The World According to Clarkson Read online

  In the year before unification 220,000 babies were born in East Germany. Last year just 79,000 births were recorded.

  They are pumping billions into the former GDR so that everything over there is either freshly restored or new. The lavatories flush with a Niagara vigour. Your mobile phone works everywhere. The roads are as smooth as a computer screen. But it’s like buying a new suit for someone who is dead.

  And that brings me back to Sonderhausen on that boiling Sunday, when I had twenty minutes to find the bar before the German Grand Prix began.

  With nothing but the sun for guidance, I just made it and in my rush failed to notice that the bar was located in the worst place in the world. It was a quadrangle of jerry-built communism; a faceless ten-storey, four-sided slab of misery and desolation. And there, in the middle of it all, was the Osterthal Gastshalle.

  I have drunk at roughneck bars in Flint, Michigan, and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. I am no stranger to the sort of places where the optics are rusty and the chairs are weapons. But the Osterthal was something else. The only light came from a brewery sign above the bar and a fruit machine in the corner. But this was enough to note that there were eight people in there, none of whom had any teeth.

  But, I said to myself, this is okay. This is a mining town. I’m from a mining town. I know that in mining towns you don’t ask for a glass of chilled Chablis. So I ordered a beer and settled back to watch the race.

  It did not last long. Pretty soon one of the toothless wonders sauntered over and offered the international hand of friendship. A cigarette. Except it wasn’t a cigarette. It was called a Cabinet and it was like smoking liquid fire. ‘Is good yah?’ said the man, helping himself to fistfuls of my Marlboros.

  Then things grew a little serious. Could I, he asked, explain what was written on the television screen? It’s just that despite the much-vaunted school system in the old GDR, he couldn’t read. But he could speak English, providing we stuck to old Doors lyrics.

  Have you ever tried this: commentating on a motor race using nothing but the words of Jim Morrison? It’s difficult. ‘Heinz-Harald Frentzen. This is the end. You’ll never look into his eyes again.’ By lap 50 I was struggling badly and, to make matters worse, they had each consumed 150 litres of beer and were ready for a good fight.

  Ordinarily, I guess, they would ram each other’s heads into the fruit machine but today they had a much better target: me, the western git. A living, breathing example of the faceless capitalistic machine that had moved into their town, bought the mine, asset-stripped it and shut it down.

  They had lost their jobs, the free kindergarten places for their children and most of their friends. In exchange they had got a new sewage system. Now I was facing a simple choice: watch the end of the race or get my head kicked in.

  What these people want, more than anything, is to have the Berlin Wall back. What I want, more than anything, is to know who won the Grand Prix.

  Sunday 1 July 2001

  Wising Up to the EU After My Tussles in Brussels

  Ordinarily I don’t talk about the European Union. But when you are in Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the capital of Europe, it’s hard to stay off the subject for long.

  Yesterday I settled down in an agreeable square with a charming and erudite Irish girl who has lived here for four years. We spent four seconds on the prettiness of Bruges, eleven seconds talking about Jean-Claude Van Damme and then I could contain myself no longer.

  ‘What exactly,’ I demanded brusquely, ‘has the EU done for me?’

  I’m sorry, but the night before I had arrived at the Presidents Hotel behind two coachloads of tourists who could neither read nor understand the fantastically enquiring registration cards. It’s interesting, isn’t it: you don’t need a passport to enter Belgium, but you do need a passport number before they will let you stay the night.

  Still, it was only a small wait of two hours before I was issued with a key to what was basically a double-bedded blast furnace. Immediately, I knew this hotel was designed and run entirely for the benefit of visiting Americans, a people who seem unable to cope unless a room is either hot enough to boil a fox or cold enough to freeze nitrogen.

  By 1 a.m. I had dragged my pillow into the minibar and was trying desperately to get some sleep when the man next door decided what he’d like to do most of all was to play squash. So he did. For about an hour.

