And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (20 page)

Others reckoned that shops should be made to display notices advising Britain’s gum-chewers of their responsibilities. Nice idea, but as a general rule gum tends to be chewed by people who can’t read.

And me. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t always dispose of it in what you might call a socially responsible fashion. This is disgusting, I know. I’ve had two pairs of trousers ruined by other people’s gum and I realise I should know better, but I’m being realistic. It happens.

I’m therefore in a good position to work out what might be done to mend the error of my ways. Obviously, if a refuse collector sees me jettison some gum from the window of my speeding car, I doubt he’ll be able to catch up in his dustbin lorry, so that won’t work. And I already know that I shouldn’t litter the pavement, so point-of-sale literature will be no good either.

Until last year the Singapore authorities gave people who smuggled gum into the country a year in jail. But this seems harsh. And anyway, the jails will soon be full of people whose dogs were nasty to foxes. So what can be done?

Well, I think I have a solution. And even by my own high standards it’s brilliant.

Gum trees.

Councils would erect poles at strategic points along the street on to which Sir Alex Ferguson and I can stick our discarded gum. They could even be sponsored, like ring-road roundabouts. And when the pole is full it could be removed and replaced with a new one.

What’s more, these gum trees could be placed on Underground trains and in shopping centres. Enterprising companies could even offer stick-on miniature versions that could be affixed to a car’s dashboard.

So there you are. At no cost to the taxpayer I find a solution. Sometimes I wonder what our government is actually for.

Sunday 27 February 2005

Every week, another high street retailer tells us that it’s in a perilous financial state. Debenhams. Bhs. Dorothy Perkins. Marks & Spencer. Boots. WHSmith. They’re all in trouble, and I know why. They don’t sell things that people want to buy.

Last week, for instance, I had a nasty cold, but, of course, being a man, it wasn’t a cold at all. It was cancer: well, when I say cancer it was a sort of cancerous leprosy. In fact, what I actually had was bird flu of the cancer of the leprosy, with a light dusting of ebola. Had Norris McWhirter been alive, he would have verified that I was the illest person in the world who wasn’t actually dead.

To make matters worse, a cruel Arctic wind was blowing and the police were advising motorists to stay at home unless their journey was absolutely necessary. Well, my journey was very necessary because I needed a coat.

Happily, I was slap bang in the middle of London, which is the world’s eighteenth biggest city and the largest shopping centre in Europe.

So you might imagine it would be easy to buy such a thing.

But where? I’m too old for the King’s Road, I’m too male for Sloane Street and, so far as I can tell, Marks & Spencer only sells pants to sensible girls who play the violin, and sandwiches. Dorothy Perkins didn’t sound too
hopeful either and what can you buy in Bhs? Table lamps, I think.

My wife suggested I try Selfridges, and so, with the sleet reminding me that I have a big hole in the back of my hair, I trundled over to Oxford Street with a gold credit card and sticky-out nipples. I was freezing.

Initially, the first floor looked hopeful. It’s the size, apparently, of four football pitches, or maybe two double-decker buses. Or Wales. Anyway, it’s huge and rammed with every designer label I’d ever heard of, and about a million I hadn’t. All of which were selling T-shirts.

I’m not joking. Issey & Gabbana, Alexander Saint Laurent, Tommy Farhi, Ozwald Hackett, Joseph Boateng. One was all green and I couldn’t get out of the damn thing. Another was full of string. It was all terribly Tate Modern and jolly pleasing on the eye, but not one of them, on a day that Kent was cut off, could sell me a coat.

‘We’ve got this,’ said one cheerful woman, holding up something that travel agents advise you to pack for those chilly evenings you might encounter on a spring break in Rome. But I wasn’t going to Rome. The next day, I was going to the iced-up
Top Gear
test track, and I had every disease in the world.

Later, I was to be found on Bond Street, where it was the same story. Lots of shops stuffed full of linen, three-quarter-length trousers and endless poster-sized photographs of people playing with beach balls.

