Round the Bend Read online

  There are better small cars if you want a household appliance – the Mini, for instance. There are better small cars if you want a fun drive. The Mini again. And of course, there are better-looking cars built to a higher standard. Um, the Mini springs to mind. But I’m afraid there are no better small cars if, like me, you are brand loyal and what you want is an Alfa.

  22 March 2009

  Problem is, I don’t think I ever met anyone who would buy a Mazda 6 – and also it’s pretty hopeless

  Mazda 6 2.2 five-door Sport Diesel

  My daughter rang from her boarding school last night in a state of righteous dudgeon and high indignation. Apparently, some pupils had been caught drinking, and as a result all social activities have been banned until the end of term.

  ‘It’s so, like, you know, so unfair,’ she wailed. And, of course, she’s right. It is unfair that the innocent are punished for the sins of the guilty. But it’s good training for when she leaves school, joins the real world and finds it’s going on there, too.

  One man runs amok with a gun and the entire British Olympic shooting team is forced to train in Belgium. One yobbo crashes his Vauxhall Nova into a bus shelter and we all have to pay higher insurance premiums. One man decides to fill his training shoe with explosives and now all of us have to get undressed every time we want to get on a plane.

  Of course, the problem is that today, thanks to all sorts of lily-livered nonsense, the range of punishments available to governments and schools is extremely limited. Hanging is banned. So is drawing and quartering. The rack is gone, along with hemlock.

  I’m no fan of capital punishment, but surely we can do better than the unimaginative procession of fines, prison and the Asbo ankle bracelet. Why not tattoo something appropriate right across a criminal’s face? Or make him walk the streets naked for a period of time? Or get him to see how far he can pull a car with ropes tied to his eyelids?

  I even have some ideas for football. When Ronaldo is tapped on the ankle, he falls over clutching his face as though he’s tumbled into a vat of acid. This spoils the flow of the game and may result in an unjust free kick being awarded.

  What I’d like to suggest is that any player who’s in that much pain plainly has no future and should be put down. No, really. I’d have a vet at each match, and anyone writhing around on the floor like a big girl’s blouse would be shot in the back of the head with a humane killer. This is not capital punishment. It’s kindness.

  Unfortunately, it is not possible, for all sorts of reasons, to put schoolchildren to sleep if they misbehave. Or to tattoo ‘loser’ on their faces. So what do we do instead?

  I was punished a very great deal at school, mainly for refusing to play cricket. I couldn’t see the point of it. You’d sit around for hours, with terrible hay fever, and then you’d be asked to stand in front of three sticks while an enormous boy called Phil Lovell hurled what is best described as a rock at them.

  It was ridiculous, which is why, every week, I took two hours’ detention instead. It was indoors, so there was less hay fever, there was no chance of having all your teeth smashed out and it lasted for only two hours. Not two years.

  Detention, then, was a pleasure. So what about corporal punishment? Hmmm. Picture the scene. You have a housemaster, who likely as not is a ‘bachelor’, in a quiet room, behind a locked door, whipping the bottom of an attractive fourteen-year-old boy with a length of cane. It’s straight from page one of the Max Mosley Catholic Priest Handbook, for crying out loud.

  We all used to be beaten fairly regularly at school until a friend discovered a way of ensuring it would never happen again. Having been caught – oh I don’t know – walking across the ruins in home clothes, or some such nonsense, he was summoned to the master’s study and ordered to bend over a chair, whereupon he lowered his trousers to reveal he was wearing a pair of black satin girl’s knickers. And then, to fluster the poor man still further, after the first thwack he moaned softly for ‘more’.

  Be assured the next five lashes were more like taps and from then on the beatings stopped. And weren’t even reinstated on the occasion when I stole the sixth form’s television and put it in the school’s annual charity auction … while engaged in the unforgivable, heinous act of chewing gum.

  So, detention is comfortable, corporal punishment is dodgy and more elaborate punishments will be a no-no with parent groups. What, then, is the modern school supposed to do when a pupil steps out of line? Stern words are an encouragement, public humiliation is cool and everything else is outlawed by wetties.

