And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (12 page)

Sunday 5 September 2004

Yesterday I spent the afternoon pretty much naked, in a darkened room, while an attractive blonde applied lashings of warm lubricating jelly to most of my soft underbelly. Sounds like fun. But unfortunately this was an ultrasound test, part of my fourth medical so far this year.

I have been sucked dry, pumped up, bent double and asked a range of questions so impertinent that even Paxman would blanch. I’ve been probed, hit, tickled, smeared and X-rayed, and I’ve forgotten what it’s like to pee in a lavatory. These days, I only ever relieve myself into small plastic vials.

The problem is that insurance companies like to be absolutely sure you’re not at death’s door before providing cover. Which, surely, is a bit like asking to see the dealer’s cards before making a bet.

To make matters worse, insurance is far from the only reason why you need a medical. You need one for an HGV licence, or a mortgage, or a job. And every single organisation insists that you undergo its bespoke check-up.

Things are so stupid that my local practice employs someone who spends half her working week dealing with nothing but people who want to borrow five grand for a kitchen extension. And she can’t even do that properly,
thanks to me. Because I have so many contracts with so many people, and because I’m forever climbing into jet fighters, I have become The World’s Most Checked Man. As such, I am a leading expert on medicals.

When I went away to school, the doctor held my testicles and asked me to cough. He could have established my reflexes were fine by tapping my knees gently with a small rounders bat, but hey, this was a public school, so into the pants he plunged.

Would that it were that simple these days. Today, the first question you’re always asked is, ‘Have you got Aids?’ Well unless you can catch it from slobbing in front of the television, or going to Cotswolds dinner parties, I very much doubt it.

The second question you’re asked is whether you’re partial to a bit of same-sex heroin. Can we just get one thing clear. I know there are no Conservative voters in the media, but there are several heterosexuals and I’m one of them. And no, I’ve never slept with an East African prostitute, and the only hypodermic needle I’ve seen all week is the one you’re about to plunge into my arm to check I’m not lying.

The fact that I smoke 60 cigarettes a day and drive like a maniac for a living doesn’t seem to bother them. Not until you get to page 442 on the form.

When they’re absolutely convinced that you’re not a Glaswegian smacked-up rent boy with a girlfriend in Nairobi, they move on to check your blood pressure. Mine is 100/60, same as it was last week, when the Norwich Union asked the same damn thing.

Then you pee in another jar, and then you sit back as
the nurse hunts around for the tiny bit of blood you have left after the Scottish Widows had their fill the previous month. After all the blood tests this year, I couldn’t even be a donor for an injured field mouse. Small wonder the pressure’s so low: I’m empty.

After my fluids have been checked, the doctor normally sticks his whole head in my bottom. Well, that’s what it feels like. ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh,’ I normally say, until he comes out again to explain that it was only his finger.

Soon, you will be led to the scales which, in doctors’ surgeries, are always set to over-read. I am 15 stone, minus a few pounds for all the blood and urine that’s been extracted. But in a doctor’s surgery, I weigh about the same as the Flying Scotsman. This, to an insurance company, is a good thing. Whoever heard of a fat heroin-user? And what’s more, fat people are
ipso facto
unattractive, which means they’re less likely to be having much in the way of man-on-man action.

At the end of the session, by which time everyone in the waiting room has died from whatever it was that brought them there in the first place, you will be asked for the medical history of your entire family, back to the middle of the eighteenth century.

Why? Even after the doctor has hit you in the elbow with his hammer and asked you to read his wall, he will still not know if there are tumours the size of conkers dangling from your brain, but the form will be completed anyway.

And you’ll be on your way to a new conservatory.

It’s all a complete waste of time, and I haven’t finished yet because at some point in the procedure, the GP is
bound to uncover something that warrants further investigation. This will mean a trip to the hospital where you will get lost.

I did, and that’s how I came to be lying in a darkened room, with a pretty blonde smearing me with KY Jelly. She then ran her ultrasound detector all over my belly, before turning on the light and giving me the good news. I’m not pregnant.

Sunday 12 September 2004

A new type of training shoe was introduced this week. It is grey, made in Vietnam and costs £39.50. Or £79 if you want one for the other foot as well.

