Born to Be Riled (33 page)

I know how this feels because it happened to me. After 18 unswervingly happy years in Fulham I was exposed, for no more than 10 minutes, to a copy of
Country Life,
and within a month I was on my way to Hackett for some tweed. I was off to a new life in the Cotswolds.

We’d found a magnificent house and, even after we’d festooned it with satellite dishes to keep us amused on long, dark winter evenings, it was still magnificent as the removal trucks disgorged our entire belongings into a cupboard under the stairs. Understand, please, that furniture which fills a house in London isn’t going to fill a lavatory in the country.

Happily, we only had to watch buggy racing from Finland and the Dubai racing results for six nights before a cousin of someone who once sold a dog to a mild acquaintance in London rang, and we were off to a bottom-sniffing, getting-to-meet-the-locals drinks party.

This was just like the drinks parties we used to throw in our early London days, but it quickly became apparent that one vital ingredient was missing – there was drink, and bonhomie and an inglenook. But no one was flirting. Aged 20, you only want to meet people so that you can get them into bed. Aged 40, you only want to get to bed.

Samuel Johnson, it seems, was right. When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. You go to London to live. And then, when you’ve served your biological purpose and had children, you move out. To die.

Children are always the excuse… but permit me to blow away a few myths on that score. My eldest is now nearly four and she hates – and I mean really hates – wind,
rain, mud, trees, fields, tractors and snow. Once a wet leaf attached itself to her shoe and she wailed like a stuck pig for two hours.

Even though we have six pastoral acres to play with, she confines her activities largely to the playroom and her colouring set. And you should see the look on her younger brother’s face when I start the ride-on mower. You know how Robert Shaw looked when he was being eaten by that shark in
Jaws
? Well it’s like that, only the boy majors a little more strongly on the fear and terror.

Most mornings both children ask if we can go to the London flat so that they may swim at the Harbour Club, meet up with friends in Tootsies and take tea at Hurling-ham. Emily is known among friends as Tara Palmer Clarkson.

And don’t for one minute be taken in by this health business. Mothers say that children in London suffer from asthma and streaming eyes, but out here the hay fever is simply appalling and I heard last week of someone with diphtheria. Consumption is commonplace, and all I’ve got to look forward to is gout.

Then there’s the noise. Hear a sound at 4 a.m. in London and you’ll turn over and go back to sleep. Hear a sound out here at 4 a.m. and you’ll jump half-way out of your bloody skin. Twice a month, at least, I’m to be found in the middle of the night stomping round the house in my dressing gown, convinced that the scuffling sound my wife heard is a one-eyed Jethro who has broken in for a spot of under-age rumpy-pumpy. Usually, though, it’s a muntjac, which is a sort of big rat.

It’s nonsense to say the countryside is quiet. No one in London is troubled by wisteria tapping on their bedroom
window, or crow-scarers. You get the rhythmic and distant rumble of jets on their final approach into Heathrow – we get the nasal drawl of model aeroplanes. You get the odd burglar alarm or party and you moan like hell. But it could be worse. You don’t, for instance, get combine harvesters working through the night, do you? Or badgers tripping your security lighting. Or campanology every bloody Sunday morning.

Sure, you have a constant background traffic roar, but we have born-again bikers who can be heard from 40 miles away. And if your child runs into the road he’ll be hit by a car doing 10. Out here, it’ll be doing 100.

In London, children can learn to ride their bicycles on Clapham Common in almost perfect safety. Mine will have to take their chances on a road that makes Silverstone’s Hangar Straight look like a farm track.

Mind you, cars are the only things that do move quickly. In London, you can pop to the corner shop for a packet of fags and be home in 30 seconds flat. You ask the shopkeeper to give you 20 Marlboro. He says £3.38. You pay. And that’s it. Me? I have to drive to the shop, and when I get there, it’s like I’ve got the lead in a soap opera. You can be there for hours.

First time I went, the bloke in front was holding a white fiver. The woman in front of him had a purse full of half-crowns. Nice thrupennies though. You can say that round here. No one knows what it means.

