How Hard Can It Be? Read online

  By the same author

  Motorworld

  Jeremy Clarkson’s Hot 100

  Jeremy Clarkson’s Planet Dagenham

  Born to be Riled

  Clarkson on Cars

  The World According to Clarkson

  I Know You Got Soul

  And Another Thing

  Don’t Stop Me Now

  For Crying Out Loud!

  Driven to Distraction

  How Hard Can It Be?

  The World According to Clarkson

  Volume Four

  JEREMY CLARKSON

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2010

  Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196025-8

  To my children

  The contents of this book first appeared in Jeremy Clarkson’s Sunday Times column. Read more about the world according to Clarkson every week in the Sunday Times.

  Contents

  Clear off, nitwit – I’ll rebuild this hospital

  This has been my perfect week

  It seems it ain’t art if it ain’t ethnic – Opinion

  First, fairy cakes – then welding, kids – Opinion

  Oi, state birdbrains – leave our land alone

  Give it up, Hamza – you’re too ugly

  Skiing through the pain barrier

  Bleep off, you’re driving me mad

  Oi, shoppers – that’s my petrol

  Join me in a saucy oath to Britain

  Ruck off, you nancy Aussies

  Time to save the world again, lads

  Potato heads are talking rot on food

  I’d rather hire a dog than a prostitute

  Pricking science’s silly sausages

  Feed them, or they’ll slash all the seats

  A vicious Japanese loo ruined my ah so

  Argh! I’ve fallen into a speed trap

  It’s just a dumb animal, Mr Oddie

  Swim with sharks – it’s easy money

  Oi, get your hands off my lap dancers

  Dante’s new hell: my work canteen

  Look, Mr McChap – you’re part of Britain, so just get over it

  Now we’re for it: we’ve stopped behaving badly

  Working while on holiday is … wow, just look at that

  By ’eck, our funny accents are the envy of the world

  Peep in my wife’s knicker drawer and see what you get

  Miss Street-Porter, I have a job for you in Cambodia

  Hey, let’s live fast and die when ministers tell us to

  Don’t let banks lose your money – do it yourself

  Fingers on buzzers, you bunch of ignorant twerps

  Play it my way, kids, and you’ll save rock’n’roll

  Ditch the laptop and suit if you wanna stay alive, Mr Corporate

  Take in a prisoner as a lodger and that’s two problems solved

  Wake up and smell the coffee – tea is for morons

  Into the breach, normal people, and sod the polar bears

  The daddy of all idiots at your child’s school sports day

  I’m a Tigger, he’s a Piglet, and you must be a Pooh

  Sorry, worms, you won’t be getting a piece of me

  The BBC’s letting loonies gag me with mink knickers

  Ambulance, quick – some idiot’s had a brainwave

  Save the high street – ditch bad service and ugly sales girls

  Ring a ring o’ clipboards – we all fall down

  The world will never be safe until Scrabble is banned

  Run for cover – Pooh the Dark Knight is coming

  Get another round in, lads – we’ve got some pubs to save

  Come quick, Nurse – the NHS is going frightfully green

  I dare you to visit Johannesburg, the city for softies

  Class-A cocoa, the powder of choice on my crock’n’roll tour

  I’m starting divorce proceedings in this special relationship

  You’re a bunch of overpaid nancies – and I love you

  Stand still, wimp – only failures run off to be expats

  It’s pure hell in the mountainous Cotswold region

  What a difference now I’ve stopped drinking fish fingers

  Gordon the ass is stomping over everyone’s pets

  Change fast, before we all gag on the fabric of British life

  Okay, you’ve got me bang to rights – I’m a secret green

  I’ll be right there, Sir Ranulph – must conquer the sofa first

  Letting beavers loose in Scotland is a dam-fool idea

  Say cheese, darling – I’ll stick on your horse’s ears later

  Now there’s a first – my elephant has just exploded

  No, I won’t wear a tiara, if it’s all the same to you

  I’m not superstitious, Officer, but it’s bad karma to harry a druid

  After three brushes with death in planes I want a parachute

  Just one word and my T-shirt offends the whole of Japan

  Stop, you’re digging an early grave with that garden trowel

  The conquerors are coming, Pierre – we Brits need more land

  Soaking up the raw emotion of the best beetroot contest

  Nurse! The OAP mods are bashing the wrinkly rockers

  Dr Useless, what’s the Canadian word for ‘lousy care’?