  Having worked up a sweat, he then decided that what he needed was a nice long shower. So he did that for an hour, too. Then he figured it would be a good time to call the folks back home in lowa. Although why he used the phone I am not entirely sure.

  ‘Hey Todd,’ he yelled, ‘it’s Chuck. Listen how loud I can make my TV go.’ I haven’t had the chance to check yet but I feel fairly sure that if you look in The Guinness Book of Records to see who has the loudest voice in the world, you will find it’s good old Chuck. And boy, does he have a lot of friends. So many that by the time he had finished calling them all, it was time for another game of squash. Eventually, I had to call reception to ask if they would ring the man and ask him to go to sleep. I heard him pick up the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ he bellowed. ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then he put the phone down, knocked on my door and whispered at the sort of level that can splinter wood: ‘Sorry, buddy.’ Then the sun rose and in the same way that it always seems to find the crack between the sun visors in your car, it found the crack in my curtains and bored a line of pure, superheated radiation straight into my left retina, so I had to get out of the minibar and back into the Aga that was my bed.

  Understandably then, the next day I was not in the mood for small talk about Jean-Claude Van bloody Damme. ‘Come on, ’I persisted. ‘What has theEU ever done for me?’

  My companion, a fervent Europhile, explained that she would not have been able to go to an Irish university because she had been educated in England and, as a result, could not speak Irish. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s very wonderful but how does it help me?’

  She had to agree it didn’t but, unfazed, went on to explain that because of the EU leather shoes must now sport an EU-approved symbol showing they are made of leather.

  Hmmm. I’m not sure that this, on its own, is quite enough to justify the two-centre, three-tier government with its staff of 35,000 people, especially as most of us are clever enough to recognise the difference between something that came from the bottom of a cow and something that came from the bottom of a Saudi oil well. ‘No,’ I said. ‘This leather thing is going nowhere. You must do better.’

  She told me that because of the EU designer clothes were now cheaper in the UK, but since I’m not big on Prada I don’t care. Then she said that were it not for the council of ministers there would be more air pollution. Wrong subject, I’m afraid. Twenty minutes later, after I had finished explaining precisely how little damage is being done to the world by man and his machines, she moved on.

  Apparently, if I go to a country where no British embassy is operating (neither of us could think of one) and got myself arrested for drug smuggling, I could call for help from any EU member state which was operating a mission there.

  So, if you get banged up in Kabul for producing heroin – and this, believe me, is very unlikely – and it turns out that the Foreign Office has been forced out for some reason, you can go to the Swedes.

  And that, after an hour of soul-searching, was all she could come up with. Cheap, bureaucratic leather shoes and help from the Vikings if things go pear-shaped in some Third World hellhole.

  That night I checked into a hotel where the chambermaids were hosting a 24-hour Hoover race. My room was on a tricky little corner where most of them crashed into the skirting board.

  This, I suspect, is why the EU doesn’t really work. None of the people who run it is getting any sleep.

  Sunday 8 July 2001

  A Weekend in Paris, the City of Daylight Robbery

  Last Sunday a Connex Third World commuter train broke down, due to t
he wrong type of government, just outside Sevenoaks in Kent. This forced both inbound and outbound Eurostar trains onto a single track, causing delays of up to five hours.

  Predictably, the passengers were said to be ‘disgusted’. Those in cattle class said that all they’d been offered was a free glass of water, while those in first class said they couldn’t get any sleep because the carriage doors made too much noise.

  It all sounds very grim. And very strange. Because I was on one of the trains and I never even noticed there was a problem. Sure, we left Waterloo at a brisk saunter and rattled past Sevenoaks at a stately crawl but this is what I’d been expecting. Time and again we are told that Eurostar doesn’t work and that the tunnel is full of rabies and German tanks.

  That’s why I’ve always chosen to go to Paris in a car, in a plane, on a boat; on my hands and knees if necessary. Anything rather than the train which could give me a disease and catch fire 20,000 feet beneath Dogger Bank.

