The World According to Clarkson (18 page)

The fact is that I’m with my children for a maximum of fifteen minutes a day, and this is no match for the constant bombardment they get on Radio 1 from Sara
Cox and the Cheeky Girls. I want my eight-year-old to be a good girl. But over Christmas I learn she wants to be a ‘teenage dirtbag baby’.

So, I suspect the mother who goes to Spain over Christmas without her bolshie, prepubescent, monosyllabic, baggy-trousered son will have a better time as a result. But maybe the boy would, too.

Of course, giving independence to the pre-teens may sound sad, horrific even, like a return to Dickensian times. But if we accept they’re capable and socially active at ten or eleven, it might also get the government out of a hole. Because while the state may be unable to afford to pay pensions, parents could get support from their children by sending the ungrateful, mollycoddled spoilt little brats up some chimneys.

Sunday 29 December 2002

A recent survey found that the British are the most hated of all the world’s holidaymakers, but to be honest it’s hard to see why.

For sure, a group of electricians from Rochdale on holiday in Ibiza might be a bit noisy, and they may be sick on the municipal flowerbeds from time to time, but us – you and me – in our rented farmhouses in Provence, we’re no bother at all. We eat the local cheese. We drink the local wine. We say ‘
bonsoir
’to the postman every morning. We’re as good as gold.

The Germans, on the other hand, make terrible bedfellows. Mainly because when they’re around there are no beds left. Ever since we were introduced, socially, by package holidays in the 1960s, we’ve known that when it comes to antisocial buffet-hogging pigheadedness on holiday, the Germans are in a class of their own.

But not any more. I’ve just come back from Dubai, where I spent some time at Wild Wad, an enormous water park where you sit on the inner tube from a tractor and then get knocked off it in 101 new and exciting ways you’d never thought of.

There were, as you can imagine, fairly long queues for the better rides, but hey, that’s okay. We could
handle the wait. We’re patient. We’re British. And that means we’re the best queuers in the whole world.

Oh no, we’re not. We spend ten minutes queueing for a No. 27 bus and we think we know it all. But believe me, compared with the Russians, we know nothing. They spent 70 years queueing for a loaf of bread and they know every trick in the book. Time and time again I’d blink, or bend down to talk to a child, and that would be it. A man-mountain would nip in front.

And I was loath to cough discreetly and tap him on the shoulder, since the shoulder in question was invariably enlivened with some sort of special forces tattoo. A baby being torn in half by two bulldozers. A dagger in a kneecap. That sort of thing.

Let’s be honest, shall we. These guys were in Dubai. They were spending probably £1,000 a day on their hotel rooms. They had digital cameras that made the Japanese look backward and satphones that could steer the space station. And you don’t get that sort of hardware, or holiday, by writing poetry. They were mafia, and that meant they were ex-KGB or Spetsnaz.

Only last year I heard of a Russian holidaymaker in the south of France. Like so many visitors to the Côte d’Azur, he was drawn to a villa on the coast and went to see an estate agent about it. ‘
Pardon, monsieur
,’ said the estate agent. ‘
Mais il n’est pas possible de visiter cette maison parce qu’elle n’est pas à vendre
.’

This obviously displeased the Russian because the following morning the estate agent was found buried head down on the beach, with just his feet sticking
out of the sand. And that’s the thing about Russians. We wear a No Fear T-shirt. They wear the look in their eyes.

And that’s why I chose not to laugh at their swimming trunks. However, I’m home now so I don’t mind telling you they were hilarious. Like Speedos but without the style, and a bit tighter.

Still, they were better dressed than their wives. Elsewhere in the world the thong bathing suit is the preserve of Peter Stringfellow or size-eight girls. In Russia it is also worn by people who are eight tons or 80 years old.

Now I’m told that there are some extremely beautiful Russian girls. But obviously they’re all on the internet, because the ones in Dubai were like turnips.

