Born to Be Riled (47 page)

Then, when it’s two in the morning and you can’t sleep because of the sodium streaming through the curtainless window, you’re awoken by a drunken bloke called Dave who’s been given a key to your room by mistake.

I’d lay there all night, listening to the Doors on my Walkman and doing my best Kurtz impression. The horror. The horror.

However, this week I found myself staying at a Travelodge hotel and, oh, how times have changed. A plaque outside said it was ‘the 100th Travelodge to be opened at Hickstead’ and that the ribbon had been cut by Judith Chalmers. All Travelodges are opened by a top celeb. They got Annabel Croft in Hemel Hempstead and
Torvill and Dean for Nottingham. But the hotels, so far as I can tell, are all the same. For a flat rate you get a room that, I’m told, can sleep up to six people. Well, that kept me busy for a while. I found beds for only four and, after an hour, gave up looking for the others and turned on the television, hoping to find some German pornography. But there was none, and I was rapidly running out of distractions.

Bored out of my mind, I played hunt the telephone, but there wasn’t one, so I went in search of a bar, but there wasn’t one of those either; just a cold drinks machine in the unmanned reception area. Yup, you pay when you get there and, by ten, the hotel is bereft of staff.

There wasn’t even a restaurant but, according to the booklet in my room, I was welcome to traipse across the car park and eat in the Little Chef. Eat. In a Little Chef. Interesting concept.

The following morning I watched my fellow inmates trooping out of their cells, climbing into their superheated Vectras and setting off for another day of sweat and disappointment. They looked relaxed, but then they would. I mean, there was nothing in their rooms to have distracted them from the business of sleep, that’s for sure.

I don’t doubt that the Travelodge idea is a good one. By not providing the guest with anything at all, staff costs are kept down, and this can be passed to the customer: £49.95 is good value for a clean room with cotton sheets.

But what if you had to spend every night on the road, in the same featureless room? Eventually you’d find those other two beds, but then what?

And all you have to look forward to is another day on the pleblon upholstery in your Vectra. I stink, therefore I am a rep.

We have the builders in at the moment, so time is tight. Just when you think you have spare minutes for some coffee and a cigarette, the headman wanders over to say that the walls are all out of kilter. Or that the water pressure isn’t good enough for a new bathroom and that we must dig what amounts to the Suez Canal. ‘It can be rushed through in about 11 years and it’ll cost £4000 million.’

However, while I don’t particularly like having a boiler that runs on peat and blows up every time there’s a cold snap, I would much rather live somewhere with a bit of history than somewhere new, somewhere faultless, somewhere Barrattish. And that, I suppose, sums up all that’s wrong with the new BMW M5, a car that you can read about elsewhere in this issue. It’s just too perfect, too well sorted, too damned smug for its own good. Had we been at school together, it would have played in the first XI and been excellent at physics. And I would have stolen its milk at playtime.

I will happily admit that it beats the XJR on pretty well every front in the same way that, dynamically speaking, a brand-new house beats an old one. Perhaps this is why new estates are littered with BMWs just 10 minutes after the last of the JCBs trundles home. And all the old
cottages with leaky taps and ancient wisteria have Jags outside.

That said, I have noticed a growing trend in petroldom which is to be welcomed. Car makers are building new cars that have the ‘Oh, I must have one’ appeal of Daisy Cottage.

I’m thinking primarily about the Smart. This little car is riddled with the sort of faults that simply would not be acceptable to Mr and Mrs G-Plan. In a World of Leather it’s DFS – Downright Frigging Stupid. You can’t take it out of town because a passing bread van will blow it straight into the hedge. The six-speed semiautomatic gearbox takes an age to shift, and the car corners like Bambi.

There are upsides, though, like it’s just about the best inner-city car I’ve ever found. You can park it nose-on to the pavement, prices start at only £6000, the panels are indestructible and it does 60mpg. Great stuff, but immaterial.

What matters is that it’s just so damned cute. If you crossed a Cotswold village with a baby seal, you’d be only halfway there. You’d need to garnish the mix with a teddy bear and a primary-school ballet class to match it for aaah-ness.

