Notes From the Hard Shoulder

by James May

  Priceland, for example. There appears to be but one Indian family in Reykjavik and, joyously, they own a restaurant. Normally, foreign curry is a wishy-washy affair modified for timorous local palates and not like proper British curry at all, but this was pukka stuff: flavoursome, authentically spicy and altogether good enough to generate the phenomenon of a 'curry coat'. But then we got the bill, and it came to over £70. Even a pint was almost a fiver. No wonder hardly anyone lives there.

  It could also reasonably be called Windland, since the fierce, icy breath of the Nordic gods could be unleashed suddenly and horribly upon the quaking, coatless carcass of your hapless correspondent at any time. Even Rainland would have sufficed for the day of our arrival, when the capital looked unnervingly like Manchester, but populated with fewer and more comprehensible people.

  But personally, if I'd discovered the place in winter, I'd have gone for Darkland. Whereas the rest of us live through a year of alternate days and nights, Iceland effectively has just one of each and they're both very long. This may go some way to explaining why all the locals were a bit squiffy. In November the sun doesn't come up until gone 10 o'clock, and then only just, and five hours later it's gone again. If, like us, you can't afford to go to the pub, you end up back in the sack by nine.

  It's a great excuse for not getting up early and it's a pity the traffic warden didn't see it that way. It's as well that a parking fine is one of the few things that could be considered good value in Iceland, with what would be a £40 or £50 ticket in London weighing in at just over a tenner. This seemed a trifling amount by local standards, so I threw it in the Reykjavik municipal bin. Bloody Vikings.

  We needed a plan. A glance at the map showed that there is a road running all the way around the periphery of the island, Route One. There is no Route Two. From Route One various unmade roads, marked in brown on the map, lead off to what might be termed areas of outstanding natural beauty. We would complete a lap of the ring road, absorbing local culture as we went, and peel off occasionally to bring you pictures of the new Range Rover with a famous waterfall, geyser or whatever. This would give a thorough on- and off-road assessment and allow me to draw fatuous parallels between herring smoking and the workings of the transfer box. Job done.

  And so we left Reykjavik. After about 500 yards we were stopped by a Land Rover enthusiast in a Defender fitted with balloon tyres that would refloat the Titanic. I outlined our itinerary and he looked at me as if I'd come outside without my coat on.

  'These roads are closed,' he said, dismissing two thirds of the map with a sweeping gesture. 'These hotels are not open in winter' – that was most of the north and east. 'These are not the right tyres. You must drive in pairs. You need radio and you must tell police. You will need,' he said, tugging at a giant puff a jacket stuffed with albatrosses, 'proper clothing.' So these people inherited dour logic as well as hairy faces from the Scandinavian settlers of 1,200 years ago.

  'We do not like it when the tourists die,' he said kindly. He had a point. Perhaps if I actually bothered to read The Vehicle-Dependent Expedition Guide, a gift from Land Rover and about as subtle as a deodorant at that, I would be a lot better at this sort of thing. Instead, I've resorted to things like DIY in a bid to put it off and remain, as a result, a complete off-road bonehead.

  Still, as Magnus might say, we'd started, so we'd finish. If we could just reach the tip of the famous glacier at Myrdalsjökull in the south we could still feel pretty chuffed with ourselves. To begin with, though, we'd make a brief and exploratory foray to the Blue Lagoon geothermal power station and hot tub complex.

  Occasional breaks in the all-enveloping fog revealed a landscape in which one wouldn't be entirely surprised to see a dinosaur. Volcanic activity has much to do with it. Iceland is something of a geological upstart at a mere 20,000,000 years old and is to the planet what an especially angry spot is to your nose. One day it, too, will erupt but in the meantime it provides limitless free energy. There's so much of it tapped at the lagoon that there is enough left to create a giant outdoor spa. It smells a bit eggy but it's hot enough to poach you while, absurdly, your exposed hair freezes into a single solid entity like the clip-on hair of one of those Lego people.

  This is hardly intrepid stuff. Back aboard the Range Rover I located, amongst a lot of buttons that at first didn't seem to do anything, one that made the steering wheel heat up. This was most welcome, as it was a bit parky and I hadn't felt the benefit of my coat when I went outside after my bath, as my mother would say.