Except one, who was like nothing on earth. Let’s start with her breasts, which were not vast. Vast is too small a word to convey the scale. When her boyfriend, who had a tattoo of two hammerhead sharks eating a man’s eyes on his forearm, chose them from the catalogue, he’d probably been tempted by the ones marked ‘massive’. But in the end he’d gone for the top of the range. The ones known in medical circles as: ‘Oh, my God. They’re moving towards us.’

The area underneath them had its own micro-climate. And yet they were not the first thing I noticed about the girl to whom they were attached.

The first thing I noticed were her lips, which were so full of collagen she looked like an orang-utan. An orang-utan with a pigtail.

And two full-scale models of the R101 in her bikini
top. I spent such a long time looking at her that when I looked back again, half of Ukraine had slipped in front of me in the queue.

Eventually I did get a ride, though, in a sort of big canal where giant waves came along every so often and made you go upside down. It was fun until I crashed into a woman who had obviously eaten so much pizza she’d begun to look like one.

Either that or she’d been to Chernobyl for her holidays. Each wave removed not so much a layer of skin as a lump of it.

There’s something else about the Russkies, too. They made no effort to smile or chat. At least the Germans are happy to come over and apologise for their country’s conduct in the war. The Russians still look like they’re fighting it.

Sunday 12 January 2003

Do you remember the television show
Dallas
? If you do, you might recall a character called Cliff Barnes who was a bit of a loser, a bit of a joke.

He was in the oil business, like his father. He was born and raised in Texas. He became known on the international stage… Remind you of anyone?

Just a thought. Anyway, after the skyscraper business in New York, Cliff talked at some length about the long memory of the American warrior and how no stone would be left unturned in the search for the men responsible and in particular, Osama bin Laden.

Finding the men responsible was never going to be easy, since they were buried under a couple of million tons of rubble.

But it turns out that finding bin Laden was even harder.

They had a good look round Afghanistan and a cursory sweep of Pakistan but now, obviously, someone’s lost the big atlas because they seem to have given up and decided to have a war with Iraq instead.

So does this mean that Ozzie is off the hook? No, not a bit of it, because he is now to be hunted down by the world’s most fearless and monosyllabic soldier.

Yes, the CIA with its sophisticated spies in the sky
failed to find him. And even though they blew up every cave from Iran to Turkmenistan, the American air force failed to kill him. So now it’s time to wheel out the human nuke.

Enter, with a fireball in the background and his locks flowing in the wind, Sylvester Stallone, who announced last week that Rambo, the 1980s superhero, is set to return.

And guess what? He’s off to Afghanistan to stab some Taliban and mastermind a plot which brings bin Laden to justice.

This is likely to be tricky since the last time we saw Rambo, back in 1988, he was fighting with the mujahidin against the Russians in a film that was dedicated, and I quote, ‘to the gallant people of Afghanistan’.

I actually took the trouble of watching
Rambo III
last week and, with the benefit of hindsight, it was hysterically prophetic. There’s this marvellous scene when an American colonel is berating his Russian captors with these fine words: ‘Every day your war machine loses ground to a bunch of poorly armed and poorly equipped freedom fighters.

‘The fact is you underestimated your enemy. If you’d checked your history, you’d know that these people here have never given up to anyone. They’d rather die.’

Now we know that Hollywood is capable of some howlers. Who can forget
U571
, in which a brave American submarine crew captured an Enigma decoding device from the Nazis and won the war?

Then there was
Pearl Harbor
, in which a brave American
pilot, flying a superior American fighter plane, won the battle of Britain and won the war again.

I know what you’re going to say: that in films, dramatic licence is more important than rigid historical fact.

We leave the historical fact to our politicians, like Tony Blair, who famously told Cliff how the Americans had stood bravely at our side during the Blitz.

However, most people do not read newspapers. They change channels when the television news comes on. And they do not snuggle up at night with a nice Simon Schama. They get their history and current affairs from the cinema, and that’s why the people who make films bear some responsibility for the course of world events.

I wonder, for instance, how much money Noraid might have raised if the IRA were not ceaselessly portrayed in Hollywood films as genial, whiskey-swilling freedom fighters with a real and noble grudge against the wicked colonial British.

