If You'd Just Let Me Finish Read online

  Jeremy Clarkson

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  IF YOU’D JUST LET ME FINISH!

  The World According to Clarkson Volume Seven

  Contents

  No time for the stodgy bits any more, so scroll down to the bottom of the page

  I’m having another baby. But I can’t tell you what it will look like

  The only answer to the Med refugee crisis: unfold your sofa bed

  So what if Tom Cruise worships lizards? Lots of us have weirder beliefs

  Call me Jezza Slobovic – I’m fat, I have a tennis bat and I will win Wimbledon

  Money’s no object and men don’t count when a woman has a horse

  Smile, joke, sing about your ding-a-ling. Then Britain will rule again

  Dismantle Palmyra and rebuild it outside Padstow. That’ll fox Jihadi John

  Gotta get a job – then I can give up elderflower cordial and live again

  It’s a simple rule, PM: you stop my ration of sex and pork pies, I park for free

  Jo’burg turns to man’s best fiend – but he’s no match for my twelve-bore

  An Englishman’s idea to stop Mao Tse Sturgeon taking the laird’s land

  I’ll just run this up the flagpole: we’ve let the Union Jack go to pot

  Spare me the 57 varieties of Angela who think they make a better ketchup

  Before you make a fool of yourself, Mr Midlife, try this for a real buzz

  Splints, tick. Crutches, tick. Stuff health and safety, tick. Let the holiday begin

  This will relax you, said the prison yoga teacher as she pulled my leg off

  Chickens are safe, but Labour’s Ms Vegan will leave us ripped to shreds

  Dear hotel manager, get off of my smalls. Yours, Keith Richards

  Sorry to be a bore but we must drill a great hole through Blackpool

  Beneath the splinter in my foot lies the key to all human endeavour

  Vite, vite, Johnny French. We can’t wait much longer for a nuclear roast turkey

  Labour’s little leftie does not deserve the abuse. But I know a man who does

  The snooper’s charter is a danger to us all. A man in the pub told me

  Come on, Charles: put Frankenfish and bio bees in your world peace plan

  Officer, arrest that man – he’s all too easily offended by Fury’s piffle

  The signs said New York but it looked just like London and felt like hell

  Hallelujah, Reverend! This hymn hater has seen the happy-clappy light

  Pipe down, mudslingers. It was Frank, not Phil, that soaked the north

  Kim has a bomb. No need for panic – just fire up the Roman candles

  I stand before the Twitter Inquisition, guilty of not worshipping Bowie

  Transgender issues are driving me nuts. I need surgery on my tick boxes

  Utter even a kind word and the lefties’ digital vitriol is instantly fizzing

  Yo, kids, this morning’s anti-drug message is brought to you by ISIS

  If you want the Oscar, Ridley, better start shooting Blade Limper

  I’m aching like billy-o and dying for a fag. It’s a fat man’s holiday

  The NHS new towns are Nazi nonsense. We need Call of Duty garden cities

  Call up the paparazzi army to take Brussels – and keep us in Europe

  Sober Syrians we should let in; boozy Brits are too shaming to be let out

  Shave off the beards, hipsters. Or prepare for a long wait at Gatwick

  Picking a holiday is hard when Johnny ISIS beats you to all the brochures

  I refuse to dry my teabags for Osama Binman

  Coming soon to Amazon it’s … er … Cary McCarface

  For me, the war is over: let Germany run everything

  Reception? Help, I need a manual on turning the light off

  Sex is running riot on TV – and I fear Countdown’s next

  At last, a folly to love from the EU do-gooders

  Come quietly, Tiddles, or it’s jail for your owner

  I’m going to hell in a handkerchief and no one cares

  Our only hope is a second vote – and a truly rotten PM

  No bull, Miguel, you look nuts in that gold lamé

  Let Russia dope: I want to see the heroin hurdles

  Sun, seeds and squirrels – it’s hell in the parks police

  Blow a billion quid – only fatties and idlers need apply

  Pipe down and come with me on a tour of Trump’s Britain

  O Adrian, who will make me laugh now?

  For a healthier, happier you, just live like it’s 1617

  My body’s a write-off in waiting, so why have all these repairs?

  Sure, you’ll get by on £85,000 a day – but the family won’t

  Our inner ape is released in a most inconvenient way

  Moove over, refugees. Militant vegans have claustrophobic cows to save

  Oi, Fatty! Join me in a little act of rudeness and we’ll make Britain normal again

  A licence to cull could be a lifeline for Prince Philip – and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

  If Farron really wants votes, he must deal with our most grievous malaise: culottes

  Um … let me break the ice, Mrs May. Have you ever been to a lap-dancing club?

