Born to Be Riled (3 page)

But, thankfully, the British recession has ended and those old values are back on line. Girls who had been forced into long and tedious skirts now insist on huge slits up to their ladies’ areas, estate agents are selling houses in Chelsea for £25 million, the stock market is up above the ionosphere. Greed is good. And greed is back. Phew.

And nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in cardom. At the Motor Show, I talked with thousands of visitors and not one asked about safety, or economy, or value for money. They wanted to talk power.

In ten days no one suggested that the new Golf Estate was a good car because of the space in the back for meals-on-wheels deliveries. No one talked about how BMW’s recycling programme might conserve the earth’s resources.

No one noticed that there wasn’t a single electric car in Earls Court, but the aisles were full to overflowing with people lying on the floor having paddy fits because the McLaren F1 was an absentee. When they came round,
they talked about the Aston Martin Vantage, the 7 litre, twin-supercharged Lister Storm, and the Lamborghini Diablo VT. Suggest that we should rip out all the cats, fit six downdraught Webers and prime them with five-star fuel and they wet themselves. And so did I.

Outside, ladies in Puffas and corduroy trouserwear handed out leaflets demanding that cars be banned from city centres. If they could have had a pound for every time someone told them to get back to Greenham, they could have afforded nicer leaflets, and a Lear jet to drop them from. Inside, you couldn’t get near the TVR stand. All the other manufacturers with their airbags and their safety videos and their girls in ankle-length skirts were watching tumbleweed blow by, while the boys from Blackpool had to fight off the crowds with sticks. Their Cerbera no doubt meets the letter of the environmental law but as regards the spirit it’s a V8-sized joke, a 5 litre two-fingered salute to the world’s whales and all who love them.

The safety lobby with their meat-free fridges and their green-tinted specs had their 15 minutes of fame in 1991, but they must now realize that Gordon Gekko is back in the driving seat, with his foot flat down in a tyre-squealing slide back to 1986. And even though the insurance companies are doing their best to ensure we can’t afford cars that will squeal tyres, we, like all clever capitalists, still have an answer.

We are buying more and more off-road cars so that we can drive through the countryside. Literally.

You can see them all piling out of the station at 11 a.m., six hours after they left home in Kent, clutching their Customer Charter form and muttering to one another about how it was leaves the last time. And the wrong-shaped snow before that.

This is a big problem for British Rail as it heads towards privatization. Without the support of the City boys – and they’re hardly likely to get it, having wrecked their lives for so long – the flotation will be a disaster.

So they’ve come up with a cunning plan, which involves demonstrating to their customers that the alternative to rail travel is even worse.

Ever since I was thrown off a train by the police for arguing with a guard – who should have been drowned at birth – I’ve made it my business to avoid British Rail’s pitifully inadequate, overpriced, badly run, slow, sick-making service, but last weekend I had to go to Harwich.

And for all sorts of complicated reasons I couldn’t drive, so with bad grace I set off for Liverpool Street station, where the man at the ticket desk said, without looking up, that Aborigines have their fish in the laundry.

Seriously, this guy had not mastered the art of speech and if he’d been on one of those customer care programmes that BR is always harping on about, I can only deduce that the lecturer was on holiday that week.

I explained that I couldn’t understand a word he was on about and that it might be better if he looked up so I could see his lips. This helped a lot and I was able to work out that the train to Harwich had been cancelled. No sorry. No nothing. His head just flopped down again like his neck had suddenly broken.

Which it would have done had there not been a piece of glass separating us. Why do they have that glass anyway? Who’d want to rob those dunderheads?

Instead of a train, there was to be a coach and this sent shivers down my spine. A coach. I’d rather have gone to the dentist. I don’t go on coaches. Coaches are for old people on tours of North Wales. Coaches are for students who want to go from Northampton to Sheffield for 10p. Coaches don’t have seatbelts and they roll down embankments, killing everyone on board.

To make sure we boarded it, there were some small Chinese women marshalling the crowds, shouting at shufflers. It was like a scene from
Schindler’s List
. Exactly where was the bus’s exhaust outlet?

