Born to Be Riled Page 5

  The doors should unlock themselves when commanded to do so by the remote control device, but they were as good as welded shut by the ice. I was out there with most of what Saxa made in 1995, and all sorts of sprays, for nearly an hour before I could get in.

  As you’d expect, the car started, but all was not well. Both the anti-lock brake and traction-control warning lights stayed on. In exactly the sort of weather I needed these things, they had decided to stay in bed.

  I couldn’t even get out of the drive. It may be gravel but the see-through ice pellets had encased it in a sort of ultra-slippery aspic, so that each touch of the throttle pedal was interpreted by the rear wheels as an instruction to impersonate a washing machine on its final spin cycle.

  I’d been missing London badly and this was icing on the cake. The traffic may only move at 13mph in the capital but at least it moves. After ten minutes of trying to go forwards, I’d slithered backwards about 10 feet, and bumped into the stable block.

  So what. We had the Volvo, a car built for such extremes. Er, no. I chiselled my way in, fired it up, hit the heater button and directed the warm air flow at the windscreen… which split clean in two.

  What really annoyed me was that my mother-in-law’s Y-registered Fiesta worked perfectly. It would have rubbed salt in the wounds, but we didn’t have any left.

  I considered firing up the lawnmower, but as it’s a convertible I resorted to the Volvo, complete with its bifocal windscreen.

  Largely, the roads were passable provided you never felt the need to exceed 20mph, but every 15 minutes someone came on the radio to say that we should all stay at home unless our journey was a matter of life and death. Well we’d run out of lavatory paper, so does that count?

  I wouldn’t mind, but they’re still at it. Since the arctic weather moved over to New York we’ve had fog, high winds, torrential rain, and on each occasion the radio traffic people have told us to stay at home.

  Well listen here guys, if I stay at home, you get a cat playing with some wool on a Thursday instead of Motor-world. If a doctor stays at home, people die. If snowplough drivers stay at home, the roads get even worse. If shop assistants stay at home, we can’t buy loo roll.

  The trouble is that people listen to these radio idiots and overreact. They still go out, but they set their mental cruise controls at one.

  Last Saturday, I pulled out of the drive right behind a B-registered Maestro which was being driven by a man who had turned his high-intensity rear lights on in November.

  The fog was just bad enough to make overtaking dangerous so I was forced to do the 16 mile drive to Banbury, and the blessed relief of the M40, at 1mph.

  When I came home at night, the fog had been replaced by astonishing rain and a wind that was moving people’s bungalows around. But I could see, and I was going to overtake people… except for one thing. I’ve forgotten how to do it.

  A recent survey said that the average driver only uses full beam headlights for 2 per cent of the time at night, which seems about right. In town you never use them, on a motorway you never use them and on country roads these days, something is always coming the other way.

  Think about it. Only as recently as 15 years ago, you would brush aside slower-moving traffic like you dismiss bits of mince pie that have dropped onto your new Christmas jumper. But hand on heart, when did you last overtake someone?

  It’s no better during the day either. On the rare occasions you find yourself on a normal road you can see a stream of cars heading off into the distance, so even when it’s safe to go past the car in front you don’t bother, because you’ll only have to do the same thing over and over and over again.

  Plus, there is a similarly train-like concoction coming the other way. The British A road today has become like a railway line. The carriages are the cars, and the engine is that B-registered Maestro.

  Overtaking has become a forgotten and pointless art for people in this country, as Damon Hill seems happy to prove every other weekend.

  Burning your fingers on hot metal

  I had three economics teachers at school. One was a Ugandan who’d let me go round to his house at night to practise smoking. Another never shook himself properly after a trip to the lavatory. And the third was a communist.

  I learned very little, but I do recall being taught that the human being was greedy because of the anytime, anyplace, anywhere Martini advert.

  I didn’t bother finding out why because I was in the middle of the Melody Maker crossword, which I’d cut out earlier and pasted in a copy of The Economist.

