Born to Be Riled Page 23
One night, I sneaked it into a stubble field, knowing that any form of motorized transport is a laugh when there’s 100 acres and a surface slippery enough to be an East End geezer. I did some handbrake turns and generally looned about and came home suffering from acute stupefaction. Honestly, I’d have been better off reading a book with an orange spine.
The G6 is, far and away, the most idiotic way of blowing £14,000. This is a car for people who see life as a chore to be undertaken, rather than as an experience to be milked. It is for a cardigan-wearing, non-smoking gardening fanatic who thinks ‘E’ is a vowel. It is for people who think that living to be 75, rather than 70, really matters. It is therefore not for you, and it sure as hell is not for me.
Spelling out the danger from Brussels
Last week I had to make the annual trudge to Germany, where I spent two days living on a diet of beer that tastes like chlorine and sausages that get up and walk home if you push them to the side of the plate.
The biggest trouble with Germany though, is that you feel duty-bound when on a derestricted and quiet piece of autobahn to travel as fast as the car will go.
This was a huge worry last week because I was in a 7.3 litre Brabus-tuned V12 Mercedes that had wormed its way into The Guinness Book of Records by doing 206mph and thus becoming the fastest saloon in the world. Incidentally, 206mph is classified by scientists as f****** fast.
Now call me a wetty if you like, but I chickened out when the clock wound its way round to 300kph, which works out, in English, at 186.
At this speed you see a truck and wham, you’re in its cab, bleeding. You’re covering ground at the rate of 272 feet a second, so that if you sneeze you can miss an entire country.
Everyone who reckons the 70mph speed limit in this country is silly and old-fashioned should be made to do 186 because I feel sure most would sing a different song afterwards. ‘Radar Love’ would be replaced with some happy-clappy gospel. 186mph puts you on the next table to God. 186mph is seriously scary.
But in Germany it is also legal. Now that’s interesting in these days of Euro unity, because at the exact moment I was chanting Hail Marys in my supersonic Brabus Benz, a friend of mine was rubbing his rosary in a Norfolk courtroom.
He’d been caught doing 107mph in a county where people still point at aeroplanes. Astonished magistrates who had only read of such speeds in Isaac Asimov books took away his licence for three weeks and fined him £600 plus costs.
They’re right, of course. We can’t have people doing 107mph on dual carriageways, and the punishment needs to be severe. The whole of Western Europe is clear on that, but what would happen, I wonder, if a pan-European speed limit were to be mooted by the European Union? For once, I suspect, Mr Kohl’s Helmut really would turn purple.
The Germans like the idea of ultra-high-speed travel. It means they can get home faster and therefore have more time to eat sausages. They don’t want to be told by a bunch of meddlers that they must slow down, and that’s fair enough too.
There are age-old customs in each European country and we can’t bulldoze them away in a pointless quest for uniformity. That’s why I’m so pathological about this drink driving business. As regular readers of this column know, Kinnock wants our limit brought down from 80 mg in a vat of blood to just 50, so that we stand alongside the French.
Thus, if you are caught driving home after drinking a pint, you will lose your licence for a year and be fined until you’re urinating lemon juice. You will then lose your job and your wife will run off with a fitness instructor who has a Porsche.
But in France things are somewhat different. If you’re over the 50 mg limit, you get three points on your licence and an on-the-spot fine of 900FF. If you break the 80 mg barrier – the current British limit – you get six points and a slightly bigger fine. You need to be hog-whimperingly drunk before they’ll take your licence and, even then, you can get it back if you go on a two-day road safety course.
So, we may end up with the same limit as France but the punishments could not be further apart, and this is just one more example of Britain being kept in the dark and kicked around by the Continental bullies.
The only shred of dignity Britain will have left after Europe becomes an amorphous blob is the English language, which most experts agree should become the official Euro-tongue.
However, a secret document allegedly found in a BMW communiqué to Rover suggests that even this might be tweaked a bit.
It says that English spelling does leave room for improvement and that a five-year plan has been drawn up to develop EuroEnglish. In the first year, ‘s’ will be used instead of the soft ‘c’ and ‘k’ will replace the hard ‘c’.
Not only will this klear up konfusion and make the life of sivil servants easier, but also komputer keyboards will need one less key.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replased with an ‘f’. This will make words like ‘fotograf’ 20 per sent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to get to a stage where more komp-likated alterations are possible. So double letters will be removed to inkrease the likelihod of akurate speling. And the horrible mess of the silent ‘e’ wil be banished.
By the fourth yar, peopl will be reseptiv to steps like replasing ‘th’ by ‘z’ and ‘w’ by ‘v’.
During ze fifz yar, ze unecesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’, and similar modifikations vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yar, we wil hav a sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
Dog’s dinner from Korea
All week, I’ve been watching newsreel footage from South Korea of International Monetary Fund bankers trying to sort out what economists call a big financial mess.
It seems that most of the banks are technically insolvent, having been forced by the government to finance massive growth in the industrial sector – growth that just didn’t translate into sales.
