And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (18 page)

The gigantic wings for this plane are built by British Aerospace in north Wales.

But each one is far too large to be taken to Toulouse by road and far too heavy to be taken there by air. So they are loaded on to barges in the port of Mostyn and floated down the Irish Sea, across the Channel and then through France’s canal network.

Plainly, this is idiotic. It would be much easier and cheaper to build them in France, but politically this would be no good at all because the Airbus is intended to show how European co-operation can work. We do the wings and the engines, the French put everything together, the Germans finish everything off and the Spanish… actually, I don’t know what the Spanish do, apart from gatecrash the launch party and lisp.

You would imagine, then, that Tony’s government would be doing everything in its power to make sure that
Britain’s contribution was smooth and effortless. But no.

Those wings can be loaded on to the barges only at high tide because the monumentally daft Environment Agency won’t let anyone dredge the harbour at Mostyn.

Why ever not? Well, there’s the European Union Habitats Directive, you see, that was drawn up to protect worms and slugs from the perils of profit. Elsewhere on the Continent they don’t apply it to navigational routes, but in Britain we do. So, thanks to the green-eyed madness of our men in parkas, building the most advanced plane in the skies is governed by the needs of an invertebrate and the orbit of the moon.

I have another problem with Tony’s launch speech, too, because he described the A380 as ‘the most exciting new aircraft in the world’. Even if we ignore the fact that he can’t possibly know since it hasn’t actually left the ground yet, I am not sure that he’s right.

Technically, of course, we must doff our caps to the engineers who have built a cross-Channel ferry that can fly. It is far from the prettiest machine ever made, but we should marvel at the quietness of its engines, its 8,000-mile range, its ability to take off on conventional runways and its parsimonious drinking habits. It uses less fuel per passenger than a Ford Fiesta.

Yes, at the moment, despite much plastic and carbon fibre in its construction, the A380 is four tons overweight, but when the 747 was rolled out in the 1960s, that was 50 tons overweight. So let’s not get too worried. They could save four tons by simply removing one American passenger.

Plainly, the weight issue has not worried Virgin,
Emirates and the other carriers that have placed orders. Even British Airways would do the same, except that its long-haul fleet is fairly new and it hasn’t got any money.

So the message is clear. For the airlines and their shareholders this enormous plane is marvellous. But I am not sure that it is quite so rosy for you and me.

Certainly life will be worse at airports because, to accommodate these giants, the gates have to be further apart. Walk past four A380s to reach your plane and you will have walked the length of four football pitches.

That is presuming you got past the check-in. I guess you have all experienced the ludicrous queues that build up now. Well, imagine how long they are going to be when there are half a dozen A380s scheduled to depart within 15 minutes of one another. With seating for 550 on each one, that is 3,300 people to be interrogated, 3,300 suitcases to be loaded, 3,300 pieces of hand luggage to be X-rayed, and 3,300 pairs of shoes to be examined.

Do you think that Virgin or Emirates will spend the money that they have saved on fuel by employing more check-in staff? I doubt it. As a result, you will need to arrive at the terminal 3,300 hours before take-off. Then there is the flight itself to worry about.

Airbus made sure that its launch video featured on-board gyms and bars. There were big, squidgy double beds and probably a polo lawn or two. But the reality is that airlines will fill the entire fuselage with seats they’ve nicked from a primary school to wedge the passengers in like veal.

In other words, being on board the A380 will be exactly the same as being on board any other jetliner. Exciting? I don’t think so, Tony.

This brings me to the final point. You see, the cruising speed of the A380 is Mach 0.85 (647 mph), which is pretty good for something with the aerodynamic properties of a wheelie bin and engines that run on mineral water. But the 747 cruises at Mach 0.855 (651 mph). This means that the 747 gets you there faster and you spend less time with your face wedged in an American’s armpit.

On that basis, you can marvel at how Airbus has jumped through political hoops and climbed technical mountains to bring the world its shareholder-friendly A380. But you are better off going in a Boeing.

