Motorworld Page 7

  And a damn sight better than risking it on the street. If you get it wrong, and it’s easy in a country where you can’t even understand the writing, you will be clamped, which involves having a yellow tag fastened to your wing mirror.

  Astonishingly, the Japanese toddle off to the police station and pay to have it removed before driving off. Seriously, the shame of being seen with a yellow tag on your door mirror is enough of a deterrent. I told you it was odd over there.

  If you’ve parked really seriously, a tow-truck takes your car to the other side of the city and traffic wardens write in chalk on the road where it is and how you can get it back. If it rains and the chalk gets washed away, tough.

  This is how bored we’d become in our jam. We were actually talking about parking regulations.

  But you can’t be classed as truly bored until you move onto the subject of psychology.

  Ten minutes later, I asked our chauffeur about Japanese psychology. Why don’t they riot? Why don’t they burn down parliament buildings? Surely, they could do a bit of raping and pillaging. I mean this place is a wart on the backside of the planet.

  It seems the Japanese motorist lets off steam by joining the Midnight Club. These guys won’t let you in unless your car can do at least 300 kph, but if you can prove that it does, you meet up at a service station, late at night when the roads are busy rather than jammed, and you race.

  It’s awesome: the Porsche 911 turbo has always been king of the hill but now the Nissan Skyline GTR has become a firm favourite. But don’t think for a minute these are standard cars — they’re not. One guy is reported to have spent a million quid hand-building a 911 which could do 354 kph.

  But if you think these people are idiots, I can only assume you’ve never met a drifter. Mostly young, they’re rich(ish) kids who, on a Saturday night, take their Nissan 200s along the intestinal road up Mount Tschuba. Fast. Very fast.

  It’s quite well organised so that beginners operate on the lower, less-demanding part of the road, intermediates are allowed halfway up and the experts are at the top.

  The idea is that you drive along, trying to ensure that the rear wheels of the car are never in line with those at the front. You see how far you can go in an oversteer slide.

  I have to tell you that some of them are very, very good, but when the car is on the ragged edge of its performance envelope, things can go wrong, especially when you remember this is a public road that isn’t closed. They say no one has been killed, but then Japan also says it wasn’t to blame for the Second World War.

  Strangely, the police don’t ever go up the mountain, believing that if the kids are all there, they’re not anywhere else.

  But they do stop cars which are obviously set up for drifting, if they catch them out and about in Tokyo during the week. A drifter’s car, by the way, is noticeable by the lack of a rear seat, which has been replaced with a selection of spare wheels and tyres.

  One young guy, if stopped by the police, simply says that he is a welder who likes to practise on his own car. And they believe him.

  We managed to talk about the rights and wrongs of drifting for at least an hour, without turning a wheel. And then we messed around with the in-car entertainment console which lets you learn English and even plays blackjack.

  Then we played ‘I spy’ but after ‘c’ and ‘r’ we were stuck. We even listened to the radio but it was just like the television, only without pictures. This is the only country in the world that never seems to play any Phil Collins hits.

  Eventually — I think it was four days later — we were getting nearer the hotel and I spotted an overhead gantry with some lights. A new thing to talk about. We set about it with vigour.

  It seems that all of Tokyo’s major routes are monitored by cameras whose pictures are fed back to a central control centre, which looks just like wartime bomber command. The people there pass this information about hold-ups to the motorist through the overhead gantries, each of which, I learned, is a giant map of Tokyo.

  The idea is that when traffic slows to less than twenty or so on a particular road, it is depicted as an orange route. When traffic is stopped, it becomes red.

  It’s a fantastic idea this, but it doesn’t work because every single road is red all the time.

  The boards can even tell you how long it will take to get from wherever you are to various points around the city. We were a couple of miles from our hotel but that, according to our board, would take three hours. And it was bang-on right.

  It even knew about the roadworks. Now, if there is one aspect of Japanese life that should be brought to Britain — and there is only one — it’s their ability to fix a road.

  You can forget all about miles of cones which have been erected to protect an upturned wheelbarrow. Over there, an army, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Iwo Jima, descends on the area and stands in serried ranks while the chief reads out instructions.

  They are then dispatched and what we saw next defied belief. In five minutes, the afflicted section of road was cordoned off by a line of cones and a bank of lights that would have shamed Pink Floyd.

  Men in reflective vests waved batons around to direct motorists, but these were no ordinary batons because you could write messages in the night sky with them. They were astonishing.

  I was mesmerised for at least five minutes, by which time the army had done the road work and was taking the cones and the lights down. Ten minutes later, there was no evidence that they’d ever been there, that they’d staged a full-scale reconstruction of the closing scene from Close Encounters.

  We talked about that all the way back to our hotel, where we arrived at a cool 10.00 p.m.

  Ordinarily, we like to shoot four usable minutes of film in a day but in Japan, we’d managed about 30 seconds — half a minute of television for eight hours in a jam.