  The worst punishment I can think of for a child is boredom. Make them do something mind-numbingly tedious, something that achieves nothing – the adolescent equivalent of breaking rocks. That’s what I’d do with modern-day miscreants. Foist tedium upon their active little heads.

  Let me put it this way. The worst punishment I was ever given was being ordered to write 1,000 words on the inside of a ping pong ball. It was hell.

  Strangely, however, while it seemed to have absolutely no point at the time, it has come in very handy this week. Because writing 1,000 words on the inside of a table tennis ball means I am well placed to write 1,000 words on the Mazda6 Sport.

  In fact, I’ve written 862 and I haven’t even started yet.

  It took me even longer, actually, to get into the car. The day it arrived, I settled behind the wheel, encouraged by the ‘sport’ badge on the back. The clatter from under the bonnet when I turned the key suggested it was in fact a ‘diesel’. So I climbed back out again and went to London in my Range Rover.

  The next day I was going to drive it but I couldn’t be bothered. On day three I didn’t have anywhere to go but on day four I had a trip planned to Didcot and I decided I had to be professional. And I was, right up to the moment when I climbed into the Range Rover again. On day five it sat there and then on day six, lo and behold, it sat there some more.

  Here’s the problem. Normally, when I review a car, I have in my mind the sort of person who might like to buy such a thing. But I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who would buy a Mazda 6.

  I can tell you, having walked past it very many times, that it’s not an ugly car, by any means. But it’s not a looker either. In the language of the teenage nightclub, ‘You would. But you wouldn’t cross the road …’

  I did drive it today and can reveal that it’s pretty hopeless. Fitting sporty suspension, hard seats and quick steering in a diesel-powered family hatchback is like trying to sell Farley’s Rusks with added vodka. The fact is that it was uncomfortable and it had a gearchange that felt as though the lever was set in a bucket of shingle.

  But the worst thing is that it commits the greatest sin of them all: it’s boring. It really is like the inside of a ping pong ball. It’s 15½ feet of nothing. Driving it felt, therefore, like I was being punished for something I hadn’t done.

  29 March 2009

  Trying to break the speed limit in this car would be like trying to break the speed limit while riding a cow

  Fiat Qubo 1.3 16v MultiJet Dynamic

  Now that no panty liner company can afford to display its wares in the commercial breaks, the government and various other bodies have stepped in to fill the void with a range of exciting new public information films.

  Quite how they arrive at the selected topics, I have absolutely no idea but in recent months we’ve been told not to sneeze in lifts, to look more carefully for motorbikists and, weirdly, how to determine whether someone is having a stroke. Why a stroke? Why not bird flu or a heart attack or syphilis? And why can’t I sneeze in a lift? If that’s where I am when the need arises, what am I supposed to do? Keep my mouth closed and pinch my nose? That’d blow my eyes out.

  Oh, and if motorcyclists want people to spot them at junctions, here’s an idea. Buy a car.

  Of course, there is nothing new in any of this hectoring. In my youth, I remember being told by Harold Wilson not to put a rug on a shiny floor, and by Rolf Harris to learn to
swim. But the sheer volume of finger-wagging today is incredible.

  We are constantly being told not to smoke, not to eat too much salt, not to drink and drive, not to ignore our tax returns, not to play with fireworks, not to stay in third gear and not to spend all day watching television when we could be up in our loft with a mile of lagging.

  Then, this morning, while reading the handbook for the new Fiat Qubo, I discovered that behind the scenes, things are even worse.

  It’s like any normal handbook for a car. Written for tribes in the Amazon, and Martians, there is advice on how to start the engine and what the speedometer does, but buried away in the middle of a fascinating passage on how to use the seats, I discovered a little nugget that said the car is equipped with a ‘European On Board Diagnosis’ system.

  It sounds harmless. A little light comes on to tell owners when an emission-related component is wearing out. But then it goes on to say, casually, that a log of the engine operation is kept … and can be ‘accessed by traffic police’.