Now, British Airways have proved that it is possible to fit a human being into a space 30 per cent smaller than his body but the coach operators have gone much further.

What you do on a coach is get yourself roughly near the seat and then a Chinese woman comes along with a mallet and hammers you into position. Then some Scandinavians pile rucksacks on your head.

I began to wonder why on earth anyone needs a seat-belt on a coach. The driver could have driven into a wall at 100mph, and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.

There is no smoking on board but that’s OK because not even Harry Houdini could have got into my pockets.
And anyway, the packet had taken a direct hit from the mallet so all the Marlboros were bent and broken.

Now I’ve just come back from Cuba and I remember staring in open-mouthed wonderment as the buses there, huge 300-seaters, trundled by with 500 dismal faces pressed to the glass. What I hadn’t realized is that I was staring in the face of sheer luxury.

Bus travel in Britain is far worse, and the pain is doubly bad here because we know what we’re missing. We know that it isn’t beyond the wit of man to fix up a buffet bar or a lavatory or, indeed, to space the seats in such a way that I could breathe properly. They didn’t even have women coming down the aisles offering to empty a pot of coffee into your lap in exchange for £1.20.

I swear as we went past one field in Essex, a herd of veals were pointing at us and waving placards.

On a coach, you pay your money and, crashes permitting, it takes you there. That’s it. This is frill-free travel, and at the other end of your journey more people come with spatulas to ease you out of your seat.

It was, without a doubt, the worst two hours of my entire life and when we emerged at Harwich docks I found myself staring wistfully at the trains there. They looked so big, and so fast, and the staff all looked like angels – a bit fatter perhaps – but with their sandwiches and their teas they were definitely God’s children.

And they are working for a bunch of people who are, very obviously, brilliant. To have thought up the idea of putting disgruntled rail customers on a coach once in a while to shut them up is inspired.

And anyone who can think like that gets my vote. When the flotation comes, I’ll take 400 shares please.

Given enough money, it can be done. I know this because in just 18 months Volvo has turned itself from a music hall joke into a serious and credible BMW rival.

It all began, gently at first, with the introduction of the 850, a surprisingly nice car to drive but you’d never know it, what with those Etch-a-Sketch lines and that badge.

Never mind that the top models had a creamy 2.5 litre, five-cylinder 20-valve engine and a truly sophisticated rear suspension, it was still bought by old people who indicated left a lot and turned on their high-intensity rear fog lights during June, in readiness for autumn.

The rest of us were still safe. We could still spot a Volvo coming the other way and get out of its way. Motorcyclists could see one approaching a main road and know, for an absolute certainty, it wasn’t going to stop.

Then Volvo gave us the T5. And before everyone woke up to the fact that this was a really nice car to drive, and seriously fast too, Volvo had entered the world’s most prestigious racing series for saloon cars. Only they’d entered an estate.

There was turmoil in the motoring world. ‘No,’ we said to them politely, ‘It’s not the British Towing Car Championships. Please pull out. It will be embarrassing.’

And it was. In the first year, they lost spectacularly. And as the Swedish tidal wave cruised round in the middle of
the field, the crowd pointed and made bovine lowing noises.

The trouble is that in the car parks at these events you started to notice, among the Sierra Cosworths and BMWs, a growing number of the aforementioned T5s, finished in black, and lowered, and sitting on 17 inch gunmetal grey alloys.

They looked very good and the cognoscenti were impressed, in a confused, what’s happening here, sort of way.

Then all hell broke loose. Volvo started its second year in the Touring Car Championship with a brace of saloons that actually won some races. And they bought every single advertising slot on ITV so that we could see stunt men and photographers and meteorologists whizzing around in their Volvos.

Never slow to leap onto a bandwagon, I got hold of a T5 for my wife, and pretty soon everyone who’d ever had a Volvo was saying that they’d been right all along and that they knew I’d come round to their way of thinking in the end.

Things by now were out of control because to run alongside the T5, Volvo brought out an even meaner T5R. And now there is, simply, the 850R. Or as my wife calls it, the R2D2. Or as I call it, Terminator 2.

