Clarkson on Cars (17 page)

A spokesman for the station described her as an ‘Earth Woman’, saying she is a veggie and a bit left wing. He even admitted that the finger had been wagged at her after an interview she did with that actress woman who wants to be an MP but won’t ever make it because she’s got bosoms like spaniel’s ears.

If Long wants to harp on about organic vegetables, then why doesn’t she buy a psychedelic bus and move to Glastonbury where I’m sure the audience would be more appreciative. There is no place for an ‘Earth Woman’ on a station which is aimed right at the jugular of 25- to 40-year-old ‘discerning’ listeners.

I wouldn’t mind but her brand of socialism has rubbed off on the news staff too. Only the other day, one, probably another ‘Earth Woman’, was reporting on a demonstration in Wandsworth, home of the lowest poll tax in Britain.

She claimed she had talked to residents who would willingly pay more for better services. Were these interviews broadcast? Were they hell. Did this woman really expect me to believe that there are people who want bigger poll-tax bills just to keep the Janice Longs of this world in odd-shaped carrots.

Then the reporter had the audacity to claim that Wandsworth was at a standstill because of the huge demo. Well, I was there at the time and I’ve never seen the one-way system flow so freely. The ‘huge’ demo she was referring to involved six people. Three were women and four had beards.

It seems GLR’s traffic reports are politically motivated too. Certainly, they’re usually pretty inaccurate. One day soon, Mrs Thatcher will be blamed for the weather.

GLR is still on trial. Apparently David Mellor doesn’t like it and unless the audience figures improve soon, the BBC’s Board of Governors will close down the only radio station I know that gets close to making life in a traffic jam bearable.

Obviously, in this green and caring land of hope and glory where man
s best friend is a dog, one has to be a little careful when advocating the slaughter of an entire species.

But let’s face it – what possible good are flies? Have you ever tried to sunbathe when a bluebottle has designs on your arm? And why, when you’ve wooshed him off 30 times, does he still try to land? Worse, have you ever tried to sleep when there’s a fly in the room? Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bump. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bump. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bump. If evolution has rendered the mole blind and turned the seal from a land-based mammal into a furry fish, why can’t a fly get to grips with windows?

And what the hell are flies full of? What is that yellow stuff that splatters all over your car windscreen when a wasp decides to headbutt your car?

There are countless dangerous, ugly or just plain useless species which serve no purpose whatsoever; David Attenborough finds a couple of hundred every week. But worst of the lot – worse than an electric eel, worse than a bluebottle, worse than a rat – is the horse. Unless of course it’s first past the post in the 3.15 at Doncaster with ten of my pounds on its nose.

When it was fashionable to wear armour, the horse was as important to personal mobility as the Ford Escort. But thanks to the Ford Escort, we do not actually need horses any more. I know they did the Boers a big favour and Custer would have been even more buggered without one, so maybe we do owe them a small debt of gratitude, but in a world of modems and faxes, the only use I can think of for the common or garden horse is as an ingredient in glue.

Things wouldn’t be so bad if horsey types were all from the land-owning classes so that at least when they took their stupid animals out for a ride, no one else would be inconvenienced. Unfortunately the middle class, as usual, has stuck its nose in.

And because the idea of land to the middle class is a lawn, it is forced to exercise its infernal pets on roads. That’s bad enough but there are some professional bodies which do the same.

If the army has enough money to transport an entire division halfway round the world, if it can afford to buy nuclear weapons which, let’s face it, are not cheap, then how come the Blues and Royals are given horses to move around London on. What’s the matter with motorbikes?

It is absolutely absurd that I should be held up every morning by one of the world’s most respected, feared and best-equipped armies as it plods through Hyde Park on animals that, in the modern world of warfare, are as pertinent as a bow and arrow. I am no military tactician but if I were to be given the choice of a nag or a Challenger in battle, I just know I’d take the tank.