In a world of Nike Motion Control Air Sprung Hi-Loaders, you might expect this rather dour and expensive new product to be a commercial flop. But, because the shoe was tested by someone’s mate in the forces, it’s being sold with an army insignia on the box. That makes it a ‘British Army’ training shoe, and that gives it an appeal Nike can only dream about.

Branding has now reached the point where the product doesn’t matter; only the logo. Already you can avail yourself of a JCB cardigan and pop down to the off-licence for a litre of Kalashnikov vodka – guaranteed to blow your head clean off. And how long will it be before Cadbury gets into romantic fiction, and Louis Vuitton into cars?

Even the dullest and most useless products are enlivened by the right name. A hotel, for instance, can raise its prices if it provides Gilchrist & Soames shampoo in its bathrooms. Who are Gilchrist & Soames? God knows, but the handle has a nanny-knows-best ring to it. There’s a sense that it’ll bring a well-scrubbed gleam to your secret gentlemen’s places.

I have no problem with this. If I’m in a shop, faced
with a choice of two cardigans that seem similar, I’ll go for the JCB option because there’s a subliminal assumption that Anthony Bamford has personally inspected the sheep from which the wool came and his wife, Carole, has done the knitting. For sure there’s a suggestion that the company wouldn’t waste 50 years of hard graft by sticking its badge on rubbish.

A prestigious badge gives clueless shoppers a sense of well-being, a sense that their money is not being wasted on tat.

The perfect life, then: suit by Knight, Frank & Rutley, mobile phone by Boeing, car by Bausch & Lomb, furniture by Holland & Holland, kitchen utensils by Mercedes-Benz, children by Uma Thurman, armpit hair by the mysterious Gilchrist & Soames and, best of all, shoes by the British Army.

This is the first time the service has endorsed a commercial product and there’s no doubt it’s entering a minefield. Colonel Robert Clifford, head of the Queen’s Own Light Sponsorship Brigade, said this week: ‘We need to be exceptionally careful about what we link ourselves to.’ Too right, matey.

You could probably get away with a ‘British Army’-branded Land Rover or some green ‘British Army’ binoculars – the Swiss Army has sponsored penknives for years. I think ‘British Army’ lager might be worth a go, too.

But I don’t think ‘army’ meat pies or ‘army’ haircuts would go down well. Also, I probably wouldn’t want to spend time on an ‘army’ holiday. It might have worked 100 years ago when they were in Ceylon and half the
Caribbean, but today they only go to Belfast, Belize or Basra.

This leaves us with a problem.

The small income that could be generated from Land Rovers, binoculars and lager would in no way compensate for the inevitable outcry that such a scheme would provoke.

However, what if the deal were to work the other way around? Instead of the army sponsoring commercial products, why not get the makers of those products to sponsor the army?

Everyone looks up when an Apache gunship heaves into view, so why not sell advertising space along its flanks? Obviously, in times of war you’d have to cover up the Pepsi logos because they’re a bit bright, but in peacetime, why not?

All the forces could join in. We could have easy-Destroyers and
Lastminute.com
transport planes. Marlboro, I’m sure, would cough up for the already Red Arrows, and local firms could get in on the act, too, sponsoring individual soldiers. Sergeant Brian Griffiths is brought to you by Cartwright & Jones – family butchers since 1897.

It’s all very well saying this is a ludicrous plan, but what would you rather have? HMS
Persil
or no warship at all? Because soon that might very well be the choice we face. And let’s not trot out the tired old argument that sponsorship would undermine the dignity of the most successful armed forces in the whole of human history.

Where’s the dignity in being allowed to fire only 10 live rounds a year? Where’s the dignity in not being able
to afford to take the ships out to sea? And running them on one engine when they do? Where’s the dignity in flying a fighter that has no gun because the MoD can’t afford one? We keep being told that soldiers in Iraq use their own mobile phones because the army’s radio equipment can’t even pick up Terry Wogan, and I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound very dignified either.

I’m not suggesting that a soldier should be made to wade into battle looking like a Formula One racing driver, but there is a happy medium. I’m thinking, as a guide, of the discreet but effective logos allowed at Wimbledon; a little patch on the epaulette that lets the watching TV cameras know that the wearer drives an Audi.