  We drove through the troll-infested darkness towards Hvolsvöllui, from where certain operational patterns began to establish themselves. Firstly, the hotel was shut, but when we rang the number pinned to the door a man appeared, opened up a couple of rooms, muttered something from deep within the hood of a much-coveted snorkel parka and disappeared into the eternal night.

  Secondly, words like Hvolsvöllui are virtually impossible to pronounce at all and especially in the correct rounded Icelandic manner. A Big John Hamburger eaten at a local roadside fuel stop was a Big John Hamborgarar, and if you wanted it with an egg it was og egg and cost £18. Liquorice Allsorts were Apollo Lakkris, coffee was kaffi and milk was mjólk. It's not a real language at all, it's just a sing-song version of our own brought on by too much Viking Bjor.

  Thirdly, the weather was always crap. The next day, earmarked for our first attempt at the glacier, was foggy and rainy again. If we reached our objective I wouldn't be able to see it and wouldn't be able to say, 'The vast plateau of the Myrdalsjokull glacier might have served as a model for the torque curve of the excellent BMW-derived V8,' so instead we visited the Skogar Folk Museum.

  I recommend this. The curator, who is called something like Thor, is completely bonkers. Most of Iceland as we see it today is modern – its oldest hotel was built in 1930 – but Thor entertains us with evidence of earlier civilisations, including numerous artefacts wrought in desperation from the shrivelled genitalia of animals. I recall a short rope made from an ox penis and a money bag formed from a pig's scrotum. The first settlers, he explained, were Irish monks who built monasteries from 'turds and stones'. Then he sat at the harmonium and played 'O Susannah' and 'Rock of Ages' while forcing us to sing along in Icelandic. And then we ran away.

  That night, in another abandoned hotel in a place called Vik, the wind roared again. The following morning the weather was even worse. This sort of thing went on for three days, the temperature gradually falling and snow and sleet joining the dizzying cycle of wind, rain, darkness, herring, Viking Bjor, empty hotel, bed. The postcards seen in Icelandic hotel receptions are less than honest. One popular example seen everywhere shows a brightly coloured puffin sitting atop a sunlit, moss-covered rock. The reality, as Newton's own picture records, is a rain-lashed clump of black volcanic debris with no puffin on it.

  We had already covered some 750 miles around Route One in our attempts to snatch evocative pictures in rare bursts of late-afternoon watery sunshine. I was convinced of the Range Rover's luxury car credentials. The engine and gearbox are good and a suitable war reparation following the shenanigans over the ownership of Land Rover. The ride is simply outstanding for an off-roader and almost Jaguar-like at times. I'd worked out what everything on the dash did without recourse to the handbook, which in any case, this being a prototype, hadn't been printed yet. I could make it rise and squat on its magic suspension and Newton even managed to tune the telly in, though the picture was affected by what the TV repair man would call 'snow'. And so, with 24 hours remaining before the car had to be back at the docks, we finally made our bid for off-road glory and the tip of the glacier.

  It started well. We scrabbled easily along the vague track leading north from Route One. We bounced over rocky mounds and forded streams; we selected low range, dived in and out of gullies and drove on for mile after breathtaking mile, a towering primaeval mountain vista to our right, a wilderness still awaiting the moment of creation on our left. This was more like it
.

  Everything seemed to go wrong at once. First we came to what looked as if it could be a frozen river, so I took the precaution of sending Newton ahead to probe the terrain with the extended leg of his camera tripod. One moment he was a six-foot specimen of fine European manhood striding forth into the unknown, the next he was a legless, flailing torso. Then the temperature dropped to minus 15, it went dark, and a distant mountain that had hitherto formed the backdrop to the scene was instantly obliterated by an approaching storm. So we turned and fled.

  It was the right decision. By the time we reached our night's lodging in the tiny hamlet of Skálholt a good two feet of snow had fallen. The wind was so strong that it blew me over when I climbed from the car. The worst storm the locals had seen for three years raged all night and had intensified by the next morning, so that by 2.00 p.m. we were still stranded, 50 miles from the capital.

