The World According to Clarkson Read online

  Then you have the modernists who think it is much better to throw away the plants and replace them with stark concrete walls and gravel. These people are called Darren and you see them every week on Ground Force.

  The Darren philosophy is tempting. First of all, you get a quick fix, a well-planned and attractive garden in a couple of hours. And second, the whole thing can be maintained by taking the Hoover to it once a year.

  But these modern gardens do feel a bit like rooms without roofs, and you will lose things in the gaps of your decking. I know one man who lost his wife down there.

  So what about the gardening option? Well, all things considered, it doesn’t sound quite so good. I mean, what’s the point of planting an oak tree when the best that can happen is that it stops being a twig just in time for the birth of your great-great-great-grandson. And the worst is that it commits suicide.

  Furthermore, if you go down the gardening route, you will have to spend your entire retirement in crap clothes with your head between your ankles. You will then get a bad back and that will require terrifying and undignified weekly appointments with Bill at the massage parlour.

  So what’s the answer then? Well, I’ve just bought an acre or so and I’m going to employ the third way. I’m going to do absolutely nothing, and next year I shall call it ‘the New Labour wilderness’, and transport it to Chelsea where it will win a gold medal.

  Sunday 27 May 2001

  An Invitation from My Wife I Wish I Could Refuse

  What would life be like if parties had never been invented? Tents would still be used solely as places for Boy Scouts to sleep, there would be no such thing as a plate clip and you would never have heard an amateur speech.

  There would be no black tie, no parking in paddocks, no chance of running into former spouses and you would never have drunk a warm Martini, garnished with ash, at four in the morning because the rest of the booze had run out.

  We’re not even programmed to enjoy parties that much. Think. When you were little you liked your teddy and you liked your mum, but other children were the enemy. You were forced to go, and sat on your bottom waiting to be humiliated by someone saying: ‘Oh dear. Who’s had a little accident then?’

  You always have little accidents at parties. No sooner are you out of nappies than you’re straight into the flowerbed where the hostess’s mother finds you face down at dawn. And then when you’re married, you get in huge trouble for dancing with the wrong girl in the wrong way for too long.

  I mention all this because three weeks ago I caught the perfect illness. There was no pain, just an overwhelming need to lie in bed all day eating comfort food and watching Battle of the Bulge.

  I was enjoying myself very much, but halfway through the afternoon my wife tired of popping upstairs with trays of quails’ eggs and mushroom soup and, with that hands-on-hips way that wives have when their husbands are not very ill, announced that I should get up and organise a party for her fortieth birthday. ‘You have 21 days.’

  My first chance to have a little accident came with the invitations. Every morning we get invites but we have no idea who they are from or where the party is being held because the typeface is a meaningless collection of squirls, and all the instructions at the bottom are in French. RSVP.

  I thought the solution would be simple. Write in block capitals and use English. But oh no. Nowadays, it’s important to make your invitation stand out on the mantelpiece, so it must be written on an ingot or a CD-Rom or on a man’s naked bottom.

  The printer was quite taken aback when I asked for card. ‘Card?’ he said. ‘Gosh, that really is unusual.’ And then he gave me an estimate: ‘For 150 invites, sir, that will be £6.2 million. Or you could go down to Prontaprint and have exactly the same thing for 12p.’ Right.

  The next problem is deciding on a dress code. What you’re supposed to do these days is dream up a snappy phrase such as ‘Dress to thrill’ or ‘Urban gothic’, but since none of our friends would have the first clue what any of this meant, I put ‘No corduroy’.

  With just two weeks to go I called a party organiser to help out with the event itself. ‘All we want,’ I explained, ‘is a bit of canvas to keep the wind off everyone’s vol-au-vents.’

  Well, it doesn’t work out like that because he sits you down and says that you really ought to have some kind of flooring. It’s only £170. So you say fine. And then he says that electricity might be a good idea, too. It’s only £170. Everything is only £170, so you end up ordering the lot.

  When the estimate came, I really was ill. ‘What would you like?’ asked my wife, seeing that this time I wasn’t faking. ‘Some fish fingers? A nourishing bowl of chicken soup? Where Eagles Dare?’ No. What I want is for everyone we’ve invited to come over all dead.

  It was not to be. With a week to go, only six had had the decency to say no and the next day, two changed their minds.

  Except, of course, we hadn’t heard a whisper from anyone who has ever appeared on television. It is a known fact that once you’ve been on the electric fish-tank, even if it’s just for a moment in a Dixons shop window, you lose the ability to reply to party invitations.

  So you’ve got the caterers asking how many they should cook for and you’re having to say they’d better get Jesus in the kitchen because it could be five or it could be five thousand.

  Then the guests start telephoning asking what they should wear instead of corduroy and where they can stay. Here’s a tip. When you’re looking for a hotel in Chipping Norton, you’re more likely to find out what’s good and what’s not by calling someone in Glasgow. People who live in Chipping Norton usually have no need of local hotels. And I don’t care what you wear. And yes, your ex-husband will be here. And no, I’m not going to tow you out of the paddock if it turns into a quagmire.