The army aren’t the only operation in London to use horses either. One of the breweries – I forget which and I’m certainly not going to bother finding out and give it advertising space in the process – delivers its beer on horse-drawn drays.

Even though it is pulled by two magnificent shire horses of a size that would keep Evostick in business for months should they ever be melted down, it has a top speed of 1 mph.

And don’t give me any claptrap about the environment on this issue because I would far rather breathe 0.00000001 mg of nitrogen oxide than slither about in a sea of manure. And if you reckon that the dray holds up 2000 cars a day for an average of five minutes each, that’s the equivalent of one engine running at its most inefficient speed for one week.

Commercial operations that use horses on the road are antisocial and as environmentally friendly as the Rother Valley and there can be no excuse. It’s just a cheap publicity stunt. But what of the people who ride their horses on the roads when they aren’t even advertising anything? Perhaps Evostick should consider melting the owners down too.

The other weekend, I went for a ride on a horse so big it was a bison. Described as a bit frisky, which turned out to be like calling Cannon and Ball a bit not funny, we spooked and skipped our way round some Scottish back roads for an hour.

Most passing cars slowed down by some margin but even when the steel dragons were crawling along at 20 mph, the demon horse jumped about like it was limboing up for an assault on the non-stop pogo dancing record. It was worse if the car was a bright colour and worse still if it went through a puddle while going by.

My leading rein explained that some horses are worth £,20,000 and that because this figure was way in excess of what the average Scot spends on a car, drivers should get out of her way.

She pointed out that horses are nervous beasts, rejecting in the process my suggestion that they’re daft, and the slightest sign of something out of the ordinary may cause them to bolt. Christ, if they can’t cope with a car going through a puddle, I sincerely hope that when the Martians do arrive, they land at Hickstead.

If it were left to her, and others of her ilk, we would all have to buy Toyota Camrys and if we did encounter a horse while out driving, we should do a smart about turn and find an alternative route. I even noticed that the back window of her car sported a warning that she slowed down for horses. When she breeds, and horsey people do, frequently and with much vigour, doubtless she will have a baby-on-board sticker too.

I have to go now because I’m due at Lingfield this afternoon.

I like gambling. Just the other day, I relieved a colleague of £10 when he discovered that Eddie Jobson did, at one time, play for Curved Air. Later today, I will win another £10 when I prove to someone else that Tom Stoppard wrote
The Russia House
.

My new wager is a tad more risky. I have bet a leading figure in the motor industry that by 1999, Audi will outsell BMW by two to one on the British market. For the record, BMW currently outsells Audi by the same margin.

My reasoning is simple. Audi is responding to changing public demand better than BMW. Audi was the first to get a baby in its television advertisements, Audi was the first to get catalytic converters standardised across its entire range, Audi was the first to use nothing but galvanised steel and Audi is first off the marks with Procon Ten.

Performance, handling and sheer macho thrustiness have been eschewed by Audi in favour of trees and flowers and having horrid accidents without dying. Audi is on the ball.

BMW is not. The filofax is dead. Nineteen-year-olds on £200,000 a year are no more. Estate agents, praise be to the Lord, are in the mulligatawny up to their scrawny necks and we laugh at people with double-breasted suits and mobile telephones.

So why, if all these have gone, should we expect the car that went with them not to go too? Bye bye BMW. Hello £10.

This probability became a certainty when I noticed, among all the hype about performance, handling and macho thrustiness in the blurb on the new 3-series, a small but vital point. You are able to buy these new cars without any ashtrays.

Well that does it. In recent months, I have become increasingly fed up with the drivel bandied about by hairy-bottomed do-gooders who want us all to take up jogging. And not even jogging on a horizontal basis either, which it seems renders us likely to catch AIDS.

I may however catch cancer or thrombosis or angina or any number of nasties that my packet of Marlboro insists are a virtual certainty should I choose to indulge in the contents.

My simple answer to this is so what? If I choose to cash in the chips early and shuffle off the mortal coil at 60 or so, you clean-living types should be grateful.

