And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (15 page)

What good’s that? How can a small photograph of some P-list celeb like me, with his arm round a bosomy, half-dressed soap actress, be of any possible benefit to the blind and cancerous orphans in Rwanda?

And the problem’s getting worse, because there are now so many charity evenings – I have invitations to 23 on my mantelpiece – that the competition among organisers to be more and more lavish is fierce. Some are even employing PR firms, who regularly ring me offering big money – thousands – if I’ll turn up for the night and drink their Krug. This means the auction prizes have to be elaborate just to cover the costs.

Soon you will be invited to buy a weekend for two on a nuclear submarine, simply to meet the expenses of the
Brazilian fire-eaters who’ve just abseiled into the marquee from a helicopter gunship.

I suppose I had better say at this point that some events
do
raise money. My wife, for instance, would certainly like it to be known that the cost of staging her annual do is entirely underwritten by Honda or Ford or Audi, and that every penny raised does go to the local children’s hospice.

And this, I think, gives us an inkling of the way forward. When you’re faced with the choice of what events to attend, don’t ask which footballers are going and what sort of peacock will be used to garnish the roast swan. Ask only how much of the proceeds will actually be going to charity.

And if you’re in Cheshire, what those proceeds will buy.

Sunday 7 November 2004

I know that in recent days we’ve lost Howard Keel, Yasser Arafat and Emlyn Hughes.

I also know that the Americans are having a hard time in Falluja and that someone from
HolbyEnders
has been caught with her nose in the devil’s dandruff. But all of this pales into insignificance alongside the news that I am beginning to disintegrate.

After a lifetime of man-sized hypochondria, where every cold is ebola and every light bruise a shattered limb, I was informed last week that I have finally got a proper, grown-up disease.

About a year ago, my left hip started to ache, so, knowing it was bone cancer, I decided to do nothing. It’s better, I figured, to wake up dead one morning than go to a doctor and be told when that morning might be.

Eventually, though, it became difficult to get in and out of my car, which is tricky when you’re the host of a television programme that mostly involves getting into and out of cars. So with a heavy heart I went to see the doctor.

‘I’ve caught cancer,’ I said Eeyoreishly. But he wasn’t convinced and, after a bit of poking around, said he thought it was more likely to be osteoarthritis, arguing that my hip joints may have simply worn out.

This seemed unlikely. My hips have never done anything.
I am not a Ceroc dancer or a downhill skier, and the only exercise I ever take is chewing food and typing.

But the X-ray pictures he took are now back from Boots – and blow me down, he was right. I do have osteoarthritis in my hips, and as a result I shall need some plastic replacements.

Apparently this is funny. On learning the news, one friend said I should avoid leaning on any radiators when I have them fitted in case they melt. Another pointed out that they’re hollow and could be used as a sort of time capsule. ‘You could fill them up with newspaper cuttings and Robbie Williams CDs,’ he said, helpfully.

My wife simply phoned our lawyer, saying she really didn’t want to be married to a cripple and could he organise a divorce.

More worryingly, I cancelled my health insurance recently because, so far as I can see, they take your money every month and refuse to give it back. So I can either go private, which will cost £25 million, or use the NHS. This would mean waiting until the end of time, and then being given two joints that the 14-year-old doctor, on the advice of his line managers, had bought on the way to work from a plumbers’ merchants.

With a view to getting round this, I had a look on eBay and guess what? You can buy second-hand sex toys(!), some naval anaesthetic and even a Vulcan bomber. But nobody is flogging off their dead mum’s joints.

That’s stupid. Why burn the old dear when you could whip out her hip joints and auction them on the internet? And what’s more, with no hips you could bend her legs double and not have to buy such a big coffin. I’d pay up
to £30, providing the joints had been washed thoroughly. But there weren’t any, so that’s that.

The producer of
Top Gear
suggested I contact one of the Formula One teams to see if it could run me up a pair in carbon fibre. Sounds great, but I’m not sure I want to spend the next 40 years hobbling around with a pair of McLaren suspension units in my legs.

