The World According to Clarkson (16 page)

Best of all, though, is that we’re about 3,000 light years from the edge of our galaxy – that’s 17,600,000,000,000,000 miles. And yet, on a clear night near Tucson once, I saw it. I actually saw it, and that was, please believe me, utterly breathtaking.

I therefore quite understand why people are drawn to the science of astronomy. Certainly, I’m not surprised that after 40 years of fumbling around, quite literally, in the dark, Britain’s astronomers have just handed over £80 million and joined forces with the Europeans.

This means they now have access to the VLT (which stands for Very Large Telescope) at the ESO (which stands for European Southern Observatory) in Chile. They will also help build the OWL (which stands for OverWhelmingly Large telescope). And, boy, with all
these snappy acronyms, can’t you just tell this is basically a GO. Which stands for German Operation.

But let’s be honest, since Galileo disproved the Old Testament, astronomers have simply been dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s. Only last month, a meteorite shaved half an inch of ozone from the Earth’s atmosphere, and did they see it coming? Did they hell as like.

Occasionally, they show us a photograph of some cosmic explosion. But bangs without the bang never seem to work somehow. Remember: in space, nobody can hear you scream.

What’s more, Ineed scale. I need something to be the size of a ‘double-decker bus’ or a ‘football pitch’ before I get the point. Tell me that they’re burning 20,000 square kilometres of rainforest every day and I won’t care. Tell me that they’re burning an area the size of Wales and I still won’t care, but I’ll understand what you’re on about.

I’m afraid then that a photograph of Alpha 48///bB1 blowing itself to smithereens may be pretty, but getting access to the camera cost £80 million, and that seems excessive.

So, what about the question of extraterrestrial life?

Hollywood has convinced us that the night sky is full of aliens watching
Holby City
. But the reality is less romantic. The Seti organisation, which searches for life in the universe, and which was immortalised by Jodie Foster’s film
Contact
, has spent £95 million and seventeen years listening to the night skies. And it has found absolutely nothing.

However, let’s say it does. Let’s say that one day some computer geek actually picks up Corillian FM and let’s say we get a message back to them along the lines of ‘Yoo hoo’.

Then what? At worst, the Corillians will beam themselves to Earth and eat all our family pets. ‘Hmm, Labrador – nice with watercress.’ And at best, they will invite us over for drinks. Sounds good, but how do you suppose we will get there?

The space shuttle can only do 17,500 mph, which is pretty fast in Earth terms, but for getting around the galaxy you may as well get out and walk. At 17,500 mph it would take 29 years for the shuttle to get out of our own solar system which, in cosmic terms, is about as far as your front door.

To stand even the remotest chance of getting to wherever you’re going before the crew dies, you need light speed. But here too there’s a problem – the faster you go, the more time slows down. This is a scientific fact. I spend my life driving quickly, which is why I have a 1970s haircut.

So, if you could build something that did 186,000 miles a second, you would be out of the solar system in 6 hours. But you’d end up in 1934.

Certainly, you’d arrive before the decision was made to send you. Worse, you’d arrive before the Corillians sent their invite and this would be social death.

Really, we know for a fact that humankind will never be able to travel at the speed of light because to do so would mean travelling backwards in time. And this, in
turn, means our world of today would be full of people from the future. People would end up marrying their own grandchildren. It would be a mess.

Let’s summarise then. Astronomers spend their time lying on their backs looking at stars, but what’s the point? They can’t spot meteorites that are on a collision course with Earth, and even if they could, would we want to know? And if they do find life out there, we will never be able to pop over and say ‘Hi’.

However, I fully support this £80-million investment. Because if a sixteenth-century astronomer using a tiny telescope was able to prove the Bible wrong, think what damage could be inflicted by today’s astronomers with their VLTs and their OWLs on the nonsense science of astrology. Just £80 million to make a mockery of Russell Grant – I’ll have some of that.