Now look. Those people who have catering concessions in the nation’s lay-bys are far from the brightest stars in the firmament. But not one of them would have woken up on that Siberian morning and thought: ‘Right.
I’ll leave the tea urns at home today and take the Mr Whippy van instead.’

They know that when the thermometer is reading 1, people are disinclined to want a 99. And it was the same story with all the street stalls I passed. They were full of scarves and brollies, not sunglasses and swimming trunks. And these, remember, tend to be run by people who have more Asbos than O-levels.

On Friday morning, I opened my newspapers to be greeted with endless photographs of Stella McCartney’s new collection. There were lots of women in shawls and chunky polo neck jumpers, and I thought: ‘Aha. Here is someone who recognises that people want to buy clothes to suit whatever weather conditions happen to be prevailing at the time.’

But no. It turns out that these new outfits are for next winter and they’ll be in the shops for August.

I’m aware, of course, that women can plan ahead. In a supermarket, my wife will buy oven cleaner and new light bulbs because she’s aware we’re running low. But men cannot do this. In a supermarket I can buy only what I want at that moment, which is usually a packet of Smarties.

Now, I know that Britain’s fashion buyers are mainly women and homosexuals, but surely they recognise this. Surely, they know that half the population buy T-shirts when it’s hot and that when it’s not they want a coat.

I realise, of course, that each square foot of prime London real estate must be made to pay, and that running summer and winter collections alongside one another is messy, both aesthetically and financially.

But how’s this for an idea? Fashion is a global business and therefore the big names must be selling winter clothes in Australia at the moment. So why not simply switch them around? This way, I would not have come home that day having spent no money at all. And I would have had a coat. And that would have prevented the cancerous bird flu leprosy from being complicated still further with a dose of double pneumonia.

Which brings me on to Boots. The company announced last week that sales since January had been disappointing, and that demand for cough and cold remedies had been lower than expected.

Rubbish. I wanted to buy half a ton of Lemsip last week, and 5,000 packets of Solpadeine, but the store was chock-full of hay fever pills and sun cream.

Sunday 6 March 2005

When the humourless and stupid Earth Centre opened six years ago, Tony Blair hailed it as being ‘greater’ even than the dome. His views were echoed by Michael Meacher, then an environment minister, who went on to say that this lottery-funded eco-theme park would be a ‘living and breathing example of sustainability’.

Well, it wasn’t. Because last week a last-ditch attempt to save the centre failed. Which means it’s gone for good, taking £36 million of our money with it.

The Earth Centre encapsulated everything that is so wrong-headed about this government and its frizzy-haired, baggy-breasted advisers, huddled together, oblivious to the fact that all their eye-swivellingly daft ideas and initiatives are thousands of light years away from what anyone actually wants.

So when one of them mined a hitherto unimagined seam of idiocy and came up with the notion of a green theme park where people could actually watch their own excrement being converted into fertiliser and then sprayed on to the vegetable garden, which would produce food for the centre’s café, no one said: ‘Hang on a minute. Are you seriously suggesting that people will pay £14 to eat someone else’s shit?’

This is because they don’t like Alton Towers, which smacks of the Great Satan and commercial greed. They
therefore end up believing that we’d much rather spend the afternoon tucking into one another’s faeces than have another go on the log flume.

So, in a blizzard of ignorance and naivety, the Earth Centre opened on the 400-acre site of my family’s old glassworks outside Doncaster and damn nearly drowned in a sea of effusive newspaper articles by yet more frizzy-haired, baggy-breasted women who’d dragged their utterly miserable children up to Yorkshire.

Unfortunately, hardly anybody else went at all. The idiots had reckoned on half a million turning up every year, but in 2004 only 30,000 went through the turnstiles. On the day I went, the place was deserted. And it wasn’t hard to see why.

Because if I want to know what it’s like to live in a green world, I don’t need to go to Doncaster. I could just strip naked and stand outside all day, gnawing on some bark. They had a yurt, which is a tent, and the guide wondered, out loud, what it would be like to live in such a thing. Not as nice as living in my house, love. They also had a big trumpet that allowed you to hear more clearly the sounds of nature.

