This was the pan-European press raunch of the new Toyota Celica, a car I had already decided I was going to hate because of its extreme ugliness.
Toyota had taken over Cannes for the purposes of introducing it to the press. Here, the massed ranks of Britain’s motor scribblers were confronted by several serious-looking German equivalents and a bevy of Danes who seemed to be much, much more concerned with the whereabouts of the nearest bar. Up front there were a bunch of Japanese chappies and an American called Reich. It was his job to act as translator. We shall call him Third.
After a great deal of sycophantic bowing and some blather about how hugely grateful they were to us for sparing some time to spend a couple of days in the south of France at their expense, the slide show began. So too did my war with the land of nod.
There were the usual charts showing how exhaust interference has been reduced, but stuck in the middle of them was a picture of a naked woman. This, Third claimed, is what the new Celica looks like.
No it doesn’t. No one will ever mistake it for a naked woman. And nor, despite Toyota’s protestations, will it be mistaken for a pouncing cheetah either.
The British at this point began to snigger, some at the absurdity of it all, others at the Germans who were still furiously taking notes, and one or two at the Danes who were trying to catch the eye of a barman.
Finally, it was a time for questions and answers. Now, I’ve never understood the point of such an exercise because, if as a journalist you have something you wish to find out, it is always better to do it when no one else is in earshot.
This, however, was different. This was an excuse for some serious smartarsery. I asked what evidence there was that people want to buy cars that look like naked ladies.
Pleased with my eloquence, I turned to lap up the ‘go get ’em boy’ looks from various colleagues. But after much debate in Japanese, the panel crushed my ardour with their answer: ‘It is a rounded car.’
Now, I suppose it would have been sensible to persist, arguing that if they spoke Engrish well enough to deliver a technical press conference like this one, then they should damn well stop pretending they didn’t understand a straightforward question. But the Japanese have perfected the art of humility to such an extent that compassion simply bubbles to the surface in even the most arrogant of cynics.
The next day I was determined to tell whoever was interested that I didn’t like the car one bit; that there are two ways of inducing a bout of vomiting. You can stick a couple of fingers down your throat or you can look at a Celica.
Instead, when confronted by an eager-looking Toyota minion who was keen to hear my thoughts, I said, ‘Oh, it’s quite nice.’
When the Germans or the British, or even the French, ask you what you think of their cars, you tell them straight. When it’s a Japanese man, he manages to park an expression on his face that’s doe-eyed, hangdog and sweet all at once.
Last year, I went to upwards of 60 beautifully organised, well-presented press introductions and I came home, aware that I could hit the word processor afterwards and say what I wanted.
There’s the nagging doubt with the Celica that if I say it’s not very good, and it isn’t, several engineers on the project may be ordered to fall on their pencils. Or more likely, they will scurry around and have a replacement lined up in the time it takes people at Austin Rover to scratch their backsides and organise a meeting to discuss things.
I have a plan, and judging by what the man from the Daily Mail said about the Celica, he has it too. This plan will redress the balance of payments, bring down interest rates and ensure that Mr Kinnock is kept out of Number 10 for another five years.
We scribblers must say the Celica is an excellent car and that you should all go out and buy one tomorrow, or even this afternoon if you have time. This will lull the Japanese into a false sense of security and they will not start work on a replacement, thinking all is well.
You, in the meantime, will believe everything we’ve written and will take a test drive. But you won’t buy the car because it is ugly, there is no space inside and you can’t see out of it properly.
It will take months for sales figures to show the Celica has fallen on stony ground, precious months that the Europeans can use to finish scratching their backsides and get on with things.
The Japanese will learn, hopefully when it is too late, that the Dunkirk spirit is alive and well and living in Fulham.
Green Machine
The woman in the hotel was most insistent that the coastal path from Wadebridge to Padstow was absolutely level.
It mattered. It mattered because she had suggested we hire bicycles and go for a ride. She talked about how we’d enjoy the fresh air and how we’d be ready for a pint at the other end. She talked about the herons that we’d see and how the countryside was some of the most beautiful in Britain. And, she maintained, it was as flat as a pancake, as level as a crossing.
She was half right too. We paid our four pounds each for the 18-speed Dirt Fox ‘hogs’ and, after a five-mile ride, arrived in Padstow, surprised at the ease of the journey.
Sure, we all wanted pints badly and sure, I was grateful for the company of the O’Tine family and their son, Nic.
Over a game of dominoes in the London Inn near Padstow’s harbour, we talked in a New Year’s resolution sort of way about how it might be a good idea to have bicycles in London, how they would keep the dreaded DR code from our driving licences and how we could get fit at the same time… fresh air… bulging muscles… reduced congestion… blah… blah.
As we spoke though, some idiot was moving the countryside around. Basically, he tilted it so that the aforementioned completely level path became something not that far removed from Porlock Hill. After half a mile on the way back my legs hurt like hell. Not long after that, the hips started asking the head what the hell was going on and then the lungs just stopped.