  You’ll probably have a miserable time but look at it this way. It’ll be much more miserable for me, and even more miserable for the poor old dear who lives next door. As the band wheeled in their speaker stacks, I called her to explain that there might be a bit of noise on Saturday night. ‘Oh I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘What is it? A dinner dance?’

  No, not really, it’s more a chance for all my wife’s wildly disparate groups of friends to come and not get on with each other.

  Sunday 10 June 2001

  How Big a Mistake are You Going to Make?

  Many years ago, when I was working as a local newspaper reporter, the editor sent me to cover the inquest of a miner who’d been squashed by an underground train.

  Hours into the interminable proceedings a solicitor acting for the National Coal Board told the court that the deceased ‘could’ have stood in an alcove as the train passed. And I wrote this down in my crummy shorthand.

  But unfortunately, when I came to write the story, I failed to transcribe the meaningless hieroglyphics properly. So what actually appeared in the paper was that the man ‘should’ have stood in an alcove as the train passed.

  Well, there was hell to pay. Damages were handed over. A prominent apology was run. The lawyer in question shouted at me. The family of the dead man shouted at me. The editor shouted at me. The proprietor shouted at me. I was given a formal written warning about my slapdash attitude. And here I am, twenty years later, with my own column in the Sunday Times.

  We hear similar stories from the City all the time. Some trader, dazzled by the stripes on his shirt, presses the wrong button on his keyboard and the stock market loses 10 per cent of its value. He gets a roasting and later in the year spends his seven-figure bonus on a six-bedroom house in Oxfordshire.

  So I feel desperately sorry for the Heathrow air traffic controller who was found last week to be guilty of negligence when he tried to land a British Airways 747 on top of a British Midland Airbus. He has been demoted and sent in eternal shame to wave table tennis bats at light aircraft in the Orkneys.

  The problem here is that we all make mistakes, but the result of these mistakes varies drastically depending on th
e environment in which we make them.

  When a supermarket checkout girl incorrectly identifies a piece of broccoli as cabbage and you are overcharged by 15p, nobody really cares.

  But what about the man who incorrectly identified a live bullet as blank, put it into the magazine of an SA-80 army rifle and heard later that a seventeen-year-old Royal Marine had been killed as a result?

  The inquest last week recorded a verdict of accidental death and now the dead soldier’s father is said to be considering a private prosecution and a civil action against the people responsible for his son’s death. I don’t blame him, of course. I would do the same. But the fact remains that as mistakes go, loading the wrong bullets into a magazine is exactly the same as loading the wrong information about broccoli into a checkout weighing machine.

  Think about the chap who was employed by P&O ferries to shut the front doors on the car ferry Herald of Free Enterprise. I have no doubt that he performed his badly paid, noisy, repetitive and unpleasant job with the utmost diligence until one day, for reasons that are not clear, he forgot.

  Now if he had been a warehouseman who forgot to shut the factory gates when he left for the night, there may well have been a burglary. And that may well have put a dent in the insurance company’s profit and loss account. But he wasn’t a warehouseman and, as a result of his momentary lapse, water rushed into the car deck and 90 seconds later the ship was on its side. And 193 people were dead.

  He was not drunk at the time. He did not leave the doors open to see what would happen. He just fell asleep.

  So what’s to be done? Well, you can employ the Health and Safety Executive to dream up the most foolproof system in the world, the sort of money-no-object set-up that I’m sure is employed at Heathrow. But the fact remains that all systems rely on human integrity to some extent and, if someone takes their eye off the ball for a moment, two jets with 500 people on board can get within 100 feet of one another.

  Or you could argue that people who hold the lives of others in their hands should be paid accordingly. But I don’t think the size of a person’s bank balance affects their ability to concentrate. I mean, His Tonyness is on £163,000 a year and he makes mistakes all the time.

  No. I’m afraid that fairly soon we are going to have to accept that a blame culture does not work. We are going to have to accept that doctors, no matter how much training you give them, will continue to stick needles into people’s eyes, rather than their bottoms. We are going to have to accept that, once in a while, Land Rovers will crash onto railway lines causing trains to crash into one another. We are going to have to stop penalising people for making that most human of gestures – a mistake.

  And the best way of doing this is to ban those ‘Injured at work?’ advertisements for solicitors on the backs of buses.

  So long as there’s an opportunity to profit from the simple, unintentional mistakes of others, then there will always be a desire to do so. To lash out. To blame. To turn some poor unfortunate soul who just happened to be in the wrong job on the wrong day into a human punchbag.

  Sunday 17 June 2001

  America, Twinned with the Fatherland

  Europe offers the discerning traveller a rich and varied tapestry of alternatives. You may go salmon fishing in lceland or sailing off Greece. You may get down and dirty on the French Riviera or high as a kite in Amsterdam. You can bop till you drop in Ibiza or cop a shop in London. And we haven’t even got to Italy yet.

  So why then do a significant number of Americans, having decided to take that vacation of a lifetime over here, always start the tour in Germany? Because Germany is to holidays what Delia Smith is to spot welding. Perhaps it’s because they’ve heard of it. Maybe they have a brother stationed at Wiesbaden or perhaps their father did some night flying over Hamburg back in 1941. Yes, I know that’s before America joined the war, but judging by the movie Pearl Harbor, they don’t.