And anyway, here’s the clincher. Apparently I can’t have the operation for another 15 years because plastic wears out even faster than bone, and it’s not like changing the battery in a torch. The doctors therefore want to make sure that the replacements I’m given will last until I really do catch ebola.

So that’s it. For the next 15 years I have to hobble around with disfigured hips, in huge pain, being laughed at.

This sounds gloomy, but actually, given that all middle-aged people are bound to start going wrong, arthritis really isn’t such a bad lucky dip prize. It knocks the socks off cancer, for instance, and it’s a damn sight better than the osteoporosis that crippled my dad.

First, it won’t kill you or make you run around town in a bee suit blowing raspberries and, better still, it only hurts when you move. Which means you can get a doctor’s note saying that you mustn’t.

This in turn means you will never again be allowed to bring in coal or carry suitcases. And you will be excused from those stupid bracing walks that your wife is forever suggesting after a hearty Sunday lunch.

I’m not sure, but I’d like to bet that I am now entitled to one of those handy orange stickers that let me treat all pavements as parking spaces.

The only trouble is that to park a car you must first of all get into it, and that really does hurt like hell. I tried to film a road test for
Top Gear
yesterday, and it was like being pulled in half by two tractors. What I’m going to do about that, I really don’t know.

Sunday 14 November 2004

As I understand it, the latest state initiative will force school bullies to wear blue plastic wristbands so the weak and fat can see them coming and have time to take evasive action.

Already I can see some problems with this. For instance, what happens if the cunning and wily school bully decides to get round the problem by simply leaving his wristband at home? Then you wouldn’t know he was a bully until you found a large dog egg in your satchel and an unusual stain in your maths exercise book.

Perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, though. Perhaps you wear the blue plastic wristband to show you’re against bullying, in the same way that people wear little ribbons on their lapel to show they’re against Aids or breast cancer or cruelty to moss.

Again, though, I can see some problems. In the same way that a small CND badge would not have protected the wearer from a nuclear fireball, I feel fairly sure that, if you turn up to school with a blue plastic wristband, it’s not really going to prevent the bully from pushing your head down the lavatory.

My biggest problem with the scheme, however, is that I have nothing to wear to show that I’m cautiously in favour of bullying. I, for instance, would love to put some sand in Piers Morgan’s lunchbox. And nothing would
give me more pleasure than spending an hour or so flicking Tony Blair’s ears.

Sure, it has its bad sides, of course – nobody likes to think that someone will draw a huge penis on their children’s homework – but there are upsides as well. Like if you’ve spent all day with your head in a lavatory you don’t need to wash your hair that night. And you will be a better, sharper, cleverer person.

This, I fear, is what the schools minister Stephen Twigg absolutely will not understand. He’ll have listened to a bunch of idealistic town council do-gooders with all sorts of nonsensical degrees in child welfare, and he’ll have decided that it was time to break out the blue plastic wristbands. So now all the loony welfare workers will have
carte blanche
to stamp out bullying, in all its forms.

You know where this is going. They started the war on speed by going after lunatics who drove around at 130 mph, and ended up nailing little old ladies for doing 31. They go after people who hunt foxes, and soon your dog will be prosecuted if it kills a mouse. They put health warnings on cigarettes, and now they want to stop you from lighting up in a pub. For the social worker there is no spirit of the law – only the letter.

This means we can wave goodbye to the socially important pursuit of teasing. I tease people for being too short. I tease people for reading the
Guardian
. And in return people tease me for looking like a human toffee apple and liking Supertramp. I’m 44, for heaven’s sake, and I still find another man’s new haircut funny. So I’ll spend the day ribbing him about it.

Teasing is a good thing. It sharpens the mind and
punctures the ego. Teasing, at its best, is faster than Chinese ping-pong and funnier than a really good skiing crash. Teasing is what separates us from the beasts. You never, for instance, see wildebeest laughing their heads off when one of their number falls in the river or gets eaten by a lion.

But of course the stupid do-gooders will see it as a sort of cannabis, a seemingly harmless first rung on the ladder, and try to stamp it out before the teaser takes up some heroin-style bullying.

