The World According to Clarkson (24 page)

In fact it’s probably best if he leaves the nation altogether – before someone kicks a boot into his other eye.

Sunday 15 June 2003

In a recent survey to find the happiest people in the world, the super-smug Swiss came out on top. Just 3.6 per cent of the population realised that having a punctual bus service and someone else’s teeth are not the be all and end all of life and said they were dissatisfied with their lot.

Whatever. The most interesting finding is to be found at the bottom of the table: the country with the most unhappy people.

I would have gone for Niger. I went there once, to a small town in the middle of nowhere called Agadez, and it was pretty damn close to even Lucifer’s idea of hell on earth. You could almost taste the hopelessness and smell the despair. There were no crops to tend and no factories to work in.

There was a shower, around which the town had been built, I suppose, and there was a table football game which seemed to amuse the children – even though the ball had been lost long ago.

It was a desperate place but, it seems, somewhere is worse. Finland, perhaps? It’s a sensible thought. You are apparently in the First World with your mobile phone and your pretty daughters but you spend all winter being
frozen to death and all summer being eaten alive by mosquitoes the size of tractors.

I can’t imagine that I would be terribly happy living in Afghanistan, either, though I dare say there is some satisfaction in going to bed thinking: ‘Well, at least I wasn’t shot today.’

When you come to think about it, the list of countries where you have an excuse to be unhappy is huge. I have never been to that featureless moonscape that’s now called Somethingikstan but I can’t imagine it’s a barrel of laughs. And I’m not sure I would like it in Brazil, either, having to walk around in a thong to demonstrate that I had nothing about my person worth stealing.

Then there’s that swathe of misery that stretches along the Kinshasa Highway in the middle of Africa. A land of flies, starvation and HIV.

A land that undermines a British social worker’s idea of poverty. However, the poll found that the people who are less satisfied with life than anyone else are… drum roll here… the Italians.

Oh, now you mention it, it’s obvious. Whiling away those long, warm summer evenings in the Tuscan hills with some cheese and a bottle or two of Vernaccia di San Gimignano.
La dolce vita
? It’s Italian for ‘the ungrateful bastards’.

Even if we poke about in Italy’s dark and secret places, we don’t find much to complain about. The Mafia has been on the wane for the past ten years, and how can anyone complain about Silvio Berlusconi’s alleged
corruption when they themselves need a backhander to get out of bed in the morning.

Besides, our prime minister is much worse. He has made a complete hash of everything and now he has started attacking cross-dressers, sacking men for wearing tights in the House of Lords. Despite this and the drizzle and the awful pub food, only 8.5 per cent of us say we’re unhappy.

What’s more, while extremism is on the rise in Britain, it’s now a damp squib in Italy. With immigrants making up just 2.2 per cent of the population there, the far right cannot get much of a toehold and while there are a few communists dotted around here and there, they tend to be one-cal Bolsheviks. Certainly it’s been years since there was a really good fist fight in parliament.

Italy’s youngsters complain, apparently, about having to live at home until they are 72 but that’s because they spend all their money on suits and coffee and Alfa Romeos rather than mortgages.

Of course, I can see that there are drawbacks to life in Italy. It must be annoying to have to post your letters in Switzerland if you want them to stand any chance of arriving, and I would quickly become bored with being killed on the autostrada every day.

Then there’s the problem of your wife. One day, you know with absolute certainty, you will come home from work to find that the ravishing beauty you married and said goodbye to that morning is waddling up the street in a black sack with breasts like six sacks of potatoes.

Plus, we think the Germans have no sense of humour, but Hans does at least find some things funny – people falling over on banana skins and Benny Hill, for instance.

Luigi, on the other hand, doesn’t even laugh at bottoms. In a country where style is everything and
la bella figura
dictates what you eat, what you wear and how much you drink, there is no room for the helplessness of mirth. As a result, there’s no such thing as Eduardo Izzardio or
Torre di Fawlty
.

