The World According to Clarkson Read online

  Here’s the problem. What I like doing most of all in the evenings, these days, is sitting in a gormless stupor in front of the television, eating chocolate.

  Going out means getting up, getting changed, finding a babysitter, arguing about who’ll drive and missing Holby City. And quite frankly, that’s not something I’m prepared to do more than once a week. So, the most people I can hope to see in a year is 52, which means it would take two years to see everyone in my Filofax.

  Except, of course, it would take much longer than that in reality because people who I’m not seeing on purpose endlessly invite me round for dinner until eventually I’ve used every excuse in the book, up to and including being attacked by a Bengal tiger, and I have to go.

  And then, as the day in question dawns, I mooch around the house, dreaming up the amount I’d pay to someone if they came through the door and offered me a guilt-free get-out-of-jail card. Once I got up to £25,000, but still no one came, I had to go and, as a result, another week went by without seeing Mark Whiting, a friend from my days on the Rotherham Advertiser.

  And, of course, the more time that goes by, the harder it becomes to call on people who you haven’t seen in ages. I mean, if someone you haven’t heard from in ten years suddenly telephones, you know full well that it’ll be for one of two reasons. He has lost his job. Or he has lost his wife.

  I have become so desperate about this friends business that I recently asked my wife not to put any new people in the address book. I don’t care how nice they are. I don’t care if he is funny or that she’s allergic to underwear. We have now got enough friends.

  This went down badly and so we’ve reached an agreement. New people can only go in the book providing old ones are Tipp-Exed out.

  This is not easy. There’s one bloke called (name and address withheld because I’m weak) who I really don’t want to see again. Given the choice of people I’d call to ask for a night out, he’d come below the woman in the video-rental shop.

  Worse. If I saw him coming down the street towards me, I’d pretend to be gay and lunge endlessly for his genitals until he went away. And if that didn’t work, I’d run into the nearest butcher’s and feed myself into the bacon slicer.

  But even so, as I stood there with the Tipp-Ex hovering above this crashing bore’s name, I could hear his voice in my head, and it sounded like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘Don’t do it, Dave. Remember all those nights we shared, Dave. I’ll try to be more interesting next time, Dave.’

  I couldn’t do it and so now I’ve got a much more radical solution, pinched from anyone who’s ever tried toget out of a love affair with someone they don’t really love any more. I need him to ditch me.

  So what I shall do, first thing in the morning, is take a leaf out of the Leeds United book on friendship, call the police, and shop him for that joint I saw him smoke back in 1979.

  Sunday 15 March 2001

  Creeping Suburbia isn’t Quite What I Expected

  You may be surprised to hear that the two words most feared by those who live in the countryside are not ‘foot’ and ‘mouth’. Or ‘mad’ and ‘cow’. Or even ‘Blair’ and ‘Prescott’. No, out here the most terrifying words in the English language are ‘Bryant’ and ‘Barratt’.

  If the cows in our paddocks were to develop sores or a fondness for line dancing, we’d simply set fire to them. But this option would not be available should one of the big development companies plonk a dirty great housing estate at the end of our garden. And tempting though it may seem, we couldn’t call in the armed forces, either.

  ‘Hello. Is that the RAF? Oh good. I’d like to call in a napalm airstrike, please, at these coordinates.’

  When a housing estate comes to your little world you are stuffed. Your views are ruined, your house becomes worthless and you needn’t expect much in the way of sympathy or compensation from His Tonyness.

  Quite the reverse in fact, because unlike the spread of foot-and-mouth, which is being driven by the wind, the plague of housing developments is actually being driven by Tony, who’s said that over the next six minutes the countryside needs another 30 million bungalows.

  I went last week to exactly the sort of place that Tony has in mind. It’s a nearly completed development called Cambourne Village and it is to be found in the flatlands of Cambridgeshire between Royston and Norway.

  It’s big. So big that it’s been built by a consortium of all the big developers. There’s a business park, a high street, a pub that does the sort of food that is garnished with garnish, three village greens, a lake and a helmetless teenage boy who rides around the network of roads all day on an unsilenced motorbike.