In the bank, the cashier always studies the cheques we pay in and exclaims in a loud enough voice to knock down barley, ‘Ooh that’s a lot of money.’ I’m not kidding here. It happens all the time, even when it’s a BBC repeat fee for £18.

I think half the problem is that in the countryside you can’t actually spend money. Go to the pub and people are playing shove ha’penny, so you leave. Go to the cinema and, although you can park outside, it is showing
Lethal Weapon
and everyone is coming out of the matinée saying they should make a sequel. Out here, Marc Bolan has not yet been supplanted by Mel Gibson as a sex symbol and Leonardo di Caprio has not yet been born.

However, I must confess that a world removed from that Norman Lamont lookalike in short trousers cannot be all bad.

It isn’t, really, and the chief reason is parking. In London, I became used to spending the last half hour of my day roaming the streets looking for somewhere to stop. And I became used to this, like you can become used to white noise or pain, only really noticing it when it goes away.

And believe me, I’ve noticed that nowadays my car is parked right outside the back door every single morning. Think about that. Think about never worrying about looking for a meter ever again.

And think, too, about pulling out of your gate in the morning, knowing that you can be doing 100mph in as long as it takes your car to get there. Oh sure, provincial towns have horrendous rush-hour jams but they’re short-lived, lasting from five-to until five-past nine, and then in the evening from 5.29 until 5.35.

People, after all, are in no hurry to have a drink after work with their new secretary, or that girl they met at a drinks party last night. They have their vegetable gardens to weed and things to shoot.

Seriously, everyone in the countryside shoots everything.
I’ve become so caught up in this that last night I went into the kitchen garden and shot all the thistles from their moorings. In London, all I ever wanted to do was meet Kate Moss. Out here, all I want to do is shoot a muntjac. I also talk about moles a lot.

And this is a worry. I do get up to London regularly, and I do meet up for lunch with bright-eyed urbanites, but when it’s my turn to talk I have to pause and gather my thoughts before speaking. When they’ve been on about Mogens Tholstrup for half an hour, it’s important to avoid the mole-hill tangent.

And anyway, all I ever want to do is get lunch over so that I can wander up and down Jermyn Street. I could walk for miles in London, breathing in the abuse from taxi drivers and checking out the hemlines. The shop windows are full of mysteries: motorized pepper grinders and compass cuff links. There’s a bustle. The people have a sense of purpose.

Contrast that to a walk in the countryside. It’s an aimless amble with just one goal – to get back home again, to your Aga and your noisy plumbing. On a walk in the countryside you’ll see trees and brambles, but where’s the fun in that? You’ve seen them before, and you’ll see them again. A bramble is not, and never will be, even remotely interesting. And nor is a fern. And nor is a woodpecker – not that we see too many of those out here. They’ve all been shot.

So why then, really, am I here? Well it’s simple, actually. If you live in London, you can’t have a Ferrari.

Launching the new Beetle to quite the largest gathering of motoring journalists I’ve ever seen could not have been easy for Dr Ferdinand Piech, head of Volkswagen. Obviously, he had to make reference to the old Beetle – which, rather inconveniently, was inspired by Adolf Hitler. This is not a big selling point. Hitler told his motor industry to design a little car so people could enjoy the new autobahns. It should cost less than 900 Marks and it would be called the ‘Strength Through Joy’. Again, not a big selling point. Only after the war, when a British major got the old Wolfsburg factory up and running again, did the rear-engined tool with its unusual faired-in headlamps come to be known as the Beetle. And who came up with that? Step forward Gordon Wilkins – one of the first
Top Gear
presenters. Does this mean that in future the Vectra will be called the Dungheap?

None of this war stuff was mentioned in the press conference. Instead, we got Janis Joplin singing, rather cleverly, ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a brand-new Beetle’. And afterwards, in one of the most lavish corporate videos I’ve ever seen, we saw hippies and flower-power people, at Woodstock and in San Francisco, naked and stoned. Earlier, we had been to a huge party in the old Roxy Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, where, to the accompaniment of the worst Hendrix tribute artist in the world, waitresses in miniskirts and waiters in tie-dye T-shirts offered us free love and beer. But why, for heaven’s sake? The Beetle has been around for seven decades. Why should it have come to symbolize the ’60s?

