The World According to Clarkson (20 page)

Out in the Middle East, German soldiers may be a bit thin on the ground but the planes we’re flying are largely German and let’s not forget our SA80 rifles. They were designed and built in Britain but they didn’t work, and all of them have had to be fixed by Heckler & Koch. Which is German.

I don’t know very much about football but I do know that the result in 1966 and the 5–1 drubbing in Munich were freak occurrences. Normally their players make ours look disabled. And it’s the same story in tennis, motor racing, gliding, invading Poland and skiing.

In fact, the only way we can beat the Germans at sport is by inventing games which they’re too clever to play. Such as cricket, for instance, and that ice thing where women do the vacuuming in front of a kettle.

I should also like at this point to explain that I’d walk over Kate Winslet’s head to get to Nastassja Kinski.

Of course, when it comes to food the Germans are rubbish. We’re much better thanks to our top chefs like Marco Pierre White, Angus Steak House and Raymond Blanc.

Eurosceptics are forever asking who we want running the country: Tony Blair or a bunch of unelected German bankers. Well, since I’d rather have a weevil than His Tonyness, I’d have to go for the bankers.

Let’s face it: if a German Tube train grazed a wall, lightly injuring a handful of people on board, they’d tow it away, replace the damaged track and have the network
up and running by morning. Also, when their roads are coated with a thin veneer of snow, they send out a fleet of snow ploughs. The notion that you might be stuck on an autobahn for twenty hours because of inclement weather is utterly preposterous.

So what that they all like to belong to a club – there’s a society in Cologne ‘for the appreciation of the Irish postal service’ – and so what if you aren’t allowed to mow your lawn on a Sunday.

Given the big choice of being ordered about by Gerhard Schroder, or Rumsfeld, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.

America likes to talk about how it saved Europe from tyranny twice in the past century. True, but let’s not forget that they were unbelievably late on both occasions. Predictably, the Germans were as punctual as ever. I like that in a man. I like it in a nation, too. And that’s why this week I am mostly a doughnut.

Sunday 16 February 2003

It’s been a bad week for the world’s wildlife with the news that macaque monkeys have joined a list of 300 species in which the females are known to prefer girl on girl action to proper sex with a male.

It was also revealed that the formidable leatherback turtle has been put on the endangered list. But because the turtle spends most of its life half a mile below the surface of the sea, scientists have been unable to say whether the scarcity of numbers is due to rampant lesbianism or ruthless Mexican tuna fishermen.

Either way it’s a shame because the leatherback has been around for 100 million years.

Indeed, some of the more aristocratic examples, such as the Leather Back Smythes for instance, can trace their family trees back to a time when the seas were patrolled by plesiosauruses. And that beats the hell out of the Fitzalan-Howards who go back only to 1066.

So what’s to be done? Well, I’ve often argued that the best way to kick-start a dying species is to start eating it. No, really. If someone could convince the
Observer
housewives of Hoxton and Hackney in east London that the best way to put a sheen back in their hair was a daily bowl of giant panda chunks, someone, somewhere,
would figure out a way to get the lazy sods breeding again.

However, I’m not sure this would work with a leatherback. I’ve eaten snakes, dogs, small whole birds in France and crocodiles, but Tommy Turtle is my line in the sand. I don’t care if turtles turn out to be the antidote for cancer, I’m not eating even a small part of one and that’s that.

Don’t worry, though. I do have a suggestion which should help in these troubled times. I suggest that we use their shells as advertising hoardings.

Why not? In the olden days, advertisements were limited to books, television and town-centre hoardings, but now you find them everywhere.

Every time I log on to the internet, I’m asked if I would like a bigger penis (yes, but not if it comes with a virus), so why not advertise on the back of a turtle? It moves slowly up the beach and is watched intensely by lots of people who may well be interested in buying, say, a new pair of binoculars.

Think. The nozzle of the petrol pump urges you to buy a Snickers bar when you are in the Shell shop and, as you queue to board a plane, the airport tunnel is festooned with reasons for switching to HSBC. It seems that the decision on where to put your money has now come down to finding out which bank manager can make hand signals in Greece without causing offence.