  Another secret about Motorworld. The crew gets on well. We go out a lot in the evening and drink. We eat well. We have a good time. But in Japan, night after night, we finished work, went back to our rooms and went to sleep. I even had notches on my bed counting down to the day when we could leave.

  We couldn’t be bothered to go out because it was too much effort in a country that offers no rewards.

  The car is finished there but that’s only one of a hundred reasons why I shall never go back.

  Switzerland

  Your dinner party is a bit lacklustre and you’ve noticed the guests have started to glance at their watches, so simply lean forwards and ask this question: if you had to shoot just one person, who would it be? The next thing you know, they’ll have drunk all your best port and, outside, the birds will be singing. And the debate will still be raging.

  Mark Thatcher is always up there as a hot favourite but Jeffrey Archer is never far behind. More earnest people go for obscure Serbian leaders or Third World dictators and Tony Blair usually gets a mention too, from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I always go for Colin Welland, but can rarely find support on that one.

  The game has become so prolonged that we’ve now introduced a new twist. Given a nuclear device, where would you set it off?

  This isn’t quite so successful because after just an hour, everyone is usually in full agreement. Japan always starts out as the obvious choice but they’ve had two already so it hardly seems fair to give them a third. Essex always provides some healthy debate too, as do France and Sydney, but it never takes long for someone to sit bolt upright and say ‘Switzerland’.

  That’s followed by a pause as everyone weighs up the pros and cons and then, usually, everyone starts to nod. Yes, Switzerland, and not only because this is the only country on earth where everyone has a fallout shelter under their stairs.

  It’s strange, this, because on paper, Switzerland has so much in its favour: breathtaking scenery, proper skiing, clean food, nice clocks and, to cap it all, we’ve never had a war with them. Well, they’ve never had a war with anyone, actually.

  I
think the big problem is jealousy. I mean, here we have a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, a country with negligible unemployment and a country that’s had the good sense thus far to stay out of the EC and which, as a result, has made its inhabitants rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

  Here’s a country with decent services, trains that run on time, bank accounts that are out of bounds to spying tax authorities, pretty lakes and a reputation for fair play. It’s no accident that the Red Cross’s emblem is a reverse of the Swiss flag.

  It’s a nice place but that’s nothing to be proud of. I know lots of nice people; liberal, kind-hearted souls who help old ladies across the street and who never have a bad word for anyone. But without exception, they are dull. These are people who can put someone to sleep just by saying hello.

  Their life is spent trying to arrange their facial expressions to match the moment, and they end up with no expression at all. And they’re so desperate to avoid causing offence, they never say anything even remotely interesting either.

  It’s the same story with Switzerland. Britain has given the world jet engines, concentration camps, hovercrafts, television, skiing as a sport, telephones and football hooligans.

  The Swiss haven’t even got round to inventing their own language, preferring instead to butcher that most ridiculous of tongues — German.

  The national pastime out there defies belief. Millions of them have taken to collecting the foil tops from UHT-milk cartons. You can see hundreds of full-grown men rummaging around in bins, looking for something unusual to add to their collections.

  The shops are full of rarer examples which sell for seven quid a go and the personal ads in the back of newspapers are stuffed full of swapsies. This is for real. The rest of the world is on roller skates and the Swiss are at home, sticking milk-carton tops in photograph albums.

  I first became aware of a problem back in the mid eighties when I found myself with an hour or two to kill at Zurich airport, which was closed because of snow. It’s good to see, I thought, that even the most efficient country on earth can screw up sometimes.

  And then I started to think more carefully about that efficiency as I strolled round the duty-free shops, smoking. Before I’d even lit the cigarette, I found myself being shadowed by a small man with an overall and a long-handled dustpan and brush. And each time I flicked the ash he was there, sweeping it up, keeping everything nice ’n’ shiny.

  A few years later, I was on a skiing holiday in Zermatt, trying to squeeze inside one of the ridiculous milk floats they call taxis. There was a sign saying it was a six-seater but there was no way my left leg, complete with its ski boot, would get inside and this infuriated the driver. The brochure had said it could seat six, and he was damn well going to get six people inside, so he set about my errant leg, kicking it until the door would shut.

  This is not what you’d expect from a people whose country plays host to the Red Cross, UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the World Council of Churches and 150 other outfits dedicated to saving lives, not kicking people and having large, flash offices on the shore of Lake Geneva.

  But this is only one side to Switzerland. You must not lose sight of the fact that every single male aged between 20 and 42 must spend at least two weeks a year in the army. Some spend more and some, those who’ve been clever enough to lose a limb in a farming accident, are let off, but here we have a fighting force with 400,000 men.

  Who get to keep their guns at home. Officially, there are two million licensed weapons in Switzerland but everyone knows the real figure is closer to eight million — not bad for a country that only has six million people.

  Everyone also knows that Switzerland is where the world’s terrorists come with a shopping list, and I know why. In my short stay, I was offered a brand-new Kalashnikov with a thousand rounds of ammunition for £300.

