For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Read online

  Sunday 8 January 2006

  We’re all going on a celebrity holiday

  We learnt last weekend that the government in Sardinia is planning to impose punishing wealth taxes on billionaire visitors who come to the island in their enormous gin palaces or their onyx aeroplanes. I’m sure this went down well with those of a Guardian disposition.

  In essence, those whose boats are more than a mile long will be hit where it hurts most, in the wallet. And second homes within 200 yards of the coast will attract a special council tax that will cause the owners to go cross-eyed.

  And the excitement doesn’t stop there because, get this, the leader of the government, Robino Di Hood, says the money raised – and it could be £550 million a year – will be spent on baby foxes and mending the ozone layer.

  Of course, delicious though the scheme might sound in eco-socialist circles, I doubt very much the super-rich will pay up. Sardinia is a pretty little place for sure, but there are many other pretty little places they can go to instead. So they will. And losing them will kill Sardinia off as a tourist destination more quickly than news of some poorly chickens.

  Let me explain. A friend of mine returned recently from a break in Jamaica. ‘So how was it?’ I asked, expecting to hear about the food, the hotel, the beach and how many times he’d had his arms cut off by crack-fuelled Yardies. But no. Instead he told me he’d seen Helen Fielding, Laura Bush and the entire Eastwood family – with the disappointing exception of grandaddy Clint.

  This is now how we judge holiday locations. Not on what we see, but on who we see.

  And on that basis, Reykjavik knocks Jamaica into a cocked hat because last year, on a family holiday in the land of fire and ice, I trumped Helen Fielding and Laura Bush with Dame Kiri Tiki NikiWara and then trumped the Eastwood family by seeing Clint himself, checking in while I was checking out.

  News of this enthused another friend so much that he went to Iceland for a winter holiday and returned to say that yes, the nightlife was very jolly and the volcanoes very active, but that the highlight had been sharing a ride in the hotel’s lift with Quentin Tarantino.

  This is what always made Sardinia such a tempting destination. Forget the emerald waters or sandy beaches. It was the chance you might catch a glimpse of Princess Caroline and Roman Abramovich raving it up in one of the Aga Khan’s bars.

  That’s why Sardinia has always been better than Corsica. Yes, the French island is more visually stunning than its Italian neighbour, and historically way more interesting as well. But it has always been let down by the quality of the celebs.

  On numerous holidays there, the only people I’ve ever clocked are Zoe Ball, Mick Hucknall and Jeremy Paxman.

  Mind you, that’s better than Dubai. On my last visit I found myself sharing a hotel with Chris Tarrant, Grant Bovey and Anthea Turner. It was like being stuck in a warm and fuzzy ITVdaytime chat show. All I needed to complete the saccharine picture of harmlessness and syrup was television’s Richard Hammond.

  Barbados is a fine case study here. It’s one of the most populated countries on earth, the terrain is fairly non-mountainous and many people with tattoos holiday in the south. So why go? Well, obviously, there are direct flights and many fine restaurants, but it’s who you see in those restaurants that empties Cheshire so comprehensively.

  At somewhere like the Cliff, it’s possible to spot Gary Lineker, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Ulrika Jonsson on the same night. That’s a triumvirate to make anyone’s holiday complete. Think about it: confirmation that your taste in food and islands coincides perfectly with the doyens of football, home improvement and er, being Swedish.

  And I’m not being snobbish either. I know plenty of cool and trendy media people who go on holiday to Tuscany every year in the desperate hope that while they’re shopping in San Gimignano for some fair-trade, organic pesto-flavoured, nuclear-free South African peace crisps, they might bump into John Mortimer.

  The celeb syndrome now affects pretty well everyone and pretty well every lifestyle choice we make.

  I mean, are you going to spend £1,100 on the egg-yellow alligator-skin diary featured in last week’s Style supplement? Not likely. Unless of course Gwyneth Paltrow is papped with one while out shopping. Then you’ll happily trade your children’s health to get one.

