Clarkson on Cars (28 page)

They are not concerned with style or image. They would buy a wheelbarrow if they thought it would get them to the post office every morning. They want cast-iron reliability and they get it from their Hondas.

And word gets around. At beetle and whist drives the length and breadth of the land, people in brown suits talk about their Hondas and other people in brown suits go out and buy one. Until very recently, the average age of a CRX driver was 47!

So, even though you may crave that VTEC engine, you would not buy the only car that can give it to you because you don’t want to be labelled as an old git.

Privately, Honda people will admit they’re concerned but when asked about possible solutions you just get a shrug. One said, ‘Short of telling everyone our cars break down all the time, we’re stuffed.’

Shame.

There is nothing quite so funny as watching an American trying to drive in Italy.

Fresh from a fourteen-hour flight, they squeeze their voluminous backsides into what they think is a toy and then set off for an appointment with Mr G. Reaper.

I have seen grown men crying at Italian service stations, explaining to anyone who will listen that they have been rammed and that while doing 55 mph, a nun drove along an inch from their tailgate, waving and flashing her lights.

Pick up any American guide to Europe and it is littered with huge passages in big, bold type advising US citizens to use public transport in Italy. The two car cultures are like Baileys and lime juice. They just do not mix.

For all sorts of complex reasons, each nation drives differently. In France, it’s not uncommon to see people hurtling down the autoroute with their left foot resting on the dashboard, but pass into Belgium and it stops. There, everybody eats while driving. Keep going and you get into Germany where they are like the Italians only faster, and more arrogant.

Doubtless, they all find Britain as odd as we find them but I’d love to know how they generalise about our driving style, because it seems to me that it’s completely different depending on which part of the country you’re in.

Down at the seafront in Brighton, it is perhaps the most explosive cocktail since someone said, ‘Hey, I wonder what would happen if we put a sugar lump in this fertiliser.’

Brighton is a town for the very young, who all seem to have 9-million-cc motorbikes, or the very old, whose idea of a high-speed thrill is a Richard Briers monologue.

I alternate between almost uncontrollable rage as yet another Honda lurches out in front, and then meanders down the prom at 4 mph, and stark fear as yet another bike roars by at 4000 million mph.

Then there’s somewhere like Doncaster which must rank as the most law-abiding town on earth. If you want to turn left at a roundabout, you will get into the correct lane and queue for five miles, even though the other lane is completely empty.

It never occurs to anyone that they could scream down the wrong lane, go round the roundabout once and then emerge, at the front of the queue, and with the right of way.

I can think of only two reasons for this. Either people are very stupid or no one is in a hurry.

Everyone is in a hurry in Oxford but that is because Oxford has quite the most idiotic one-way system in the known world. Arrive from the east and you are forced to go through all sorts of outlying villages, like Torquay and Keswick, before you’re allowed to head for the town centre, where there are no parking spaces.

Coventry’s ring road also has all the precision of spaghetti. There are people there today who popped into town for a packet of fags in 1973.

But it could be worse. It could be Birmingham. Get off the M6, go down the Aston Expressway and you are herded into a tunnel which spits you out again in Kidderminster. Turn round, try again and you’ll be back on the M6. Every driver in Birmingham looks like forced rhubarb.

Bournemouth has by far and away the most sensible system I’ve ever encountered with all the street names clearly signposted in large letters, and Braille, on every ring-road exit. Even the staggeringly old population in their Austin Sevens can get from whist drive to beetle drive without ever getting lost.

But Scotland in October is perhaps the best place in the UK for making progress. Everyone up there is used to dealing with the two greatest hazards on our roads – ice and caravans – so when neither is in evidence, they’re like dogs off the leash. I have never, ever been inconvenienced by a Scottish driver, even though rather too many of them seem to have Ladas.

Even when I’m in England, I’ll hang on to the back of any Scottish-registered car because its progress will be neat, fast and safe.