Then, when you get off the plane, the luggage trolley advertises all the new and exciting ways of getting to the
city centre. Even the back of a parking ticket is now a mini-hoarding.

In the days of George Dixon, phone boxes were boxes in which you found a phone.

But not any more. Now they are full of advertisements for young asylum ladies from Albania as well, curiously, as posters which talk about the advantages of having a mobile phone.

Have you been in a London taxi lately? The undersides of the foldaway seats carry advertisements telling you to put an advertisement there. I got a mailshot last week asking me to sponsor a child. Does that mean some poor African orphan has to walk around with ‘Watch Jeremy Clarkson’ on his forehead?

Advertisers have bought up every square inch of everywhere where people stand still. I went to a pub the other day which had adverts in front of the urinals and it’s the same story in lifts, cinemas, Tube trains and, I presume, buses.

Fancy chilling out in some remote beauty spot where you can get away from the hurly-burly of consumerism? Forget it. Chances are you’ll find a bench complete with a plaque advertising some dead person who also liked to sit there.

In town centres, every hanging basket and roundabout is sponsored, although on the open road things are better. Advertisers are banned from putting hoardings within sight of a motorway, but don’t think you are safe. If Melvyn Bragg’s arts programme on Radio 4 becomes
too incomprehensible and you flick over to Classic FM, pretty soon you’ll be brought down to earth and invited to buy your very own garden furniture.

The only problem is that the sheer number of people needed to find places for these adverts, and the even bigger number needed to sell the space, means that in the end there’ll be nobody left to make anything worth advertising.

I went to Sheffield last week and was horrified to note that the vast steelworks have been pulled down to make way for an equally vast shopping centre which, presumably, can exist only because all the people who used to make knives and forks are now employed advertising the shopping centre.

Soon advertising agencies will be the only businesses left. That’s bad for the economy but irrelevant as far as the turtle is concerned. He doesn’t care whether it says Corus on his shell or Saatchi Cohen and Oven Glove. Just so long as it says something.

Sunday 23 February 2003

Boo. Hiss. Ref-er-ee. In last week’s controversial
Country Life
poll to find Britain’s nicest and nastiest counties, Staffordshire was named the worst place in all England.

At first I assumed that being a
Country Life
survey it would have nothing to do with the real world. I thought they would have counted the number of monogrammed swimming pools in each county, divided that by the availability of arugula and added the number of hunts to come up with Devon as a winner.

But no. They’ve been quite thorough, looking at house prices, the weather, the efficiency of the local council, the quality of the pubs, tranquillity, the arts, the lot. And they ended up with a list that had Devon, Gloucestershire and Cornwall at the top (Cornwall? Have they never seen
Straw Dogs
?) and Staffordshire at the bottom.

Now I admit that Staffordshire is a bit like one of those lost cities in Egypt. We know it to be there. We can see it on maps. And it’s written about in books. But nobody knows where it is exactly.

Plus, it’s ringed by places of such horror that even Indiana Jones would think twice about trying to go there. He may have faced runaway balls and poisoned
darts in his quest for the lost ark but should he, one day, mount an expedition to locate the ancient city of Stafford, he will have to go through either Wales, Birmingham or Cheshire. Grisly.

I know where Staffordshire is because I spent most of my most interesting years there. I went to school about half a mile from it, my virginity went west in Yoxall, I got my first speeding ticket on the A38 outside Bartonunder-Needwood, and it was in Abbots Bromley that I learnt how to be chemically inconvenienced, how to be thrown out of a pub, how to be chucked by a girlfriend without blubbing, how to drive fast, how to do everything that matters, really.

No, honestly. In the Coach and Horses I learnt that it was possible to snog a girl and play pool at the same time. You don’t pick up a trick like this in Tiverton, that’s for sure.

I remember, too, going home from parties in those misty dawn mornings that were a hallmark of that baking summer of 1976. Across the Blithfield Reservoir on the boot of some girl’s mother’s Triumph Stag, Bob Seger’s
Night Moves
on the eight-track. That was Staffordshire and God it was good.