In a futile bid to pacify these striking bits, the brain started to think a little more seriously about the bike’s eighteen gears. But it was hopeless. In first my legs spun round like a washing machine on its final rinse cycle and, in everything from second to eighteenth, it felt like I was towing a 16-ton weight.
I swore, right there and then, that I would never ride a bicycle again. It is my New Year’s resolution. Last year, my New Year’s resolution was never to set foot in Spain again and, accordingly, I have just turned down Ford’s invitation to the launch of the four-wheel-drive Sierra Cosworth in Barcelona.
Riding a bicycle can’t possibly do any good whatsoever. Had I not dismounted and walked the last two miles, I would now be dead – the most unhealthy thing I can think of.
The bit of London where I live is pretty flat but getting to my favourite watering hole in Wandsworth involves a bridge. That means an incline must be tackled and that, in turn, means a heart attack. Plus, I have been reading recently that cycling in London now does you more harm than good because you are in among the traffic, breathing in the resultant fumes more deeply than ordinarily might be the case because it’s all so damnably strenuous.
Now, I’m as green as a screen and will willingly drive to the bottle bank, resplendent in my ozone-friendly armpit spray and recycled jumper. As I struggled up that Cornish mountain, I was scarcely able to believe that I had actually considered only a moment or two earlier the notion of buying the ridiculous two-wheeled contraption that I was now having to push.
My mind was consumed with hatred. Hatred for the man who’d made me pay for the privilege of hiring his horrid bike. Hatred for the woman who said the path was flat. Hatred for the meddler who moved Porlock Hill. Hatred for Walter Raleigh, and his silly tobacco plant.
Darkness had almost fallen by the time I arrived back in Wadebridge. And it was almost morning before ACAS had sorted out some kind of settlement with the striking legs, hips and lungs. No one has ever been able to talk about how it feels to be that ill because anyone who has been that ill is now dead as a result.
Sure the Audi still produces a teeny bit of nitrogen oxide, a little carbon monoxide and some carbon dioxide which would be turned into oxygen by the trees if only cyclist types would stop chopping down forests to fuel their environmentally friendly wood-burning stoves.
But now look at the bicycle which, unlike the galvanised Audi, will one day rust away and be discarded to mess up the countryside.
I don’t know for certain but I’d make a big bet that there are more old bicycles on the bed of the sea than there are old Audis.
If you cycle from Wadebridge to Padstow, you will pollute the air with obscenities as you go, you will arrive dead and your bicycle will be tossed into the estuary where it will pollute the river and very probably snare one of the herons. If you drive an Audi from Wadebridge to Padstow, especially if you drive it with the windows down, the herons will wave cheerily.
You might not want a pint quite so badly when you get there but if you have to drive back again you couldn’t have had one anyway.
Reasons for buying a car 8
Reasons for buying a bicycle 0
Democratic Party
It’s funny, but for ages I’ve been under the misapprehension that Britain is a democracy. I suppose I concluded this from our electoral system. Two parties present their manifestos to the nation and after we’ve studied these and compared Thatcher to the Welshman, we vote. The party with the most seats is judged to be victorious. It all seems very fair to me.
Democracy works in all sorts of other ways too. As a shareholder in many companies, I am forever being asked to vote on takeover bids. If 55 per cent of Ford workers want to go on strike, they will be called out on strike. If six in a group of eleven want a burger and five want a pizza, everyone goes to a local McDonald’s and not into one of those Pizza Huts.
I do not want a Labour government to achieve power, but if a majority of voters goes completely bonkers and allows that Welshman into the hot seat, I will accept the decision, albeit with bad grace, and move to a country with some common sense. Democracy works. Majority rule works. So how come we in Britain are obsessed with the interests of minorities?
If I were to approach my local council for funds to start a theatre group, they would turn me away, arguing that I was too middle class and far too apathetic about Mike Gatting’s rebel cricket tour. The money would go instead to someone who has a predilection for members of the same genital group and a definite intention to employ at least three whales.
Now, if the majority isn’t affected by a minority’s aspirations, then it doesn’t really matter all that much. It must be part of living in a caring society, I suppose. But when a minority wants something that is deeply offensive to a majority, then it must be told to bugger off. This is why every one of London’s 5000 buses should be burned and their drivers put to death.
Each weekday, 9.3 million people move about the capital in cars or taxis, but there are just 3.3 million ‘bus users’. For sure, this is a big majority but it’s bigger still when you remember that if you take a bus to work, you sure as hell have to use it to get home again. That means the 3.3 million ‘bus users’ becomes 1.7 million. Then there are those who commute on the bus and use it at lunchtime.
Even London Regional Transport admit that only about 1 million people use a bus each day. This means that there are nine people in cars for every one on a bus. On that basis, it should be nine times harder for a bus to get around on our roads than it is for a car.
However, this is not so. There are 45 miles of bus lanes in London which, at certain times, cannot legally be used by cars. A majority, therefore, is squeezed into the resultant traffic jams and has to watch a minority whizz by in acrylic coats and plastic shoes.