  It’s just not fair – donkeys get all the breaks

  Forget Antigua, 007 – all the real action is in Acacia Avenue

  Mad Johnny Baa Lamb is here to save the pit bulls

  Up to the waist in Brown’s slurry on my new farm

  Help, quick – I’ve unscrewed the top on a ticking bomb

  Cleverness is no more. It has ceased to be. This is a dumb Britain

  I’ve got a solution for the rainforest: napalm the lot

  Get me a rope before Mandelson wipes us all out

  Stop the game, ref. We’re all too cross to play by the rules

  Call me a spoilsport but I’m glad my dad wasn’t a lesbian

  I’m so dead – shot by both sides in th
e website war

  Sing about the fat man again and I’ll shoot Tiny Tim

  The BA strike is off – so that’s many a Christmas ruined

  So, Piggy, Buttocks and Rat – what shall we call Gordon?

  Clear off, nitwit – I’ll rebuild this hospital

  Hello and a very happy new year to you all, especially if you are reading this on Rugby railway station wondering why all the tracks are still in the ground waiting to be turned from iron ore into something on which a train one day might run. Or conversely, you might be at Birmingham International pondering the vexing question of why the whole thing had to be shut down for two hours because of what the emergency services called a ‘small fire’ in a nearby cafe.

  Well, I am afraid the answer is simple. In the olden days, all that stood between the bosses and the work being done was the trade union movement. And the unions could be silenced most of the time with a corned-beef sandwich and a vague promise of some jam tomorrow for the workforce.

  Not any more. Now, when you want to get something done, the union boys are the least of your worries. Because you must also ensure that no Muslims or gingers are upset in any way by what you’re planning, that no creatures, even if they are rubbish ones like snails or foxes, will be dislodged, that you won’t make any unnecessary carbon dioxides, that all those involved will wear orange clothes, hard hats and boots made from box-girder bridges, that they are all as sober as a Sunday-best Swede and that, should a small fire break out within 200 miles, provisions are in place to send everyone home for at least a year.

  That’s before you go to the government, which gives you £2.50 to replace every railway line in the country because all the rest of the money it gets each year is being spent on arresting Pete Doherty and holding public inquiries into how it lost the medical records, banking details, driving records and previous convictions of everyone in the world. These public inquiries can be convened only once all concerned are aware that they can’t kill a fox or upset a red-headed person and that if there’s a fire nearby they must sail immediately to a point midway across the Atlantic and sit there until it, and every other fire in the world, has been put out. And an investigation then has to be held to find out what caused it and who’s responsible and how that person should be punished. Unless they are ginger, in which case they will get a free tinfoil coat, a bit of soup and some counselling.

  Plainly, all this has to stop. We must go back to the closing days of the nineteenth century when, without any heavy lifting gear or automation, 177 miles of broad-gauge railway line from London to Bristol and beyond was converted to narrow gauge in just one weekend. Actually, we don’t even need to go back that far. The M1 was not there one morning and the next it was. Then there was Spaghetti Junction. The 30-acre site was crisscrossed with two railway lines, three canals and two rivers but despite this they had to build a network of slipways that would link eighteen different roads. And they got the whole thing done in thirty months. Which is about as long as it takes these days to build a garden shed, if you do it by the book.

  I believe that the time has come to stop the nonsense and last week we were gifted the perfect opportunity. As I’m sure you heard, the Royal Marsden hospital in Chelsea, west London, was severely damaged by a fire and even a partial loss of its facilities is rather more than an inconvenience. A damaged railway line causes people to be late for work. A damaged hospital, which sees 40,000 patients a year and sits at the centre of an already overstretched National Health Service, may well cause people to die. Gordon Brown visited the scene and said that the evacuation of the hospital at the time of the blaze had seen Britain at its best. And that he would do everything in his power to get the place up and running again.

  Stirring words and now let’s go for some stirring action. People are already saying that it will take ‘months’, which is government speak for ‘years’, to remove the ruined roof and replace it with a new one. But why can we not aim to do it in ‘weeks’?

  Let’s go back to the days when governments – and rail companies for that matter – knew that they existed to serve us and that we weren’t just a nuisance who are told to stay at home if we’re not involved and wrapped up in fluorescent clothes if we are.

  Let’s go back to the days when speed was not a dirty word. In 1994 the Santa Monica freeway in California was destroyed by an earthquake. You may remember the scenes of total devastation: crumpled bridges, huge slabs of concrete, twisted steel and rubble. It was a nightmare, but they had traffic running on it again in just eighty-four days.

  Let’s aim for the same sort of target with the Marsden. Let’s tear up the rulebook about carbon dioxide and hard hats and no reversing without a banksman. Let’s get the builders in there tomorrow, or now, and let’s allow them to smoke so they don’t have to pop outside every fifteen minutes.