Then you’ve got the Fiat Multiplex Cinema. I have it on good authority that even Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli thinks this clever six-seater is ‘absolutely hideous’, and he’s right – it is. But then so was the Elephant Man, and that didn’t stop us crying when he croaked.

There’s more too. I have never been able to watch Michael Elphick in anything –
Boon
, chat shows, whatever – since he broke the Elephant Man’s matchstick
cathedral, and I will not be able to speak to anyone who criticizes the Fiat. It may be new and modern, but I want to own one even more than I want to own Blenheim Palace.

At car industry press conferences five years ago, all we would ever ask was whether the four-door saloon that we’d just been shown would be available with a diesel engine, or four-wheel drive, or as an estate. And that was all we wanted to know. But now we could say: ‘Will it be painted pink and have the engine mounted in one of the wheels?’ And they’d probably say yes.

I suppose that Renault must take the credit for having started this trend by introducing the Twingo, but now there are characterful cars on virtually every street corner. The Mercedes-Benz A-class. The Rover 75. The Honda S2000. The Jaguar S-type. The Evo sisters from Mitsubishi. And, yes, even the Daihatsu Move. Alfa Romeo is back in business, and Ford – the most conservative of all car manufacturers – has recently caught the bug, too, so now, instead of giving its designers pencils and tracing paper, they all break at five for a cup of tea and an E. And have you seen that new Vauxhall sports car? Well, like, wow.

But this wave seems somehow to have bypassed Munich, where the Teutons are still struggling with their track rod ends and their camshaft technology. BMW seems to be struck on the idea that a car is just a device for moving people around. Look at those television ads that pick on one tiny engineering detail and hammer it home. Great. We know that BMW pays great attention to the tiniest nut and bolt, and that the cooling system in the M5 is to be admired.

But loved? I rather think not.

It’s just like the
Financial Times
. What great insight. Not only do the people who produce this paper understand the City but they can write about it all in a clear and concise fashion. They do the job entrusted to them quite brilliantly… but that’s all they do.

So come coffee time, which do you settle down to flick through? The
FT
? Or the
Sun
? And which car would I rather take home tonight – the M5 or the Jag? Absolutely no contest.

Time. For centuries, mankind’s greatest minds have tried and failed to explain its secrets but, so far, only Rod Stewart has come close. ‘Like a fistful of sand, it slips right through your hand,’ he once sang.

Pink Floyd reckoned that each time the sun comes up you’re shorter of breath and one day closer to death. But for those unschooled in the ways of 1970s rock, it remains a mystery with no tangible beginning and no foreseeable end. All we know is that, despite its abundance, there’s never enough around when you want some.

If you live to be 70, you have just 600,000 hours to play with, and that isn’t enough, I’m afraid, to mess about on mainland Europe trying to buy a cheap new car. I’m sorry, but the only way you can save money on a car is by wasting time. And time is the most precious commodity you’ll ever have.

The experts say that ‘all’ you have to do is phone round
a few dealers in, say, Holland, getting quotes. Then you ‘simply’ wire them some money and, six weeks later, fly over to pick up your shiny new right-hand-drive car. Never mind that it will have had its stereo stolen; you bring it back to Britain, contact the VAT man, fill in some forms, pay Customs whatever they want, go to the post office, write to Swansea, fill out some more forms, buy some registration plates and – hey presto! – job done.

Well, most of us haven’t got time to clean our teeth properly, leave alone take two weeks off work to save £4.50 on a poxy Rover 216.

I’m forever watching programmes on the television where men with improbable hair busy themselves with money-saving tips. Don’t call in a plumber for that burst pipe; ‘pop’ over to your local DIY store and buy a welding torch. Then ‘simply’ dig up your drive using a pile-driver, repair the pipe, encase your handiwork in concrete and you’re back in business.

I read a report in the newspaper last month which said that men spend only 15 minutes a day playing with their kids. Well, of course we do. It’s because we’re all in the shed building DIY microwave ovens to save money.

Now, look. The clock is ticking. You’ve only got 300,000 hours left and you’ll spend 100,000 of those asleep, and another 25,000 watching period dramas on TV. Then there are the queues caused by Mr Prescott’s bus lane and, whoopsadaisy, your arterial route map has just exploded. Tilt. Game over.