Now of course, it would be easy for fat Westerners to sit back over a glass of port and laugh, saying they grew too fast and now they’ve fallen over. Filthy little yellow nouveaus. Got what was coming. But when the people of a country are having to fill a van with money every time they want a pound of rice, that country is weak. And sitting right on South Korea’s border is North Korea, a country that spends all its money on plutonium and mad German scientists. If the West does nothing, the Far East could become mushroom city.
And then you’ve got that oriental dignity to deal with. Analysts seem to be saying South Korea really needs a loan of $40 billion yet they’ve only asked for £2.50.
So, all things considered, it can’t have been much fun this week for the IMF Shylocks. All that political and economic turmoil to worry about, and nothing to look forward to at night except another plate of roast dog.
However, every time I saw them arriving at yet another meeting in a blizzard of flashbulbs they seemed to have bemused grins on their faces, like there was something warm and comfortable in their trousers.
It took me a while to figure it out, but now I understand. They were being chauffeured around in Korea’s answer to America’s Cadillac. It’s called the Kia Enterprise.
It’s priced at the equivalent of £40,000, which seems like rather a lot for a car that’s the size of a Scorpio. Certainly, you aren’t paying for much in the way of styling.
What they appear to have done is taken an old Toyota Corolla and blown it up with a bicycle pump. They should have blown it up with Semtex, but never mind.
To ensure, however, that no one is in any doubt that this is a serious player, it comes with a gaudy bonnet mascot fashioned to look like a golden dog turd. Clever stuff this – you eat the animal and use its excrement to enliven the look of your car.
From the back, you’ve g
ot a sign in the rear window which says ‘intelligent control’ and, of course, the word ‘Enterprise’ picked out in gold on the boot lid.
Do not, however, expect much in the way of warp speed. The engine compartment may house a 3.6-litre V6 which is said to be capable of propelling the car to 144mph, but acceleration is not so much Star Trek as Star Stroll.
I blame the gearbox, which inevitably, is an automatic. Now, the whole point of an auto is that you just get in and steer; you don’t have to worry about gears, but in the Enterprise you can think of little else. The lever is festooned with buttons that make it do all sorts of things you don’t need.
And that really sets the tone for the whole car. Switch on the engine, which is commendably quiet, by the way, and the dashboard doesn’t simply come to life. It explodes into a technicolour blaze that can detach retinas at 400 paces.
There’s a digital read-out for every single feature of the car, and this car comes with the lot. Adaptive damping, traction control, mirrors that fold away, a fridge on the rear parcel shelf, parking proximity sensors. I mean it; the lot.
There is a television too, but instead of simply shutting down when you set off, a message flashes on the screen, saying, ‘Attention on Driving’. Well, it’s hard to comply when you’re driving into what looks like a forest of lasers.
It’s in the back though, that things really go bonkers, and this I guess is where the IMF boys have been seated.
First of all, there’s almost no legroom whatsoever, but you can remove the backrest from the passenger seat and use the squab as a leather footrest. Nice.
You can also move your seat around electrically, change television channels and adjust the temperature from a wood-look console in the centre armrest. But I’ve saved the best bit till last. The reason why all those IMF chaps are wearing bemused grins is because the back seat vibrates.
All over the world, car manufacturers spend an absolute fortune making their cars quiet and relaxing. Kia too must have blown millions dealing with what’s called NVH – noise, vibration and harshness. Yet, having eradicated it, they allowed their engineers to put it back.
No wonder they nearly went to the wall last summer. If people want a car that vibrates they’ll spend £100 on a secondhand Morris Marina, not £40,000 on a style-free wasteland with dog dirt on its bonnet.
At present, Kia’s British importers have no plans to import the Enterprise, preferring to stick with whatever it is they are already bringing over. There’s a very cheap hatchback with a warranty, a four-wheel drive thing and a saloon of such enormous tedium I can’t remember its name or what it looks like.
Let’s ensure we keep it that way. Send the people of South Korea food parcels and emails wishing them well. Send money in brown envelopes, but make them promise that the Enterprise boldly stays at home.
New Labour, new Jezza
Well it’s been a lovely, long hot summer and frankly, right now is a good time to be British. The economy is booming. House prices are back where they belong and unemployment is at its lowest levels since 1981. By pulling all the right faces and not actually doing anything, tony@numberten.co.uk seems to be popular, and even when his fat sidekick, John Prescott, made some silly noises about two-car families they were drowned out by reports that half a million people had bought a new set of wheels in August.
The trouble is, of course, that columns like this thrive on bad news. I need to stand on a rake or fall in a vat of sheep excrement for there to be something to write about each month. Good news, frankly, is dull. I haven’t even had the privilege of driving any spectacularly awful cars in recent weeks. There was the Toyota Corolla, of course, which is motorized mud, but it’s not ‘bad’ by any means. And the same goes for Saab’s 9-5, on which you light the blue touch-paper and then hang around – nothing at all exciting will happen. In a world of ceremonial fireworks, this new Swede is a damp sparkler. And anyway, this dreary twosome are more than outweighed by some of the most exciting stuff we’ve seen in years. There’s the Puma, of course, and the new 911. But what can I say about that? It’s very reliable? Whoa Jezza – incisive stuff.