But there weren’t any because, unfortunately, while they were making the place, they’d built an access road right through one of the most important wildlife reserves in the region. So all you could hear through the eco-trumpet was the sound of various yellow ants, little ringed plovers and marbled white butterflies suffocating to death under a million tons of slurry.

This, however, was only part of the hypocrisy. There was also a feature where visitors were reminded of the
region’s flirtation with coal, and how much damage this had done to the environment. I bet that went down well with the locals.

And then there was the blurb that said the Earth Centre was bound to succeed because it was within ‘a two-hour drive’ for 20 million people. Yes, except, if you turned up in a car, you were charged £8.50 to get in, whereas if you turned up on a train or a bicycle it was only £4.50.

When will these buffoons realise that if you open an attraction without sufficient free parking, it is absolutely bound to fail? That’s what did for the dome. They deliberately made it inaccessible for motorists, because ‘I don’t have a car, and neither does anyone else I know.’

Unfortunately, 28 million people in this country do have a car, and I should imagine they didn’t take kindly to being herded into the Earth Centre’s unheated cinema and reminded that they were a pack of planet-murdering bastards.

It wasn’t the hypocrisy, though, that annoyed me most about this terrible place, or the waste of money. It was the dour bossiness, the finger wagging and the concept that all fun in life must be balanced with guilt and rage. Their vision of a perfect world looked to me pretty much like the devil’s lecture theatre.

They even said that you could use the same solar-powered system as the Earth Centre at your home for ‘the price of a motorboat’.

I see. And how many people do you think would say, ‘No, I won’t buy a 40-foot Sunseeker. I shall use the money instead to buy some stupid power system that means my kettle won’t work whenever it’s cloudy.’ How
many people do you think have the choice in the first place?

I am genuinely delighted that the Earth Centre has joined the dome as a shining example of why green issues, political correctness and multi-faith thinking have no place in a modern, civilised culture. And I hope it shows the dreary harridans that there’s another, bigger, more sensible world, away from their earnest and fun-free dinner parties.

What I hope most of all, though, is that the site of their latest failure is turned into a lap-dancing, paintballing racetrack. With discounts for those who turn up in a car. I reckon this could be achieved for half what the Earth Centre cost and that it really would be a shining example of sustainable business.

Because it would be packed.

Sunday 13 March 2005

A study, reported in this newspaper last week, suggests that there’s no such thing as a midlife crisis. And that when people reach the age of 40, they become a symphony in corduroy: happy, contented and more popular than ever.

It all sounds very jolly, but I’m afraid it’s balderdash, because when I reached 40 I got the distinct impression that I’d outlived my biological purpose, that I would never again do anything worth doing for the first time and that there was nothing to look forward to, except maybe having my Labrador dognapped.

It may be true to say that middle-aged people stop being competitive and self-centred but that’s because, at some point in your forties, you reach the top of the ladder and realise there are no more worlds to conquer. So there’s no point stabbing colleagues in the back because it’s pointless. You know the only way is down.

The worst thing about becoming 40, though, is that your brain’s default setting changes from sex to death. We’re told that men in their twenties and thirties think about rumpy-pumpy every six minutes and never consider dying at all. Well, for me, it’s the other way round.

At 40, the big picture of Jordan’s breasts is erased from your human screensaver and replaced by a shadowy figure with a cloak and a scythe.

The other day, some celebrity was in the newspapers
because she’d forgotten to wear any knickers. But I was more interested in the death of Ross Benson. He was 56, for God’s sake. That means I only have 11 years left. And while 11 years to a young person is 11 years, let me assure you that when you’re past 40, 11 years is about 15 minutes.

I wonder all the time about how I might die and when it might happen. Every morning when I wake up, I’m surprised. And what’s more, I’ve talked to several of my friends, all of whom admit that when they’re not really thinking about anything in particular, they think about death.

That’s why you see so many old men playing golf. They’re not doing this to stay fit. They’re sacrificing their dignity in a desperate bid to make the screensaver go away.