  They’ve even tried to crack religion. Obviously, the vast majority of people who’ll come to live in Cambourne will be white, middle class and Church of England. But, of course, in these days of multiculturalism you can’t just stick up one church and be done with it. So, to cope with that, the single church will be multidenominational.

  Quite how this will work in practice, I have no idea. Maybe there’s an inflatable minaret round the back somewhere. Maybe they hang up the tapestries when the Catholics are in, and then it’s all whitewashed when the lone Methodist from No. 32 fancies having a bit of a sing-song.

  I was thinking that this kind of thing might lead to jealousy, and maybe even a small war. But then I thought of something else. If there’s going to be any backbiting in Cambourne, it’ll be over who gets what house.

  You see, unlike any estate I’ve ever seen, every single property in the whole damn place – and there are more than 3,000 of them – is different. Large, £260,000, double-fronted village houses with PVC sash windows and garages nestle right next door to small two-bedroom cottages which, in turn, are jammed up against three-bed semis, some of which plainly have ensuite bathrooms and some of which don’t.

  This looked like an anthropologist’s worst nightmare. ‘Not only does the man at 27 have a wooden, Sussex-style garage for his BMW 318i but he also has a 20 × 20 lawn, with a tree. And if you stand on the avocado bidet in his back bathroom, he has a view of the lake!’

  Sounds like a hideous way to live until you remember that all proper villages are like this. There’s a manor house, a dower house, a smithy, a home farm, some tied cottages, a council estate and a boy on a motorbike. It’s normal. What’s not normal are the housing estates of old, where every single property is exactly the same as all the others. And everyone has a BMW 318i.

  That is what’s wrong with Milton Keynes. Yes, you never sit in a traffic jam and yes, there’s always somewhere to park. But all the houses are the same. They appear to have been pushed out of a Hercules transport plane and parachuted into position.

  In Cambourne, it’s all different. And some of it is very, very pretty. There’s one row that put me in mind of Honfleur in Normandy. And as I wandered around, I started to feel little pangs of jealousy.

  I thought I had it all worked out, living in the middle of the Cotswolds, but I have no neighbours to chat to and there are no other children to keep mine amused. In Cambourne you can walk to the shops, walk to the pub, walk to church and walk to work. I could walk for two days and I’d end up with nothing more than muddy shoes.

  They’ve even got their own website, where residents can sell bicycles and share wife-swapping tips.

  And they don’t even have to put up with the usual drawbacks of village life like an annual bus service, tractors and men in jumpers deafening all and sundry with their penchant for campanology. Though I would imagine that when the inflatable minaret is pumped up, things might get a bit noisy.

  But you know the absolute best thing about Cambourne? It’s not in Oxfordshire. Which means it’s not in my back yard. It’s in Cambridgeshire. Which means it’s in Jeffrey Archer’s.

  Sunday 1 April 2001

  Is It a Plane? No, It’s a Flying Vegetable

  So, the Bubbles have cancelled their order for 60 Euro-fighter jets, saying they need the money to pay for t
he Olympic Games. Well, thanks Mr Popolopolos.

  That’s just great.

  Eurofighter could, and should, have been a shining example of pan-European cooperation. One in the eye for Uncle Sam. The greatest ground-attack ‘mud mover’ the world had ever seen. But instead it will stand for ever more as a beacon, showing the world that a federal superstate can never work on this side of the Atlantic.

  The idea for such a plane was first hatched back in the early 1970s when Britain realised it would soon need a land-based fighter bomber to replace both the Jaguar and the Harrier. We couldn’t design such a machine by ourselves because we were on a three-day week at the time, so we went to see the French and the Germans.

  The French said they already had a fighter, the Mirage, and therefore only needed a bomber which could be used on aircraft carriers. The Germans said they didn’t need a bomber since, for once, they weren’t planning on bombing anyone. They needed a fighter. And they absolutely were not interested in this aircraft-carrier business because they didn’t have any.