  However, let’s just stop and think for a moment. It is never reported that every motorist driving to Paris is stopped by the constabulary and made to stand naked in a freezing cell while they raid his pension plan to pay for the inevitable speeding fine. Nor do you ever read about flights being diverted to Bournemouth due to the wrong type of air.

  This happened to me last autumn. My car was at Gatwick. I had landed at Hurn. So what did I do? Get on a train and go straight to London, or get on a bus for a three-hour trip round the M25 so I could be reunited with my wheels? The answer, as far as I know, is still parked at Gatwick in car park G, row 5.

  The result is that last Sunday I chose to go to Paris on Eurostar. The first-class ticket cost me FFr2,000 so it’s more expensive than flying. But from the centre of London to the centre of Paris it is ten minutes faster than going in a Boeing.

  You can smoke, too, so who cares that the carriage doors open as though they’ve been blown apart with Semtex and that the clanky drinks trolleys have square wheels?

  However, I’m not sure that Paris was the right destination. It’s funny, isn’t it, that Haussmann’s low-rise, starburst city of lurve is always first choice for a romantic weekend break and yet, when you stand back for a moment, you have to wonder why.

  Obviously, the metropolitan pomp is extraordinary and the whole place does give good fountain, but in recent years it has become dirty, down-at-heel, more rude than ever and yet somehow less interesting. On the dark and broody Left Bank, left-wing Jean-Paul Sartre types have been driven away by high rents and the aristocracy has retired to its clubs on Rue St Honoré.

  You are left with a vast and chewy middle class and at this time of year even that is busy sunning itself on the beaches of Biarritz. Paris is therefore like the elephant house without the elephants. It’s bereft of anything. Except perhaps a sense of menace; a sense that, really, you should put your wallet down the front of your underpants.

  It’s not as bad as Detroit, obviously, where you wouldn’t get 30 yards before someone put a hole in your head so they might steal your toenails. Or Puerto Rico where the hotel guards said it would be best if I stayed at the bar. But it’s bad all right. At night, Paris has eyes.

  Carjacking, for so long the preserve of Muscovite gangsters and urban Durbanites, is now an everyday occurrence. Elsewhere in Europe the weapons of the needy are a sponge and a bucket of water, but at the traffic lights in France it’s a pistol and an instruction to get out.

  The French, displaying a Latin leaning to the right, blame immigration, saying Paris was fine before it was swamped with half of Macedonia. But the fact is that I felt tempted to steal something the first time I sat down at a pavement café and ordered a couple of beers.

  This was in Montparnasse, which is nothing special, and yet the bill was ruinously preposterous. I paid ten bleeding quid for two poxy 1664s and half a dozen olives. Then there was my laundry bill in the hotel: £180. It would have been cheaper to buy a washing machine.

  And we haven’t even got to the food which, I was assured, would restore my faith. Even the worst-looking dive, they said, would conjure up a taste sensation. Everyone in France, apparently, is born to cook.

  No, they’re not. The first time I ate out I was struck, for the first time ever, with loose stool syndrome; the second, my lobster had been nuked (they probably got it from Mururoa atoll); and the third, I got a plate of what tasted like a smoked inner tube.

  So, all I can say is that if you’re looking for a dirty weekend of rumpy pumpy, forget Paris. They’ll nick your condoms. And make you eat them later. At £500 a pop.

  What I would do is get on the train and do what you always want to do on the plane – turn left. That way, you’ll end up in Bruges where you can walk round quite safely in a hat made of money, gorge yourself silly on pig’s trotter sausage and have a very, very nice time.

  Sunday 15 July 2001

  It’s a Work of Art, and It was Built on Our Backs

  I suppose that in the world of jet travel we have all seen some noteworthy modern architecture. The arch at La De´fense in Paris. The new Reichstag building in Berlin. The Transamerica Tower in San Francisco. And yes, even the Millennium Dome.

  But no matter what you’ve seen or where you’ve been, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is enough to blow your underwear clean into next week. Some say this vast, curling edifice resembles a ship; others say it’s a big steel fish; while those of an architectural bent argue that it echoes Bilbao’s maritime past while drawing on the town’s more recent flirtation with heavy industry.

