The World According to Clarkson (19 page)

So while the parents may be blissfully happy in their Cotswold stone palaces, they are moving into the centre of Oxford for the sake of their children’s sanity.

To cure this, the local council, which is borderline insane when it comes to roads, will undoubtedly follow in the footsteps of London and impose a congestion charge, which will add £100 a month to the already significant school fees.

It will argue, of course, that the children should go on the bus, but they are six years old, for crying out loud – whatever Uncle Ken Livingstone says.

So then the local Nazis will argue that they shouldn’t be going to school so far away. True, probably, but that is a decision people can make on their own. They don’t need some woman with a bicycle knitted out of bits of her husband’s beard to make the decision on their behalf.

What’s to be done? The solution is simple. There are five families, each with two children, each doing the school run every morning. Why not club together to buy a minibus? The cost is minimal, it can go in the bus lane so the time saving is immense, you are happy, the eco-beards are happy and that just leaves Rupert.

Rupert is not happy because his friends in the City are still losing their jobs, but the country-house market has repaired itself overnight: ‘Gosh. This analysis business is harder than I thought.’

Exactly. Stick to breathing. It’s the only thing you’re any good at.

Sunday 26 January 2003

There’s some doubt about whether the country can afford to back a bid for the Olympics in 2012. The money, we’re told, would be better spent on the bottomless pits of health and education.

Oh, for crying out loud. We are the fourth-richest country in the world. If the Greeks can organise a fortnight of running and jumping, then for God’s sake why can’t we?

Sure, the £5 billion it would cost to host this big sports day would pay for an awful lot of baby incubators with plenty left over to house the refugees and fit new hips to every old lady in the country. But that’s like spending all your surplus family income on insurance and piggy banks. Just occasionally you’ve got to say ‘what the heck’ and bugger off to Barbados for a fortnight.

What we need is some job demarcation here. We let the government look after the dull, worthy stuff and then we have a separate organisation solely concerned with making us feel good about living in this overcrowded, grey and chilly island. It won’t be allowed to buy hips so nobody can complain when it doesn’t.

The national lottery should have been that organisation, but sadly it’s more dour and Presbyterian than Gordon Brown’s drinks cabinet.

It has a remit to provide funding in six areas. First, there’s ‘the arts’, which in principle is far too noble and which in reality means pumping money into small black-and-white films about an Asian woman who does nothing for a year.

Then there are charities, sports, projects to celebrate the millennium (they mucked that one up) and health, education and the environment. Why? Why use our fun money to pay for more bloody baby incubators – that’s the government’s job.

My real
bête noire
, however, is the final category. Nearly 5p in every lottery£1 (£300 million a year) goes on ‘heritage’. If you don’t know what that means, here are some of the organisations applying for grants.

The Royal Parks Agency wants £428,000 to conserve and restore Bushy Park, by Hampton Court. Nope, sorry, tell the Queen to pay for it.

Then we have the Museum of Advertising and Packaging, which wants £948,000 to pay for some new buildings. What? All the richest people in the country are in advertising and packaging. You want £948,000? Go and see the Rausings.

Here’s a good one: Age Concern Northumberland would like £38,900 for a project called Meals on Wheels for Garden Birds. No, no, no, no, you can’t have it – it’s too dull.

The list of applicants runs into the thousands and while there’s no list of who gets what in the end, you can use the search engine. I started by typing in ‘multi’
and ‘cultural’ and the poor computer nearly exploded. ‘Church’ had a similar effect.

Why is lottery money being used to restore churches? The church is richer than royalty. It’s even richer, I’m told, than Jonathan Ross. If it needs a few bob to replaster a nave or two, it should think about bringing in bigger audiences. And if it can’t put enough bums on seats, it should think about packing up. Or performing only in Germany. That’s what Barclay James Harvest did.

But why is lottery money being used for ‘heritage’ in the first place? Maintaining the fabric of the country is surely the responsibility of the government. Lottery money should be spent on building new stuff designed only to make us feel good.

