Born to Be Riled (9 page)

On that inner ring road you get to be very good indeed at crosswords.

On paper, I’m sure the traffic management system looked like a brilliant idea. Remove all the on-street parking. Keep cars out of the town centre. And encourage vibrant bus companies to run shuttle services.

On the town planners’ maps, the pedestrianized streets would have been full of carefree shoppers and dainty trees, but in fact they’re choked with buses from endless different companies who, to stay competitive, run older vehicles that belch out blue smoke.

The end result is a cauldron of chaos and lost opportunities.

My wife was 8.9 months pregnant so, as a bus was out
of the question, we were forced to park near Abingdon and walk. The Japanese tourists were hard enough to circumnavigate, but on the High Street there was a wall of buses jammed nose to tail for as far as the eye could see. The air was unbreathable and the distances were simply too great for someone who, in fact, gave birth that afternoon. We trudged back to the car, empty-handed, and headed for home.

On the way, we found a Toys
Us on the outskirts, where I burdened my credit card to the tune of £275. That’s £275 which, thanks to the council’s idiotic transport policy, has been kept from the town centre shopkeepers.

I only live 17 miles from Oxford but I will never ever go back. I will never eat in an Oxford restaurant. I will never go to an Oxford pub. I will never buy anything from an Oxford shop.

I will go instead to towns where they are wise enough to welcome me and my car. Banbury. Cheltenham. London even.

This town planning business is becoming a triumph of vegetarianism over common sense.

Council people are obsessed with commuters, people who work in town centre offices, people who create the rush hours. But in their blinkered drive to solve this problem they’re forgetting that towns should be a hub for the outlying villages, centres where people go to shop and eat and be entertained. And these people, whether councils like it or not, need to come by car. You can’t take a fridge-freezer on a bus.

If the car is banned and out-of-town superstores are encouraged, town centres will die. Already, privately run
bakers and haberdashers have been replaced with estate agents and building society offices. Oxford is spoiled because the Japanese tourists will keep on coming, but other towns whose spires are not quite so dreamy should be very, very careful.

If you hammer the commuters, shoppers will go elsewhere, and if you keep on hammering, business leaders will pack up and go too. What’s left?

I wouldn’t mind, but the solution is so desperately simple. Instead of removing parking spaces, councils should provide as many as is humanly possible. They should analyse every last yard of yellow line and wonder whether it’s absolutely necessary.

Stick up pay-and-display units. Charge us a pound an hour. It’s OK. We don’t mind.

If you make parking easy, you will automatically reduce congestion because you will not have cars going round and round the block any more. Seriously, I cannot think of a more idiotic use for a car than looking for somewhere to stop it.

But, of course, a town planner who admits this is talking himself out of a job, so over the coming years we’re going to be treated to a series of schemes which are, quite simply, bonkers.

Last week, a bunch of European ministers met to discuss the issue and heard that in Turin there is now an advanced booking service for parking spots, to prevent motorists from driving into the city on the off chance of finding a space.

Yes, but when I need some cigarettes, I want them now and not after Mrs Miggins has finished buying her cat food.

In the Netherlands, the city of Groningen is divided
into four quadrants. Traffic can whiz round the ring road and enter one sector, but if you then want to go to another sector you must get back on the ring road again.

Why? I lay awake all last night trying to figure that one out and I can’t think of a single advantage.

In Zurich, sophisticated bus priority signals keep cars sitting at junctions for hours.

This is galactically stupid. A fat Swiss banker is not going to leave his Mercedes 600S at home and take the bus. He is just going to set off from home a little earlier to compensate, and then he’s going to sit in the jam with that huge, 6.0 litre V12 chewing up the world’s resources like Pac-Man.

And there’s the rub. In Britain, according to the RAC, 80 per cent of all journeys are dependent on the car. It doesn’t matter how much the government taxes motorists or how miserable life is made for them by councils, there is no alternative.

Yes, cry the dissenters, but what about the 20 per cent of journeys where there is an option. When I go into my local town I could easily walk, or use a bicycle.

But here’s the thing. I never ever will.

Strangely, even though some of the chaps are the size of a double garage and their womenfolk are even larger, it’s a graceful sight to behold.

And so, during the week, are Britain’s motorways.

Stand on a service station footbridge and you are treated to what can only be described as automotive ballet.

Get yourself on to the M40 on a Tuesday and you will see a display of driving that would leave Damon Hill breathless. Sure, he can control a car at 180mph, but unlike the reps in their Mondeos and Vectras he doesn’t have a phone in one hand and a sausage roll in the other.

Formula One chiefs are concerned about the speed differential between the top cars and the Fortis, but guys, guys, guys. Mondeo Man is out there every day on the motorway, doing 90, juggling with juggernauts that can barely crack 50. And he doesn’t whinge.

He can’t because he has no grounds. British truckers are in a class of their own. Think. When was the last time one of these seven-axled giants caused you even so much as a moment of concern on the motorway network? It never happens.

They get on with their lives, getting lettuces to the shops before brownness sets in, and you get on with yours.

Of course, you’re good too. I drove up from London to Oxford last Tuesday and I have never seen such fine driving. These guys were harassed and bored but they made deft, precise and well-signalled moves. They kept up when it was right, hung back when it was necessary and, as a result, never gave any cause for concern.

Like anything, practice makes perfect. The more you drive, the better you’ll get. If you’re out there every day, be it in a truck or a Mondeo, clocking up 50,000 or more miles in a year, you will be damned good.