  It’s why people will wait 200 years for a table in the Ivy. It’s why people are salivating at the prospect of sending their children to Marlborough. A fine school, of course, made so much finer these days by the attendance of Eugenie York.

  It’s why the village of Barnsley in Gloucestershire has become so expensive. Yes, it sounds a bit whippetish for sure, but having Kirsty Young, the Five newsreader, as a regular in the local pub makes you out to be a player.

  If, however, you find all this too ghastly and you’d rather eat your own nose than share a holiday hotel with Jade Goody and Nick Knowles, then don’t despair.

  Try Sardinia. Because, if this tax plan comes to fruition, it’ll be full of no one at all.

  Sunday 15 January 2006

  The worst word in the language

  Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can’t really use these words any more and yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those in the travel and hotel industries to pepper their conversation with the word beverage.

  There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. And the biblically awful ‘gift’. I also have a biological aversion to the use of ‘home’ instead of ‘house’. So if you were to ask me round to ‘your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta’ I would almost certainly be sick on you.

  But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hung-over, is ‘beverage’.

  Apparently, they used to have ‘bever’ days at Eton when extra beer was brought in for the boys. And this almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Boris Johnson would understand.

  Therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hotels have got it into their heads that the word beverage, with its Eton and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing a customer.

  Now look. The customer in question is almost certainly a businessman, and the sort of businessmen who take scheduled planes around Europe and stay in business hotels are fairly low down the pecking order. You think they turn their phones on the instant the plane has landed because the Tokyo stock exchange is struggling to manage without them. No. The reason they turn them on so damn fast is to find out if they’ve been sacked.

  Honestly, you don’t need to treat them like you’re on the set of Upstairs Downstairs. They do not spend their afternoons cutting the crusts off cucumber sandwiches. And they do not say grace before dinner. They’re called Steve and Dave and you know what they’re doing on their laptops in the departure lounge? Organising a backward hedge merger with GEC? ‘Fraid not. They’re looking at some Hooters Swimsuit pictures from the internet.

  For crying out loud, I’m middle class. I went to a school most people would call posh. But if I came home and said to my wife that I wanted a beverage, or asked her to pass the condiments, she’d punch me.

  When I travel, I don’t need to be treated like Hyacinth Bucket. I want you to understand I speak like you do and that I’ll understand perfectly if you say there’s a kettle in my room. You don’t have to say there are ‘tea and coffee making facilities’.

  And please, can you stop saying ‘at all’ after every question. Can I take your coat at all? Would you care for lunch at all? Or, this week, on a flight back from Scandinavia, ‘Another beverage for yourself at all, sir?’ What’s the matter with saying ‘Another drink?’ And what’s with all the reflexive pronoun abuse?

  I’ve written about this before but it’s getting worse. Reflexive pron
ouns are used when the subject and the object of a sentence are the same person or thing. Like ‘I dress myself. You cannot therefore say ‘please contact myself. Because it makes you look like an imbecile.

  If you send a letter to a client saying ‘my team and me look forward to meeting with yourself next Wednesday’, be prepared for some disappointment. Because if I were the client I’d come to your office all right. Then I’d stand on your desk and relieve myself.

  I’m not a grammar freak – I can eat, shoot and then take it or leave it – but when someone says ‘myself instead of ‘me’ I find it more offensive than if they’d said ‘spastic wog’.

  Before embarking on a sentence, work out first of all what’s the shortest way of saying it, not the longest. There seems to be a general sense that using more words than is strictly necessary is somehow polite. That’s almost certainly why, on another flight the other day, I was offered some ‘bread items’.

  We see this most conspicuously in the catering industry, where I am regularly offered a ‘choice of both Cheddar and Brie’. No, wait. I’ve forgotten the pointless adjectives. I should have said a ‘choice of both flavoursome Cheddar and creamy Brie’.