Sunday 21 July 2002

What on earth are you all doing in the evening these days? I see television viewing figures so I know you’re not in front of the box and I also know, because pubs are closing down at the rate of one a day, that you’re not in the boozer.

You can’t all have Sony PlayStations, so new technology isn’t the answer, and obviously you aren’t at the theatre or there would be no need for Arts Council grants.

I thought perhaps you might all be out dancing but I read in the papers last week that Cream, the rave club in Liverpool, has seen attendances quartered in the past ten years. Judging by the pitiful sales of books these days, you’re not curled up in front of the fire reading.

In fact, if you add up the officially produced numbers of people who do the usual stuff in the evening – drinking, cinema, theatre, eating out, watching television, having sex and reading – you are left with an eerie conclusion. Every night twenty million people do absolutely nothing.

This week I became one of ‘the disappeared’. First of all I am still largely preoccupied with finding and murdering the fox that’s killing my chickens and second I went to the circus. And neither, thanks to various
animal rights organisations such as Born Free, the RSPCA and the Labour Party, are listed as officially recognised pastimes.

I’m dimly aware of having enjoyed traditional big-top circuses when I was little, apart from the clowns, who were downright scary, but I’m also dimly aware that such circuses were sort of outcast a couple of years ago when Mary Chipperfield was found guilty of being rude to a monkey.

I think this was probably sensible. I don’t normally agree with the RSPCA since I believe it is the duty of an animal to be on my plate at supper time but, that said, it’s hard to condone wanton cruelty.

And circuses were cruel. They had boxing kangaroos that were plainly off their heads, and animal-rights activists were forever opening up cages to find that the elephants had eaten their own dung and the tigers had bitten off their own tails. If they’d given a fox some cannabis and told it to jump through hoops of fire, that would have been fine. Foxes deserve to be humiliated. But there’s something hideous about watching a lion, the king of the jungle, standing on one leg in a tutu.

There was something equally hideous about the ‘modern’ circus which replaced the Chipperfield original. This usually involved a message of some kind and the message was usually about Margaret Thatcher: ‘Next up tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Dave Spart, who will use mime to explain the relationship between poll tax and apartheid.’

Not exactly family entertainment, and nor were the
French and Canadian alternatives, which tended to feature dwarfs juggling chainsaws.

It really did look, as the new millennium dawned, as if the circus had been buried for good. Even the Dome, which was the biggest top of them all, reinforced that. So what was I doing in a tent last week?

I have no idea but I can tell you that, as live entertainment goes, it blew Darcy Bussell into the hedgerow and the Rolling Stones into the middle of last week.

It was called Gifford’s Circus and it was held in a tent of a size that would be familiar to anyone who has camped out on Everest. There were no clowns in terrifying suits and they had not plundered the Kalahari for animals. In fact the only four-legged entertainment came right at the end when a dog, belonging to someone in the audience, sauntered into the ring and got its lipstick out. It was that kind of show.

They had two jugglers from Ethiopia, who are apparently on the verge of taking a world record with their back-to-back routine. And they had Ralph and Celia, who came on in Victorian bathing costumes and played what appeared to be a game of aerial twister. Did you know it was possible to stand on one leg with a woman balanced on your nose? No, I didn’t either.

I don’t want to sound like some tweedy duffer who thinks television is the devil’s eye, but there was something uplifting about this simple rural entertainment. Believe me, watching a man taking off his trousers on a tightrope is amazing. I can’t even do it in a bedroom without falling over. It was uplifting because it was so
‘up close and personal’, and so small and so low-budget that you could see there was no computerised trickery.

Isn’t that what you want from entertainment – seeing people do things you cannot do yourself?
Big Brother
? Give me the big top any day. If you are one of the twenty million dispossessed who stare at a wall every night because you can’t think of anything better to do, give the local circus a try. I think you’ll like it.

I was going to finish up at this point with something edgy and sharp. Something a little bit cool and now. But in the spirit of the piece I will leave you with this:

A goat goes into a jobcentre and asks in perfect English for some work. The slightly amazed clerk has a look through his files and says he could try the circus.

