The World According to Clarkson Read online

  That was London. But in a town built by politicians for politicians, it’s much, much worse. You can’t even build skyscraper in Washington, DC, because all buildings must be smaller than the Washington Memorial. The message is simple. Nothing here is bigger than politics.

  To explain that there’s a world outside their window, and it’s a world of dread and fear, I felt compelled to buy some spray paint and a ladder and write something appropriate in big red letters on the White House.

  But when I got there I simply couldn’t believe my eyes. Put simply, I live in a bigger gaff than the president of America, and that’s not bragging because, chances are, you do too. It really is pathetically small.

  All around there were television reporters revealing to their viewers some snippet of useless information that they had picked up the night before over a bowl of authentic Ethiopian pasta. And I wanted to say: ‘Look, stick to what’s important. Tell everyone that President Bush lives in a hut and, most of all, warn people that the X-1 display at the Smithsonian is closed.’

  Sunday 18 February 2001

  Flying Round the World, No Seat is First Class

  According to recent scare stories, people on the 27-hour flight to New Zealand have a simple choice. You can either die of deep vein thrombosis or you can die of cancer which is caused by radiation in the upper atmosphere reacting with the aluminium skin of the aeroplane. Both options are better than surviving.

  I boarded the plane at Heathrow and was horrified to note that I was to share my section of the cabin with a couple of dozen pensioners on a Saga holiday. Great. Half were at the stage where they’d need to go to the lavatory every fifteen minutes, and half were at the stage where they didn’t bother with the lavatory at all.

  But the seat next to me was free. So who am I going to get? Please God, not the girl with the baby I’d seen in the departure lounge. There is nothing worse than sitting next to a girl with a baby on a long-haul flight. I got the girl with the baby.

  And then I was upgraded to first class. I didn’t stop to ask why. I just took the moment by the bottom of its trouser leg, moved to the front and settled down with my book. It was a big fattie called Ice Station, which promised to be the sort of page-turning rollercoaster that would turn the fat 11-hour leg to Los Angeles into a dainty little ankle.

  Sadly, it turned out to be the worst book ever written. Just after the lone American marine had wiped out an entire French division single-handed, I decided to watch a movie instead. But since I’d seen them all, in their original formats, with swearing, I was stuck.

  You can’t even talk to the stewardesses because they think you’re trying to chat them up and you can’t talk to the stewards either, for much the same reason. So I thought I’d get a drink, but of what?

  My body clock said it was time for tea but I’d already moved my watch and that said I should have a glass of wine. But I couldn’t have a wine because then I’d want a cigarette and you can’t do that on a plane because, unlike a screaming baby, it’s considered antisocial.

  I know. I’ll look out of the window. I’ll look at this overcrowded world in which we’re living. Well sorry, but for six hours there are no towns, no people and despite various claims to the contrary no evidence of global warming. Just thousands upon thousands of miles of ice.

  So I went back to my book and was halfway through the bit where the lone American was busy killing everyone in the SAS, when we dropped out of the clouds and into Los Angeles.

  Time for a smoke. But this being California, that meant I had to go outside, which meant I’d have to clear customs, which meant I had to get in line with the Saga louts who’d all filled their forms in wrong.

  I queued for an hour while the American passport-control people, in a bad mood because work stops them eating, barked at the old biddies and then realised that time was up. Unlike everywhere else in the world, airlines in the States are allowed to take off with your bags on board.

  And so with a heavy heart and even heavier lungs I trudged back to the 747 for the next, really long leg and found that my first-class seat had gone. But then so had the girl with the baby.

  In her place there was a Californian beach babe who was going to Auckland with her equally volleyballish friend.

  To begin with, I didn’t think too much of the fact they were holding hands but as the flight wore on and they started holding rather more intimate parts of one another’s bodies, the penny dropped.

  I know I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve been told countless times that people are born gay and that it’s not something that happens because you’re too much of a boiler to pull a bloke. So there must be good-looking lesbians, too. It’s just that, outside films, you never see one.

  I tried to read my book, in which the hero was now taking on and beating the entire US Marine Corps using nothing but a rope ladder, but it was impossible to concentrate. And you try sleeping when you’re seventeen inches from two pneumatic blondes playing tonsil hockey.

  Somewhere around the Fiji islands they went to sleep, and so did I, waking up an hour later when I moved my arm and the nicotine patch tore a couple of armpit hairs clean out of their sockets.

  After twelve hours we landed and I had forty minutes to make my connection for Wellington which, even though the domestic terminal is a brisk fortnight’s walk away, was just about doable, providing all went well in customs.

  It didn’t. A man took my papers into a back room and emerged ten minutes later wearing rubber gloves. I damn nearly fainted.

  Believe me, you do not want an intimate body search after a 27-hour journey. You don’t want an intimate body search after a 27-minute journey, come to think of it, but thankfully he limited his probing to my suitcase and I made the last flight with one minute to spare.

  On it, I had another breakfast, finished my godawful book and tomorrow, after just 36 hours in Wellington, I’m coming home again. This is jet-set living? You can keep it.