  But now, 20 years on, I’ve discovered the Martini advertisement is not to blame for our acquisitive streak. It’s magazines.

  Back in the days when Melody Maker and the NME were my bibles, I’d spend all my money on albums and ever more sophisticated hi-fi equipment. I really believed that ‘Snow Goose’ sounded better on my Garrard 86SB than it did on Andy Byrne’s miserable SP25.

  I was out of the traps like a greyhound with chilli up its backside when CD hit the scene, but since Neil Young told Q magazine that analogue is better I’ve dusted down all my all LPs again.

  I have a voracious appetite for magazines, even though I know the cover price is a tiny fraction of the resultant costs.

  Last year I lived in London surrounded by friends and restaurants but, having picked up a copy of Country Life at the dentist’s, I now live in the countryside, where there are wasps and murderers and low-flying Tornadoes. The cinema is showing Mad Max, and everyone at the pub is saying there should be a sequel.

  Naturally, we’ve started to take Homes and Gardens, and now the kitchen floor is being replaced with stone flags, a company called Smallbone is being asked to check out the units and Harrods have just delivered a bed so large that it encompasses three time zones.

  When you pick up a magazine, you’d better have nerves of titanium or you’ll go broke.

  But I challenge anyone to stay out of the bankruptcy courts if they even casually browse through an organ called Auto Trader. This, I just know, is published by Lucifer himself. This is bad news on bog roll.

  It’s a chunky 350 pages and it’s stuffed full of advertisements for secondhand cars, each one usually accompanied by a poor-quality black and white picture.

  And yet it is one of the most compulsive reads in the entire universe. When I take a normal, glossy magazine to the loo in a morning I get pins and needles, but with this tome you develop gangrene.

  I think the basic problem is money. Auto Trader concentrates its efforts on stuff we can afford, stuff we drooled over in the glossies five years ago, which is now being sold for beer money.

  Let me give you a few examples. Mercedes 500SEC. B reg. full spec includes air con, electric seats, cruise control etc. New 16 inch wheels and tyres. Very clean car. £6,795.

  Think about that. What we have here is the classic football manager’s car with a 5.0 litre V8 engine, all the fruit and three-pointed star reliability for less money, after you’ve haggled a bit, than a Mini. Go on, admit it: you’re tempted.

  Well what about this one then? BMW 750iL. 1988. Diamond black with black hide upholstery, electric everything, cruise control, full service history, a truly stunning car. £8,345.

  So there you have it. For the price of a downmarket Ford Fiesta, you can have a V12 BMW.

  Every single page throws up a fistful of bargains which make a sale at DFS look like some kind of rip-off.

  The book has just fallen open on the bargain basement section and there, at the bottom of the page, is a Mitsubishi Starion, which is a sort of Japanese Capri.

  I remember testing this car back in 1985 and I thought it was wonderful, a real hooligan’s special with its 2.0 litre turbo motor, its simple rear-wheel drive layout and 170 horsepower. Nice seats too.

  Well now you can have one for £995. Or, if the Starion is a bit too garish, how about a V12 Jaguar XJS for the same price? Or for a tiny bit more, a Porsche 944 or a Range Rover?

  I d
on’t doubt for a moment that these cars have been clocked, stolen, pushed in boating lakes, crashed and welded together in a school project, but for nine hundred quid we’re not talking about the BCCI are we?

  Yes, they will cost heaps to insure and, sure, a big V12 will eat fuel, but let’s be honest: the biggest single cost with any new car is depreciation, and you won’t lose much sleep over that.

  Cars like this are best used as funsters, at weekends, so you can consider your purchase as a sort of gamble, a punt on an outsider in the 3.30 at Lingfield.

  Its doors may fall off the first time you take it out, or it may sail through its MOT six months down the line. But either way, you’ll be able to stand around at parties telling everyone who’ll listen that you have a Jaguar XJS.