  Honestly, ladies, I do sympathize with you about the menopause – men get it too

  BA lands in the brown stuff over a power cut. Next we’ll blame it for turbulence

  You young people were jolly naughty on 8 June. Go to your rooms with no vote

  Wish you were being drizzled on: last week’s sun ruined my Riviera holiday

  School’s out of touch – kids must learn to wire a plug and embrace nepotism

  Centuries of male suffering inflicted by Croatian ragamuffins and French fops

  Clarkson on the horror of modern stag dos

  Living to 125 is a doddle: you simply get the government to make dying illegal

  When I went to hospital, I was at death’s door. But a far, far worse fate awaited me

  My foolproof recipe to kick the fags – chewing gum and a hideous chest infection

  Grab your hippie-hemp bag, the little shop of package-free horrors is open

  While CND was blowing up red balloons, nukes were keeping us healthy and safe

  Nab him, grab him, stop that pigeon – and let the homeless eat him now

  Some terrace chants are mean, but Manchester United fans are just bigging up their new hero

  Terrorists have put half the world out of bounds, and bedbugs patrol the rest of it

  The best art criticism is done not with words but with craft knife and spray can

  Oh blow, our star role in a hurricane epic has gone with the wind

  Wine bore’s red? Wide-awake white? No, I’ll take the vino in-betweeno

  Guy Fawkes was an amateur. You should have seen me and my friends blow up Hull

  Injured at school, the Famous Five go in search of a no-win no-fee lawyer

  Sorry, kids, but Britain will be the next Vietnam, with you as the cheap labour

  Stick to pretty fish, Sir David Attenborough, and stop blubbing about dead whales

  Eat your heart out, Dyson – the Surrey space cadets are hoovering the galaxy

  The girls, the gambling, the gin – I’ve gone galloping mad for horse racing

  I had fun with acids at school; now I want them kept under military guard

  Just remind me, please, why we think the world is becoming a better place

  Follow Penguin

  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?

  Round the Bend

  Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

  What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

  As I Was Saying …

  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.

  No time for the stodgy bits any more, so scroll down to the bottom of the page

  There’s an especially marvellous moment in the wonderful film Planes, Trains and Automobiles when Steve Martin turns to John Candy and says, ‘When you’re telling these little stories, here’s a good idea: have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener.’

  I was reminded of it last week as I read a story in The Times about a chap called Dan Jarvis. Today Dan is a Labour MP and the Shadow Justice Minister but back in the day he was a Special Forces major. He parachuted over enemy lines in Afghanistan and Iraq and saw service in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. So we are talking about a man who knows how to handle himself in a tight spot.

  Anyway, late one night our all-action hero was at London’s King’s Cross station, travelling down a long escalator, when he noticed a drunk at the bottom waving a bottle.

  ‘I gave him a wide berth,’ Dan said, ‘but he lunged towards me. I kept going but he squared up to me and then said, “Give me your f****** wallet or you’ll get this f****** bottle.” ’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Dan, with a steely-eyed determination.

  This is excellent. A drunken would-be mugger has picked on the wrong man this time. Dan looks like a weedy businessman but underneath the suit this father of three is a trained killer. His back is like a sack of writhing pythons. His buttocks are like ostrich eggs. He’s twelve stone of sinew and muscle and righteous indignation.

  We can barely contain ourselves. We are desperate to know what happens next. Ready? Right, here goes. Dan turned and walked away.

  He did. He walked away. So we have the best build-up in anecdote history and it completely fizzles out at the end. Dan said the incident made him think about the nature of society and the treatment of crime. Whereas it made me think: why can’t some people tell a story properly?

  I have one friend who is completely hopeless. He starts out by saying, ‘I was on my way to work this morning,’ but then interrupts himself to add a raft of detail that is simply not necessary. ‘You know I’m working on the high street now because, well, I couldn’t get on with my old boss. My dad was the same. He used to argue all the time with his boss when he worked at the colliery. But you could back then …’

  So he had identified the starting point for his story as his trip to work but then instead of going forwards he had reversed down memory lane to a South Yorkshire mining town in the 1920s. The only solution at this point is to take an imaginary phone call. Or to gouge your own eyes out.

  The trick when regaling friends with a story is to remember that everything is better if it’s shorter. Well, not everything, obviously, but you know what I mean.

  I used to work on a television show called Top Gear and every week the films were edited to a length that felt right. They felt balanced. They felt good. But every week there simply wasn’t the time to fit them into the programme – so they’d have to be shortened. And without exception they were better as a result.

  In journalism college the lecturers would often call us students back at the end of the day to give us a story that had to be turned around immediately for the ‘late news’ section that local papers had in those days.

  One time they told us that a train carrying nuclear waste had crashed in a residential area and that we had to get the story across in no more than seven words. I loved doing that.

  It’s why I love Twitter today: because it forces people to be concise, to think how they can say a lot without saying much of anything at all. Twitter is making the world a funnier, more interesting place.

  It’s why I adore tabloid newspapers. Anyone can say, ‘Mr Paddy Ashdown, Leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, today admitted to an extramarital affair.’ But it takes a special type of wit and brilliance to come up with ‘It’s Paddy Pantsdown’ and cover the whole damn thing in three words.

