Born to Be Riled (20 page)

Between 1982 and 1985 I used to play a great deal of blackjack, and it almost always made me miserable when I lost. Which I did. All the time.

Nowadays, however, I have learnt to approach the table fully expecting an hour’s cards to cost me a hundred quid. Which it does. All the time. By abandoning hope, I’ve removed the despair.

This is a very important philosophy when you’re confronted with someone who’s trying to sell you a pension. Do not listen. As soon as they open their briefcase, put your fingers in your ears and hum Bruce Springsteen ballads.

A pension is by far and away the most stupid thing ever to hit the civilized world. You scrimp and you save for 30 miserable years, hoping that you’ll live to reap the rewards.

And what, pray, are you going to do with those rewards at the age of 92? Buy a gold-plated Nebulizer? Luxuriate in some silk-lined incontinence pants?

They say you’re investing for the life you don’t yet
know, but that can work both ways. What if, after a life of deprivation, you are eaten by a tiger? Or what if, just a week before the big pay-out, you get an even bigger one from Camelot.

Pensions are all about planning, and planning is all about hope. And hope, invariably, leads to despair.

Tonight, I’m off to New Zealand to race a V8 jet boat up some rapids, and that’s an experience to beat any 4 per cent growth on capital, believe me.

They say pensions are tax-efficient but, quite frankly, they’re so dull I’d rather give my money to the government. So long as they promise to spend it on F-15s and nuclear submarines. Things I can be proud of.

The whole point of having money is to have fun. That’s it. There is no other reason, which is why you must also slam the door on anyone trying to tell you that a PEP or a TESSA is a good idea. It is not.

You give your cash to someone who, in return, sends you statements once in a while saying that you now have more money than you had when you started. But you haven’t, because it’s locked away.

Some would argue that the stock market provides a better alternative because the money is always available. But I’d be grateful if all talk of EC1 were kept out of the equation just at the moment. Even the most idiotic gambler can see the Footsie is at its highest level ever, and that Mr Blair is at the gates. The only way is down.

I have thought about this quite carefully and it seems to me that all investments do nothing to enrich your soul. And I don’t care what the grinning salesman says, they’re all risky. Remember, pensions have a habit of falling off boats.

You will spend your life hoping this doesn’t happen. You’ll wind up frightened and alone, shivering in the corner of a one-room bedsit, unable to afford a single-bar fire because some City institution is playing the silicone gee-gees with your cash.

My advice is simple. Remove the risk. Invest your money… no wait,
spend
your money, on something you
know
will lose. A car.

Now at this point, a few people will raise their hands and draw my attention to the Mercedes SLK, which, when it was launched at the beginning of the year, came with a two-year waiting list. Secondhand values went through the roof, up the chimney and in some cases right to the top of the television aerial.

SLKs were being advertised at £45,000, which is £10,000 more than they’d cost a patient man. But pretty soon everyone was trying to sell their Merc, and in a matter of days prices settled down again. The SLK was a freak.

And I see no new cars on the horizon which will perform a similar trick; certainly not the BMW Z3. Last weekend, I counted 26 in the secondhand columns, giving it the exclusivity of a packet of biscuits.

Cars were an investment once, but too many people walked away from those late-1980s boom years nursing fingers that were burned through to the bone. However, and this is the key, they may have paid £100,000 for a Ferrari 308 GT4 which is now worth £20,000, but at least they still have a Ferrari.

I know of two chaps who clubbed together in the height of the madness and bought an Alfa Romeo SZ thinking it was their passport to a life of rum punches in
Barbados. However, as they took delivery the bubble burst, and they’ve been wearing margarine trousers on a slide into oblivion ever since.

But who cares? If it had been a stock exchange deal that had gone wrong, they’d have a worthless piece of paper. But they’ve still got a Group A racing chassis, those wonderful looks and that magical 3.0 litre V6 engine. They did all right.

I was flicking through the small ads in this paper last week and found that for, say, thirty grand you could have a Jaguar XJR or a low-mileage BMW M5 or, staggeringly, a Bentley Turbo R.