  Obviously the whole thing was never going to work, so in the spirit of what was to come the three countries did the sensible thing, signed a deal and went back home to come up with some preliminary studies.

  Now, to understand the hopelessness of the position I would like you to imagine that they were not designing a warplane but a vegetable. So Britain came up with the potato, France designed a stick of celery, and Germany did a lobster thermidor. The project was dead.

  But not for long. From nowhere, the Italians and Spanish suddenly decided that they wanted a piece of the action and, flushed with the idea of these extra complications, a new contract was drawn up.

  It was ever so straightforward. The amount of work, and therefore jobs, given to each country would depend on how many of the fighters they would buy. That was fair. But not to the French it wasn’t. They wanted one plane, 50 per cent of all the work and total control, and when they were told to get lost, they did.

  Taking Spain with them.

  So now it was Britain, Germany and Italy and it stayed that way for about twelve seconds, when the Spanish fell out with the French and asked to come back in again. So fifteen years after the project was first mooted and just eighteen months before the RAF needed its planes, the project at last was up and running.

  Then disaster. The Berlin Wall fell over and all of a sudden European governments lost the will to spend trillions on a plane that would have nobody to fight. The air forces, too, realised that a highly manoeuvrable, Mach-2, dogfighting jet would have no place in the new world order. So it was agreed by everyone to keep going.

  Germany and Britain were going to take 250 Euro-fighters each, which is why we each had 33 per cent of the workload. But in the recession of 1992 our governments wondered if this was a trifle excessive. The RAF dropped its order to 232 planes and the Luftwaffe to just 140. But the German government insisted that it kept its share of the work. When everyone else kicked up a fuss it threatened to pull out.

  Fearful that the pack of cards was about to come tumbling down, the Italians and Spanish went to lunch and the British got tough. Immediately, we gave in to the Germans.

  However, the delay had thrown up a new problem: the name. All along it had been called Eurofighter 2000, but by 1994 it was obvious that it could never be operational until 2001 at the earliest. So it became the Typhoon, which conjures up pictures of devastation and death.

  Well, don’t get your hopes up. You see, Tony Blair recently decided that the plane’s missiles should be British rather than American. Good call, but the British weaponry won’t be available until eight years after the jet goes into service. So what are the pilots supposed to do in the meantime: make rude gestures?

  That said, though, I have talked to various authoritative sources over the past year and it is widely thought that Eurofighter will become the world’s best fighter-bomber. It is desperately easy to fly and at £50 million a pop it is also extremely cheap. To put that in perspective, each new USAF F-22 Raptor will cost £115 million.

  So Eurofighter is something about which Europe can be justifiably proud. Should the Russians ever decide to invade, we will have exactly the right sort of fire power to hold them back.

  However, for dealing with sundry world leaders in far-flung parts of the globe, what you really need are aircraft carriers. Britain has just ordered two and there was talk of modifying Eurofighter to become precisely what the French wanted 30 years ago. But presumably it was too much of an effort. So what have we done? Well, in a perfect spirit of European cooperation, we have teamed up with the Americans to build something called the Joint Strike Fighter. Thank you, Europe, and goodnight.

  Sunday 8 April 2001

  Is This a Winner’s Dinner or a Dog’s Breakfast?

  No. I mean, yes. Yes, I have just been to Barbados but no, I didn’t stay at Winner Central, the newly reopened Sandy Lane hotel. Why? Because I checked, and for bed and breakfast only, a fortnight there for a family of five would cost £44,000.

  So, who’s going to fork out that kind of money for two clean sheets and a croissant? Not David Sainsbury, that’s for sure. He was staying in our hotel down the road. And not the TetraPak Rausings, either. They were holed up in their bungalow.

  Obviously, I had to find out and since you can’t just walk in for a nosey, I had to bite the bullet and book a table for dinner. So I called to make a booking and was told that if I didn’t turn up, $100 would be deducted from my credit card. Christ. A hundred bucks for not going.