  Speeding towards a pact with the devil

  In recent months there have been several distressing moments on television. We were all moved by the scenes of poverty and deprivation from Rwanda, and my mother was shocked by the language and violence in GoodFellas.

  But according to an obscure government quango, the most irresponsible and dangerous programme on television is Top Gear. The quango in question is called PACTS (Parliamentary Advizzzzzzzzzory Council for Something or Other) and it says that when Top Gear refers to a car’s ability to ‘knock on the door of 150mph’, we are guilty of ‘glamourising’ speed. Funny that – I never knew ‘glamorising’ had a ‘u’ in it.

  PACTS also says that speeding costs 1200 lives a year. Well, they’ve obviously researched this subject with the same diligence that they spell their words, because if speed really does kill, Concorde would be the most dangerous means of travel. I’ve just done a quick calculation and reckon the number of people killed by Concorde so far is zero. And that makes it pretty damn safe in my book. When will people learn that speed cannot kill someone? It needs to be mixed with something else first, like the sort of bad driving you see in Whitehall at half-past five when all the quangos are shutting down for the night.

  Besides, if speed is so lethal, how come motorways, which carry 15 per cent of all the traffic in this country, account for only 3 per cent of the casualty accidents? And if you do crash on a motorway, you are three times less likely to die than if you crash in a built-up area.

  PACTS is undeterred by facts, though, and backs up its claims by saying that about one-third of all fatally injured vehicle occupants are involved in a speed-related accident. What speed? 90mph? 40mph? 0.002mph? It doesn’t say.

  If the people who make up PACTS are typical, I know exactly what we’re dealing with here – wizened old has-beens in Hondas who suffer from the upper-class disease of too much money and not much brain. Unable to get a proper job, but duty-bound to do something constructive, they sit on endless committees doing good things. And just because the patron is a marquis or a baroness or a marquee, everyone they write to is supposed to fall on their sword and promise never to stray again.

  When I test a car, I don’t leave out the price just because some viewers can’t afford it, and I won’t leave out the top speed either. It’s a salient point. And if I described it in a drab monotone everyone would throw chairs at the television.

  If there is one character trait I despise even more than reasonableness and socialism, it’s idealism. Yes, it would be lovely if no one was killed on the roads and there was no war, but they are and there is and that’s tough titties. It’s like the NHS. It would be ideal if I had a nurse, a GP and a selection of specialists in attendance 24 hours a day, but this cannot happen. We have to be realistic, but you can bet that someone, somewhere, is prancing about on a bloody quango telling anyone who will listen that Stow-on-the-Wold needs nine new hospitals. Yes, it does, but it can’t have them and that’s an end to it.

  Do you know that there are a bunch of wimmin outside Greenham Common even today. Though the base is now only used for Top Gear photo shoots and police driver training, they say they won’t move until the last nuclear weapon has been removed from the face of the earth. But if the entire American Pacific fleet can’t persuade North Korea to stop making its atom bombs, I really don’t think a bunch of hippies in Berkshire has much of a chance.

  There’s bound to be a quango up in Whitehall where people with gout meet once a week to decide how best to deal with these grubby New Age campers. The odd thing is that both groups of people are as daft as each other.

  Road rage – you know it makes sense

  Like the rest of Britain, I was saddened to see that Britain’s schoolchildren cannot read or write.

  It seems that teenagers are leaving school these days well versed in the dangers of ecstasy, but with no real idea how to spell it.

  Worryingly, these people are driving around in cars, peering at road signs and wondering why they always end up in Colchester when they were trying to get to Weston-Super-Mare.

  Presumably, they cannot understand any of the information being provided by their dashboards either. ‘Why’, they will wail as they splutter to a halt on the hard shoulder, ‘have I run out of petrol?’. And how do they know whether they’re doing 40 or 90mph?

  What concerns me most, though, is that these people are just as likely to be stopped in the street and counselled for their opinions as clever people like Stephen Fry or Jonathan Miller.