Sure, when you’re 90, a pension would keep you in panty pads and a Bentley won’t, but at least you’ll have had a life. You’ll be seen as wicked and interesting, and as a result no one will care when you simply wet the chair.

Last night, I found myself at the Auckland Travelodge, tucking into a bed of wilted leaves and chicken served with ‘jus’.

To be honest, there’s nothing much wrong with Travelodge – except they always put me in a room that’s two time zones away from reception – but I would like to know how on earth the word ‘jus’ wormed its way on to one of their menus.

In the very recent past, ‘jus’ was only to be found at the very finest restaurants in France, but in just a few
years it’s filtered down the food chain, through bistroland and onwards until it ended up in New Zealand, in a Travelodge, under my chicken.

Where it tasted pretty ropy actually. I knew it would, because it just doesn’t belong. I go to a Travelodge when I want a pasta salad, and I go to Château du Domaine St-Martin when I want ‘jus’.

In carspeak, this is even easier. I go to Land Rover if I want an off-roader, and I go to VW if I want a hatchback. So would someone please explain to me what the Toyota Rav4 is all about?

When it was launched in Britain a couple of years ago, I think I was going through a rough patch with Toyota. I wasn’t speaking to them, or they weren’t speaking to me, but either way I never actually drove one.

I heard it was an attempt to marry the Camel Trophy to Marks & Spencer, which seemed a bit unlikely, but press reviews were favourable and it sold pretty well.

Thus, when I came to New Zealand last week, and needed a car that would travel great distances and do some off-roading, all on a BBC budget, it seemed like the ideal solution. In fact, I’d have been better off renting a space hopper.

Most of the roads here are single-carriageway, so you need plenty of overtaking punch which the 2000cc engine simply can’t deliver. When the road ahead is empty, you drop a cog, mash the throttle and yes, yes, yes, you are gaining and you’re pulling out, and a few minutes later you’re alongside, but you’re never going to make it before the next bend, so you drop back again, a beaten man.

I know of no road, anywhere in the world, where there is a long enough straight for a fully laden Rav4 to strut
its stuff in the overtaking lane. And the roads in New Zealand are bent like the wires in a Brillo pad.

This, however, does mean I had a chance to check out the handling. And yes, I’ll admit that for an off-roader it steers and rides and corners with a surprising degree of comfort and agility. In saloon car terms, it’s right up there with, say, a Lada Samara.

Now, of course, all these drawbacks are to be expected in a car that’s been designed to drive through swollen rivers and up sheer cliff faces. But the Toyota, sadly, can’t do either of those things. Indeed, with its road tyres, even a gently undulating grassy field proved too much.

I stabbed away at the centre differential locking button like a dying man trying to restart the engine on his crippled submarine, but it was to no avail. With insufficient grip, and even less torque, I was merely digging a hole that eventually would have taken me back to England. I’m afraid that despite a high ground clearance, the Rav4 is about as much use in backcountry New Zealand as an aqualung made of cheese.

Toyota has simply tried too hard. By trying to make an off-road ‘car’, they’ve ended up with something that’s no good at anything.

Now this applies equally well to Suzuki’s Vitara, but at least this makes up for its numerous shortfalls by being handsome in a hairdressery sort of way.

I’m forced to say the same applies with the three-door Rav4 too, but I had a
five
-door version, which is a terrible, terrible mutation that looks like it was styled by a World War Two plastic surgeon.

And the interior was done by someone who obviously works in a poorly lit room. The dash is so bland that
my colleagues resorted to drawing extra dials and switches on it with chalk. And because we couldn’t overtake anything, and therefore each journey took an age, we ended up with six boost gauges, a rev counter, an eight track, a CD autochanger and, if memory serves, a fart counter too.

Worse than the tedious innards, though, is that, unlike any other off-roader, it doesn’t have a high driving position, so you can’t sneer at other drivers. Not that there’s much to sneer about in a car with almost no redeeming features.

Certainly, you can’t sneer about the price. The five-door Rav4 is an almost unbelievable £17,000, making it the most preposterously overpriced piece of under-powered, nausea-inducing nonsense ever to hit Britain’s roads.