I don’t think this is quite enough, though. Worrying about your wife ballooning and not being able to laugh at your unreliable postal service are not the end of the world, and having a dodgy prime minister is normal.

STOP PRESS: I’ve just read the result of another survey which says Britain is one of the most dishonest countries in the world. So when 91.5 per cent of us said we were happy, plainly we were lying.

Sunday 22 June 2003

The other night a man from the Campaign to Protect Rural England went on the news to say that housing estates in Ledbury are just the same as estates everywhere else and that all traces of local character are being lost.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing at the executive homes over his shoulder, ‘we could be anywhere from Welwyn Garden City to Milton Keynes.’

‘Pah!’ I scoffed, reaching for the remote control. ‘What’s he want? All houses in Somerset to be made from mead and freshly carbonated village idiots? And all houses in Cheshire to be built out of gold and onyx?’

I agree that Bryant and Barratt charge through the countryside with the destructive force of a double-barrelled shotgun, and I welcome any move that eats into their profit margins. If they are forced to make houses in Barnsley out of coal, that’s fine by me.

But having spent the week on a mammoth tour of England, I can assure you that there are far bigger problems to be addressed. I would go so far as to say that today provincial Britain is probably one of the most depressing places on earth.

Of course, there are worse places, places where you can starve to death or be eaten by flies. But this is a wealthy country with many widescreen television sets,
and that’s what makes it all so depressing: the sense that it could be so much better.

It’s not the villages or the countryside that are wrong. It’s the towns, with their pedestrian precincts and the endless parade of charity shops and estate agents.

At night boys, with their baggy trousers and their big shoes, scream up and down the high street in their souped-up Vauxhall Novas. There is nothing you want to see. Nothing you want to do.

You wade knee-deep through a sea of discarded styrofoam trays smeared with bits of last night’s horseburger to your overheated chintzy hotel where, in exchange for £75, they give you a room where you can’t sleep because of the constant background hum of people coupling or being sick outside.

It’s almost as though every council in the land has become so engrossed with their war on the car that they spend all their time and money on speed humps and traffic-calming pots of geraniums. They seem to have lost sight of what the town is for: shopping, chatting, being a pack animal.

There are exceptions, usually towns and cities with universities, such as Oxford, but for the most part urban Britain is utterly devoid of any redeeming feature whatsoever.

And that’s before we get to the people. Who are they, with their faces like pastry and their legs like sides of beef? And what on earth do they say to the barber to end up with such stupid hair?

They come from nothing, live a life enlivened only
by a twice-yearly visit to some hairdresser who takes the mickey, and then they die so quietly that they’re not even remembered with a plaque on a park bench.

I’m not kidding. In the Third World you will see hopelessness etched onto people’s faces but in provincial Britain it’s gormlessness.

In the papers and at your house people discuss the euro and Iraq. But you get the sense that in Britain’s town centres they simply don’t care about anything. They drink, they eat, they mate, then they die. They might as well be spiders.

Scottish Courage, a brewery, is to be commended for launching a new type of drink to ease the misery. It’s a bottle of Kronenbourg sold with a shot of absinthe, a bright green hallucinogen that is 50% proof.

Banned by many countries throughout the civilised world, though not the Czech Republic and Britain, it was a favourite tipple for all the maddest artists. Van Gogh was reported to have drunk the stuff before cutting off his ear. Oscar Wilde said: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not.’

This then is the perfect solution for life in provincial Britain today. One glass and you imagine you’re not in Hastings at all. After the second you imagine that you are in fact in St Tropez and that the monosyllabic fizzy-haired girl you’ve just pulled won’t give you something nasty to remember her by. After the third, your hair starts to look normal.

Experts say that mixing lager and absinthe is like drinking
Night Nurse and Ovaltine and that its sole purpose is to get you drunk. So what? I see nothing wrong with that.

All over northern Europe people drink to get drunk, but in Reykjavik, the biggest drinking city anywhere, they don’t come out of the clubs for a vomit and a fight.