‘The circus?’ says the goat. ‘Why would the circus want a bricklayer?’

Sunday 28 July 2002

House prices are teetering on the edge of a bottomless hole and pretty soon anything with less than six or seven bedrooms will be worth less than its contents.

There ’sa very good reason for this. As far asI can tell, every single house in Britain is on the flight path for one of the government’s proposed new airports. No village is exempt. No dale is deemed too beautiful. No town is too small or inconsequential. Even Rugby, apparently, needs four runways, six terminals and 5,000 miles of chain-link fencing. Nottingham, too, and Exeter – everywhere does.

The thinking behind this is worryingly simple. The government, fresh from its success with the Millennium Dome and the River of Fire, has worked out that no people in Britain flew on commercial airlines in 1901 and 180 million did in 2001. So, using the same sort of maths that brought us Gordon Brown’s shiny new overdraft, it reckons 500 million people will be landing and taking off from British airports in 2030.

That’s half the population of China. It’s twice the population of America. It’s everyone in Britain using a plane ten times a year. And that seems unlikely somehow.

Still, if you reckon half a billion people will be needing
a runway within 28 years, it’s easy to understand why every field in the land is currently earmarked as a potential airport.

This has led to a biblical outbreak of Nimbyism. Councils affected by the proposal to build a massive new airport on the Kent marshes took the government to court last week, saying the extra noise should go to Gatwick. So now, we can be sure, the people of Sussex will be fighting back.

This will turn Tunbridge Wells into the West Bank. It’ll be father versus son, mother versus daughter, neighbour versus neighbour. And it will all be completely pointless because, let me explain right now, there is no way in hell that an airport will ever be built on the Medway marshes.

First of all, since London swelled up to the size of Belgium, Kent is as inaccessible as the South Pole or Mars. Given the choice of going on holiday via an airport in the middle of the Thames estuary or staying at home and beating myself over the head with a brick, I’d stay at home.

Of course, they could get round this by building better road and rail links but what they could never get round is the most fearsome organisation in the entire world. In a straight battle between this lot and Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden would end up killing himself to escape from the hounding. It can nit-pick a man to death from 400 paces. It never gives up. Its members are terminators. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The twitchers have pointed out that the Medway marshes are home to the country’s largest heronry and that is pretty much that. A simple avocet would have done the trick but they’ve come up with a whole herd of herons so one thing’s for sure; there will be no Kent airport.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some environmental protesters in China who had wheeled out a dolphin to try to stop the massive Yangtze dam. And Chinese officials had got round the problem by shooting it.

But that will never happen here. The mere fact that we have this consultation shows how democratic we’ve become. Now everyone has the chance to object. As a result, nothing will happen until the end of time. No matter where the government selects, there will always be a slug or a beetle or a butterfly.

What we need at a time like this is someone who can machete their way through the eco-twaddle. We need someone who can shove the government’s projections back up Alistair Darling’s new hole czar. We need a realist at the helm. And I can think of nobody better qualified than me.

Video conferencing and emails take up less time and involve less risk for businessmen than being chased across the Atlantic by heat-seeking missiles. So I can see, in the fullness of time, a dramatic fall in the demand for business travel.

However, there will be a significant increase in the number of people travelling for fun. And, as I said earlier,
it won’t be fun if they have to set off from a mudflat on the Medway or a business park in Rugby.

You have to leave via London and – contrary to the claims made by Stansted, which is in Bishop’s Stortford, or Gatwick, which is in Brighton – the capital has only one airport: Heathrow.

The government’s proposals seem to call for one new short runway but what good is that? Build six new long ones and be done with it. They will be able to handle the bigger planes that are coming. Heathrow is more accessible than any other airport in Britain and nobody living nearby can complain because it was there before they were. They’re all deaf anyway but six planes landing at once are not six times louder than six planes landing one at a time.