  Sunday 25 February 2001

  They’re Trying to Lower the Pulse of Real Life

  Did anyone else notice that, in the aftermath of last week’s train crash, the newspapers were gripped with a sense of impotent rage? Try as they might, and some of them tried very hard indeed, they couldn’t find anyone to blame.

  The tracks hadn’t disintegrated. The train driver wasn’t four. There were crash barriers on the motorway bridge and the man in the Land Rover hadn’t fallen asleep. It had been an accident.

  But, of course, there’s no such thing as an accident these days. If you trip over a paving stone or eat a dodgy piece of meat, there will be an inquiry, someone will be culpable, and steps will be taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

  We had a very wet autumn, as I’m sure you will recall, and as a result many rivers burst their banks. But this was not an act of God or a freak of nature. This was someone’s fault.

  Nobody is allowed to just die, either. George Carman QC, for instance, pegged out at the age of 71, which is not a bad innings. But oh no. His death has been chalked up to cancer, as though it might have been avoided if he’d not eaten cheese and broccoli.

  Well now look. The human being, and the human male in particular, is programmed to take risks. Had our ancestors spent their days sitting around in caves, not daring to go outside, we’d still be there now.

  Sure, we’re more civilised these days, what with our microwave ovens and our jet liners, but we’re still cavemen at heart. We still crave the rush of adrenaline, the endorphin highs and the buzz of a dopamine hit. And the only way we can unlock this medicine chest is by taking a risk.

  Telling us that speed kills and asking us to slow down is a bit like asking us to ignore gravity. We don’t drive fast because we’re in a hurry; we drive fast because it pushes the arousal buttons, makes us feel alive, makes us feel human.

  Dr Peter Marsh, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, says the recent rise in popularity of bungee jumping, parachuting and other extreme sports is si
mply man’s reaction to the safer, cotton-woolly society that’s being created.

  He told me this week that, when the youth of Blackbird Leys in Oxford was stealing cars and doing handbrake turns back in the 1990s, a number of liberal commentators called to ask him why.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘These kids steal a really good car, take it back to their housing estate and charge around, with all their friends cheering and applauding. They are having a laugh, and making the police look like fools on television, and you have to ask why!’

  Who has decided that we must live in a temperance society where there is no stimulation, no risk, no danger and no death?

  In the past two months alone we’ve been told that water makes us mental, that coffee increases the risk of miscarriage, that lawn mowers cause deafness and that middle-aged men who dance will get ‘glamrock shoulder’.

  A professor at Aberdeen University described washing-up bowls as ‘an absolute menace’. We were told that snooker chalk causes lead poisoning and that the new euro coins contain nickel, which will blister skin. There were warnings too that apples cause E-coli and that mercury thermometers kill babies.

  So where is all this rubbish coming from? Well, to be honest, it’s being imported from America, where scientists are now worried that a consignment of Play-Stations that has been sent to Iraq could be linked to form a crude supercomputer. This, they say, could then be used to pilot a chemical warhead all the way to Buffalo Springs.

  Americans, remember, have got it into their heads that you can now wage a war without losing a single soldier or airman, and we see the same sort of thing with their weather too.

  Instead of shrugging when a hurricane marches across Florida, or a tornado tears up Oklahoma, they insist that the government does something about it. They want more warning, better protection.

  Then of course there is the business of smoking.

  Did you know that there are now porno websites in America where you can call up pictures of girls with farmyard animals, and then, at the highest level, for members only, pictures of fully clothed girls enjoying a cigarette?

  And despite a few plaintive cries for help from the back of the Washington Post, the public over there seems to have bought into this belief that life can, and should, be run without risk, that all accidents are avoidable, and that death is something that only happens to people who eat meat and smoke.

  This is odd. From the outside, Americans appear to be human – a little larger than normal, perhaps – but equipped nevertheless with arms and heads.

  So how come they are able to overcome the base instincts that drive the rest of mankind?

  I can think of only one answer. If they do not need risk and stimulation, they must be genetically malformed. There’s a simpler word for this. They must be mad.

  Sunday 4 March 2001

  Forget the Euro, Just Give Us a Single Socket

  If you were charged with the task of standardising an entire continent, from the Baltic to the Bosporus, I’m pretty sure you would come up with a list of things that are slightly more pressing and important than a single currency.

  Plug sockets, for a kick-off. How can it be that our MEPs have managed to homogenise a banana, yet they still allow each member state to offer a new and exciting way of getting electricity out of the wall?

  This wasn’t so bad when we travelled with only a comb, but now that we need to charge up the batteries in our computers, mobile telephones and electronic organisers it means we must pack a vast array of adaptors; so many in fact that you now need to travel like an E. M. Forster heroine, with fourteen trunks and Cummerbund Akimbo, your manservant.

  And then the check-in girl has the temerity to ask if your bags contain any electrical appliances. Damn right they do.