Sunday 23 January 2005

Walking is something that I will gladly do when the car breaks down. In London I have been known to pop out for the papers and not stop until I get to Dartford in Kent. But the notion of treating the exercise as a noun, of going for ‘a walk’: that has always seemed faintly preposterous.

Still, last weekend the children wanted to play Monopoly, so on the basis that anything is better than that, I went for a proper post-roast Sunday afternoon stride through the rolling vastness of England’s achingly beautiful green heart. And, of course, I arrived back where I’d started from with mild exhaustion and a hint of hypothermia.

Each of my wellingtons weighed 200 tons, I had mud in my navel, my lips were royal blue, my face was fuchsia pink and my hair looked as if it had been through a jet engine.

More than that, though, I was angry, riddled with guilt and astonished at what has been done to the countryside while nobody was looking.

You may recall from your childhood those long, lazy summer adventures when you could climb trees, go where you wanted and fall in stuff. It was pretty much a free-for-all, providing you stuck to the ‘Country Code’.

Published in 1951, this was a simple set of rules, designed to explain to the working classes what they
should do when faced with bits of the world that were not cobbled. In essence, it said that you must not pull faces at the sheep and you must remember to shut all the gates.

Last year, however, the code was rewritten as the ‘Countryside Code’ by representatives from half a dozen government agencies who, plainly, have never set foot outside Hoxton in east London. It’s like the instruction manual for the space shuttle.

Then there’s the countryside itself, which now looks like Camp X-Ray. You’re marshalled by signposts telling you where the footpath goes and, just to make sure that you stay on it, you’re fenced in by miles of electrified razor wire.

Every few hundred yards you are reminded of your responsibilities by slogans that would not look out of place in a Soviet tractor factory. ‘Kill nothing. Only time’, said one.

There was another which said ‘No dogs’. But before I turned to my faithful Labrador and said, ‘For you ze valk is over,’ I took a moment to reflect and thought, why not? If dogs are such a menace, why are these same government agencies so keen to look after foxy-woxy?

Well, I’ve had a look at the new code, and it seems that the problem isn’t dogs.

It’s what comes out of their bottoms. Now, I know that in the parks around Islington, north London, dog dirt is a menace; but the countryside is almost entirely carpeted with excrement. We are ankle-deep in, er, produce from sheep, cows, horses, foxes, chickens, organic llamas and pigs, so why should your household pooch be expected to put a cork in his backside until he gets home?

And why are there so many hills? Why is there a stile every 2½ feet, over which you have to haul your six-year-old, whose hair is standing on end because she keeps bumping into the electric fencing?

I could sue for this, and I would win. I know this because my tree surgeon told me the other day that if some town boys fall off one of the sycamores in my paddock, I can’t just hose their broken bodies into the soakaway. I would have to compensate their parents and pay for a proper funeral.

Legal action, however, was the last thing on my mind as I strode onwards and into what was plainly the front garden of someone’s very nice private house.

Now, one of the pillars of the new ‘Countryside Code’ is that we should consider other people: ‘Don’t openly laugh at the beardy’s purple cagoule. Wait until he’s passed and then crap yourself.’ Fine, so why not move the footpath round the man’s garden, rather than through it? It wouldn’t be difficult.

But no. The sign steering me right past his sitting-room window had been knocked in with special vigour by someone who, you just knew, had absolutely relished the way that it would direct all his communist mates from the Ramblers’ Association straight on to the rich bastard’s lawn.

And if the rich bastard complained? Well, he could be told that these footpaths are ancient thoroughfares and cannot be moved just like that. You can’t just change the practices of the countryside, you know… unless you’re waging class war, of course.

Out there, in the quiet of the twenty-first-century
Cotswolds, you’re only as free as a bird if the bird you have in mind is a budgerigar. You’re as marshalled and governed, and as unable to go your own way, as a piece of Great Western rolling stock.

However, I think I have worked out a solution.

If you must go for a walk, forget the green bits that have been colonised and sanitised by Tony Blair’s urban army; do it in the middle of your local city.