You’ll have to think up your own name because it just says Volvo on the back. However, no one is fooled for long, thanks to the rear wing, the vivid red finish, the six-spoke gunmetal grey alloys and the chin spoiler that grazes the road.

Inside, there’s powered, heated Suedette seats and all the fruit. There is also a wooden dashboard, the likes of
which I have never seen before. You see, it’s made from what looks like polished pine and it is absurd.

It’s useful, though, because there’s no way you’d climb inside and think of the car as ordinary in any way. OK, so it starts with a key and the clutch pedal is on the left, but once you’ve let it up a bit you’re at the controls of a wheeled neutron bomb.

The huge turbo means the 2.3 litre motor now develops 250bhp, and that, translated into bald figures, equals a 0 to 60 time of six point something seconds and a top speed of 160mph. In a Volvo.

It will cost about £32,000 whether you have the saloon or the estate, manual or automatic transmission, and while that’s a lot, I have to say, you do get a lot of car for the money.

What surprises is the sophistication. Instead of being bad and loud, it’s all quite subdued. You even get traction control which does its best to mediate as the explosion of power fights with the front-wheel drive.

Saab once said you can’t put more than 170bhp through the front wheels. But Volvo has anyway and they’ve ended up with a car that you drive like your trousers are on fire.

There’s a Terminator 2 outside my house right now, and as it’s three in the morning I’m sorely tempted to take it for another drive. I love looking at the body language of those in front as they struggle to see what on earth is behind. It’s a Volvo Jim, but not as we know it.

And it isn’t either. It flows through the bends and while the ride is firm on those unbelievably low-profile tyres, it’s never jarring. It’s just like a BMW really, only faster.

And there you have it: an entire piece about Volvo where the word ‘safety’ didn’t crop up once. Mine’s a Neirsteiner.

Other recent announcements from Whitehall couldn’t have come a moment too soon. Kings will no longer be allowed to behead people they don’t like very much, Wessex is to get its own legislature and the campaign against drink driving is to be moved up a gear. What?

There is now lamb chop all over my television because there I was, eating supper, when the Roads Minister, Robert Key – who looks like he’s seen rather too many lamb chops in his time – came on the news to talk about his war on people who drink and drive. All seven of them.

In 1982, 43,341 people were breathalysed and 31.1 per cent of them were over the limit. Something needed to be done, and something was. In 1992, 108,856 people were breathalysed and under 8 per cent were found to
be positive. In other words, the government has won its battle.

But Mr Key says 610 people died in drink-related accidents last year and that his fight goes on. Well, my dear chap, most of those were wobbly pedestrians who fell in front of sober drivers and, short of adopting a Muslim attitude to drink, you aren’t going to do much about that sort of thing, are you?

Apparently, yes. In America, dinner party hosts are being sued by their friends for failing to provide soft drinks and, while that is unlikely to catch on here, Mr Key does ask that we encourage sobriety when we have people round. Now look, I spend most of my time these days sitting around dinner tables not being allowed to smoke or eat meat – and now Key says that I can’t have a glass of wine either. Bet he never bans food.

His next point is that young people often find it difficult to say no to a drink because of social pressure. The last time someone was this wrong, he was called Neville Chamberlain and he had a piece of paper in his hand.

It is, in fact, old people who are far and away the worst offenders. And the reason they get away with it is because, at night, the police tend to stop youngsters in hot hatchbacks rather than rosy-cheeked farmers in Jags.

Key has proved that he is not in the real world and that he should be fed to the lions. But he has yet more to say. It seems he wants to lower the legal limit, arguing that one pint affects a person’s ability to drive. Sure does, fatty, but so does being old. A 17-year-old with one pint in his triangular torso has faster reactions than a sober pensioner, so why not ban old people from driving? Or people with a cold, or those who need to go to the loo, because I sure
as hell can’t concentrate when I’m bursting for a pee and you haven’t provided any service stations. And anyway, what do you lower the legal limit to? Nought? And when does someone have no alcohol in their blood? Five hours after a pint? Five days? No one would ever dare drive again.

We’ve had a long line of idiots in the Transport Ministry but this one tops the lot. And weighs the most as well.