of sexism or of favouring those born to stroll the Kings Road.

  But for heaven’s sake chaps, if Beloved can waltz in and order me to pay for two skirts, a packet of stockings and a bedside table, why can’t I spend even a few minutes staring wistfully at a decent pair of greased bosoms?

  Rat Boy

  There are mutants in the sewers. Each night as darkness falls and a clinging fog descends to envelop the city in an eerie and impenetrable blanket, you can hear, if you listen carefully, the manhole covers sliding back.

  From deep beneath the streets, the hordes, horribly disfigured by exposure to state education, emerge into the silence. Clad in tattered rags, their eyes glint in the oddly transfused glow as they drift into the sodium lighting.

  Stealthily, they move unseen from street to street in a hunt for the currency of that mutant world beneath the catseyes.

  Down there, order has broken down and decency has become anarchy. There is no social structure as we know it; everyone is awful. The mutants only trade in two commodities. Ecstasy and car stereos.

  In order to get the drug, you need the music machines. And in order to get the music machines, you need to emerge into the old world where greed is good, where people wear double-breasted suits they bought in Next and talk into cellphones about how they’ve moved their wedge from copper to sugar.

  They watch items on the television called Hot Property and The City Programme. Their success is measured by the initials on the back of their cars.

  The mutants understand this grading system too. The wise elders say they know it because in the past, they too lived among us in the real world.

  They know that they will get more ecstasy from The Man if they break into the cars with an ‘i’ on the back.

  This is why, in the past two weeks, I have woken up on successive Sunday mornings to find one of my car windows completely reshaped. Go to bed and it’s a flat piece of green tinted glass. Wake up and it’s many immensely tiny pieces of glass spread over a huge area. Most of them, though, are in the heater vents where they can rattle.

  Trouble is, I am the sort of person who enjoys confusing the mutants. They break into my car because it looks as though it will sport the sort of stereo that can be exchanged for six or seven tabs. In fact, it is worth, in earth money, about £3.25.

  Nowadays, they break into my car to laugh at it.

  The mutants have left me alone for two years but with the emergence of Acid House music, their need for spiritual enlightenment is ever greater. Make no mistake, no one can be safe until the council weld up the manhole covers and pump cyanide gas into the web of tunnels beneath.

  You might imagine as you sit there in your Next suit that even if your car is broken into, so long as nothing is stolen – all is well: if that’s the case, you obviously don’t drive a Honda.

  If you don’t drive a Honda, you will be able to telephone one of the mobile glass repair outfits that fill 85 per cent of the Yellow Pages and a cheery man in an overall and an Escort van will come and kiss it better.

  Some say these men are mutant spies who are cashing in on the antics of their blood brothers in the sewers but this is only conjecture. Probably.

  If you do drive a Honda, you will spend Sunday ringing these people and becoming increasingly fed up with them calling you guv and saying they can do nothing until Monday.

  You just know they’re the sort of people who hold their cigarettes between thumb and forefinger with the hot bit pointing inwards. You know they spent every minute of their state education dreaming of being a taxi driver. They have the banter.

  Why, you enquire, can they not send round one of their men? Because, they say, Honda will not let them carry original equipment stock.

  Later, their bosses are more precise. Er, it’s not that they won’t let us actually. We just don’t because the Japanese change their models every six minutes and glass manufacturers in Europe can’t keep up.

  This means those of you who drive a Honda that’s been subjected to the attention of a mutant on Saturday night cannot get it mended until Monday morning. And this in turn means you must hope the cardboard you insert in the hole is a sufficient barrier to another mutant attack on the Sunday night.

  When you do get to a dealer, he will lighten your wallet to the tune of 90 quid. And break your door. Well, he broke mine.

  So I reckon a two-pronged attack is in order and I am volunteering to the last vestiges of law enforcement in this country as a back-room boffin.

  First we must look at the root cause of the problem. That leads inexorably to the conclusion that all state schools must be closed down. Never mind opting out of local authority guidance. Close them. All of them. Now.

  While the teachers with their beards and corduroy jackets are trying to teach the urchins how to do binary numbers and where Africa is, the kids at the back are thumbing through Vauxhall manuals to see how best to get round a dead lock.

  Then we must attack those who have already moved underground. That means posting teams of heavily armed ex-boxers outside manhole covers, with Uzis, flamethrowers and some of those guns Christopher Walken used in Dogs of War.

  You probably think all this is a load of rubbish, but before you reach for the headed notepaper, consider two things. Firstly, who are the people that break into cars? Do you know one?

  No, of course you don’t. No one does, so they must come from somewhere else.

  Secondly, who the hell is buying all the stereos they steal? Where are all the shops that sell them? And if what they’re selling is obviously stolen and on offer in such mind-boggling numbers, why on earth can’t someone with a firearms licence pay the vendor a call?

  You can’t pay them a call because it isn’t a them. It’s a he, a sort of Thatcherday Fagin who lives underground, distributing ecstasy tabs with gay abandon.

  I promise that if I actually catch someone in my car, I will not stop hitting them over the head with something blunt until they are in as many pieces as the glass they broke to get in.

  In a Flap

  Imagine, for a moment, the face of an opera aficionado if, halfway through a performance of Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, Bruce Springsteen bounded on stage and began a 120 decibel rendition of ‘Born To Run’.

  Or picture, if you will, the depths to which a prison warder’s jaw would drop if Ronnie Biggs appeared at the door of Wands-worth jail asking if his bedroom was still free.

  Presumably neither Ronnie nor Bruce could be persuaded to stage these feats but if you, like me, enjoy watching innocent strangers in a flap, all is not lost – just try letting someone out of a side road in London.

  It’s a relatively simple procedure. Let’s say you’re in a slow-moving queue of traffic on Baker St
reet and you see a BMW driver who has quite obviously been waiting for some time to pull out (easy: he’ll look like a non-opera buff at a performance of Don Giovanni). Simply stop and with a huge smile on your face, flash your lights, indicating that he may emerge into the traffic stream.

  After he’s looked gormlessly around to make sure you’re not waving at a friend, and then peered into your eyes to ascertain there isn’t a hint of lunacy hidden within their depths, the flap begins.

  Once he has assured himself your intentions are genuine, his left hand will dart for the gear lever – put in neutral ten minutes earlier because the clutch leg was getting tired. Not only will the hapless hand in consequence drop the cigarette entrusted to it moments before but it will miss first gear anyway, and more often than not hit reverse. Happily, the tired clutch leg will have been slower on the uptake so passers-by will only be treated to an earful of crunching cogs rather than the sight of a BMW lurching unceremoniously backwards into the window of Mr Patel’s sandwich bar.

  Wait a little longer and the kangaroo petrol-powered BMW will be in front of you, complete with a driver equipped for the next month with the best ‘guess what happened to me’ story any Londoner could wish to relate.

  Strangers to the city (yes, they exist) will be baffled by this scenario, but it isn’t as crazy as it sounds. In London you do not let people in, make no allowances for the elderly or infirm, treat red traffic lights as no more than advisory stop signals and, if you plan to survive with your wings intact, you become bloody arrogant.

  London is, of course, an exception: to some, horribly frightening; to others, a challenge that needs mastering. There are those who will drive miles to avoid any contact with its streets and yet also those who regard the new traffic lights at Hyde Park Corner as the brainchild of a spoilsport.