  I’m probably worrying unnecessarily but does this mean Dixon of Dock Green can now hook a laptop up to your engine management system and see how fast you have been travelling?

  If it does, the good news is that if you have a Fiat Qubo, Jim Bergerac can dig about in the wiring as much as he likes, because he’s going to find that since you bought the car you have never broken the speed limit once. This is because it’d be like trying to break the speed limit while riding a cow.

  The Qubo is a van. Oh, they’ve tried to liven it up with fancy green paint and triangular windows and they plainly got a room full of men in polo-necked jumpers to think up the name. But it is still a van.

  I have no problem with this. The Citroën Berlingo is a van and as a family car it works rather well.

  The Qubo doesn’t. It was designed in conjunction with Citroën, sits on the platform of a Punto and is powered, if you go for the diesel option, by a 1.3-litre engine from Opel.

  Needless to say, there are all sorts of silly mistakes. For instance, the boot lid is opened by pressing a little button on the key fob. Great. Except, I guarantee that every time you turn the key to start the engine, you will press the button by mistake. So you will then have to get out and shut it again.

  Of course, being able to open the boot with the button is jolly useful if you are coming back from the shops laden with bags and toddlers. But I’m afraid that because the tailgate is so huge, it cannot be opened if anyone has parked within a mile of your rear end. These are the details that turn what could have been a good idea into one that simply doesn’t work at all.

  In engineering terms, you really can’t have ‘brilliant, apart from …’, whether it’s a nuclear power station, a motorway crash barrier or a car. I mean, the Titanic was brilliant, apart from its crappy rudder.

  Of course, you may look at the low price of a Fiat Qubo – it’s about the same as a McMeal – and the low running costs and say that you don’t mind a wonky tailgate, or a gear lever that feels as sturdy as one of Bugs Bunny’s ears, or the fact it has no carpet at all – let me repeat that, ‘no carpet at all’ – because it provides so much more space than a conventional hatchback.

  Well, let’s look at that space, shall we. The inside of a five-seater Qubo is not much wider than a normal car and certainly no longer. It is simply taller, which is jolly useful in a van, but unless you are 9 feet tall or you have a massive Afro, it is of absolutely no use at all in a car.

  Citroën got round this in the last Berlingo I drove by fitting a series of cubbyholes above your head. The Fiat Qubo I drove just had mile upon mile of useless air.

  The space isn’t all that versatile either. Yes, the back seats fold down and can even be lifted out altogether. But unless you actually enjoy trapping your fingers, you won’t want to put them back in again.

  Then there’s the speed. I tried the 1.3-litre diesel model, which takes more than 16 seconds to get from 0 to 62. You might not be bothered about this because you are a Porritt. But let me be clear. I am talking here about performance that can only really be measured in geological terms.

  Honest to God, the Qubo is so slow that if you climbed into one this morning in Hunstanton and attempted to drive south as fast as possible, coastal erosion would swallow you up by Wednesday evening.

  Mount Everest is currently moving northwest at around 5 centimetres a year. That’s the sort of speed you’ll be going in your Qubo, and be assured, on a road, this kind of pace is not just antisocial. It’s dangerous.

  I have no problem if you want to recycle your tofu and knit your underwear from hemp, because none of these things affects anyone else. But driving a Qubo affects everyone. It clogs up the system. They should have called it the Imodium.

  Yesterday, on the A44, I built up a massive, mile-long tail. I was going to say, I felt like the head of a comet, trailing gas and fury in my wake, but the imagery is wrong. In fact, I felt like a sperm.

  One poor woman, in a Citroën C2, became so fed up with my tectonic drift, she attempted to get past in a place that was suicidal. Had I not braked to let her back onto my side of the road, she would have had a head-on.

  You might argue that the crash would have been her fault. But what if her mum had rung to say she thought she’d put too much salt on her lunch and was having a stroke? What if she was about to sneeze and needed to get home as quickly as possible?