  ‘Are you ready to order at all, yourself, sir?’ ‘Yes, I’ll have the hearty winter-warming soup and the nourishing bowl of pasta, topped with the delicious dew-picked tomatoes, thanks. And to follow, if yourself can manage it, a plate of gag-inducing, nostril-assaulting, bacteria-laced Stilton.’

  It’s all rubbish. Why is a bowl of pasta more appealing than a plate of pasta? And why not simply say pasta? Because don’t worry, I’ll presume it’ll come on some form of crockery, in the same way that I’ll presume, if you put a kettle in my room, that you might have put some coffee granules in there as well.

  I’ll leave you with the best example I know of this nonsense. It was a rack of papers in a hotel foyer over which there was a sign: ‘Newspapers for your reading pleasure’.

  All they had left was the Guardian. So it wasn’t even technically correct.

  Sunday 22 January 2006

  McEton, a clever English franchise

  Following Tony Blair’s attempts to rebrand the entire nation, we’re now told that London is no longer home to the Queen, some beefeaters and 10,000 chatty cabbies who know where they’re going. It is instead a vibrant multicultural city where you can hear 600 different languages on even the shortest trip to the shops.

  Talk like this, we’re told, is what won Britain the Olympics but, that aside, I find myself wondering what it will do for the country’s balance of payments.

  Tourists do not come here for our weather, or the quality of our provincial cooking. Nor are they attracted by the exceptional value of our hotels, or our beaches, or Birmingham. I’ve never met an American or a Japanese person who has said: ‘I want to come to Britain so I can buy an Arabic newspaper from a Bengali store where the cashier speaks Polish.’

  What most foreigners like about Britain is not multi-culturalism or tolerance or any of that new Labour nonsense. No, what they like is our history. Shakespeare. Blenheim Palace. Soldiers in preposterous hats who don’t move. Yes, they may go and see some dead dogs in a modern art gallery but that’s only because they’ve spent the morning on the top of a sightseeing bus and they’re freezing.

  Do they, for instance, go back home with baseball caps worn by modern British policemen? Or a plastic incarnation of the traditional Dixon of Dock Green helmet? Which gets more visitors: Anne Hathaway’s cottage or Benjamin Zephaniah’s birthplace?

  Then there’s British Airways. When the staff wore blazers and the planes were finished in grey and royal blue, captains were beating foreigners off the ramp with big sticks. When they went all ethnic with those jazzy tailfins, the whole thing went tits up.

  Any British business is well advised to use pomp, tradition, tea and history in all global marketing campaigns. So we arrive neatly at the doors of a British institution that is steeped in nothing but history and tradition. Our public schools.

  There are those, of an Islington persuasion, who think they are nothing more than a hotbed of outdated values, cruelty, inequality, drugs, bullying and buggery. Not so. When I was at Repton in the 1970s we did not wear tails and we hardly ever set fire to anyone. In fact, my house looked a bit like London today. There were kids from Iran, Japan, Trinidad and even Ethiopia.

  Sent by parents who wanted them to have a traditional British education, most had only a rudimentary grasp of English. And yet there they were, going through the complications of puberty, thousands of miles from home, unable to communicate with teachers, matrons or even the woman in the village shop.

  I felt rather sorry for them – not so sorry that I didn’t steal all their biscuits, obviously – but I did feel that the downside of being sent so far away for an education far outweighed the perceived upside, that is, that you could go back to Ethiopia knowing the Latin for ‘What ho’.

  Now, though, Repton has come up with a brilliant idea. They’ve moved the mountain to Muhammad. They’re keeping the old place in Derbyshire to cater for the children of Cheshire businessmen, and they’re opening a sister school in Dubai.

  As a money-spinning venture this is up there with the iPod. I mean, Dubai is full of Indians who will understand cricket, and Arabs who have the funds to make the desert green. It’s also full of expats who’ll thank God they don’t have to pay the fees and 12 airfares every year. A big-name British public school in the Middle East. It’s a stroke of genius. And not just for local parents but also for Britain’s trade deficit.