In Stockholm the city centre is not buried under a styrofoam mountain every morning.

I do not understand why this should be so here. Maybe, deep down, there’s a sense that Britain had fulfilled its obligations to the world by 1890 and that now we’re like a nation of spent matches, serving out our time in IT or by changing the crabby sheets at the local overheated hotel.

Whatever, I certainly have no answers. But building speed humps certainly won’t help. And nor, I suspect, will worrying about the gable ends on houses in Ledbury.

Sunday 29 June 2003

There are many signs of middle age: hair growing out of your ears, a waistband that will not stop expanding no matter what you put in your mouth and an increasing bewilderment at the noises made by Radio 1.

But the seminal moment when you know for sure that you have become old is when you look out of your bedroom window and say: ‘Ooh good, it’s raining.’ This means you are more interested in your plants looking good than getting a tan and looking good yourself.

For 43 years I have sneezed my way through the British summer, swigging from bottles of Piriton and gorging on handfuls of Zirtec. But hay fever has never dampened my enthusiasm for those lazy days in the garden, listening to men surge by on their motorbikes.

Mainly this is because I’ve never really had a garden in the accepted sense of the word. Too much sun and too little chalk in the soil have little or no effect on rubble and weeds. Now, however, with a veritable forest growing out of my ears, I have become interested in maybe having a herbaceous border here and a weeping pear there. So I was interested to read about the olive trees of southern Italy. In the war so many were chopped
down for firewood that the government imposed a ban, saying they could not be uprooted without permission from Mussolini.

When the war ended the law was never repealed, so the trees grew older and older.

They became fat and tufts of hair began to appear from their knots. What’s more, the fruit they produced became worse and worse to the point where it could be used only in paraffin lamps.

Then along came Charlie Dimmock. Suddenly, everyone in northern Europe decided they would like a century-old olive tree in their garden. A booming black market was the result, with Bavarian bankers paying up to £3,500 for a ‘gnarled designer’ tree to enliven their Munich roof terrace.

Inevitably the tree huggers are up in arms and, for once, I’m with them. What’s the point of paying £3,500 for something that I guarantee will be dead within six months?

This is the one thing I’ve learnt during my short spell as a gardener: everything dies. Two weeks ago I spent £500 on a selection of plants for my conservatory after the last lot were killed by scale insect. On Sunday I went to London for the day, and when I came home at night it looked as if the American Air Force had been through the place with some Agent Orange and napalm. ‘You should have left the windows open,’ say the experts. So you leave the windows open, which means your plants survive. But, sadly, your video recorder and PlayStation do not.

Because someone with a Ford Fiesta haircut and baggy trousers will walk in and help themselves.

Things are no better outside. Keen to have instant results, I laid some turf the other day and my life became consumed by where the sprinkler was and where it needed to be next. Please God, I would wail as the sun girded its loins for another blistering day, have mercy. But there was no mercy, no rain, and now my new turf looks like that sisal matting in the Fired Earth brochures.

You sit in the garden only when it’s sunny, but you can’t relax because you know the sun is a 5-trillion-ton nuke and by the time you go indoors at night every living thing out there, except the thistles, will be dead.

I bought some plants with red flowers which stood tall and so erect that they seemed to have been fertilised with Viagra. After one day in the sunshine they had keeled over and nothing I have tried will make them stand up again. I’ve watered them, not watered them, read them poetry, played them Whitney Houston records and shown them pictures of the Prince of Wales. But it’s hopeless.

I had a tree surgeon round yesterday to talk about the mature trees that are dotted around the garden. Unbelievably, I have to maintain these things in case some village kids try to climb them and a branch breaks. That’s true, that is.

His report was shocking. The lime is dying quite fast. The poplars are pretty much dead already and the sycamore, with a trunk that’s fully 12 feet in circumference, has some kind of incurable rot. So it will spend the
next ten years dropping boughs on passing motorcyclists who’ll then sue me for negligence.