  The truth, however, is that it sits in the city like the Taj Mahal would sit in Barnsley, dominating the sightlines and your thought processes with equal aplomb. It’s there at the end of every street, and when it isn’t it’s etched on your mind.

  You can be halfway through a bowl of paella half a mile away and you are drawn, as if by some invisible force, to get up from your table for yet another look. It’s the aurora borealis. It’s a moonlight rainbow. It’s a meteor shower and a tornado and the most magnificent African sunset all rolled into one. It is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. And I have seen Kristin Scott Thomas in the nude. So, obviously, I had to go inside.

  On the top floor was an exhibition of frocks by Giorgio Armani which, I’m told, was a runaway success when it was shown at the Guggenheim in NewYork recently. This, of course, means nothing because Americans will turn up in great numbers to watch a tractor move.

  Unfortunately I can get excited by a frock only when there is someone in it so I went to the middle floor, where there was a display of television sets. But since I’ve seen this sort of thing in Dixons, I carried on going to the ground floor, where there was a large queue to go in a triangular maze.

  This is always going to be a problem with buildings of this nature, whether they be the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Dome. What the hell can you put inside that is going to be more astonishing than the building itself?

  The most successful exhibition ever staged in Bilbao was a motorcycle show. But then bikers tend not to be terribly interested in aesthetics. Most would walk over a lake of Renaissance art if there was a Harley-Davidson on the other side. I, on the other hand, was glad to be back outside again, to sit in a bar and gawp at this disjointed tower of titanium and golden limestone.

  I knew that three architects had been invited to pitch for its design. Each was paid $10,000 and allowed three weeks and one site visit to come up with something. And I knew that the contract had been awarded to a Canadian called Frank Gehry. But who on earth paid for it?

  The Guggenheims made a fortune from mining, but then they lost a big chunk of it when the South American mines they owned were nationalised.

  Today the family is still a huge patron of the arts but it likes a bit of public money as well. And it got public money in Bilbao to the tune of $100 million.

  And that begs another question. How can Bilbao, which is one of the greyest, most unfortunate and ugly towns in the whole world, possibly have come up with
$100 million for a museum? Towns of this nature in Britain can’t even afford to empty a dustbin let alone build a modern-day version of Westminster Abbey down by the river front.

  This being Spain, answers are not easy to come by. Everyone has a recorded telephone message saying that they’re at lunch and will be back some time in September. If by some miracle you do find someone who is at their desk, they say they can’t be bothered to find out.

  So let’s consider the facts. Bilbao is a Basque town and the money was raised by the PNV, a Basque nationalist party. That’s fine, but what is the PNV doing with access to $100 million?

  Idon’t know – but I do know this: in 1999, and that’s the most recent year for which figures are available, it cost the British taxpayer £3.5 billion to be a member of the European Union. That equates to £60 for every man, woman and child. And that sum, plus a bit more, went to Spain to help with the modernisation programme.

  Well now, Spain already is modern. Dentists use electricity. The hedges are neat and low-voltage lighting has replaced that halo of the Third World – the fluorescent tube. Sure, they may tell you that they’ve ‘only’ been a democracy for 25 years. But 25 years is a long time. Nobody ever says that he has ‘only’ been married for 25 years.

  What are they doing with all the cash? Well, I can’t find a link but it may well be that, actually, you and I paid for the Guggenheim. And that makes it as British as Gibraltar.

  The Dome may have been an unmitigated disaster but it seems that, unwittingly, we’ve managed to create the greatest building the world has ever seen. Go there, but for two reasons don’t go inside. One: it’s not worth it; and two: they’ll charge you, even though you’ve paid already.

  Sunday 22 July 2001

  They Speak the Language of Death in Basque Country

  By the time you read this I’ll be in Menorca, you’ll be in Turkey, your neighbours will be in Florida and a man in a mask will be in your sitting room, helping himself to your television set.