Well, I was bullied at school, mercilessly and endlessly, for nearly two years. I forgot what it was like to wake up normally rather than as a result of someone letting a fire extinguisher off in my face. And I was thrown on a daily basis into the school’s unheated plunge pool.

I remember one night being dragged out of bed at 3 a.m. and told that, because the school would be a better place without me, I would have to be killed.

There was a very good reason for all this. I was a very annoying, very spoilt 13-year-old prig. I had the capacity to irritate before I’d even said anything, and I was the owner of a biblically idiotic haircut.

Eventually the bullying became so awful that I confided in my mother, who said that if everyone was picking on me then I must be doing something wrong. So I grew my hair very long, took up smoking and tried my hardest to make everyone laugh.

It’s not easy when you’ve got a mouth full of dog dirt, but eventually I succeeded, and the bullying stopped.

I really, genuinely believe that were it not for the bullies, I would now be a humourless estate agent in some
godforsaken provincial town. Bullying, in other words, saved my life.

And it can work for fat kids, too. You can ban them from watching crisp advertisements on television, and put health warnings on their cheese, but there’s nothing more guaranteed to make them lose weight than having their hair set on fire from time to time.

Sunday 28 November 2004

I’ve done a power slide in an airboat on the Florida Everglades. I’ve seen the sun set over the Perfume River in Vietnam. I’ve flown an F-15E fighter bomber, and I’ve ingested pretty well everything there is to be ingested. While doing 180 mph. In a Ferrari.

In other words, when I read those silly magazine features listing all the things you’re supposed to do before you die, I’m left feeling hollow and empty. I’m only 44 and I’ve already seen Etna explode. I’ve swum with the bloody dolphins in Tahiti and I’ve tried my hand at bobsleighing.

I’ve even done the odd eightsome reel, which is as close as anyone should get to folk dancing. So now, what are you saying? That I should go off into a corner and commit suicide?

Apparently not. Because last week we were presented with a new list of 100 things to do before we die. Only this time around, the authors are not drunken magazine hacks back from a long lunch; they’re all eminent scientists, boffins and inventors.

The idea behind the scheme is simple. James Dyson, who designs purple vacuum cleaners, says he wants to make schoolchildren think of science and engineering – and vacuum cleaners, presumably – as cool. I thoroughly approve of that, but I must say that most of the suggestions
he and his colleagues make are either difficult, revolting or impossible.

Let’s start with something simple, like extracting our own DNA. All you have to do, apparently, is gargle with salt water and then spit it into a glass of washing-up liquid. You then dribble ice-cold gin down the side of the glass and watch as spindly white clumps form in the mixture. This is the essence of you.

Of course, coughing up phlegm is not quite as glamorous as driving a hovercraft over the glaciers of Tibet, but think what you could do with a thimbleful of your own DNA. You could nurture it, and keep it in a warm place and then, who knows, one day it may grow into a perfect replica of you. Or, if you smoke as much as I do, a perfect replica of a Marlboro Light.

Well, it gets worse, because one of the other things the boffins suggest is that you turn yourself into a priceless jewel. Apparently there’s a company in Chicago that exposes cremated human remains to heat and pressure for 18 weeks, after which they have turned into a brilliant one-carat diamond.

Can you see a drawback with this? Yes, that’s right. And frankly I’m surprised to find that some of Britain’s biggest brains failed to notice that this was supposed to be a list of things to do
before
you die.

Here’s a worrying one. You can link your computer to that huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico, then spend your spare time listening for signs of extraterrestrial life. This, I imagine, would require quite a lot of patience. So much, in fact, that on balance I think I’d rather be a diamond.

Certainly I’d much rather go to Tennessee, where the
donated corpses of murder victims are available for would-be forensic scientists. Anyone can have a go, apparently.

You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, given the brainpower of the team behind this list that they could have come up with something a bit better than poking around in a dead American’s liver to see what killed him. Or slowly turning into a diamond as you while away the hours listening out for something that’s too far away to be audible.