And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Read online

  That’s why I don’t have a pension. It would be a complete and utter waste of time because you’re entrusting your money to a bunch of suits who are too stupid to get a job in banking or estate agency.

  Look at their offices in the City. Big gleaming towers of glass and steel. Who’s paying for them? We are. And it’s the same with their soothing advertisements on the television.

  You want my advice? Spend your spare cash on chips and chocolate because that way you’ll die the day you stop work with a smile on your face.

  And being carted off in an enormous coffin at 62 is better than lingering on for 40 more years, hoping for a handout from the next batch of immigrants the government has shipped in to keep the country’s average age below 400.

  Sunday 15 February 2004

  Scotch – stop skiing and return to your sheds

  For a while now, things have been going badly for Scotland. The shiny new parliament building is 10 times over budget and already three years late. The economy is stuttering, and all’s not well under the kilt either because the birth rate is almost elephantine.

  Last week things got worse. The Welsh beat them at rugby and then again at football, and now we hear that the Glenshee Chairlift Company has lost £1 million in the past two years and must sell its two Highland ski resorts.

  Apparently, global warming is to blame. In the olden days, the Scotch people got some respite from the weather every winter because the ceaseless rain turned to snow, which was at least pretty. But now it just rains all the time.

  Good. I never really saw the point of skiing in Scotland. The tourist board says in its bumf that heading north of the border with your planks is a ‘really good way for novices to try out the sport before committing to a high-cost holiday elsewhere in the world’.

  Really? I would imagine that anyone who tried skiing for the first time in the Cairngorms would come away from the experience with frostbite, hypothermia, iced-up hair and a passionate resolve to give up the sport for good. Learning to ski in Scotland is a bit like learning to scuba-dive in a quarry. You get the basics, but not the point.

  Of course, I don’t much care for the act of skiing itself. As I’ve said before, I never understand why people ski down a slope to a bar and then go on a lift so they can ski down the same slope again. That’s like walking to the pub on a Sunday, then going home and walking to the pub again. Madness. I ski to a bar and then go inside for a drink.

  This part of a skiing holiday I like very much. The crystal skies, the jaggedy mountains, that pin-sharp air and all those pretty girls in salopettes. It’s a fun-filled blizzard of primary colours and you get a tan.

  Even the Val d’Isère doctor’s surgery – where I go, having fallen off my skis on the way back from the bar – is full of wondrous new injuries. I once saw a bloke in there who had a ski pole sticking out of his eye.

  And then in the evenings you can drink wine until it’s coming out of your ears, knowing that the mountain crispness will zap your hangover in the morning. Lovely.

  This, however, is not how I imagine a skiing holiday in the Highlands might pan out. I’m not sure anyone would get much satisfaction from executing a nice parallel turn on sheet heather. So, Scotland has to rely entirely on its après-ski activities and, er… Well, quite.

  Sure, Val d’Isère is full of people called Bunty and Rupert who throw bread rolls at you and enjoy debagging one another, which can be wearisome.

  But what do you have for company in Glenshee? A family of weird beards from Tipton and a pint of McEwan’s. Skiing is supposed to be sophisticated, and Scotland just isn’t.

  Of course, you might say that Scotland is only 500 miles away and is therefore easier to get to than Val d’Isère, but actually both are an hour or so away by plane. Yes, it’s easier to drive to Scotland but you should be aware that if there is any snow on the hills, it will have blocked the roads. So you won’t get there anyway.

  If you do make it, you’ll certainly find good access to the top of the mountains, thanks to the new Cairngorm funicular railway, which seems to have cost the taxpayer nearly as much as the Scottish parliament. And now isn’t really needed because, according to The Economist, the number of McPasses sold since the 1980s has halved.

  The Glenshee Chairlift Company does believe a buyer can be found for its two resorts, but unless they can find someone who has the business acumen of an otter, I wouldn’t hold your breath. With cheap air fares and no sign of a recession, France and even Colorado are always going to be less wet.