  That is why I am always deeply suspicious of market research. I mean, if it were so good at predicting things, we’d have a Welsh prime minister.

  Nevertheless, I’ve been completely absorbed this past week by the Lex Report on Motoring, a huge tome that’s been compiled by one of Britain’s foremost car retail and leasing operations.

  It says here that six out of ten people supported the road protesters’ cause, which is an extraordinary finding when you learn that 72 per cent of drivers say traffic congestion is a ‘major’ problem.

  So, what we have here is a majority of people wanting fewer jams, and a majority of people saying there should be no new roads. Hmm.

  How about this one? Sixty-one per cent of the British public – the people who brought the world jet engines, hovercrafts, communism, optical fibres, television and the telephone – say that cars are only a ‘little’ more environmentally friendly than they were 10 years ago.

  Nine per cent – the real dimwits – say that cars have become more damaging to the environment in the last decade.

  Unbelievable. Ford has just announced that a new Fiesta produces the same amount of toxic gases as 20 Fiestas did a few years ago which, in my book, means there’s been a twentyfold improvement.

  And who had heard of recycling centres in 1986? Car firms are making huge efforts to shape up, but obviously the message is not getting across.

  Ah, I see now why that should be so. The report says that only 19 per cent of people trust car advertisements, and that friends and acquaintances are considered to be a great deal more knowledgeable than newspaper journalists.

  I may as well give up now because Top Gear gets a special mention. Only 34 per cent of private buyers trust us. Right: now it’s personal.

  So now I shall switch my attention to the huge section on so-called road rage.

  This is the bit that’s been picked up by radio stations and television networks all over the country but, again, I find myself wondering…

  In 1995, 1.8 million people were forced to pull over or off the road, 800,000 were physically threatened, 500,000 had their cars deliberately rammed, 250,000 were attacked and another 250,000 had their cars damaged.

  Add the figures up and you’ll find that 3.6 million people were abused, threatened or hit on the roads last year… which isn’t enough.

  You see, I have a great deal of sympathy with people who become angry and frustrated while in their cars, because losing your temper is part of the human psyche, as natural as smiling or having sex.

  Wetties ask why we don’t lose our rag quite so readily while walking down the pavement, but that’s a stupid question. If someone inadvertently brushes past you in a shop doorway, it’s n
o big deal.

  If, however, by not paying attention, their car brushes against yours, you will be without wheels for a week or so, there will be a fight with the insurance company and you will almost certainly end up poorer as a result.

  And that’s if you are lucky. If you’re on foot, even the biggest Mickey Skinner-type impact won’t cause much damage, but on the road, it’s different. You could wind up dead or paralysed, and that’s certainly a good enough reason to get out of your car and smash the other guy’s teeth in.

  A few years ago, I was desperately late for a wedding and, while overtaking a Volvo, found another car coming the other way. I dived back to my side of the road and very nearly caused a huge shunt.

  At the next set of lights, a huge Irish person heaved himself out of the Volvo and spent a couple of minutes trying to throttle me. That was road rage.

  But it was my fault. I deserved it. I nearly killed the poor bloke and I consider myself rather fortunate to have escaped from the encounter with mild bruising. I deserved more.

  Frankly, if more people behaved as responsibly as that large Irishman the standard of driving would improve. You’d think twice about cutting someone up if there was even the remotest possibility that you’d end up impaled on your gear lever.

  When I see that there have been 3.6 million examples of road rage in the last year, I say to myself that there must have been 3.6 million examples of bad, inattentive or selfish driving.

  911 takes on Sega Rally

  If you were to enlarge Birmingham a thousandfold, you would end up with Australia. Sydney is like a bigger version of Edgbaston. Perth is the National Exhibition Centre. Alice Springs is Handsworth and the rest is Canon Hill Park.

  I think it’s fair to say that you can judge a city by whether or not you feel the need to go to an amusement arcade. If it’s sunny and warm and the bars are full of lively and interesting people, you won’t give ‘Space Invaders’ a thought.