In the spring we were treated to an onslaught of new convertibles like the SLK and the Boxster, and now they’re tickling our erogenous zones again with a welter of coupés. Alfa has announced that it will be importing the 220bhp, six-speed three-litre GTV, but it’ll find life tough out there as it competes with the Mercedes CLK, the Peugeot 406 and, of course, that rocket ship Volvo C70.
The next big deal will be the advent of the serious niche car. There’s the Land Rover Freelander of course – a car that’s making our nanny almost moist with anticipation. Then there’s the BMW Z3 coupé, the VW Beetle and the Audi TT. I’m starting to swell just thinking about them. Obviously, what’s happening here is that platform-sharing is starting to pay dividends. If you can bolt any body onto any chassis, you can make new cars more quickly and cheaply than ever before. In the past Ford could never have given us a Ka, a Fiesta and a Puma, but seeing as they’re basically the same, nowadays they can. And this means more choice for you and I, which makes picking your ideal five-car garage harder than ever before.
Obviously, I’m a fifth of the way there because already I have a 355. But in La-La Land it would be a Berlinetta, and not a GTS. This would leave space for my convertible to be a big fat barge of a car – and that leads me straight to the door of the Mercedes SL. Also, now that I’ve started to shoot anything that moves, I’ll need a four wheel drive and, much as I respect the Land Cruiser and the Grand Cherokee, I’d have to have a Range Rover. It would come in new ‘Autobiography’ trim where you get to select whatever colour and interior appointments take your fancy. I’d demand wood from that 2000-year-old tree in California – just to annoy the Americans – and then I’d fit television screens in the back of the front headrests. These will be visible to following traffic to make for all sorts of fun as I drive up and down the motorway with Debbie Does Dallas on the video. As far as an everyday car is concerned, I’d have the new Jaguar XJR V8 for all the reasons I outlined last month, which leaves me with the need for a family estate car. I’ve considered, obviously, the Volvo V70 T5 and its V8 rival from BMW. The Mercedes 300E is a contender too, but I’ve decided the kids should walk and that dogs don’t really need to go on outings. My final car would be one of the 100 Nissan Skylines. I don’t care that it got trounced in our Nurburgring feature last month or that it failed to do well in this month’s handling test.
We need cars like this because, pretty soon, tony@ numberten.co.uk will stop pulling faces and let Fatty Prescott loose. Time is running out. Winter is almost upon us. For God’s sake, get out there and live.
Sad old Surrey
Careful and studious readers may know that A.A. Gill is being hauled in front of the Commission for Racial Equality after describing the Welsh as being ‘pugnacious little trolls’.
Well, though we write for the same newspaper, I wish to distance myself from these attacks. Wales is a pretty and charming part of the country and the Welsh have a rounded range of abilities – singing and er… setting fire to things.
I think if we’re going to single out a part of Britain for ridicule and hatred, Wales comes a very distant second to that jumped-up lump of suburbia called Surrey. If I may be permitted to liken the British Isles to a beautiful woman, Surrey is her most stubborn dingleberry.
In the past three years I have travelled to many countries and seen traffic to frustrate even the most dedicated petrol-head, but on Monday morning Guildford made Tokyo look like the Brecon Beacons. To get from one side to the other took two hours, at an average speed of 6mph.
All around, people were sitting in their horrid neo-Georgian houses congratulating themselves on having moved out of London to the country, obviously unaware that they have not left London at all. They’re as much a part of the metropolitan sprawl as Tottenham.
Except that in London, if a main thoroughfare is full locals can use any number of rabbit
runs whereas in Surrey this is not possible.
Sure, there are a few open spaces and, given Surrey Man’s tendency to drive a large four-wheel drive car, none would present much of a problem, technically speaking. But to drive off-road in Surrey is to invite a confrontation with one of its rangers.
Now, a friend of mine once signed on at the Kensington dole office saying he was a shepherd, and I dare say an investment banker would find life hard in Swaledale, but a ranger? In Surrey? Why?
What they do, apparently, is drive around the much coiffeured heathland in Land Rovers telling other people in Land Rovers not to drive off-road, and to get back to central London where they belong.
So everyone sits on the roads, not moving for hour after hour after hour. Every Laburnum Close and Orchid Drive is full. Every B road is full. Every dual carriageway is full. And there’s no way in hell that Fatty Prescott is going to get this lot onto a bus.
For these people, image is everything. They won’t even admit to living in Surrey, saying instead they live on the Surrey/Hampshire borders or, for those in the know, that they live in GU4 – which, the postman will tell you, is a ritzy suburb called Shalford.
Here, I saw mothers depositing their children at school from cars that were several miles long. One had an American off-roader that was easily bigger than an Intercity 125. Why should she use a train when she’s already got one?