Born to Be Riled (10 page)

And I’m sorry, I just don’t like those jackets which have lapels like a butterfly’s wings. Nor will I ever do my top button up unless I’m wearing a tie.

Last weekend a footballer called Paul Gascoigne was in the
News of the World
wearing what can only be described as a dogtooth dog’s dinner. It was a suit, in that the top
and bottom matched, but the jacket was down to his knees.

I have never seen such a ludicrous garment, and can only assume his mother had knitted it.

But then again, this Gascoigne person probably looks at my Lee Cooper jeans and Toggi shirts and thinks he’s been through a time warp. Away man, it’s 1976 all over again.

And that’s the point. Each to his own. Those of us with a penchant for chunky gold jewellery will go for a Toyota Supra. Paul Gascoigne would be bewitched by the Honda NSX whereas Clement Freud, obviously, has a Lexus. I have no idea what David Attenborough drives, but would hope it’s a Jaguar. A Bentley, these days, is a bit too Paul Daniels. Know what I mean?

So what about me? Well from a fashion point of view, it would have to be the new Aston Martin V8 coupé.

This is a brute of a car. It weighs 2.2 tons. It’s 17 feet long. It’s wider than an ocean liner and it has a monstrous, hand-built V8 which can propel it to 60mph in less than six seconds. It’s a rocket-propelled rhino.

Basically, what we have here is a Vantage without the artificial lungs. Aston has removed the superchargers but kept the high-performance pistons, camshafts and valves to create a replacement for the unloved Virage.

In terms of styling, it does without the Vantage’s hugely flared wheel arches and massive tyres, but the rear end is identical. To follow this car is to be in the presence of evil.

When you see it in your rear-view mirror, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Get out of its way or be prepared to look like a
waxwork dummy at gas mark six as each of its eight lights begins to flash.

If you still choose to block its path, you should know that its driver could swat you out of his way and not even know. A big Aston could head butt a tower block and the tower block would lose.

Some say it’s nothing more than a bespoke Corvette, a big American-style tank with leather innards, and I say yes to all that. I can’t think of anything better than a V8-powered gentleman’s club.

I can, however, think of a great many cars which are nicer to drive. A Ferrari 355 will run rings round it and a Mercedes is not only more nimble but undoubtedly more reliable too. Round a race track, I doubt the big Brit could hang onto a Golf VR6.

But for all the reasons already outlined, the Golf had better hope the Aston didn’t catch up on the straight bits. Which it would.

None of this matters though. The point is that when I looked at my reflection in a shop window, I felt good. It is my automotive Lee Cooper and Toggi combo. The interior of the V8 may be surprisingly cramped but, despite that, this is not a car for small people. You’d look stupid driving this unless you were at least 6ft 3in and 14 stone.

Other people who would look stupid in it include Liberal Democrats, Freemasons, folk singers, nancy-boy footballers, vicars, scoutmasters, people who like DIY or Michael Bolton, women, environmentalists and anyone who has ever been to a poetry reading.

You can’t even think about driving this car if you like salad.

Socialists are right out. So are people who use the words ‘toilet’, ‘nourishing’ or ‘settee’. If you read the
Daily Mail
, talk about tasty square meals and country fayre then, along with ramblers and people with limp wrists, lisps, or sticky out ears, you must buy a Datsun instead.

Are you a new man? Do you like to help around the house? Are you proficient at changing nappies and running up a set of curtains? Have you ever read a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel? Well go and buy a Honda then, because the Aston will break your kneecaps.

The V8 is for those of us who like our beer brown and our fags to be high on tar and low on lentils.

What I love about this car is that while it does nothing to hide its immense power, it comes trimmed in the finest leather. The carpets are so expensive you wouldn’t fit them in your house, and the wood is lustrous enough to cause a mass fainting on
The Antiques Roadshow
.

You mustn’t be fooled though. If you slide a Phil Collins CD into its stereo, the airbag will spring forth to punch you in the face.

It likes Elgar and its favourite rock track is Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’, though Led Zep’s ‘Black Dog’ will do. If you treat it like a hard-drinking, hard-playing soul mate, it will reward you with a spine-tingling range of growls, and the power to knock down copper beeches as you fly by. The only trouble is that it costs £140,000 which is an awful lot of money. I have a suggestion though. To raise the funds, rob a bank. It would like that.

These 650 guys are concerned not with what’s good for the country or the environment, but with power. Every decision they make is based on a quest for votes.

I remain absolutely convinced that the Labour Party’s apparent shift to the right has nothing whatsoever to do with the elected members’ beliefs. They’re just saying what they think the middle classes want them to say.

And the Conservatives are no better. Here are a bunch of people who’d done all that was necessary by 1989. They could have just sat back and let things tick over, but no: half of them now want to privatize my shoes.

We should replace them all with a bloke who has a bit of common sense. Every Thursday, he would pop down to Westminster so that civil servants could ask for advice.

Should the Spanish be allowed to fish in our waters? No.

Should Peter Blake be allowed to keep his ninety grand? No.

Should we ban scoutmasters from keeping guns? Yes.

Should we shoot people who let their dogs crap in the street? Yes.

It’s all so simple. We don’t need 650 people making noises like farmyard animals five days a week, when most of the burning issues could be settled over a cup of coffee by a bloke in a cardigan.

Certainly, if we were to introduce this new system, and
I really think it’s one of my better ideas, the roads would become free from caravans.

Should this question ever be brought before the Commons, the member for Devon North would argue forcefully that caravans form part of his constituency’s life blood, and that if they were to be banned so soon after all the cows were burned there’d be anarchy and looting on the streets of Minehead. And then someone else would rise to their feet and point out that some of his voters work in a caravan factory and that they’d be out of work, claiming benefit.