There is no mud, there are more visual diversions, you can go where you want without fear of electrocution, your dog is welcome, and you won’t come home covered from head to foot in shit.

Sunday 30 January 2005

On the eve of the 1982 Monaco Grand Prix I was dining with friends at a small restaurant called the Potato of Love in La Napoule when I found a slug crawling through my lettuce. ‘Regardez,’ I said to the proprietor. ‘J’ai trouvez une er… um, une escargot sans une maison dans mon salade.’

He was horrified and whisked the plate away, saying that by way of recompense we could drink as much wine as we liked. On the house.

Now, I should explain at this point that I’ve never been a big drinker. That said, every once in a while I would be happy to indulge in what’s now known as a binge-drinking session.

The next thing I knew, I was being dragged from the back of a car by several armed and very angry French policemen, who handcuffed my arms behind my back and then threw me to the ground. ‘Aargh,’ I exclaimed, as I plunged, nose first, into the road.

It became apparent that, because we’d been in a right-hand-drive car, the policemen couldn’t remember who’d been at the wheel. So they decided to punch the information out of us.

Obviously, being completely spineless, I’d have grassed on the offender straight away, but I was also completely
drunk and as a result had no clue who it might have been. So I was hit. ‘Aargh,’ I said again.

In fact, I said ‘Aargh’ quite a lot in the course of the next few hours – mostly, though, when my escape attempt went all wrong.

For some reason that never did become clear, we were taken to a hospital where the cunning plan was hatched. Having no spoons to hand, I ruled out the tunnelling option and began to wonder if it might be possible to go to the attic and build a glider while no one was looking. And then the idea hit me. I decided that, this being a hospital, the window in the lavatory would not be fitted with bars.

I was right, and so – with the policeman waiting outside the cubicle – I made lots of, I thought, rather convincing being-sick noises and eased it open. It was not a big window but I was almost completely out when I felt the policeman’s burly hands on my ankles.

Have you ever been dragged backwards through a small window, while wearing handcuffs? Well, don’t try it, because it hurts. It hurts nearly as much as being thrown to the floor again.

Perhaps this is why they’d taken us to the hospital. Because, by the time they’d finished with us, it’s almost certainly where we’d end up anyway.

But no. We were bundled back in the van, taken to the police station and ordered to strip. Oh, how they all laughed when they saw my sunburn. ‘
Le rouge Rosbif
,’ said one. At this point, I was thinking about effing Frogs, but I fear I may have said it out loud, which is why they punched me again. And because my trousers were round
my ankles, I fell to the floor again. And because I was still wearing handcuffs, I landed on my nose again.

The cells in the Cannes Can are like… well, to begin with, it was hard to say what they were like since the only light came through a 1-inch peephole in the door.

For all I knew, there were Laura Ashley curtains in there and an elegant ottoman at the end of the bed.

Sadly, as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, it became apparent that this wasn’t so. In fact, there was nothing but a bed made from stone, a mattress made from wood and a hole in the floor near which several previous occupants had relieved themselves.

Boredom set in within about five minutes. I couldn’t even pass the time by trying to hang myself because they’d taken my shoelaces and belt. And cruelly, they’d taken my lighter, too, leaving me only with the cigarettes. The solution was sleep, but this was impossible because if I used my jacket as a pillow it was freezing, and if I kept it on I got a cricked neck.

Sleep was also impossible because one of my friends in the next cell had decided to run, noisily, through a list of battles in which the English had beaten the French. Sadly, we ran out of ideas after Quiberon and Agincourt and, anyway, my enormously swollen nose testified to the fact that in the only battle that mattered that night, we were losing badly.

At around seven in the morning – though because they had taken my watch as well, it might have been four – I decided to order breakfast. So I waded through the effluent and, through the small hole in the door, said I’d like toast, buttered to the edges, poached eggs, some fresh
orange juice, a double espresso and my bloody lighter back. What I got instead was a burly French finger in my eye.

Eventually, though, the door was unlocked and, having been made to sign the visitors’ book, I scarpered, leaving my hosts to wonder if they really had had Donald Duck in the cells all night.