  When you arrive you are shown by the doorman to a woman at the reception desk who shows you to a man who shows you to the door of the restaurant, where a man shows you to the man who shows you to your chair. I felt like the baton in a relay race.

  Or rather I would have done but sadly I was still at the gate, in the back of a taxi being stared at by a guard with a piece of curly flex connecting his ear to the back of his jacket. He probably thought it made him look like an FBI agent, but in fact it just made him look deaf. Which is why I resorted to shouting at him.

  I was told subsequently that it is poor form to turn up in a taxi and that I should really have arrived in a proper car. Which would have meant buying one. And that would have been even more expensive than turning round and going home.I adn’t really gone to the Sandy Lane for the food. I’d gone to see the people. So you can imagine the crushing disappointment of finding that the restaurant was not a sparkling sea of Cheshire Life gold shoes, with a sprinkling of noisy New Yorkers. In fact, only two other tables were occupied.

  To my right there was Bewildered Dotcom Man, who’d gone to bed one night, a struggling geek on 38p a year, and woken up the next morning to find he was worth $4 billion. He was wearing a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, see-through white trousers and was accompanied by his wife, Janet.

  To my left there was White Tuxedo Man. He was with his wife, Sylvia, to whom he uttered not one word. He spent most of the evening either reading the credit cards in his Filofax or talking into his mobile phone… which would have been impressive except that I have the absolute latest Ericsson, which works on Everest, in the Mariana Trench and even in Fulham. But it couldn’t get a signal in Barbados, so sorry, sunshine, you weren’t fooling anyone.

  So, with no other guests to laugh at, we thought we’d have a giggle at the food. Good idea, but I couldn’t find it.

  It turned out that there was a sliver of what looked like corned beef on my plate, but it was so thin that when you tapped it with a knife it made a clinking noise. I tried scooping it up with a fork, and then a spoon, but neither was successful, so in the end I gave up and just licked the plate. What did it taste like? Well, meat, I guess, with a porcelain afterglow.

  Then the water came. There had been an enormous song and dance with the wine but this was just a dress rehearsal for the main event. The waiter unscrewed the cap as though defusing a nuclear bomb and for one glorious moment I thought he was going to ask me to sniff it.


  But that would have been only mildly ridiculous. So instead, he poured a splash into the glass for me to taste. ‘No, really. Unless you got it out of Michael Winner’s bath, just pour away. It’ll be fine.’

  Drinking at the Sandy Lane, though, is nothing compared to what happens when you need to expel it. In the lavatory you are offered a choice of bog roll – plain or embossed. And that is just so Wilmslow.

  Before leaving we were given a ballot paper on which we were asked to vote for the evening’s ‘champion’, the waiter who’d impressed us most. The losers, presumably, are lobbed into the shark pool.

  And then we got the bill, which was the funniest thing of all because, when translated into English, it came to £220. The lobster-salad starter, all on its own, had been £32, and for that I’d have expected the damn thing to get up and do a song and dance routine. Instead, it had just sat there, being a dead crustacean. A bit like White Tuxedo Man’s wife.

  I don’t care what you read over the coming weeks by hacks on freebies, the Sandy Lane is preposterous. If you were given all the money in the world and told to design the most stupid restaurant on the planet, you wouldn’t even get close. I mean, you wouldn’t think to put the waiters in pink trousers, would you? They have, though. And pink shirts.

  But that said, it is a good thing. Every resort should have a place like this, a giant black hole that hoovers up precisely the sort of people that the rest of us want to avoid. Once you know they’re there, you can go somewhere else.

  Sunday 29 April 2001

  Call This a Riot? It was a Complete Washout

  Following the success of last year’s anti-beefburger riot when protesters gave Winston Churchill an amusing Mohican haircut and planted cannabis seeds in Parliament Square I was rather looking forward to last week’s rematch. Obviously I was a little concerned that my car might be turned over and burnt, so I booked a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and spent the day hunting what Jack Straw had promised would be a festival of rubber bullets and Molotov cocktails.