  Imagine how well Eton would go down in Los Angeles, or Harrow in Tokyo. Imagine the earning potential these schools would have; offer to put little American kids in bowlers, boaters and busbies and parents would be queueing round the block to have little Hank thrown by a mortar-boarded master into a chilly swimming pool.

  Of course, in America you’d have to change the word for fagging, and in Japan I can see some complications with the traditional Remembrance Day service.

  In fact, to make it really work you’d have to study the history of Harry Ramsden’s. A traditional fish and chip shop, near Leeds, it was bought and then floated on the stock exchange by a former boss at KFC who wanted to make it a national dining experience. And all he needed for that was the brand. So the beef dripping in which the chips were cooked was replaced with blended vegetable oil, and the harbour-fresh fish with frozen fillets.

  Now there are 170 Harry Ramsden’s and I don’t see why there shouldn’t be 170 Etons. And before you wonder where they’re going to find enough quality British staff to run a global business this big, may I point you in the direction of the Excalibur hotel in Las Vegas. Billed as a medieval hotel with turrets and legend it is, of course, just a big plastic skyscraper full of American bellboys in Little Lord Fauntleroy shorts. Horrid? Absolutely, but the place is always packed.

  Repton has shown the way. But if Eton were to pick up on the idea and open a chain of, say, Eton Harry Potter Experiences, it would earn Britain more than Lloyd’s of London and Mrs Queen put together.

  Sunday 29 January 2006

  Rock school sees off drone school

  William Shakespeare has probably done more to damage the cultural worth of Britain than anyone else in the whole of human history. After endlessly having to study his plays on the school curriculum, generations of children have ventured into adulthood convinced that all literature is coma-inducingly dreary. I don’t blame them. Portia’s speech about the ‘gentle rain’ is in no way as stimulating as 10 minutes on Grand Theft Auto.

  I believe that Shakespeare, along with Milton, Donne and Chaucer, has a place in modern Britain. And that place is deep in the bowels of the British Library, where he can be studied by hardcore language students.

  Right now, my n-year-old daughter has a voracious appetite for books. She devours Jacqueline Wilson and reads The No. l Ladies’ Detective Agency endlessly. But I can guarantee this craving will be snuffed out the moment she
’s introduced to Twelfth Night.

  There’s a lot of political posturing about the future of education right now, all of which seems to miss the point: that at school, children should be encouraged to study books that make reading fun.

  And it’s the same story with religion. Because I was forced into chapel every Sunday, and made to read the Bible, which is even more excruciating than Paradise Lost, I emerged from the chrysalis of puberty filled with a sometimes overwhelming desire to set fire to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  But music is my biggest bugbear. You see, I have no regrets about being a literary dunderhead and an atheist, but I have huge sadness that I can play the piano, but only in the same way that a dog can tie shoelaces.

  There’s a photographer I know. He’s Welsh and drunk most of the time, but once, in the foyer of the Hotel Nacional in Havana, he sat down and played, with both hands and all the twiddly bits, some Billy Joel songs.

  I couldn’t believe it. This miserable Welshman had a hitherto unseen ability to bring hope and happiness to that bleak and hopeless place; he had the skill to bring them the sounds of America, the sounds of freedom. And he’d chosen to assault them with Billy bloody Joel. The bastardo.

  But the women loved it. In fact, there’s nothing more a woman likes than a man who can play a musical instrument. If you can bash out a double-handed rendition of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ you are virtually indistinguishable in the eyes of womankind to Jon Bon Jovi. As a result, my Welsh friend spent most of that night being ridden round his bedroom by a Cuban teenager in a cowboy hat.

  But at school they never say, ‘Listen, boy, if you can master Air on a G String, you’ll spend your entire adult life removing Angelina Jolie’s.’ And even if they did, you’d still struggle because the ditties they make you learn are so turgid.