I will never buy a pair of those fur-lined boots with zips up the front and I will never get in your way in the post office, failing to get my mind or my arthritic fingers round the hard ECU or whatever currency has replaced Sterling by then.

I will never demand money from the government every time it drops below 70 degrees and I won’t clog up the roads in my ten-year-old Maxi with 600 miles on the clock. Dying before you’re an old-age pensioner is the most socially responsible thing you can possibly do.

And if you manage to kill yourself in such a way that the treasury benefits, so much the better. On this front, you have two choices: fill up with four star and drive over Beachy Head or, and this is the option I’ve chosen, smoke 40 cigarettes a day for 50 years.

In today’s money, I will have given the chancellor £30,000, thus paying for a hospital ward that I will never use. Now THAT is public spirited.

Also, I will give tobacco companies about £20,000 which helps keep unemployment down and motor racing alive.

At this point in the debate, earth people like Janice Long usually pipe up with the age-old argument about passive smoking and how they, full to overflowing with organic vegetables, do not wish to inhale somebody else’s nicotine.

Well, I find football offensive. I do not see why that Paul Gascoigne person has to take up so many pages of my
Sun
every day and I do not see why large areas of Fulham are virtually closed off every time 22 men feel the need to charge around Chelsea kicking an inflated sheep’s pancreas at one another.

In my opinion it would be better if they could be persuaded to indulge in this curious pastime at an out-of-town stadium. Football fans, however, point out that they enjoy the game and wonder, out loud and often, why on earth they shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy it in a convenient location.

Of course they should. Nice though the concept is, I don’t have the power to ban football or socialism or lots of other things I don’t like. So who gave the likes of British Airways, LRT and Pizza Express the power to ban smokers smoking?

Just recently, I went for three hours without a cigarette because some Finnish bus company provided a no-smoking coach which took us to a no-smoking shopping centre. From there, we went to a no-smoking airport and on to an internal SAS flight which is also no smoking. It deposited me at Helsinki which, as far as I can work out, is a no-smoking city. And people wonder why Scandinavia has the highest suicide rate in the world.

By offering the new 3-series without an ashtray, BMW must take its share of the blame for job losses in the tobacco industry and big third-world debt problems in tobacco-producing countries. Tax lost from reduced cigarette consumption will be applied elsewhere and the NHS will be swamped with incontinent pensioners who’ll live to 150. The suicide rate will spiral and slaughter on the roads will become wholesale as people can’t find a way to keep calm in traffic jams. The Tories will be ousted, communism will take its place and how many cars do you think BMW will sell when we all have to call one another ‘comrade’.

And what is BMW’s reasoning? Well, a spokesman said a car that has never been smoked in fetches more on the second-hand market than one which has a nicotine bouquet.

Someone at Audi should explain to him that these days, quality of life counts for a little bit more than saving a few quid.

Privately at least, the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class has caused a murmur of discontent among certain motoring journalists.

People who can be found running around their offices making gear change and tyre squeal noises have been heard to mutter that the S-Class in general, and the 6-litre V12 in particular, is a rather unsavoury and tasteless exercise in frivolous excess.

Now, I don’t understand this. For years, these people, who can be distinguished from normal people by their Rohan trousers, have argued that all cars should have 5-litre turbo engines and suspension systems that are harder than washing-up a Magimix.

So that they have something new to talk about loudly and often in pubs, they want each new car to be bigger and faster and better and more exciting than anything ever before made by anybody.

Mercedes has done that but instead of handing out credit where credit is due, they point to its 2.2-ton bulk, saying that in a world burdened with dwindling resources, there is no place for such a monster. What’s more, you even get the impression when talking to Mercedes engineers that if they had begun to design the car yesterday rather than back in the early 1980s, it would not be as it is.

I have never seen such a defensive press pack. Way before you get to engine specifications or that brilliant rear-axle layout there are literally pages and pages of bumph about how environmentally aware Daimler-Benz is.