  I lay on my bed and contemplated life, the new Range Rover and everything. I said that anything short of an untimely death miles from civilisation would be a fair result, so in that sense we had succeeded. At the same time, I was haunted by a mental image of the navigation lights of the once-weekly Grimsby-bound container ship receding across the bay in Reykjavik. Bugger. Once again, there were going to be some terribly disappointed people at Land Rover.

  POLICE CAR, LIGHTS, ACTION

  We're dealing with the sharp end of the law here, so for the usual legal reasons our 'victim"s name has to be concealed. I can tell you that he's in his mid-20s, and that even in the dimness of the Omega's rear seat his whole head looks a mess – dirt, bruises, old scars and vivid new stitches, the legacy of one of the roughest upbringings the country has to offer. The nature of our meeting suggests the inside of his head isn't in much better shape either, the legacy of a hard drug habit. 'A typical Glaswegian thug,' I am discreetly informed. We'll call him Bastard.

  'Why'd you do it this time then, Bastard?' asks the driver, a hint of despair in his voice.

  'I can't help it, man, I'm addicted to it.'

  'You did it for the chase, yeah?'

  'Aye. I'd love a smoke, you know.'

  But smoking isn't allowed in police cars, and is impossible with your hands cuffed behind your back.

  The atmosphere in the police Omega is relaxed, anticlimactic, friendly even. PC Kyle Morrison and Bastard are obviously well known to each other. Some of the 32 previous convictions have seen to that. They chat.

  'That was the same route you took last time, you know,' says Morrison, incredulously, as we pull up at base and our fugitive climbs awkwardly out. Another officer discreetly holds a lit cigarette to his lips so he can have a few drags before being bundled inside for questioning. As he disappears, Bastard turns to me. 'You from a newspaper then?'

  'Car magazine.'

  His face lights up. 'Max Power, yeah?' And then he's gone. The dark car pound is near silent except for the lurch of cooling engines and the barking of Brodie the police dog from the back of the Volvo, and the air is heavy with the stink of roasted brakes and clutch plates. The bastard has just nicked another car.

  Chief Inspector Alex Martin of the Strathclyde Police Traffic Group is well aware that police pursuit work is a controversial subject. Speed, as any traffic cop who has just stopped you will be quick to assert, kills.

  'There's always been a car-crime problem in the north side of Glasgow especially,' he explains. The area he covers is host to some notorious housing estates, where car theft is just one branch of a lawlessness that involves serious drugs, burglary and violence. Traditionally, one third of all vehicle thefts in Strathclyde have been made in his area, and over a third of the force's car chases take place on the Chief Inspector's patch.

  'If it became known that the police would never exceed the speed limit we'd never catch any of these bad guys,' he says – and these are guys who are often 'on the fringes of other criminal activity', guys who always make a run for it. 'But at the end of the day our people are ordinary drivers and subject to the same rules as everyone else, and should they be involved in an accident while driving a police vehicle, then that will be fully investigated. Should there be sufficient evidence, and I admit there are occasions when there has been, then they are reported for careless driving. Our guys are not immune, and I believe that's only right.'

  The Scottish approach to the issue, like some aspects of Scottish law, is slightly different from the English one but is still based around intensive driver training. It's obvious that Martin and his men regard the driving school at Scotland's Tulliallen Police College as quite simply the best in the world. But where some English traffic cops are taught specific pursuit driving skills, the Scots are not. The point is that police driving should not be a specialism, but rather just driving to a highly advanced standard. This is critical to Martin's safety argument. 'We believe there's no need to teach pursuit driving; if you can teach someone to drive safely at speed, that should be enough.'

  The seriousness of Glasgow's car-crime problem led, in 1994, to the formation of Strathclyde's special Stolen Vehicle Squad, a collaboration between the traffic and dog departments and the outfit we are to join for a Monday night shift. The dog is a crucial but last-resort member of the team: in the event of a 'bale out' – when the thief abandons the car and legs it – then the dog can be called in to bring him down. One member of each shift is always a specialist dog-handler, a man who lives with the dog at home and work and will probably adopt it as a pet at the end of its working life. It can be hard on the dog – last year one was stabbed by a desperate fugitive.

