Clarkson on Cars (21 page)

Stack the Sierra Ghia against any of its rivals in a
Performance Car
group test and it would lose, hands down. But in the real world, it should be, and is, a winner.

So would I ever think about running one? You have got to be joking. ‘Hey bird, do you want to come for a play with the heater in my Sierra?’ does not sound quite so endearing as ‘Hey bird, ever been up a back street at a hundred and forty?’

Does it.

Each Wednesday, I have to make a 120-mile journey from Nairobi, South London to Bombay, near Birmingham.

If I leave at 7 a.m., I am onto the M40 before the London rush hour begins and then I arrive in Birmingham ten minutes after its rush hour has died down.

En route, I can ring people up on a new device I have just bought called a mobile telephone, I can mount huge excavation projects in one or both of my nostrils and I can listen to the radio, or if Greening and Nicholas are on one of their left-wing crusades, play a compact disc instead. It’s all very civilised.

If I stick to this schedule I never encounter anything which could be described as a jam but even if I don’t there are only three places where things get sticky and, even if they’re at their most glutinous, I only need add twenty minutes to my ETA.

However, like the good citizen I tend not to be, I have taken of late to dispensing with the motor car and using public transport instead. Thus when the token veg-head at a dinner party begins to harangue me for promoting death, I can explain that I do my bit for congestion and pollution. Then we all play party games, seeing who can get the fork, which I have inserted into her eye, out again.

But here’s the rub. In the last fourteen weeks, British Rail has failed to get me from London to Birmingham, or back again, on anything even approaching time. Yesterday, I’ll admit, it was only six minutes late but the week before I was stationary for one hour outside Coventry and consequently arrived at the terminus a staggering 94 minutes behind schedule.

A man kept coming on the public address system, presumably to explain why the train was not moving, but as he had not mastered the art of speaking English, his message was a trifle garbled.

The women who rush up and down the aisles, dispensing salmonella and bashing into your elbows, said they didn’t know what was going on and that we should ask the ticket collector, but he was in a terrible temper and explained rather brusquely that it wasn’t his fault. Also, his uniform didn’t fit.

If this was a one-off, caused by a mad Mick with a bit of Semtex, you might put it down to bad luck and be understanding, but it happens with the regularity of a freshly wound metronome.

The awful thing is that even if it didn’t, even if the train was as punctilious as the Queen’s Christmas message, it would still take 40 minutes more than a car to get from my front door to the door of my choosing in Barmyhom.

Then there is the cost. Getting to and from Birmingham in a car that costs 15p a mile to run sets you back £36, while if you use public transport there are two £5 taxi bills and British Rail has the bare-faced cheek to charge £44 – none of which it spends on cleaners.

I smoke, quite a lot, and that means I am wedged, with the most disgusting bunch of old fleggers, into half a carriage where the ashtrays are all missing, the windows are caked in nicotine and if you stand on the carpet for more than a minute, you stick to it.

If smoking is going to be allowed, why the hell can’t someone pop into the relevant carriage once in a while with some Flash? Same goes for the lavatories, which ought really to have a sign advising passengers that excrement should be ejected in the general direction at least of the small porcelain receptacle without taps.

Even if I could afford first class, I would object to sharing my carriage with people in polyester suits shrieking into mobile telephones. And let’s face it, the staff are still just as rude and the train is still just as late whether you have an extra tad of leg room or not.

I have also noticed that, in first class, I always feel sick whenever the train’s speed exceeds 100 mph, which thankfully isn’t very often. Mind you, this is better than the ‘thrifty’ carriages, which shake so much the print in your book blurs and your coffee goes everywhere except down your mouth part.

What is required is a class in between first and second (second, apart from being uncomfortable, is also full of mutants). Yesterday, on the way up, a fat girl plonked herself next to me and talked incessantly about retirement homes, thus preventing the massive nose diggery scheme I had planned. On the way back, the man opposite was shamelessly reading the
Guardian
.