  Or maybe in the brochures Germany somehow looks appealing to an American. I mean, both peoples tend to eat a little more than they should and both have a fondness for driving very large automobiles, extremely badly. Both countries also have absolutely hopeless television programmes where the hosts dress up in vivid jackets and shout meaningless instructions at the contestants. An American flicking through the 215 one-size-fits-all alternatives in his Stuttgart hotel room would feel right at home. Until he got to Channel 216, after midnight, and found a whole new use for a dog.

  Both countries enjoy the same British exports, too: Benny Hill, Mr Bean, Burberry mackintoshes. Then there’s the question of taste. Only two countries in the world would dream of teaming a tangerine bathroom suite with purple and brown carpets. And only two countries go around pretending to be democracies while burdening the people who live there with enough regulations and red tape to strangle everyone in China. Twice. In Germany, you must not brake for small dogs and you must have a licence before you can play golf. An American would nod sagely at that.

  So, it would appear that Germany and America are identical twins and now you may be nodding sagely, remembering that some 25 per cent of Americans are derived from German stock. Indeed, shortly after Independence, there was a vote in the Senate on whether the official language of the fledgling USA should be English or German.

  Whatever, a great many Americans spend vacation time in the Fatherland, including, just last week, a retired couple from Michigan called Wilbur and Myrtle. They packed their warm-weather gear into a selection of those suitcases that appear to be made from old office carpets, got their daughter Donna to drive them from the gated community they call home to Detroit airport, where they flew for their holiday to Cologne.

  Myrtle had packed some powdered milk because she’d caught a report about foot-and-mouth disease in Europe and figured she’d better stay safe. Wilbur was worried about catching KGB from beef that had been infected with BSM and vowed on the plane he’d stick to chicken. Both wondered if you could get chicken in Europe.

  I know this because I know the man who lent them a car. They liked him very much, not simply because he spoke such good English but also because, contrary to what they’d heard, he could stand on his hind legs. Myrtle asked whether they should go to Munich because an antiques fair was in town or if it was better to visit Frankfurt which, she’d heard, was the Venice of Germany. ‘Well,’ explained my friend, ‘there is a river in Frankfurt but it’s probably stretching things a little to think of it in the same terms as Venice.’

  Still undecided, they set off, and that should have been that. But just two hours later they were on the phone. It seems that they’d become a little confused and strayed into Holland, where they’d found a charming little cafe´ that did chicken.

  Unfortunately, however, while they were inside someone had broken the back window of their car and helped themselves to all their belongings: not only the Huguenot felt-tile suitcases but also their passports, driving licences and Wilbur’s wallet.

  Maybe the thief was a drug addict after his next fix. Or maybe he’d mistaken them for Germans and had taken everything in exchange for the theft of his father’s bicycle. Or perhaps he’d taken umbrage at their registration plate. All Cologne-registered cars this year begin with KUT, which is Dutch for the worst word in the world.

  Either way, poor old Wilbur and Myrtle were not having much luck with the police, either in Holland or Germany, to which they’d returned. They decided after just six hours in Europe that they’d had enough and were going to fly home. So they did.

  The problem is, of course, that while Germany may superficially have some things in common with America, it is not even remotely similar once you go beneath the surface. There’s no ‘have a nice day’ culture in Germany. The German does not care if you have a nice day because he is a European.

  I’m writing this now in a town called Zittau on the Polish border. I feel at home here.

  Sunday 24 June 2001

  Cornered by a German Mob Bent on Revenge

  So there I was
, cruising into town with the top down when, with the crackle of freshly lit kindling, my map hoisted itself out of the passenger side footwell and, having spent a moment wrapped round my face, blew away.

  Ordinarily this would not be a problem. I had the name of a bar where I could watch the Grand Prix and I even had its address. So I would simply pull over and ask someone for directions.

  Unfortunately, I was in Germany where, if someone doesn’t know exactly what you are looking for, they won’t tell you at all. To make matters worse, I was in the eastern part of the country where there are no people to ask anyway.

  I first noticed the problem in the achingly beautiful Saxony town of Zittau which, at 8.30 on a Friday night, was deserted. It was like a scene from On the Beach. Further up the autobahn in the city of Zwickow, Aida was playing at the opera house but there were no queues. The shops were full of expensive cutlery sets but there were no shoppers. There were car parks but no cars.

  The latest figures suggest that since the Berlin Wall came down, some towns have seen 65 per cent of the population migrate to the west in search of work. I do not believe this. If 65 per cent have gone, then 35 per cent must still be there. Which begs the question: where the bloody hell are they?

  West Germans are paying a special 7 per cent tax at the moment for a new infrastructure in the east. Chancellor Kohl promised this would last for three years but twelve years have elapsed and still the spending goes on.

  A recently leaked report from Wolfgang Thierse, the German parliamentary speaker, painted an apocalyptic picture of the east as a region on the verge of total collapse. We think we have problems with migration from the north of England to the south-east but ours are small fry and we are not hampered by having the lowest birth rate in the world.