  Rivalling the dogs as stars of the SVS roadshow are two fully marked-up Volvo T5 estates. They are standard cars but for the usual police paraphernalia: a dog pen that fills half the load bay and extends into the nearside rear seat to allow a quick exit through the door, and uprated pads and discs sourced from 'a racing outfit'. The Volvos were chosen for reasons of acceleration, braking and handling that allow it to keep touch with a recklessly driven lesser car without taking risks at junctions, red lights and any other hazards at which a police driver must slow down.

  The two Volvos usually work in conjunction with a fully equipped but unmarked car that can scout unobtrusively and then call in the marked cars if necessary. The T5s are famous among the locals. If absolutely necessary, a police helicopter can also be called into action.

  The squad is successful. 'Car crime is going down,' says Martin. Last year the outfit made 348 arrests and recovered stolen vehicles worth half a million pounds. The shift starts at 19.00 hours.

  The rear seat of a police car. A stiff-shirted, slightly intimidating figure up front, and the constant crackle of radio that is the leitmotif of law enforcement. I am in tonight's unmarked car, Rover 800 callsign Tango Mike Eight, with PC Malcolmson.

  By 19.30 reports come through of a recklessly driven silver Honda, registration unknown but possibly stolen, on one of the Possil Park housing estates. The plain car's siren goes on and I am treated to the curious sound of a police car from the inside: strangely muffled, constant, without the doppler effect. We drive briskly through the town – 'making progress', the police would call it. I am forbidden by the terms of my being here to record the speeds reached, but in any case when I ask how fast we're going Malcolmson says 'thirty' without hesitation. He later also warns me to be careful what I say if we become involved in a pursuit – the standard in-car video is now equipped with sound recording, so that the mandatory police driver's commentary can supplement the video evidence in court. 'Very helpful to the jury,' says my driver; not so helpful if I'm screaming blue murder from the back seat.

  But the Honda has gone to ground. Back at base we meet up with the two marked cars and Brodie, the German shepherd which, at a word from his master, PC Gordon Harper, would pin me against the wall. 'Otherwise he could go into a schoolyard full of kids and happily play around.' Good dog.

  An hour's cruise around in Omega Tango Mike Six introduces me to the Ruchill estate, dilapidated epicentre of Gl
asgow's car crime and a place where law-breaking often begins in childhood. 'We stopped a car last week,' says PC Andy Pryde. 'The driver was 15, and there was a 14-year-old, two 13-year-olds and a 12-year-old on board too.' A burned-out Astra in a strip of waste ground stands like a portent; there is a soft tinkle of broken glass as a hurled bottle falls short of the car. The police have no friends here.

  As I switch to the T5 at 21.15 another sighting of the renegade Honda comes through, lights and sirens go on and the Volvo bounces off its rev limiter as it screams to another area of Possil Park. I catch sight of a scrawled slogan on a derelict wall – 'fuck the polis'. I was warned that Brodie has a strange sixth sense for crime, and as we enter the estate he begins to bark madly. We find the abandoned Honda Civic, largely intact, but the steering column surround and ignition barrel are torn apart. 'Cars are still too easy to steal,' confirms PC Pryde. A gang of young lads hangs around 10 yards off, watching. The cops know one of them may well be the culprit, but no one's going to grass anybody up here.

  Honda Civics are popular tonight. At 22.10 the radio jabbers out reports of a stolen dark-red one. Again we shriek to its last known location, a residential area about half a mile square. The drivers know the roads like cabbies; know that if they lurk at the two likely exits from the estate while the plain car goes in, they might catch the Honda as it bolts. If it's still in there. We sit with the windows open, listening for the squeal of tyres that is the signature of joyriding. Nothing. After over an hour we admit defeat and return to base for tea break.

  At midnight, with the kettle not yet boiled, the hand-held radio delivers a cool, emotionless report that the Honda has been sighted on the run. The world goes mad, cups and chairs fly as the squad scrambles for its cars. I find myself back in the Omega, grappling with the rear seat belt – this is a police car – as insane acceleration and cornering toss me around the rear bench. The three cars split up and head for the last sighting at the Milton estate, hoping to outflank the 'target vehicle' on all sides.