A couple of weeks ago, a girl said she was educated at a public school called Abbots Bromley and that she was 29. Yet she claimed not to know any of the thirty 29-year-old ex-Abbots Bromley girls I fired at her. Either she was, in fact, 46 or she did not go to AB at all and she was educated in the state system; like most liars.

The class I’m proposing would not be based on ability to pay but on breeding. Smoking would be compulsory because, in my experience, the only people worth talking to get through at least twenty a day, all the sandwiches would have meat in them, polyester would be banned and so would the
Guardian
. Basically, before being allowed in the carriage concerned, M15 would have to check your background, you’d be tested on certain U and non-U expressions and you’d have to be proposed by me.

However, in Major’s classless society this is unlikely to get off the ground, which means that those of us wishing to be green will get black as we talk to reds.

So why don’t I just give up and use the car? Well, the thing is that, for about five miles, the train runs alongside the M1 and even if it’s being as asthmatic as ever, it always manages at that moment to be going faster than the traffic.

This gives a false impression of speed and efficiency and for a glorious moment you tend to forget that British Rail couldn’t get its leg over in a brothel.

So here is an appeal. If, on a Wednesday, you are heading North on the M1 just near turn-off 17 and you see a train coming up alongside, please, please, please put your foot down.

And make me a very happy man indeed.

Last night I returned from America with a cricked neck and sunburned feet to find that someone had thoughtfully left a Jaguar XJS for me outside the office.

Ordinarily, one has to reverse cars to the main road some 200 yards away but, because of the broken neck, I had to make a 67-point turn in a street that is just two inches wider than the Jaguar is long.

This was a nuisance. It was also much, much colder than it had been in Florida. There wasn’t enough headroom. The leather seats were like blocks of ice. I knocked my cigarette end out while twirling the wheel. I had jet lag. All in all, the Jaguar XJS, pretty new rear windows or no, was lining up alongside VD in the suitable companion stakes.

And as the very
raison d’être
of the XJS is comfort, I began to consider the notion of abandoning it and using a taxi.

But then, as I finally accomplished the turn, the CD player began, seemingly of its own accord, to fill the cabin with the strains of ‘Nimrod’, Elgar’s most moving excursion to the very furthest-flung corners of jingoism.

And, as a result, I stopped likening the XJS to an enema and began instead to think of it in the same breath as lobster thermidor and, er, second helpings.

I do not consider myself to be especially musical. You’re reading the words of a man who fainted while attempting to learn the flute and who reached grade four in piano, but only after failing grades one, two and three.

Yet music is capable of inducing strange mood swings. It can soothe away the aches and strains of a busy day or it can drive me nuts. I even have a compilation tape which I play when I want to get somewhere quickly because all the songs on it, from Bad Company’s ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’ to Bob Seger’s ‘Long Twin Silver Line’, are designed specifically to make me drive much faster than is usual.

I have another tape, well I have a lot of other tapes actually, but there’s one in particular I play when the day has been especially awful and the traffic is being especially bad and the pavements are full of horrid working-class people queuing up to spit on me as I drive by. They do this a lot these days.

This one features such songs as Albinoni’s ‘Adagio in G’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’. There are those who recommend John Martyn and Leonard Cohen, but these guys take things a bit too far. I mean, they go beyond calming you down; they lower you so low you start to hallucinate about gas ovens and vats of Valium.

On the other hand, Katrina and the Waves’ ‘Walking On Sunshine’ or Haircut 100’s ‘Fantastic Day’ prompt a grin bigger than Cheshire. If either is on the radio, I’ll even let people out of side turnings. Yet play me anything by Billy Bragg and I’ll throw a brick through the Labour Party’s nearest HQ. And ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ makes me dribble.

I don’t like foreigners at the best of times, but whenever I hear even so much as a snatch of Elgar, the mild dislike becomes a deal more pronounced. And believe you me, the best place to be at such a time is behind the pencil-thin wheel of a Jaguar.

If you sort of half close your eyes, you can imagine that deeply sculptured bonnet is the prow of HMS
Victory
, the nose of a Spitfire, the protruding snub of a Challenger tank.