Unless it’s in Norfolk. No one can make neat, fast or safe progress in this moonscape because the farmers think they have a right of way everywhere. You can be plunging down an arrow-straight piece of asphalt, hurrying to keep an appointment with the horizon when a huge tractor will just trundle into your path, its trailer weighed down with all those EC subsidies and its tyres leaving great gobs of glutinous mud all over the road.

Never be tempted to drive quickly in Somerset either, because every other road user will be drunk out of their minds. This is the spiritual home of the Ford Escort RS2000 which is driven by people who like bits of twig in their drinks.

And forget Wales, because none of the road signs have any vowels in them. It’s also worth noting that no one in Wales knows the way to anywhere. Pull over and ask the directions to Llyllghll and they always start by saying ‘er’ – which is your cue to move on.

Stick around and they’ll have you circumnavigating the corn exchange till kingdom come.

Now in any of these places, the one common bond is that every driver thanks God he doesn’t have to live and work in London.

London scares the hell out of everyone and to complicate it still further, there are little microcosms like Fulham where everyone works in banking, estate agency, stockbroking or insurance. They all wear suits. They all worship Gordon Gekko and they all drive BMWs. None of them will ever, ever, ever let you out of a side turning.

Head east to Southall and you can see how Octav Botnar made his millions. Everybody drives a Nissan so spectacularly badly that you wonder how anyone is left alive.

In Camden, cars are few and far between because everyone is at home, smoking dope and thinking of new ways to be PC. The car up there is Beelzebub, Hitler and Myra Hindley all rolled into one.

Plus the council does its best to keep them out by digging up the roads. This is a Labour local authority trick – everyone thinks you’re doing roadworks but in fact, you’re simply employing people to keep cars out. You never have any intention of actually opening the road, ever again. Clever stuff.

Wandsworth, of course, is not a Labour council which means they never do any roadworks at all. And explains why I’ve spent all morning on the telephone, trying to hire a crane to lift my car out of a pot-hole it fell into last night.

London is a melting pot, a cramped labyrinth where the locals all do things differently and where they still have to mix it with people from all over the world; Norfolk farmers in town to get some more subsidies, Italian playboys, and tourists who’ve never driven on the left before.

We should be surprised, not that it doesn’t work very well, but that it works at all.

She doesn’t eat meat and though she has a television, she makes a point of explaining that she never watches it. She lives in Islington and she cares, she really cares.

When she was asked, reasonably enough, whether the chap over by the fireplace was her boyfriend, she replied, somewhat haughtily, that she can do without stereotypes thank you very much, and hurried off into the kitchen for some more mulled walnut and dill.

Actually, hurried isn’t quite the right word because she was wearing the daftest trousers I’ve ever seen. They were so baggy that as she walked past an open window, the breeze caused a significant course deviation. Plus, she appeared to be wearing eight shirts.

She was a very ugly person but was not wearing make-up because war paint is sexist and the fascist companies that make it use guinea pigs as beagles. Or something.

But it was the shoes that confirmed what I’d suspected all along. This girl drives a Citroen 2CV. Her footwear looked like a cross between a battleship and a coal scuttle, which was stupid enough, but the soles appeared to have been fashioned from potato skins.

I am fascinated by shoes; the idea that old people walk into a shop and though faced with a wide range of alternatives, actually choose those felt booties with zips up the front. Or that young and pretty girls will happily pay a wad of Melvins for a pair of canvas shin-high boots with crepe soles nine inches thick… and then go dancing in them.

Except they don’t of course, because by the time you’ve done all the laces up, it’s time to come home again and because the only dance you can do while wearing nine-inch platforms is called ‘the man who’s just about to topple off a cliff dance’, which is not very elegant.

You can drive with platform shoes on but you must expect to be stopped by the police who, with some justification, may feel that your car is being driven by a committee.

The sort of person who chooses to wear platform shoes either has a height complex or is so wrapped up in what’s in and what’s not that they will put up with great discomfort to look good. Either way, they will drive something very showy, and very loud, and something with all the refinement of a baboon that’s been forced to wear evening dress for the first time. Something like a TVR in fact.