  To achieve this, a vast army of busybodies and nitwits will need to be kept at bay as they strut about with their clipboards and their concerns that mice may be nesting in the embers and that they must be taken, in a helicopter, to the countryside and freed humanely before work can start.

  Dealing with them is possible, providing the man in charge has a side parting, a small moustache and a fondness for telling everyone who gets in his way to eff off. It’s a job that I would like very much.

  Sunday 6 January 2008

  This has been my perfect week

  A couple of weeks ago, plans for a wonderful new coal-fired power station in Kent were given the green light and I was very pleased. This will reduce our dependency on Vladimir’s gas and Osama’s oil and, as a bonus, new technology being developed to burn the coal more efficiently will be exported to China and exchanged for plastic novelty items to make our lives a little brighter.

  It’s all just too excellent for words, but of course galloping into the limelight came a small army of communists and hippies who were waving their arms around and saying that coal was the fuel of Satan and that, when the new power station opened, small people like Richard Hammond would immediately be drowned by a rampaging tidal swell. They argued with much gusto that if Britain was to stand any chance of meeting Mr Prescott’s Kyoto climate-change targets then we must build power stations that produced no carbon emissions at all.

  You’d imagine then that last week, when Gordon Brown announced plans for a herd of new nuclear power stations, they’d have been delighted. Quiet power made by witchcraft, and no emissions at all. It’s enough, you might imagine, to make Jonathon Porritt priapic with pleasure.

  But no. It turns out the eco-mentalists don’t like nuclear power either for lots of reasons, all of them stupid. They worry about what would happen if a reactor blew up. Which is a bit like worrying about living in a house in case a giant meteorite lands on it. They claim that people who go within 5 miles of a reactor die of leukaemia instantly. (They don’t.) They wonder where the plants will be built. (Wales?) And they ask what we will do with the waste. Simple. Put it in the Rainbow Warrior.

  The fact of the matter is this. The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well-intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.

  I’ve argued time and again that the old trade unionists and CND lesbians didn’t go away. They just morphed into environmentalists. The red’s become green but the goals remain the same. And there’s no better way of achieving those goals than turning the lights out and therefore winding the clock back to the Stone Age. Only when we’re all eating leaves under a hammer and sickle will they be happy.

  I’m serious. All the harebrained schemes for renewable energy are popular among Britain’s beardies only because they don’t work. I heard one of them on the radio last week explaining that if he were allowed to build 58,000 islands in the Caribbean he could use steam coming off the sea to make enough power for everyone. Yeah, right. And then you have their constant claims that the tide ca
n be used to make electricity. Really? If that’s so, why am I not writing this on a computer powered by the Severn Bore? Sure, this summer work will begin on a tidal plant off the coast of Wales. Eight turbines, each 78 ft long and 50 ft tall, will harness the moon’s gravitational pull, and if all goes well it won’t even provide enough electricity to run Chipping Norton. You’d be better off burning tenners.

  So what about wind turbines? Nope. They don’t work either. Quite apart from their unmatched ability to mince baby ospreys and keep everyone within 15 miles awake with their mournful humming, they don’t provide enough juice to power a Rampant Rabbit. Denmark has built 6,000 wind turbines and it’s said that together they can produce enough electricity to meet 19 per cent of the country’s (frankly minuscule) needs. But since they came on line not a single one of Denmark’s normal power stations has been decommissioned. They are all running at full capacity because, while the wind turbines are theoretically capable of meeting nearly a fifth of the country’s demands, they produce nothing at all when the wind drops. And since nobody can predict when that might be, the normal power stations have to be kept on line all the time. It’s been a disaster, which brings us back to nuclear power: the only solution if you want to maintain our standard of living and cut carbon emissions.

  Not only is the energy clean but there are other advantages too. The new power plants will be privately run, which means you can buy shares in them and you won’t lose a penny. Because when things are going well you’ll get a dividend, and when they’re not going well you won’t care because you’ll be covered in sulphurous sores and blood will be spurting from where your eyes used to be. Better still, to make sure things don’t go badly a vast army of health and safety officers will be employed to ensure the concrete is thick enough and visiting schoolchildren are not allowed to press any of the buttons. This means the high-vis Nazis will have no time left to stop policemen climbing ladders.

  What’s more, because so many countries are going nuclear, Iran for instance, there is bound to be a global shortage of sufficiently well-qualified atomic engineers. This means wages will rise, and that will cause schoolchildren to stop aiming for stardom in Heat magazine or a 2:1 in media studies and start concentrating a bit more in physics and maths.