  The crash would not have been her fault at all. It would have been mine for putting the needs of the polar bear ahead of the needs of everyone else.

  5 April 2009

  I raised my knife, snarled … and fell in love

  Jaguar XKR convertible

  In the past twenty years, I cannot recall a single bad review in any British publication of any new Jaguar. More than that, I can’t recall a single review that wasn’t drowning in its own hyperbole. ‘Jaguar gets it right’. ‘Jaguar kicks Johnny Foreigner’s arse’. ‘Jaguar pounces on Porsche and smashes its Nazi face in’.

  Unfortunately, none of these rave notices made much of an impression on the car-buying public, who read the rave notices, recalled the strikes of the seventies and the woeful unreliability of the eighties and, fearful that the car would smell of Arthur Daley’s sheepskin, bought a Mercedes instead. Which is why Mercedes is still owned by Mercedes and Jaguar is owned by some Indians who are currently asking the British government for a bit of money to keep their ailing British operation alive.

  None of this matters to Britain’s car journos, though, who are at it again with the new XKR. Autocar tells us it’s better than a 911. Car magazine calls it ‘brilliant’, Evo says it’s ‘great’. And we can be in no doubt that when the Telegraph tests the XKR, it will say, ‘The spirit of Sir William Lyons lives on in this fine automobile.’

  I don’t know why the Brit hacks are so blatantly pro-Jag. But I really do get the impression that if one of the company’s engineers were to drop in to the offices of a car magazine one day and relieve himself all over its photocopying machine, the reporters would argue that his stream of urine shone out like a shaft of gold, bringing light and warmth and wholesome goodness to everything it touched. Whereas, if a bloke from BMW popped by to pee on the pot plants, they’d call the police.

  I’m afraid, however, that the worst Jag apologist among Britain’s shrinking band of motoring hacks is me. I’m dreadful. I try my hardest to remain calm and rational. But reviewing a Jaguar is like reviewing the performance of a Wimbledon underdog. They are always brave and plucky and full of spirit and you’ll sort of forgive them anything, even when they’ve served 200 double faults on the trot, vomited on a ball boy and topped off the afternoon by sending round a horrid XJ40 that is held together with duct tape and powered by a stupid and weedy 3.2-litre engine. A car I once described as ‘magnificent’ – just before I bought another Mercedes.

  Well, with the new XKR, I decided it was high time to remove the underdog sympathy gene and explain why it was too little too late. I was going to
point at the huge amount of extra brushed aluminium body piercings that have sullied the original – and extremely beautiful – shape and explain in no uncertain terms that there’s no point fitting back seats when there is no human being, not even the pygmy tribes of South America, who could ever actually fit in one.

  Then, I was going to send in the nuke and explain that no one in their right mind would pay £78,400 for a car that had its light switch on the end of the indicator stalk. This may be acceptable in a £7,800 eco-box from the jungles of Burma, because one switch that does two things saves money. On a car like the XKR, it should be on the dash, as it is in my Mercedes.

  And while we’re on the subject of the interior. No. Really, no. You cannot have a touchscreen satellite navigation system, because, as anyone who’s tried out the new BlackBerry will testify, they do not work.

  I was primed. I’d dipped my keyboard in acid. I’d swallowed a handful of honesty pills and I was going to fire a lexicon of invective in the direction of Coventry, but then my XKR test car was delivered by two rather forlorn figures from Jag, who sat at my kitchen table admiring my central heating and drinking coffee like it was exotic. Both said with expressions that I thought had gone west with Sir Clement Freud that they felt so unhappy, because now, at last, they had a range of great cars either on sale or nearing the end of the pipeline and that unless the damn banking crisis ended soon, all their efforts would have been in vain. I felt sorry for them, I’m afraid.

  So, the new XKR? What a beaut. Jesus. This thing could rip a 911 clean in half while actually eating a BMW 6-series. And it’d still have enough energy left to pull an SL’s spine out. It’s the Battle of Britain all over again, and the result’s the same. I mean, think about it – this XK is even made in the same factory that produced Spitfires.