So when I saw the result of the
Country Life
survey I was horrified.

Staffordshire worse than Hertfordshire? Worse than Essex? Worse than East Sussex and even Surrey? Rubbish. If Kent is the garden of England, then Surrey is its patio.

Staffordshire, however, is one of its lungs. The rolling
farmland near Uttoxeter, replete with wisteria villages, is as delightfully English as anywhere in the country and the Cannock Chase on a damp autumn morning, with the dew in the ferns, is like Yosemite, without the cliffs to fall off or the bears to eat you.

Actually, to be honest, it’s not like Yosemite at all, but there is a lot of wildlife. Deer. Deer. More deer. If you’re really lucky, you might catch a glimpse of a great crested Lord Lichfield stomping about the woods. And where does the Duke of Devonshire live? Derbyshire, that’s where.

Mind you, he’s about the only thing that has come out of Devon. I’m struggling now to think of anything in my house that was made there. And you could spray the county with machine-gun fire without hitting a single musician, artist or rock band. You wouldn’t hit a pheasant either. The bloody things are all far too high.

Whereas Staffordshire is the birthplace of your lavatory bowl, the Climax Blues Band, Dr Johnson, all your crockery and Robbie Williams. It’s also home to my oldest friend, who has the best name in the history of speech: Dick Haszard. And even better, his uncle’s a major.

I was explaining all of this to the man who edits my column. There was lots of puffed-up indignation and tutting. So we agreed that I wouldn’t write, as planned, about that Swiss yacht winning the America’s Cup and that I would write in defence of Staffordshire.

Sadly, though, I can’t. The problem is the towns. Stafford. Lichfield. Stoke.

They’re all ghastly. And it’s all very well having the Cannock Chase, but it’s named after Cannock, which would be the worst town in the world were it not for Burton upon Trent. Rugeley is a power station. Tamworth is a pig, Newcastle under Lyme is just confusing and Uttoxeter is hard to spell. All you can buy on the high street in any of these places is a house or a hamburger, and at night all any of them offer is a polyurethane tray of monosodium glutamate and the promise of coming home with a beer bottle sticking out of your left eye.

I still maintain that it’s not the worst county. I’d far rather live in Staffordshire than Surrey but, and this is a serious point, trying to argue that you’d have a good time there because I did 25 years ago is daft. Nearly as daft, in fact, as those professional Scousers who from their piles on the banks of the Thames still maintain that Liverpool’s the greatest place on Earth. Well, if that’s the case, Cilla, why don’t you push off back to Walton?

Sunday 9 March 2003

Last week the Queen of England very kindly agreed to break off from her waving duties and lend a hand with a television programme I’m making about the Victoria Cross.

And so on Wednesday I slipped into a whistle and went to Buckingham Palace to see some prototype medals she’d found in a cupboard. Sadly, I never met my new researcher but I did have a snout around the state rooms, which provided a rare insight into the life of the royals.

First of all, I’ve never really understood why the richest and most powerful of the world’s royal families has to live behind a
Coronation Street
, working-class veil of net curtains. There are no nets at Versailles, for instance. But it turns out they are weighted at the bottom and designed to catch flying glass should someone set off a bomb.

That’s something you andIdon’t have to worry about, and nor do we have to share our house with 500 staff, most of whom, it seems, will one day take the tabloid shilling and spill the beans on your toiletry habits.

Then there’s the bothersome business of guests. Last week the new president of Albania was scheduled to
make a twenty-minute visit. Imagine what that must be like.

Going to meet him off the Eurostar and trying not to look surprised when he emerges, not from the carriage, but from a hidey-hole underneath the bogies.

Then she’s got the weekly visits from His Tonyness. They probably weren’t so bad when he was a new boy but now it must be awfully wearing to have to call him sir and kiss his shoes all the time.

Mind you, he’s nothing compared with the ordinary people. Pretty well every day a bunch of hand-wringing do-gooders goes to the palace for an official function of some kind, and every single one of them, no matter how worthy they are, will feel an almost uncontrollable urge to nick something.