The government buys the baby incubators, which are ‘useful’. The lottery buys us statues, which are ‘amazing’.

Take Parliament Square in London. It’s an island surrounded on all sides by three lanes of snarling diesel engines. You can’t get to it and there’s no point in going anyway unless you want to while away an afternoon looking at the guano on Winston Churchill’s hat.

It is therefore the perfect place for lottery money to be spent on a huge new fountain.

In this country, most people’s idea of a fountain is some cherub having a wee.

Last year the Fountain Society gave its award for best new water feature to Sheffield for its cascade in the Peace Gardens. It’s good, especially at night, but (comparatively speaking) it’s a bit of a Dimmock.

Think of Vienna where crystalline water gushes from every hole in every paving stone, or Paris where giant cannons fire trillions of gallons into a frenzy of rainbows under the Eiffel Tower.

In Dubai you have the seven-star Burj Al Arab. It’s the best hotel in the world, more flunkies than an Edwardian tea party, rooms the size of Wales, food to stump A. A. Gill and views from the top-floor restaurant of F-15s lining up on their Baghdad bomb runs. It has everything.

But all anyone who has been there talks about is the fountain in the lobby.

Fountains can do that. Everyone loves a fountain and Parliament Square is the perfect place to build the mother of all water features.

The ‘heritage’ lottery fund could easily afford it – although the Museum of Advertising and Packaging might be disappointed – and there would still be enough left over for an observatory in the Peak District, a latticework bridge of ice and light over the M1, an Angel of the South and, with a bit of saving, a dirty great Olympic stadium in 2012.

Sunday 2 February 2003

Momentous news. George Bush has said something sensible. At a memorial service for the seven astronauts who died last Saturday he said: ‘This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human heart.’

Fine words. But this is America, a country where nobody is allowed to die of anything except extreme old age, and only then after a lengthy public inquiry. So instead of ploughing on with more journeys of ‘exploration and discovery’, the space shuttle has been grounded.

The message is clear. They’re telling us that the crew’s safety is paramount, but if that’s the case why does the space shuttle have no ejection hatch? That may sound silly but back in 1960 the boffins didn’t think so, because they sent a chap called Joe Kittinger to an altitude of 102,800 feet in a helium balloon. That’s almost twenty miles up, by the way, and to all intents and purposes is space.

Once he reached the correct height he opened the door of his capsule… and jumped. Moments later he became the first man to break the sound barrier, without a plane, as he tore past 714 mph. The thickening air slowed him gradually until, at 17,000 feet, he opened his
main parachute, landed gently in the New Mexico desert, had a cigarette and went home for tea.

A couple of years ago I met the guy – he now flies an aerial-signwriting biplane in California – and he was absolutely convinced that if the shuttle had had an escape hatch the crew of
Challenger
would be alive today.

But what of
Columbia
? NASA officials say they will leave ‘no stone unturned’ in their quest to find out what went wrong. It’s hard to know precisely what this means. Bush said he would leave ‘no stone unturned’ in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. So on that basis NASA will probably look under a few rocks in eastern Texas and then declare war, for no obvious reason, on France.

Piecing
Columbia
together again and trying to figure out what went wrong is a PR stunt. Plainly, in a 20-year old craft that’s been to space 28 times there is no design fault. Whatever went wrong was an accident and even if they do work out what it was, it won’t stop accidents happening. They could cure cancer but people would still die of heart attacks.

The law of averages now says that there will be a shuttle crash every ten years.

The law of probability says that if you launched one tomorrow it would be fine. But there won’t be a launch tomorrow. And the way people are talking there might never be a launch again.

Some say there’s no need for manned space flight any more. Others point at the space station and say it’s a scientific red herring. And inevitably the
Guardian
asks
how many baby incubators could be bought with the $15 billion (£9.1 billion) that it costs to keep NASA going every year.

This makes me so angry that my teeth itch.
Columbia
was named after Columbus, for crying out loud: what if he’d decided not to cross the Atlantic because it was a bit scary?