To hammer the point home, buses are now to be seen carrying advertisements on their rumps telling car drivers that the bus lanes are London’s arteries. ‘If you drive your car in one, you’re a clot’ proclaims the tag line.
So, I pay £100 a year for the privilege of sitting in a jam, caused by a bus lane which is being used by people who pay a few pence. That is certainly not democratic.
Even when the buses aren’t working, you aren’t allowed to use these lanes, and the police, displaying their usual common sense, emerge in force to hammer this point home.
And who the hell do bus drivers think they are? As soon as the last pensioner is aboard, they pull out into the traffic stream, oblivious to the fact that I might be alongside at the time.
Only the other day, the avoiding action I was forced to take nearly resulted in that silly stolen baby being taken off the front pages. And in the ensuing discussion, the driver had the audacity to use the f word while explaining there was a poster on the back of his bus telling me to give way whenever he wants to set off. Why should I? I am young, with a living to earn and a mortgage to pay. His passengers are old or unemployed and cannot therefore be in much of a hurry.
To prove that buses do nothing but clog things up, you should look at what happened when they all went on strike last year. Many left-wing radio stations predicted chaos would result as everyone took their cars instead of the bus. This is rubbish because people who use the buses don’t actually own cars.
In fact, I have never seen the traffic in London flow so well, which is hardly surprising when you consider that huge, red oblongs, each of which is bigger than my flat, weren’t stopping every few yards. A great deal of effort is used to dissuade people from stopping their cars, even momentarily, at the side of the road; yet it is fine for vehicles three times larger than even the biggest Mercedes to stop whenever and wherever they damn well want.
As a result of that day, I am of the opinion that the biggest cause of traffic congestion in the capital is the public transport system.
One of these days, someone is going to have to get tough; someone is going to have to explain that buses must go, that they are the principal cause of traffic jams and that they have no place in a democracy.
Unless this happens soon, I will move to Moscow where special lanes are reserved for rich and important people such as myself, and not the proletariat scum in their trams.
Cat Lover
I have chopped the word ‘free’ off one of those trendy stickers they give you in garages so that it now says ‘I love lead’. It is in the back window of my Alfa and it is meant to be a joke. But I’ll tell you something: people who won’t eat meat have no sense of humour.
Now look. I have green armpits and each morning, I wipe my bottom with recycled lavatory paper. Whenever it’s humanly possible I buy unleaded petrol and I make all the right noises about elephant hunts and Japanese whaling fleets. I even stopped buying tuna after one of those tabloid newspapers said that each time a bundle of tuna is trawled in, a whole load of dolphins are killed.
But this, according to my vegetarian friends, is simply not enough. I was even described as a half-wit the other day because I wouldn’t give those anti-nuclear idiots at Greenpeace any of my hard-earned money.
I simply wondered out loud how, on the one hand, they could want the CEGB or whatever they call themselves now to stop burning fossil fuels and, on the other, campaign for the decommissioning of nuclear power stations.
What do they want us to do? Get the cows we don’t eat to work treadmills? Power our CFC-free fridges on manure? The computer I’m using at this moment runs on electricity and I really don’t give a stuff how it gets to the plug just so long as it keeps getting there cheaply, efficiently and, if it’s at all possible, greenly too.
The trouble is that the loonies who get taken in by this environmental crap lose all sense of realit
y. And with it goes their sense of humour. Forgetting to take a plastic bag to the supermarket becomes a life or death struggle. Making jokes about the Irish or religion is considered to be acceptable but woe betide anyone who dares to appear on television and poke fun at the greenhouse effect.
What staggers me is how damnably knowledgeable everyone is about the trendy, vegetarian matters of the moment. We all know the name of every Mexican trawlerman who has killed a dolphin; we know exactly how much rainforest is being destroyed each hour; we know how hard it is to recycle supermarket carrier bags; and we know just how much effluent there is in the North Sea.
But people who can trot out the number of elephants slaughtered a week last Tuesday don’t seem to have the first clue about what the difference is between unleaded petrol and catalytic converters.
What with her Greenpeace sweatshirt and her penchant for going on and on about nuclear disarmament, the girl who called me a half-wit is easily the greenest person I know. But when I asked why she bought a Toyota MR2 which doesn’t have a catalytic converter, she said, ‘I don’t need a catalytic converter because my car already runs on unleaded petrol.’
Now, I sat her down and tried to explain that although her car does not produce any lead, it still chucks out 78 lb of unburned hydrocarbons, 50 lb of nitrogen oxides and more than 1000 lb of carbon monoxide in one year. If she had bought an Audi 80, which does have a catalytic converter, then she would be responsible for just 7 lb of hydrocarbons, 8 lb of nitrogen oxides and 30 lb of carbon monoxide.
And do you want to know what her answer was when presented with these remarkable facts and figures? Would you like to guess? She said, and this is verbatim, ‘That’s all very well but the Audi isn’t very trendy, is it?’
Somehow, someone is going to have to get through to people like this and explain what the cat business is all about.
Clarkson on Cars Page 10