I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not certain you can save money by buying abroad. This is because, when we want a new car, we usually decide how much to spend, rather than what model we want. Who cares that you can buy a
Rover for £10,000 in Copenhagen? You don’t want a Rover, and you don’t want to spend even a tiny fraction of your short life in Denmark.

Say you have a £12,000 budget and, wisely, you decide to buy a Ford Focus. But then you hear that such a car is available in The Hague for £8000. So are you going to buy the Ford and save four grand? Or are you going to go over there and get something a little more tasty? An Alfa 156, perhaps, or a swanky, posh Lexus IS200.

Or – and this is what 92 per cent of new car buyers actually do – are you going to read about the great deals over there, then buy your car in Britain because you’ve got better things to do with your day than haggle with a dope-smoking pornographer in a bad jacket?

Well, don’t worry, because help is at hand from Kia, a Korean car company that has just announced that it will slash its prices to bring them more in line with the EU norm.

Of course, buying a Kia in Britain has its drawbacks – you end up with a Kia for a kickoff, but, hey, there are worse things in life. Certainly, you should avoid the Pride, which will endow you with none, and I’m not sure the four-wheel-drive Sportage is terribly good either. The new four-door Shuma I can see would work well on the cab rank at Nairobi Airport, but here in Britain it belongs on
Call My Bluff
with Alan Coren trying to convince his opponents that a Kia Shuma is a sort of kebab.

Kia has never managed to get its names right – a trend that goes back to its first vehicle, the Bongo. But the prices are low, so I’ve had a good look through the range to find the least nasty and have chanced upon something called the Clarus 1.8LX. It’s a four-door saloon that
comes with air-conditioning, seats and a big, ugly radiator grille.

Now sure, when you park it on the driveway your neighbours will come round for a good laugh, but you’ll be able to wipe the smile off their faces when you explain that it cost just £10,995 and that you bought it in England. Then you’ll be able to go inside, slam the door and spend some quality time arguing with your children about Doris Troy.

The Chrysler Voyager is like that creature from Hallowe’en. You can stab it, shoot it, throw it out of the bedroom window and six months later it’ll be back in the sequel –
School Gates II
.

You were told in 1997 that Mr Blair and the wide-mouthed frog were using one to ferry their children to and from school. And even though you know the man is a war criminal, you still went ahead and bought one.

In 1998 you were told that it came stone-dead last in a survey to find Britain’s most environmentally friendly cars. And in early 1999, in this very column, I announced that the Vauxhall Vectra had lost its crown. ‘The worst car you can buy now,’ I wrote, ‘is the Chrysler Voyager.’ I hated it.

But still the queue to buy one stretched out of the dealership, round the corner and halfway up the inner ring road past Asda.

Last week, though, I really thought its time had come.
In official crash tests, part-sponsored by the government, it was described as ‘appalling’. In a frontal impact at 40mph, the steering column was forced up into a driver’s head and the footwell split open. It scored zero.

Surely, I thought, this would be it, the end of the road. No more rearing up out of the bath to stab Michael Douglas. It would be dead. Finished. Roll credits; not that it has ever earned any.

But no. An owner told me yesterday that he wouldn’t be getting rid of it because it was only the driver who’d be killed, not the kids in the back.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such collective lunacy. You know it will kill you, your family and the planet. You know that it’s uncomfortable and ungainly. You know it’s the choice of Mr Blair, and still it is the second best-selling people carrier.

Of course, those with four children will say there is no alternative, that no people carrier is desperately safe, except the Toyota Picnic, and there’s no way you will drive around in something called a Picnic. Quite right, too.

Well, I’ve just bought an eight-seater that could run into a house at 40mph and everyone inside would look up quizzically and say: ‘Did anyone feel a bump just then?’ It is a Toyota Landcruiser, and it is so vast that, if our dog were to die in the back, it would be three months before the smell reached our noses in the front. I saw some footage the other day of what happens when a big off-roader hits a normal car, and it was incredible. It just rides up the ordinary car’s bonnet, ripping the roof clean off and severing the heads of anyone inside.