If I find myself listening to Elgar while driving along in, say, a Mercedes, I have to get out and sit on the grass verge until it’s finished. When you’re in a Mercedes, you can only listen to Strauss or Wagner or something that makes you want to bludgeon your way around the Soviet Union, smashing it into small pieces.

You also cannot listen to Elgar when you are driving around in America, because it sounds silly. When you are in America, you absolutely must listen to American music.

A cruise down the seventeen-mile drive south of Monterey in a convertible Mustang to the accompaniment of six spotty youths from Manchester banging on about life in a tower block is just plain daft. Even Squeeze, whose tunes are fine on a wet Wednesday in Clapham, are wholly inappropriate. No, you need Don Henley wailing on about ‘Boys Of Summer’ and the Doobies with ‘China Grove’.

From time to time, I get to air my views about this and that on
Top Gear
, the motoring programme, and while all of it is a giant ego trip, the best part as far as I’m concerned is choosing the musical interludes, the dream sequences where a car is seen whizzing hither and thither to the strains of whatever song we happen to feel is suitable.

Having explained that the Lamborghini Countach was a fairly terrible car, it seemed right that we should play Bad Company singing the song called ‘Bad Company’. Similarly, having decided that the Ferrari 348 is just about the finest car made, Tina Turner was drafted in to give us a 30-second slug of ‘Simply The Best’.

In the new series that should have begun by now, you will be treated to a seven-minute item about the Ford Mustang. Because I can’t think of enough words to fill in for such a long stretch, much of the soundtrack will be down to Andrew Strong and ‘Mustang Sally’. Nice of him that; in the same way that it was nice of Prince to do ‘Little Red Corvette’, and Mark Cohn to do ‘Silver Thunderbird’.

We will never be stuck when it comes to choosing music for bits about American cars because American singers find them a source of lyrical romance. ‘Cruising in my Mustang down the 15 to New Orleans’ is always going to be a better line than ‘Strugglin’ up the A1 to Rotherham in my Maestro’.

A few weeks ago, a columnist in a rival magazine argued that one tends to make one’s mind up about a car within five seconds of getting into it. This is almost certainly the case, but what he didn’t say is that whether you like the car or not is dependent on the music that happens to be playing at the time.

So, do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or is it the other way around? Certainly, the needs of people who are disabled, be it through a physical or mental malady, outweigh the needs of those who are able-bodied.

It may cost a business a thousand quid or more to install lavatories big enough to take wheelchairs, but this is something that must be done. If I was disabled and found a shop, hotel or restaurant which did not provide such a facility, I would crap on the floor. On purpose.

However, I am unable to think of any other minority group whose needs should be allowed to inconvenience the majority.

Thus, I have no sympathy whatsoever with these so-called action groups that hang around outside embassies and council offices, waving placards and getting their beards wet.

I do not understand why my poll tax bill in Fulham should be nearly £500 a year when I just know that a huge chunk of that will be spent on weirdos. Like most people, I want my bin emptying, the street lighting on, the schools open and the police doing some arresting. And that’s about it.

What we have instead is pot-holed roads, council officials who won’t answer the telephone, rampant truancy and a police force which can never get to the scene of a crime because of all the dog turds on the pavement. Oh and some immensely wealthy Cypriot lesbians.

This is absurd. If you happen to be a homosexualist Cypriot, you cannot expect everyone in the whole borough to finance your perversion. The council should let us decide whether we want to spend our money on gay Eastern Mediterranean types or not. Me, I prefer beer.

I like to smoke while eating, but if I am at a table peopled entirely by non-smokers, I will try to limit any cigarettery to periods when food is not in evidence.

So why then do vegetarians expect – demand even – special attention whenever I have them round for dinner? If I am prepared to give up smoking for them, they should damn well be prepared to eat cow for me. It’s all give and take in this world and, if you’re in a minority, you should bloody well do the giving.

Now, against this sort of a background, I was approached the other day by a chap from something called the Tall People’s Club of Great Britain who would like me to become a member.