  This might be sad news for those who worked there but it’s good news for the rest of the world because John Logie Baird was Scottish. Alexander Graham Bell was Scottish. Alexander Fleming was Scottish. James Watt was Scottish. Charles Macintosh was Scottish. John Dunlop was Scottish. Scottish people invented everything: the kaleidoscope, paint pigment, carpet cleaners, the US Navy, adhesive postage stamps, hypodermic needles, anaesthetics, golf, paraffin, radar, hollow pipe drainage, breech-loading rifles. This list is simply endless.

  Plainly, the Scotch were put on the earth to invent stuff. And for the past hundred years or so they have been sidetracked by this ridiculous flirtation with skiing, and getting their chairs back from Westminster Abbey. They took over every trade union and ballsed them all up, and now they’re making a pretty good fist of wrecking Westminster too.

  Pack it in, the lot of you, and get back to your garden sheds with your spanners and your microscopes.

  George Bush said recently he wants to go to Mars. So how about one of you forgets about winter sports for a while and builds him a spaceship.

  Sunday 22 February 2004

  My son thinks I’m gay, and it can only get worse

  It was a perfect scene. My boy and me walking back across the fields from his Sunday morning game of rugby. The sky was bright. Lunch was in the Aga. And all was well with the world.

  ‘Daddy,’ he said, pointing at our new garden shed. ‘There are people in India who live in houses that are smaller than that.’

  ‘Huh,’ I joshed. ‘Never mind India. The first flat I owned in London was smaller than that. And even then I couldn’t afford it on my own, so I lived there with another boy.’

  There wasn’t even a pause while his seven-year-old brain processed this information. He just came straight out and said, in the vernacular of youth: ‘So were you, like, gay when you were younger?’

  A few days later, the subject came up again. Some homosexual people were on the television news complaining about George W. Bush’s views on same-sex weddings, and I thought: am I going mad?

  Of course you can’t have same-sex weddings. It undermines the whole point of marriage, the concept that two people form a stable unit in which children can be conceived and raised. Arguing that homosexuals should be allowed to marry is as silly as arguing that I should be allowed to play for Manchester United.

  I was born with the ball skills of an emperor penguin, so I can’t play football.

  Andrew Lloyd Webber was born with a face like a melted wellington, so he can’t be a model. And if you’re born with a predilection for members of the same genital group, you can’t get married. Get over it.

  And yet, actually, it’s me that will have to get over it because soon my children’s generation will be in charge and they see nothing odd about boys marrying their boyfriends. My son, as we know, thinks his dad used to be gay, and that’s fine with him.

  It’s not just homosexuality. Any item from the news leaves me feeling bewildered and alienated, a stranger on my own planet. A government employee who passed secret emails to her mates isn’t to be prosecuted. Marks & Spencer has opened a Lifestore, America won’t intervene in Haiti because it’s an election year. Posh doesn’t want hair like Jordan. It’s all just too incredible.

  The trouble is that I’m 43 and therefore past my dead-by date. I was designed to live until I was 40, and now it’s only central heating and Mr Sheen furniture polish that’s keeping me out of the crematorium.


  So now we’ve got the young bloods raring to go, but they’re permanently at odds with the wrinklies who are still around, not really wanting anything to change. I have a name for this. Prince Charles Syndrome. He wants to get cracking with his vision of Britain but his mum’s still in charge, being cautious and opening day-care centres for the handicapped.

  This is a problem. All over San Francisco there are lots of vibrant young men and women who think it’s perfectly acceptable for homosexuals to adopt babies. They think that having two dads or two mums would in no way skew the child’s view of life. But they’re being held back by an old guy in Washington.

  Here, young people who only watch Buffy and Dec want to abolish the licence fee but find themselves at odds with old people who wonder what they’d do without John Humphrys in the morning and Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday afternoon.

  If I were dead, the children would listen to Chris Moyles over breakfast and there would be peace. But since I’m not, the radio is in the bin and there is war.