The video could have shown SS stormtroopers burning books in Poland, or vast hordes of underpaid Mexican peasants, or my mum using her Beetle to jump-start yet another of my dad’s ailing Fords. And it would have been just as relevant. I mean, the Queen Mother was around in the 1960s too, but she’s hardly an icon of free love is she?

Anyway, when the rather clever video, which had been set to The Who’s ‘My Generation’ and the Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’, finished, the lights in that vast auditorium were turned back on and there on the stage were… seven Germans in suits. They’d been hammering away all evening about what fun the old Beetle had been and how much fun the new one was, and yet… and yet. Fun. German. German. Fun. These two words do not sit well together. Dr Piech, notorious in the car world as easily the least funny man alive, tried to smile, but I suspect there was a public relations man under his desk tickling him. It was more of a grimace.

I suppose that now is a good time to explain that I was never a fan of the old Beetle. I mean the engine was air-cooled – why? And located at the back, behind the rear axle – why? It had a crappy suspension design too, so anyone trying to corner with any verve would end up facing the other way, or dead. The heater didn’t work, the six-volt power supply was disingenuous, and if weathermen even thought it might drizzle later, the sills would oxidize. It was a poor design, badly built and horrid to drive. And that’s exactly why it did so well in the 1960s. It was bought by a bunch of tree-huggers precisely because it was crappy. Ideally, they would like to have driven around in a bush, but as this was not possible
they chose the worst car available. Like now. Visit any road protesters’ hide-out and you’ll find the car park awash with 2CVs. Another anti-car car.

At this point, fans of the Beetle will doubtless point out that 21 million have been sold, many to people like my mum, who has never felt tempted to hug a silver birch. Quite right, and nor do the vast army of South American Beetle drivers have much to do with trees – except for chopping a lot of them down, that is. Sure, but, you see, the Beetle’s greatest strength has always been its cheapness. It was designed to be cheap, and in Mexico, where it lives on, it still is. My mum had one because it was cheap. Tree-huggers had them because they were cheap. Students buy them even today because they’re cheap. But they are not, and never have been, fun. Whereas with the new car, it’s the other way round.

As it’s the British Grand Prix today, you’re probably expecting this column to focus on the battle between the talent of Michael Schumacher and the technical supremacy of McLaren. Well sorry, but I just don’t care any more.

Along with most of the country I’ve recently been introduced to football, and I’ve seen the light. That match between England and Argentina was, without any question or shadow of doubt, the most gut-wrenching two hours of my entire life.

I genuinely do not know how football fans live though this torment every weekend. During the penalty shootout
I was, medically speaking, in the throes of a massive coronary. My heart had stopped, and even if a Bengal tiger had started to savage my wife, I’d have been unable to move. Football has introduced me to the true meaning of passion.

If someone overtakes a Ferrari during a motor race, I’ll tut and wander into the kitchen to see if by some miracle there’s a cold sausage in the fridge. But when Argentina were awarded that penalty, I found myself sprawled on the floor demanding that a gunboat be sent immediately to Copenhagen harbour. I wanted to rip the little mermaid to shreds. I sobbed to my wife that we would never, EVER have Danish bacon in the house again. EVER, do you understand? And then David Beckham was sent off.

I thought I hated the referee, but this was something else. My brain concocted a whole new chemical for this one. Had you cut me at that moment, I’d have bled concentrated sulphuric acid. When they showed that slow-motion replay of Beckham’s ill-tempered foul, I really and truly wanted to smash him in the face with a tyre iron. And even now, two weeks later, I still lie awake at night dreaming up new and imaginative ways of making him pay. I’m told he sometimes goes out dressed as a woman. Well good, because when I’m finished with him he will be one.

It wasn’t all hatred though. As the game unfolded I began to fall in love with Tony Adams, fantasizing about moving with him to a little cottage in Devon and rearing geese. And when Michael Owen scored that goal to put England ahead, I experienced a euphoria way beyond the ken of mortal man.

So when England were knocked out I couldn’t simply
stop watching. I needed more of these incredible highs and they came in spades when Germany lost 3–0 to a country that didn’t even exist five years ago.