  This is deeply maddening for me since I have always prided myself on being able to survive abroad for up to a month on nothing but hand luggage. I have even developed a routine whereby one pair of underpants can be made to last for four days.

  You wear them back to front on day two, inside out on day three and then inside out and back to front on day four. I know a cameraman who claims to have developed a combination that allows a five-day switchover routine, but frankly I don’t believe him.

  Then we have telephone connections, which in the past were of no great importance. But now we all have internets, how come there is no edict from Brussels on what is, and what is not, a standard socket?

  They launch the euro, which means I won’t need a wallet that bulges with different currencies. Big deal. Yet they’re happy to have me stomping around the Continent with enough cable in my suitcases to build a suspension bridge.

  It’s also very difficult with road signs. Only the other day, while searching Zurich for the A3 motorway to St Moritz, a blue sign said turn left and a green sign said turn right. Blue is motorway, yes? Nope. Not in Switzerland it isn’t. The blue sign takes you on the sort of road that made the cabling in my suitcase look straight.

  And lifts: why can’t there be a standard letter that denotes the reception level? It has been agreed that all across Europe prisoners have an inalienable right not to fall over and yet it is deemed acceptable for people like me to spend hours stabbing away at meaningless buttons and emerging half a day later in the hotel boiler room.

  Now I don’t want you to think that I long for the days when newspapers ran headlines saying ‘Fog in the Channel. Europe cut off’. I don’t subscribe to the British-is-best mentality, because we have John Prescott and fuss and mutt. We have much to learn from the Continent.

  Austrian lavatories, for instance, are plainly a good idea. There’s a short flush for your number ones and a full-on Niagara for even the most stubborn number two. Then you have three-hour lunches in Spain and smoking bars on long-haul French airliners.

  So, surely, if we must have European integration, it should be a case of taking the best bits that each country has to offer and blending them into the other member states.

  Take customs officers. In Germany you get poked in the chest by a hippie with a gun, and woe betide anyone who tries to get a carnet signed in France. I tried this last week and the man at the desk couldn’t be bothered. He so couldn’t be bothered that, when pressed, he hurled the form across his office, shouted ‘merde’ at nobody in particular and stomped off.

  I want to see an implementation of the system they have in Italy, i. e. no system at all.

  It might be useful, too, if we could find a universal butt for European wit. We have the Irish, the Swedes have the Norwegians, the Dutch have the Belgians and so on. What we need is a universal whipping boy so that jokes translate smoothly.

  No, not the Welsh. At dinner last week in Austria, there were sixteen people round the table and, really, it was like a bunch of flowers. There were Scandinavians, Germans, Brits, Italians, the lot, and it was great.

  We explained the jokes for the Germans, the French chose the wine, the Italians ordered the food, the Austrians talked to the waitress and the Dutchman spent his evening stopping the Swede from trying to commit suicide. We laughed at one another, joked with one another, learnt from one another and it was just the most perfect evening; a shining example of European cooperation and harmony.

  It was spolit by only one thing. There, in the middle of our arrangement of roses, bougainvillea, edelweiss and tulips, complaining that we smoked and doing mock coughs to hammer the point home was a giant redwood: an American. He did not understand Wiener schnitzel and couldn’t grasp the notion that we would want another round of drinks.

  Sure, he was the perfect butt for all of us, but we must remember that he comes from a federal superstate where the plug sockets are all the same. It’s a worry.

  Sunday 18 March 2001

  I’d Have Laid Down My Life for Wotsisname

  The court case involving Jonathan Woodgate threw up an interesting dilemma last week when his best friend gave evidence against him. So what do you do?

  On the one hand, socie
ty cannot function without honesty, so therefore you know it’s right to offer your services to the prosecution. But then again, friendship is supposed to be an unshakeable bond which cannot exist without loyalty. So it is also right that you should keep shtum.

  Well, I thought about this long and hard in the shower this morning and I’ve decided I’d squeal like a baby. Because you know something? Friendship is not an unshakeable bond at all. It’s like a gigantic sand dune, seemingly huge and permanent, but one day you get up and it’s gone.

  Back in the early eighties I spent pretty well every Saturday night with the same group of friends in a King’s Road basement bar called Kennedy’s. We laughed all the time, we went on stage with the band, we sang, we drank ourselves daft and we knew, with the sure-fire certainty that night will follow day, that we’d be mates for ever.

  Had one of them been accused of gouging the barman’s eyes out with a lawnmower, I’d have told the police I was dead at the time and that I knew nothing. I would even have taken the heat on his behalf, had push come to shove. Which would have made me feel awfully foolish today because I have no idea where two of those friends are, and, for the life of me, I cannot even remember what the third one was called.

  How did this happen? Presumably, when I said goodbye for the last time ever, I really did believe I’d be seeing them all again the following weekend. It wasn’t like we’d had a row, or that they’d all grown beards or moved to Kathmandu. We just went home and never saw one another again.

  And this happens all the time. I went through my address book earlier and there are countless hundreds of people, friends, muckers, soul mates and former colleagues who I never ever see.