Sunday 19 September 2004

Every morning, it seems, I open the papers to be confronted with a photograph of yet another bronzed gap-year student ‘with the world at her feet’ who’s been murdered while trekking through some fleapit on the wrong side of the equator.

If I were the parent of teenage children today, I’d advise them to stay home in their year off and experiment with heroin instead. It’s a lot safer.

Happily, my children are far too young to be stabbed in the Australian outback and, even more happily, by the time they are old enough they will have been on so many exotic school trips that the world’s wildernesses are unlikely to hold much appeal. ‘Oh, not the Kalahari again. I did that in Year 2.’

The trips run by my school, back in the 1970s, weren’t remotely exotic. Once we were taken to Matlock Bath with a Penguin biscuit, but this was an exception.

Mostly, they’d load us on to the school minibus, which would then be driven by a certifiable lunatic to the Peak District, where we’d be made to walk five miles through a peat bog to look at a millstone grit outcrop.

‘In geology,’ the psychopath would bark, ‘this is a series of sandstones, grits and conglomerates, resting directly on the carboniferous limestone…’

‘Hmm,’ we’d all think, ‘but is it big enough to hide behind while we have a fag?’

Then you had the Combined Cadet Force, which was public school code for genocide.

Large numbers of boys were bussed in eighth-hand army lorries to the Yorkshire Dales, where we were told to leap to our deaths from cliffs, or walk around with millstone grit outcrops on our backs until we collapsed from heat exhaustion.

Anyone who did actually die was given detention.

Today, things seem rather different. My kids are only at prep school, and already they’re talking about whether they want to go bear-baiting in Alaska or skiing in the Urals. Or maybe both. ‘Oh please, Dad. Aramoctavethia and Phoebocia are going, so why can’t I?’

Well, one of the reasons is that parents budget for the school fees without realising that, in fact, we’ll need half as much again for Icelandic windcheaters, horse rental in Argentina and a Unimog for the South Pole. Seriously, by the time my eldest leaves for ‘big school’ she’s likely to have more Air Miles than Henry Kissinger.

And big school, of course, is much, much worse. School magazines in the olden days – i.e. the 1980s – used to show photographs of well-scrubbed boys and girls at their desks, learning algebra. Now, school magazines look like brochures for Kuoni.

They’re full of boys and girls building box girder bridges in South Africa and sensitive radio telescopes in the jungles of Costa Rica. I’m not sure this is a good idea, because if a child has tackled the Zambezi, rescued
14 Colombian tribes from McDonald’s and colonised Mars by the time they’re 18, what’s left?

Mostly, when I was young, we went on holiday to Cornwall, although, once, I seem to remember spending a fortnight in the shadow of a gasworks just outside Jedburgh.

So when I reached adulthood I went berserk. The stamps in my passport became so prolific that I needed another, and because that was always away having visas stapled in place, I had to get a third. In the space of 10 years, I visited more than 80 countries and spent at least one night in each of the US States. I made Hemingway look like an agoraphobic and Alan Whicker like a slugabed.

As soon as the door to China was just slightly ajar I was bounding through the Forbidden City with my Nikon, and it was the same story in Vietnam, and Cuba. I went to Norway once, simply because it was the only European country I hadn’t visited, and I vacuumed up the Mediterranean islands like a dog vacuums up the crumbs from a five-year-old’s birthday party.

Eventually, though, the ants in my pants settled down and I realised that, while the world can offer many beautiful and wondrous experiences, home is where your friends are. And no experience is ever quite as rewarding as being in the gooey, firelit bosom of your family.

As a result I now sigh and mooch around with shoulders like a bent coathanger if I even have to go to Oxford; but that’s fine. I’m 44 and that’s a sensible age to pack away the pith helmet and pick up the secateurs for a spot of light gardening.

But 18?

I have a horrible feeling that my kids are going to leave school not prepared for the world but sick of it.

Obviously they will be far too tired for any further education, which doesn’t matter because by then universities will be allowed to take only working-class children. That means there will be no gap year either, and that means they won’t be stabbed in Sudan.