You’ll learn to recognize the danger signals. That’s a Datsun. He is likely to do the unexpected. That’s a T5
doing 50. It must be Plod. It’s starting to rain. I’m easing off now.

I use Britain’s motorway network a great deal during the week and it is like being part of a huge, perfectly synchronized, well-oiled dance routine. Everything is fluid. Everything is inch perfect.

Unfortunately, I also use Britain’s motorway network on a Sunday and it is an experience that takes me to the outer edges of fear and trepidation. Two miles and my colly is well and truly wobbled.

Last week, I found a Vauxhall Nova with a lone woman on board trundling down the outside lane of a dual carriageway at 15mph. What in God’s name was she doing in possession of a driving licence? Enid Nun 004. Licence to kill… and be killed.

Now I don’t believe there are many people left who, just for the hell of it, go out for a drive on a Sunday. And even if there are, I doubt they’d chance their arm on a motorway.

But there are undoubtedly a great many people who, after they’ve done the
Mail on Sunday
, head off to see Auntie Flo, via the garden centre. These people probably never drive during the week, and in a whole year probably clock up fewer than 2000 miles.

They’ve never been trained to drive on a motorway and they have had no practice. Allowing them out there is like letting me take the role of principal violinist the next time the London Symphony Orchestra is in town. I’d be crap and they’d sack me.

These people get into the lane they’ll want 20 miles early and will do everything in their mealy-mouthed little minds to ensure you and I do likewise. If they can get
their wheezing asthmatic old crocks up to 70, they’ll sit in the outside lane making sure no one gets past. It’s against the law, you know.

They clutter up the petrol stations with their awful cardigans, putting unleaded in their diesels and Wendy’s Panties on their hideous, hateful children.

And then they crawl down the slip road at 4mph, joining the motorway when they’re up to 6.

Suddenly, the professional, talented, regular driver finds his space is full of no-hopers. The trucks may not be out to play on a Sunday but you still have an odd and dangerous cocktail.

On a Tuesday, 99 per cent of all the cars out there will do exactly what you expect them to do. But on a Sunday, half will do exactly the reverse.

I have discussed various solutions with all sorts of clever people but there don’t seem to be any that are practical. You can’t include motorways in the driving test because the good people of Norfolk and Cornwall would be stuck.

You can’t post lookouts at the top of every slip road to pull over people they suspect may be a nuisance when they get down there.

And we can’t encourage people in bad cardigans to drive around with a huge sign in their rear windows saying ‘I’m really no good at this.’

Or can we?

With Quentin’s books I’d have to spend the whole time buried in a dictionary, finding out what all the words meant. The guy reads Chaucer for fun, for Chrissakes! All my books have either a submarine or a jet fighter on the front and they’re full of goodies who seem like they’re going to lose but who, on the last page, do in fact win. I like plots, and Hardy wouldn’t recognize a plot if one jumped out of a hedge and ate his foot.

A book is no good, as far as I’m concerned, unless I just cannot put it down. I missed a plane once – on purpose – because I was still sitting at home finishing
Red Storm Rising
. If Princess Diana had walked into my bedroom naked as a jaybird just as I was three-quarters of the way through
The Devil’s Advocate
, I wouldn’t have looked up long enough even to tell her to get lost. My wife, however, has just taken two years – yes, years – to read
Wild Swans
, which is about a woman in China who has a daughter who goes to live somewhere else.

But I have just read a book which has no plot, no F-16
on the cover, no goodies, no baddies, and I absolutely loved it. Which is a bit of a worry. It’s called
Rivethead
and it’s by an American person called Ben Hamper who, in the review section, describes it as ‘an enormously enjoyable read. I laughed. I cried. I learned. I got naked and performed cartwheels for my repulsed neighbours’. My kinda guy.

Basically,
Rivethead
is the story of one man; a man who gets up every morning and goes to work at the General Motors truck and bus plant in Flint, Michigan. Really, it should have an orange spine, but mercifully it doesn’t. Because if it did, I never would have heard about GM’s answer to the Japanese threat. You see, when American cars were being sold with tuna sandwiches under the driver’s seat and Coke bottles rattling in the doors, GM decided it must impress on its workforce the need for better standards. The workforce, largely, was a doped-up bunch of ne’er-do-wells who thought only of their weekly pay cheques and how much beer they could cram in at lunch time, which is why GM’s decision to have a man dress up as a cat and prowl the aisles, spurring people on, is a trifle odd. That they called him Howie Makem is stranger still.

Equally peculiar was the later scheme, which involved the erection of several sizeable electronic notice boards all over the plant. These kept the people informed of sales, production figures and such, but could also be used for messages. One day it would say, ‘Quality is the backbone of good workmanship’ and on another, ‘Safety is safe’, but Hamper saves his vitriol for the day when he looked up from underneath a suburban pick-up to see the sign: ‘Squeezing rivets is fun!’ He goes on to wonder whether,
in the local sewage works, there are boards telling the guys that ‘Shovelling turds is fun’. And asks why, if the ‘demented pimps’ who had dreamed up this message thought riveting was so much fun, they weren’t all down on the line every lunch time, having the time of their lives.

Hamper also lays into the likes of Springsteen and John Cougar Mellonfarm, asking what they know about the daily grind. He says they should be forced to write about things they understand, like cocaine orgies, beluga caviar and tax shelters. I made an exception and read this book because I am interested in the car industry, but I can recommend it to you even if you have never been in a car plant, and don’t ever intend to.

I tried to get Quentin to read it, but as the first word is ‘Dead’ and not ‘Sibilance’, he said he couldn’t be bothered… and asked how Janet and John were these days.