  A thousand pounds would have secured the latest piece of laser-sighted hardware from America, or maybe a grenade launcher, complete with instructions on how to get it into Britain.

  It is by no means uncommon in Switzerland to see someone walking through the woods with an AK47 slung over one shoulder, but interestingly, only 80 people died violently in 1994 — and a big chunk of those were suicides. The American gun lobby should use Switzerland as proof positive that guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

  And the Swiss will kill anyone who tries to take their country by force. Contrary to popular myth, they do have a navy which patrols the lakes, but there are less obvious signs, too. Look carefully at the entrance to various tunnels and you’ll see camouflaged gun emplacements. Peer under some of the graceful motorway bridges and you’ll notice they’ve been mined, ready to be blown up at a moment’s notice.

  There’s more. The motorways have been designed to double up as makeshift runways in a time of war and you’re never left in much doubt about the sort of air power Switzerland can muster.

  Go hiking in the mountains and you’ll find valleys full of warplanes waiting for the Germans to get bolshy again. And then there are level crossings for jets.

  These look just like train-type level crossings but the barriers come down to let Mirage fighters take off. It seems that as planes have needed longer and longer runways, they’ve been extended irrespective of what was in the way.

  But what are the Swiss so worried about, for heaven’s sake? I mean, taking the place is a tactical nightmare thanks to all those mountains and what do you end up with if you win? Which you won’t. Some meadows and a cuckoo-clock factory.

  Hitler couldn’t even be bothered, though it is said this was because all his wealth was stored there. He even joked about the place, saying that when his armies had conquered Europe, he would take Switzerland with the Berlin fire brigade.

  This, of course, was not possible, because you are not allowed to take Switzerland with a fire brigade.

  It’s one of many, many things you are not allowed to do in Switzerland, like wash your car on a Sunday, or hang your washing outside or run over a pigeon.

  This must be the only country in the world where they have a special sign which is made at great expense and hung up throughout city centres, advising passers-by that roller-skating is not allowed.

  I could fill the rest of this chapter with rules that would curl your hair and straighten your pubes but instead, we’ll just concentrate on what Switzerland is doing to make life a misery for the motorist.

  In some places, like Zermatt, they have simply banned the car altogether and replaced it with a weird collection of electrically powered boxes on wheels. These sneak up and down the nauseatingly quiet main street, running over everyone who didn’t hear them coming.

  But don’t worry. They can’t go quickly because there are still speed bumps all over the place. Do worry, however, if you need an ambulance and they roll up with something from the set of The Clangers to take you to hospital.

  You get the impression they’d like to ban cars all over Switzerland but even the greenest politician out there knows this is not really on. So they’ve instigated a policy of gentle persuasion instead.

  Ten years ago, they spent an absolute fortune widening roads and building huge intersections so that traffic could move smoothly and efficiently in a country that prides itself on such things.

  But now they’re digging up the new lanes and making the intersections deliberately complicated. In towns, they are letting people in mental hospitals design the oneway systems so that they are useless and parking spaces are being cut.

  This would be enough to drive every motorist to despair but to rub it in, they have gone bus-lane crazy. In Geneva particularly, they’ve crammed cars into inch-wide slots on the boulevards and avenues, allowing buses and cyclists enough space to drive around sideways.

  This is costing a fortune. Quite apart from the cost of digging up roads, and making new and ever more elaborate signs, they are pumping billions into the public transport network
to make it more and more attractive.

  But here’s the thing. There are 1750 different banks in Switzerland, and all of them are run and staffed by fat bankers who have facial topiary and large Mercedes. And frankly, they are hardly likely to give up Strauss on the stereo and air conditioning in favour of a hot tram.

  So they continue to drive to work, even though they don’t understand the new road layout, can’t park when they get there and will be fined thousands of francs should they be unfortunate enough to run over a pigeon.

  The motorist in Switzerland is down on the ground with a broken nose and two cracked ribs but still the government stands over him in hobnailed boots shouting, ‘Had enough, bastard? Had enough?’

  Their latest game is to ban all noisy cars and motorbikes, which is no bad thing if the limits were set by sensible human beings. But in Switzerland, they’re so draconian that the TVR Griffith is outlawed. Furthermore, cars with automatic gearboxes have to be two decibels quieter than those with manual shifters. No one knows why, and every car manufacturer I spoke to says the only way to achieve this is to make manual cars deliberately noisier.

  Then there are the fines. Drive too fast and they’ll take your house and sell your children into slavery. They really are quite open about this — the Swiss government is proud of its stand against the car.

  And the Swiss people are right behind them. I know we’re talking here about a people who will report their next-door neighbours for parking illegally, but when they had a referendum on the speeding issue they actually voted for lower limits on the motorway. Then they voted again for higher petrol prices.

  This is not because they’re sick, or congenitally deformed; it’s because they’re frightened.

  In the 1930s, Europe was under the spell of fascism, which was defeated. In the 1960s, there was the ever-present threat of communism but once again, the horror has gone away.