  A lot of people are asking whether Christians and Muslims can co-exist in our shrinking world. But I’m more worried about the cocktail of young and old. Of course, it’s bad enough for me at 43, but what must it be like for my mum, who’s pushing 70? There can’t be a single thing in her life that makes any sense at all.

  We took her to a pantomime at Christmas and even that, so far as she was concerned, might as well have been performed in Klingon. ‘Why,’ she wondered as we came out, ‘don’t they do all the old songs?’ The same reason, I suppose, that M&S has Indonesian knick-knacks among the bananas and bras.

  Here we have someone who can’t watch American television programmes because ‘I can’t understand what they’re on about’, and yet she’s living on the same planet at the same time as her grandchildren, who’ve watched so much Australian soap they go up at the end of sentences.

  She takes them out for supper and all they do is sit in the restaurant with their big twenty-first-century thumbs playing on their Game Boys. This must be horrible for her generation, but it’s going to be worse for ours because we’ll live longer and the pace of change will get even faster.

  You think it’s bad now, but imagine what will happen when your kids are in charge.

  Gay vicars, internet reality TV from your next-door neighbours’, public inquiries every time anyone dies, satellite speed traps, thinking computers, cloned dogs, foxes on the parish council, Polish on the curriculum, holidays on Mars. The world is their oyster. But for the rest of us it’ll be a pearl-free barrel of bilge.

  Sunday 29 February 2004

  Sorry, but the public apology is a Big Lie

  To demonstrate the toughness of a Toyota pick-up truck for a television programme, I found a tree and then crashed into it.

  Unfortunately, when the film was shown an eagle-eyed viewer thought the horse chestnut looked just like one in his village, so he toddled across the road and, sure enough, there were smears of red paint on the trunk. Naturally he reported the matter to the parish council, which wrote a letter of complaint.

  As a result I was summoned to the office of a BBC bigwig, where I spent half an hour looking at my shoes, saying, ‘I dunno sir,’ and, ‘It was only a tree.’ I also argued that if it were a parish council tree, this meant that it was public property and therefore I was entitled to drive into it.

  But it was no good, and a letter was sent back to the parish council offering an unreserved apology and guaranteeing that in future Top Gear would try to drive through the village without crashing into anything.

  I wasn’t really sorry and I’m still not sorry. I only agreed to say I was because then the situation would die down and we could go to another village and crash into something else.

  Ever since Clint Eastwood ordered those gunmen to apologise to his mule in A Fistful of Dollars, there’s been a sense that saying sorry to make everything all right has been a bit of a joke. If the baddies had apologised, the film would have ended immediately. But they didn’t, so there was a lot of shooting and, in Clint’s case at least, plenty of squinting too.

  But then along came Tony Blair, who, after the Hutton Inquiry, said that all he had ever wanted was for the BBC to apologise to his mule, Campbell. As a result of that, apologising has become a global obsession. Spurs players were recently castigated, not for losing a match but for not saying sorry that they’d lost.

  I am afraid that His Tonyness’s attempts to appear as big-hearted as Eastwood may have set a dangerous precedent. What’s to stop Saddam Hussein apologising to his captors for all the genocide: ‘I don’t know what came over me. I really am most dreadfully sorry. Can I go now?’

  No, really. In Pakistan a man responsible for selling nuclear secrets to Libya and North Korea has escaped prosecution by begging on television for the nation’s forgiveness. Oh well, that’s all right.

  We occasionally see apologies in newspapers when they’ve said – oh, I don’t know – that Jordan has 17 A-levels and a degree in nanotechnology from Harvard. But it’ll be in a typeface so small that it’s not visible to the naked eye, it’ll be on page 38, next to a distracting shower advertisement, and it’ll have been written only because some hotshot lawyer was standing over the writer with a gun in one hand and a writ in the other.

  Saying sorry because you’ve been forced to means you’re not sorry at all. An apology has to be real to heal. As G. K. Chesterton said: ‘A stiff apology is a second insult.’