Then you have Chuck Yeager. In 1963 he was presented with a Starfighter NF 104. He knew that when the nose was angled up by 30 degrees then air no longer passed over the tail fin and that it would spin. He knew that the ejector seat fired downwards. He knew that it was called the Widowmaker by other pilots. But he still tried to fly one into space. That doesn’t make him a hero. It makes him a human.

Yes, I know the shuttle’s only real role these days is to service the space station and yes, I’m sure that seeing whether geraniums can flower in zero gravity will only slightly increase our insight into the workings of the universe. But we’re missing the point. What the space station does is not important. What matters is the fact that we can build such a thing.

It’s the same story with the shuttle itself. I’ve been to the factory in Louisiana where they refurbish the giant fuel tanks that are fished from the ocean after each mission. I’ve been to one of the rocket tests up the road in Stennis and it’s like listening to the future.

I’ve even been allowed to sit in the cockpit of a shuttle and press buttons. Yes, it’s ugly and yes, it’s expensive. But never forget that this machine generates 37 million
horsepower and is doing 120 mph by the time its tail clears the tower.

Remember, too, that the temperature on its nose as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere is hotter than the surface of the sun.

The shuttle – one of the most intriguing and awesome technological marvels of the modern age – is America’s only worthwhile gift to the world.

Would I put my money where my mouth is? Would I climb aboard if they launched one tomorrow? Absolutely, without a moment’s hesitation.

And I would do so with some other unusually wise words from Bush ringing in my ears. ‘Each of [the
Columbia
astronauts] knew great endeavours are inseparable from great risks and each of them accepted those risks willingly, even joyfully, in the cause of discovery.’

Sunday 9 February 2003

Following the rousing anti-war speech made by Germany’s foreign minister last week, I would like to proclaim that from now on ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner
’.

Yes, I know this actually means‘I ama doughnut’ but it gets my point across perfectly well. And my point is this…

When was the last time you heard one of our politicians talking so very obviously from the heart? Fuelled by passion rather than a need to keep on the right side of his party’s PR machine, Joschka Fischer laid into Donald Rumsfeld, slicing through the American nonsense with a very simple and very effective ‘I don’t believe you’.

Over the years I have said some unkind things about the Krauts, but from now on, and until I change my mind, the teasing will stop. So sit back, slot a bit of Kraftwerk into your Grundig, light up a West, take a sip of your Beck’s and let’s have a canter through some of the Fatherland’s achievements over the years.

We think
Trainspotting
was clever but let’s not forget that back in 1981 two chaps from
Stern
magazine wrote an immeasurably more powerful drug movie called
Christiane F.
And while I’m at it,
Das Boot
was a much better submarine film than
Morning Departure
, in
which Richard Attenborough’s upper lip momentarily unstiffened for no discernible reason. In fact,
Das Boot
is probably the best film ever made.

What about comedy? It’s often said that the Germans don’t have a sense of humour, but look at it this way. They may laugh at desperately unfunny stuff such as
Benny Hill
and
Are You being Served?
, but who made it in the first place?

Then we have music. Quite apart from Haydn, Handel, Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, can you think of a better pop tune than Nena’s ‘99 Red Balloons’? Bubblegum with a political undertone, and you never got that from Bucks Fizz.

Other things that the Germans gave the world include contact lenses, the globe, the printing press, X-rays, the telescope and Levi-Strauss; and chemistry lessons would have been a lot less fun were it not for the Bunsen burner.

What else? Well, it was Frank Whittle who invented the jet engine, there’s no doubt about that, but the Luftwaffe had jets in its planes long before we did.

Similarly, the Americans and the Russians spent most of the 1960s fighting to gain supremacy over one another in space, but both were using German scientists and German rockets.

Got a Range Rover? That’s German these days and so is the new Mini, the new Bentley, the new Rolls-Royce, the new Bugatti, the new Lamborghini and all new Chryslers. The Rover 75 is German, the entire Spanish car industry is German and by this time next
year I bet they’ll have Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Fiat as well.