Hard words, but just to make sure Toyota and I don’t have to do pugilism again, I’ve now swapped it for one of their Land Cruisers – a huge diesel automatic, and I love it. Sure, it won’t go round corners, but each time it ploughs off the road it just ploughs
through
whatever it hits.

It knows its place in the world. It doesn’t try to be something it’s not, and concentrates instead on simply being big. If the Rav4 is ‘jus’ in a Travelodge, the Land Cruiser is gravy in a transport café.

Some time between the seventh and eighth grappa, Tiff climbed back into his chair and announced that he wanted
to buy a BMW M5. At first, we thought he was a little more tired and emotional than usual, but his arguments seemed rational. ‘Its engine is so good and I love its looks and it feels so right and you can pick one up for £15,000 or so,’ he said, before falling off his chair again. Mr Editor Blick and I didn’t notice though, because we were deep in conspiratorial mutterings. We’ve got to stop him. We’ve got to demonstrate that the supercharged Jaguar is better.

The next day, Count Quentula was out parking cars for his village fête when I called with the news. ‘Tiff wants a Bee Em,’ I said. ‘Oh Christ,’ said Quentin. ‘The poor deluded fool. I’d better let him have a go in my S Class.’ And therein lies the problem. At this level in the market, people have nailed their colours to the mast and almost nothing will shake them loose. Tiff likes BMWs. Quentin likes Mercs. And I like Jags. When I start banging on about my XJR, Tiff will look up from his 24th grappa and ask if I’d like another gin and tonic. ‘And how are the Masons these days?’ When Tiff is in mid-soliloquy about the smoothness of a BMW 6, Quentin will interrupt to ask if he’s run over any old ladies yet.

And when the Count tells us about the unburstability of a 500, Tiff and I wonder how we managed to miss his 50th birthday. With cars like this it doesn’t matter what they look like, or how fast they go, or whether they do 12 or 200 miles to the gallon. It’s an image thing, pure and simple.

The data is confused, but some figures suggest that up to 90 per cent of Britain’s executives never change marques. If they start out in business with a C Class, they are in Merc’s web and there is no escape. During the late
1970s and early 1980s, a great many bosses did the unthinkable and deserted Jaguar’s leaking ship. But the big cat was in their soul, and now the cars are made properly again many are coming back to the fold. This, of course, means that if BMW wants to maintain its healthy market share, the new 5 Series only needs to be as good as the old one. Tiff will want one no matter what. Thus, as one magazine has called the new boy ‘close to perfect’, you could accuse the Hun of overkill.

Certainly, I can’t remember driving any other car which does quite so many things quite so well. The £30,000 528 I tested was truly fast and yet eerily efficient. It has room in the back for a small tennis tournament and yet it handles with an aplomb that leaves you breathless. Then there are the details, the best of which is the interior lighting. You get the usual red instruments, which BMW says provides a restful get-you-home environment, and I’d have to agree. But in the new 5 Series they’ve gone further, because next to the mirror are two tiny red spotlights, providing a stylish red glow around the centre console. It gives the whole dash an exquisite 3D effect and, in addition, you can find your phone and fags.

For the Tiffs of this world, for all BMW drivers, this car is better than close to perfect. It’s a solid 10. If it had been crap you’d have loved it, but it’s brilliant, so I dare say you’ll want to spend your evenings in the garage with it and a bucket of KY jelly. Me? I couldn’t wait to see the back of it. And Quentin is hardly jumping up and down, clutching his privates, as he waits for a go. Dynamically, it is superior to anything for the same sort of money made by Jaguar or Mercedes. But we don’t care. When I overtake someone in the Jag, you can feel the warmth of approval.
People point and coo; they’re talking about how good it looks and how quality is better these days. Middle England wants a Jag. Now try the same overtaking manoeuvre in a 528 and feel the hate. There goes another pushy yuppie, hoping to hit a tree before his ticker gives out. Gaps that open for Jag Man are closed when you’re in a BMW. People don’t like them.

I tried this argument on Tiff but got nowhere. ‘Look,’ he said, pouring another grappa. ‘You can go faster in a BMW than you can in a Jag or a Merc.’ And then he fell off his chair again.

When you read a road test report in any newspaper or magazine, you will learn how a car handles at its very limits of adhesion.