Time and again we saw Richard Harris in a smart overcoat giving presents to children while marauding gangs of British squaddies drove their armoured Land Rovers over a selection of prams and pushchairs.

So when the boys came round your bar with the collecting tins, well, hey dude, have a dollar.

They no doubt did much the same after they saw
Rambo III
and now they probably feel like a bunch of chumps.

Who knows? Perhaps the young men of Algeria saw it, too, and thought: ‘My, those Afghans look brave
and fearless. We must join forces with them as soon as possible.’

I learnt the other day that one of the ancient enemies of the Afghans wrote a poem about them: ‘May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger and the vengeance of the Afghan.’

Stallone would be well advised to remember that as he puts
Rambo IV
into production. Because if this film is as stupid and as irresponsible as its predecessor, it might just provoke some ‘freedom fighter’ to drive his ‘holy war’ into the side of the Sears Tower.

America is not invincible – but unfortunately Cliff probably doesn’t understand this.

In the world he comes from, you die and then a few years later you come back to life in the shower.

Sunday 19 January 2003

So the value of your six-bedroom country house with its six-acre garden has fallen from £6 million to £600,000 in the past six days.
Country Life
magazine is chock-full of advertisements for properties that have been on the market for months. Huge discounts are there for the taking. And how do you double the value of a Gloucestershire house? Simple. Put in carpets and curtains.

According to the experts, this meltdown in the shires is because nobody’s job is safe in EC1 and City bonuses are much smaller than usual. Really? Well, first let’s find out who these ‘experts’ are.

When a former public schoolboy moves to London, his options are limited. The bright ones end up in banking, while those who are only one plum short of a fruit salad do stockbroking. Those who are mildly daft end up in insurance and those who are borderline idiotic wind up behind the counter in Hacketts.

That leaves Rupert. He needs a job where he can wear a suit or else he won’t get invited to the right drinks parties in Fulham. But Rupert cannot add two and two without falling over. Rupert thinks Tim Nice-But-Dim is a documentary. So Rupert is an estate agent. That makes him an expert on house prices.

Now Rupert reckons that it’s all falling apart in the
countryside because he met some chap at a ‘do’ last week who had just been fired from Goodyear, Stickleback and Bunsen Burner. ‘Poor chap. Was going to buy a house in Hampshire. Now he can’t afford it.’

Oh dear, Rupert, you are wide of the mark. Sure, City bonuses affect the market, but only slightly and only in Surrey. How many City boys are there in Alnwick or the Trough of Bowland? Scotland, too, is far beyond the reach of a commuter train – as is the West Country. How, pray, do City bonuses affect the price of a recent barn conversion in Milford Haven?

I live in what
Tatler
magazine once called the country’s ‘G-spot’. I am less than an hour from Notting Hill but by the same token I’m only five miles from Jilly Cooper Central in Gloucestershire. This is the Cotswolds and thanks to a local wildlife park there are more white rhinos up here than there are City boys.

So if it’s not people in stripy shirts tightening their purse strings, what has brought the whole market to its knees?

Well, I know five families who live within three miles of where I am sitting now. Each has a substantial wisteria-softened eighteenth-century house with a pool, views that would make Elgar priapic and enough land to control their own sight lines. And all of them are moving out.

This has nothing to do with hunting. Since none of these people ride, none of them care. Nor does it have anything to do with foot-and-mouth. They may
own land, but only so as to stop anyone doing anything with it.

Furthermore, it has nothing to do with the closure of the local bank or post office. These people have Range Rovers and staff to post their letters. So why, then, are they leaving in such vast numbers that suddenly the countryside has become a forest of ‘for sale’ signs?

It is the school run. Their children go to school in Oxford, which is eighteen miles away. During the day it is a 25-minute drive, which is not ideal but it’s bearable.

However, in the morning it’s an hour and a half and that is simply too much. The children need to be up at 6.30 a.m. and in the car by 7.15 a.m. They have to eat their breakfast out of Tupperware containers on the way. It’s even worse at night because they don’t get home until six. By the time they’ve done their prep, their music practice, had supper and a bath, it’s bedtime. That is no life for a six-year-old.