And that would be it. Caravans would stay.

Whereas under my system the bloke in a cardy would weigh up the issues over a slurp of Kenco and say, ‘No, they must go.’

In twelve years of writing about motoring I have only touched on this issue once because it did not seem important. I lived in London, and on the rare days when I sallied forth to the Provinces I was on a motorway.

But now I live in the Cotswolds and it’s unbelievable. I’ve just taken delivery of a new supercharged Jaguar, and so far I haven’t had it past 20 because round every corner the road is blocked by a Sprite Alpine.

I was stuck behind one called Sprint the other day. How can you call a caravan a ‘Sprint’?

And when they’re parked in a field they hardly blend into the environment. As Mark Wallington says in his magnificent book,
500 Mile Walkies
, ‘Why can’t they be painted black and white, and given udders?’

As a child I went on a few caravan holidays and I remember wondering what we were doing there. I mean, we lived in a large farmhouse in the countryside and now,
here we were decamped in a small box in the countryside – feet away from a fat family whose daughter, Janet, had woeful diarrhoea.

This, however, is not the issue. If people want to spend their precious vacation in a metal container, in a field full of other metal containers, eating shabby food and defecating in a bucket, fine.

The problem with caravans is that you can’t simply beam them to a site,
Star Trek
style. You must hook them up to the back of your wheezing, asthmatic car and, with absolutely no training whatsoever, tow the damn thing into some of Britain’s greener parts… like here.

People. As you look in your rear-view mirror and see a trail of cars stretching back to the horizon, do you not feel even the smallest pang of guilt? Do you not feel that it might be a good idea to pull over and let everyone by once in a while?

Do you not vow that next year you will undertake the journey at night, when you would be less of a bother?

Or do you secretly relish having the power of being part of a tiny, tiny minority who, for a few hours a year, can control something huge like traffic speed. Did you dream as a child of being a councillor? Or joining the parks police? Go on, admit it, you did.

You are a mealy-mouthed little twerp with no regard for others. In the last few weeks you’ve made me late for every single appointment, and you don’t give a damn.

If caravans can’t be outlawed, and without my new system of government they never will be, there should at least be some new rules.

Anyone wishing to tow one should be forced to take a complicated driving test. They cannot be towed by any
car with less than 300 ft/lbs of torque. They can only be taken on the roads between 2 and 6 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. And they should incur road tax of £200 a foot.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I’m not talking about the sort of rally where the car’s wheels only ever touch the ground in service halts. No, this sort is best described as a treasure hunt. Even so, disappointingly, there are rules, the worst of which is that all cars must be fitted with seatbelts. This meant that when I took part there were only 66 competitors, which isn’t good enough in a country with nine million blind people. But hey, I’m used to rules, and the best way round them is to indulge in a bit of Boss Hoggery. I figured that if I nicked the notes from the navigator, he’d never know and we’d win. But the organizers had that one covered; all the directions were in Braille, a language which means as much to me as Swahili
or German. Like everyone else, we had to use the force. But unlike everyone else, we went wrong at the very first turn.

Let me explain. The Braille was in English and this was not a language that featured on my co-driver’s CV. So he spelled out each instruction, letter by agonizingly slow letter. Thus we left the base and headed off towards the centre of Madras in our Maruti Gypsy, with Mr Padmanabhan muttering t-y-r-d-i-n-a-k-l-m-t-e-y-r-l-e-f-f. Which, if you have a pen and a piece of paper, and a fortnight, you could work out meant turn left in a kilometre. Trouble was it took me nearly five miles to figure it out, by which time we were completely and hopelessly lost. Not only do I not speak Braille but my Tamil’s not that good either. And there I was, with a blind man, in a city that I’ve never been to before (and never want to go to again, incidentally), on the same land mass, worryingly, as Portugal and Yemen. Things could go wrong here.

We’d be drifting down a road and, all of a sudden, Mr Padmanabhan would look up from his notes to ask: ‘What is l-k-j-r-i-j-l-s-s-s-a-e-q-j-t?’ And to be honest, there isn’t really much of an answer.

But somehow, and I guess quite by chance, we did happen upon a checkpoint. Relieved, I wound down the window and asked just how far behind we were. But here’s a funny thing; they said we were the first to come through, which was strange as we’d been the last to leave. However, it all became crystal clear when they told us that we were at checkpoint six and that we had somehow missed one to five. I knew damn well how we’d missed them. We’d been in Tibet. Nevertheless, we ploughed on until suddenly I was told to stop. ‘We are now at
checkpoint seven,’ Mr Padmanabhan said. But we weren’t. We were in the middle of an industrial estate, and it’s hard to point out to a blind man that he’s gone wrong. Again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but we’re not.’ ‘Yes we are,’ he insisted. And to avoid hurting his feelings, I had to leap out of the car to get my card stamped by a non-existent official at a checkpoint which wasn’t there. ‘Told you so,’ he said when I got back in the car.

Back at base, the event over, we learned that we’d been scrubbed from the running order altogether, on the basis that we’d only found one of the checkpoints. They all figured we’d given up and gone home. We didn’t even get any lunch, which was no bad thing because it seemed to consist of stillborn blackbirds which had been trodden on then coated with curry powder, bay leaves and ginger.

Oh how we all laughed as the navigators tried to pick bits of beak out of their teeth. And oh how they all laughed as they reminisced about how hopeless all their drivers were. We must see this sport in Britain. All you Round Table, Rotarian types, stop pushing beds up the high street, jack in the three-legged pub crawls and give the RNIB a call. And then call me to say where and when.