Then there’s the sort of person who wears stout ankle-length boots with elasticated sides. Inevitably, they’re a sort of orangey colour and of course, they are made from good, hard-wearing leather. We’re talking dairy farmer here. We’re talking Daihatsu Fourtrak or Subaru.

Gentlemen farmers wear brown leather brogues with a dimple effect which they bought in 1972, a week after they bought their first Range Rover.

The brogue is popular in the City but on the streets of EC3, it is never brown, it is black. And you can always tell which of the brokers, bankers and Lloyd’s-men are ex-army by whether the heels are strengthened with segs.

Ex-army men like to let you know they’re coming and consequently feel the need to make a huge, metallic clicking noise as they pound up the railway platform on a morning.

At home, all city boys have BMWs. And you can tell which ones are ex-army city boys again because the carpet in the driver’s side footwell is ripped to shreds.

BMWs are also popular in SW2 but only after they’ve been stolen a few times and have intergalactic mileages. So, any pre-C-reg BMW is almost certainly being driven by someone who appears to have a pair of massive white bouncy castles on each foot.

The rather less extravagant training shoe belongs under the wheel of a Ford Capri while the good old-fashioned Green Flash tennis pump suggests the person wearing it is not the slightest bit bothered by fashion. They play tennis and need reliable and steady footwear. They need a reliable and steady car so they have a Honda.

Volvos, too, are reliable and steady (apart from the T5) but as all of them round these parts are driven by 35-year-old women, every time I see a blue court shoe, I can’t help thinking of Sweden.

Unless it’s being worn with a mini skirt in which case she’s less than 35, has no children and therefore owns a Golf GTi. If it’s a micro skirt, she’s 19 and has a Peugeot.

Odd to think, then, that all of these people, one day, will have a pair of those fur-lined booties with zips up the front, a tartan shopping trolley and a husband with a Rover 2000. We all will. One day, all of us will wear brown shoes.

Even people who, today, wear grey ones. Now remember, in American spelling, gray is an anagram of Gary so no prizes for guessing what sort of a car My Grey Shoes drives. If the shoe in question is from Dolcis and worn with a white sock, he is a photocopier salesman and has a Vauxhall Astra. If it is cut low at the sides, fitted with a tassel and worn with a pale grey silk sock, he is a footballer and has a Toyota Supra.

The footballer’s girlfriend, a model called Denise, drives an Escort Cabriolet. How do I know this? Because her shoes have heels like ice picks and are red. If there’s an ankle bracelet too, she doesn’t have a car at all. She rides around in Gary’s Astra.

This is a rule. And it comes from the same book that says all geography teachers wear shoes which look like Cornish pasties. That way I just know when a beige, crepe-soled piece of plastic footwear shuffles by, the man is on his way to a Triumph Acclaim.

I also know that when I see someone in Wellingtons on a hot day, in the middle of a town, I am in the presence of an idiot; which means he must have a motorbike.

But the worst sort of shoe is the half desert wellie, the suede ankle boot with two lace holes on either side. Now I’ve noticed that everyone who has a pair of Jesus boots like this also has a Nissan Micra. Worryingly, I’ve also noticed that everyone who has ever been charged with child molesting turns up at court in a pair.

But here’s the icing on the cake. Every time I’ve been to church, I’ve noticed during the sermon, just before I’ve nodded off, that all vicars wear them too.

So, next time the police need to interview someone about a nasty piece of child molestation, they only need find themselves a Nissan-Micra-driving vicar. Cuts the list of suspects down to about two hundred thousand.

The road from Modena to Lucca is well known to British holiday-makers, who use it as a scenic route from the industrial heartland of Northern Italy to the tranquil beauty of Tuscany and Umbria.

It’s smooth and fast all the way to Abetone, but from there on down, it’s intestinal and difficult and treacherous. And that’s on a quiet day, in your Volvo.

But on a not-so-quiet day, there is an added hazard because this is the road that Ferrari, Lamborghini and, to a lesser extent, Bugatti use to test their 200 mph supercars.