  This ability to get your message across quickly is going to become a lot more important in the future because a whole generation is growing up with an intolerance for wasted time. They see no point in sitting through the whole of the Battle of Britain when they can go on YouTube and just see that good bit where the German’s goggles fill up with ketchup.

  Many see the sudden and dramatic increase in the amount of entertainment that’s available online as a bad thing. They reckon that without record company bosses to filter out the wheat from the chaff and editors to decide what’s worth printing and what isn’t, the world will become a sea of beige.

  I disagree. Because when everyone has the same platform on which to launch a musical career, people will have to work doubly hard and be doubly brilliant to get noticed. Waffle will be an early casualty.

  And as a result I shall get straight to the point with an anecdote of my own from this rather turbulent week. Most of us have woken up after a night at a charity ball to find an empty wallet and a signed rugby ball on the kitchen table. So we’re all familiar with the sense of: ‘Oh no. What have I done?’

  Well, it was worse for me on Friday morning because I woke up after a night at a charity do to be told by my lawyer that someone had uploaded a video of me using choice language to describe bosses at the BBC. He was very stern and I had to look at my shoes like a naughty boy.

  But it was all meant in jest and, anyway, it worked. By being brief and controversial and a bit sweary, I woke the room up, and the auction prize I was offering – one last lap of the Top Gear test track – raised £100,000.

  22 March 2015

  I’m having another baby. But I can’t tell you what it will look like

  As you may have heard, the BBC has taken my gun and my badge, and I must admit it’s all been a bit of a shock. For more than twelve years Top Gear has been my life, completely. It was an all-consuming entity, a many-tentacled global monster that was dysfunctional and awkward and mad, but I loved it with a passion. I loved it like my own child. Which in many ways it was. But then, one day, I read in Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph that my contract wasn’t going to be renewed and that they were going to give my baby to someone else.

  I felt sick because, after I’d lost my home and my mother, I’d thrown myself even more vigorously into my job and now, idiotically, I’d managed to lose that too. The sense of loss was enormous. I used to think about Top Gear all the time. It was a black hole at the centre of my heart. I woke every morning worrying about every single line. And I went to bed at night worrying that the changes I’d made during the day were wrong. Friends would talk to me when we were out and, though I could see their lips moving, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. My mind was always elsewhere. I was comfortably numb.

  Two days before the ‘fracas’, I’d been told, sternly, by my doctor that the lump on my tongue was probably cancer and that I must get it checked out immediately. But I couldn’t do that. We were in the middle of a Top Gear series. And Top Gear always came first.

  The hole it’s left behind seems to stretch for eternity. And eternity is a big place. Imagine a ball of steel the size of the Earth. Now imagine a fly landing on that ball once a day, and then taking off again. When it has eventually worn the ball of steel away to nothing, that is just the start of eternity. And I’ve somehow got to fill it.

  Playing Patience on my laptop is not the answer. Because when you get bored, and you will, it’s still only eight in the morning and you can’t even think about going to the pub for four more hours. And
then you have to decide not to go to the pub because that’s the road to ruin and despair.

  So you watch the lunchtime news and it’s full of Ed Miliband doing his new Dirty Harry act and David Cameron in a hospital with his tie tucked into his shirt and his sleeves rolled up, and it’s still five hours until the start of Pointless. So you go to the shops, and for the first time you are aware that every penny you spend is coming from a pot that’s no longer being topped up. So you decide not to spend anything at all.

  The only good thing is that my son is currently living with me in London, doing A-level retakes. Which means I can spend, ooh, about sixteen hours a day reading about the Cold War and helping him with his creative writing coursework. But soon he will be gone, and then the yawning chasm will open up once more.

  We read often about people who live on benefits, and it fills us with rage that they are sitting about with a plasma television we bought, eating chocolate biscuits that aren’t bloody well theirs. Yet after a couple of weeks in the same boat (well, all right, mine’s more of a liner), I’m beginning to develop a bit of sympathy. Because what the hell do they do all day to stay sane?

  I suppose it helps when all your friends are on the dole as well. You can all hang out in the bus shelter together. But selfishly, most of my friends have jobs, which means that until eight at night I have almost no one to play with.

  This means I have to make everything last for hours. I have set aside this afternoon to fill in the membership form for a local tennis club. And then I shall use all tomorrow morning to take it round. The afternoon? Not sure yet. I may organize my jumpers.

  And so we get to the nub of the issue. When you are thrust into the world of early retirement, it’s no good living from day to day because then you’re just a twig in a stream. You just get stuck in an eddy till you rot. You need to have a long-term strategy. You need something that will fill the void.

  But what? Squash? Really? I’m fifty-five years old, which means that long before I become good, my knees will explode and my ears will fill up with hair. Fishing? Hmm. I’m not certain, when you’ve spent a life being chased across the border by angry mobs and shot at in helicopter gunships, that you can fill the hole by sitting on the bank of a canal, in the drizzle. It’s the same story with gardening. When your Maserati’s done 185mph you’re not going to get much of a thrill from a rhubarb growth spurt.