  Justin Timbertrousers apologised after baring Janet Jackson’s breast live on American television. But was he really sorry? Bill Clinton apologised after his game of hide the cigar became public – but only because he’d been caught.

  And now that Jimmy Hill lookalike who’s running for president has apologised for saying all Sikhs are terrorists. But John Kerry is a politician, so actually he didn’t apologise at all. He said he was sorry if his remarks had been misunderstood, which is the same as saying ‘I’m sorry that you’re all too stupid to understand what I’m on about.’

  As a word, ‘sorry’ is a useful get-out-of-jail-free card when you’re having an argument with your wife and there’s only 10 minutes before your favourite television programme starts: ‘Yes, I know I’ve dropped coal in your hollandaise sauce. I am a useless husband on every level and I’m sorry. Now can I watch 24?’

  Sorry works when you tread on someone’s toe, or if a child accidentally burps after drinking too much Coca-Cola. Sorry is for minor indiscretions like being a bit late. When you need to squeeze past someone at the cinema to reach your seat, you say sorry because it’s another way of saying excuse me. And excuse me just won’t do if you’ve done something big: ‘I’ve just shot your husband in the middle of his face. I do hope you’ll excuse me.’

  Of course, to bring a bit of gravitas to the moment of humiliation and to dispel the illusion that they’ve done nothing more than spill water on someone’s trousers, people who make public statements today have learnt to adopt a serious face and say that they are making an ‘unreserved’ apology.

  But when you saw Lord Ryder making his ‘unreserved’ apology on behalf of the BBC to St Tony and the half-horse half-donkey Alastair, weren’t you reminded, just a little, of John Cleese dangling, upside down, from that loft apartment window in A Fish Called Wanda, apologising to the psychotic ex-CIA man played by Kevin Kline?

  Elton John once said that sorry seems the hardest word. But that’s not true. A brave man, a man with a spine and some iron in his blood, would say: ‘I don’t accept your apology and I want you larched.’

  Sunday 7 March 2004

  Calling your kid Noah or Coke – how wet is that?

  Lots of my fortysomething friends seem to be taking a leaf out of the Blairs’ book on birth control and squeezing out a last-minute baby.

  There are two things you must remember when someone rings to say they’ve just produced an offspring. First, and for no obvious reason, you must ask how much it weighs, and second, you must try not to d
rop the phone when they tell you what name they’ve chosen. ‘Chardonnay?’ you have to say in measured tones. ‘How very, ummmm, oaky.’

  The annual list of most popular names shows that the Bible is still a source of inspiration for most, and that the two names at No. 1 are the super-traditional Jack and Emily. But look beneath the top 10 and it’s a maelstrom of lunacy where working-class children are named after Australian pop stars and footballers’ wives. And the middle classes are no better, going for increasingly ludicrous handles. I mean, what kind of a name is Araminta?

  We grew up laughing at Frank Zappa for calling his daughter Moon Unit, but today we’re naming our kids after remote Himalayan villages and exotic cheeses.

  People have always named their children to reflect their aspirations – that’s why Ruby and Opal were so popular in the nineteenth century, and it’s why my poor old mum was named after Shirley Temple. I suppose it’s also why so many people coming from the Caribbean in the 1950s called their boy kids Winston.

  This is no bad thing, being named after a prime minister or an actress your parents admired. But in America people aspire to goods and services, and that’s resulted in a surge in popularity for names such as Armani, Timberland, L’Oreal and Celica, which is a type of Toyota. One poor sod last year was called Del Monte.

  At this point, I was about to launch into yet another attack on the Americans who regularly choose a child’s name by picking letters out of a Scrabble bag. But I’ve just remembered that over here Harvey Smith called his horse Sanyo Music Centre, so let’s move on.

  Before naming a child Diet Coke or Josh Stick, it’s important to remember that the name you choose will have a huge impact on how the poor thing’s life will turn out.