The World According to Clarkson (21 page)

I did. Over the years I have been to hundreds of houses and have never once felt the need to pocket a teaspoon or an inkwell. But over a cup of tea in the palace’s music room, I was overcome with a Herculean bout of kleptomania. I had my eye on the harpsichord but anything would have done. A cup. A saucer.A milk jug, even.

Staff, I’m told, keep a watchful eye on visitors but what do you say when you see a leading Rotarian shove a royal teapot in his pocket? How on earth do you ask for it back, diplomatically? I mean, he’s going to know that you know that it didn’t get in his trousers by accident.

And what’s more, when Denise Van Outen boasted that she’d nicked an ashtray while on a trip to the palace
Mrs Queen couldn’t very well prosecute. It would seem mean, somehow. The same goes for the old biddies who pick flowers while at the garden parties. Even Prince Philip has never been heard to yell: ‘Oy, Ethel! Leave that orchid alone.’

Gravel, apparently, is what most people steal. Handfuls of it. Although my biggest problem with the loose shale that covers the courtyard was resisting the urge to do a handbrake turn on it.

The worst thing, though, about living in the palace is the decor. The Queen is the only person alive who watched that Michael Jackson shopping trip to Las Vegas and thought: ‘I’ve got one of those vases.’

The whole thing is a symphony of gloomy portraits of unsmiling ancestors with splashes of pure ostentation and gilt. In the main corridor pink and gold Eltonesque sofas clash violently with the bright red carpets.

It’s a Neverland kind of Derry Irvine hell and, unlike anyone else, the Queen can’t watch an episode of
Homefront
and think: ‘Right. I’ll knock through here, fit a natural wood floor, some Moroccan-style scatter cushions and top it all off with a bit of rag-rolling on the ceiling.’ She’s stuck with it.

She’s stuck with her job, too, endlessly waving and asking people to hand over the teapot. Of course, theoretically, she still has the power to start a war, though His Tonyness is capable of doing that on his own these days, and she can still dissolve Parliament.

This brings me on to my biggest point. Imagine having the power to send that braying bunch of ne’er-do-wells
from the Palace of Westminster home, and not doing it.

Not even for a bit of fun, during a party. Whatever you may think of the Queen she has willpower, that’s for sure.

You may argue that the pain of being a queen is eased by her vast fortune. This may be true. But what can the poor dear spend it on? A speedboat? A Lamborghini? She’s not Victoria Beckham, you know.

Some say she should be replaced with a president. But who, at a cost to the nation of just 82p per person per year, is going to live in what amounts to Liberace’s wardrobe, and spend their days making small talk with stuttering and sweaty two-bit Third World politicians whose entourage is hell-bent on nicking the carpet?

You’d need to be mad to volunteer for all this. But then presidents usually are.

Sunday 16 March 2003

What a week. With the blossom in the trees and the sun on our backs, the nation kicked off its shoes, sat back and split its sides at photographs of those holidaymakers in Italy, all cold and shivering under their umbrellas.

There was, however, a fly in the blueness of it all. Normally when the sun puts his hat on someone on the weather forecast will tell us precisely how long we can spend outside without catching cancer.

This week, however, the Ministry of Misery came up with a new idea. On Wednesday it announced that the warm weather may cause smog in the south-east and that this may lead to breathing difficulties.

Oh, for God’s sake. What kind of sad, friendless person peels back his curtains on the sort of days we had last week and thinks: ‘Oh no’? Well matey, whoever you are, just because you spend all weekend in the darkest corner of your mother’s attic, downloading photographs of naked ladies, doesn’t mean we have to as well. So get back to your internet and leave us alone.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Italy or France. And even in the land of the healthy and the home of the safe you aren’t warned on the radio to stay indoors whenever it stops raining. What you get there is: ‘It’s a
beautiful morning in the Bay Area. We’re expecting highs in the upper twennies. Here’s the J Geils Band.’

What we get is: ‘It’s a beautiful morning in the southeast. We’re expecting thousands of people to choke to death. Stay indoors. Stay white. Here’s some Morrissey.’

However, despite the best endeavours of the killjoys, the pleasant weather did set me thinking. Was it right to laugh at the 1.8 million people who’ve gone away for Easter? Can you really have a good holiday here at home?

Those of you who spent Good Thursday in a jam are probably thinking: ‘No, you cannot.’ But actually, spending two hours in traffic listening to the radio is better than spending two hours checking in at an airport. In a jam nobody wants to look in your shoes, for instance.

There are some drawbacks, though. Wherever you go in Britain some clown on a two-stroke microlight will spend the day 100 feet above your head, battling pointlessly and noisily against a four-knot headwind.

But let’s not forget that the Lonely Planet guide voted Britain the most beautiful island on earth.

There’s variety, too. Readers of the
Sun
can go to Blackpool or Scarborough. The reader of the
Independent
can go to Wales, the readers of
Taxi
magazine can go to Margate. Readers of the
Observer
, all of them actually, can take their Saabs to one of those wooden fishing cottages on Dungeness, where they can spend a week pretending to be Derek Jarman and having angst about the nuclear power station.

And readers of the
Daily Mail
? Well, they can go to their cellars to avoid falling house prices, murderers and
whatever plague it is that’s going to kill them this week.

So what about you, readers of the
Sunday Times
? Well, obviously, you have Norfolk and Rock to play with, but if you fancy something different – very different – may I suggest the Imperial Hotel in Hythe?

As is usual in British south-coast provincial hotels, the heating was turned up far too high, the carpets were far too patterned and the chef had ideas far above his station. The menu was full of things nestling on other things.

But don’t be fooled. Don’t think this was just another British hotel that threw in the towel when cheap package holidays started in the 1960s. No, this place presented me with one of the most bewitching nights of my entire travelling life.

The dining room, for instance, featured an altar – and, on the far wall, some curtains, behind which, I can only presume, there was an oven. So when the older guests, so prevalent here on the south coast, drop dead in the soup, they can be cremated on site. ‘You check in. We check you out.’ Maybe that’s the Imperial’s motto.

I must also mention our waitress. She was a pretty little thing who laughed, and I mean likea drain, whenever anyone spoke to her.

After dinner she took me into a broom cupboard – I felt a Boris Becker moment coming on but sadly it was not to be. She needed to explain, she said, that she was joyful because she has Jesus Christ Our Saviour inside her. Lucky old Jesus.

The bar was full of dead pensioners, a group who said they were ‘tri-service people’ but were actually 00 agents,
and all the German baddies from
Die Hard
, who’d arrived on the lawn in a helicopter.

I therefore went to the lounge and guess what I found? If it had been a Roman orgy or a Ku Klux Klan meeting, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but in fact there were 50 soldiers from the Chinese army in there. You don’t find that sort of thing in Siena.

So will I be taking my summer holiday at the Imperial? No, not really. The Lonely Planet is right to say Britain is the most beautiful island on earth. But only as a place to live.

The most beautiful island to take a holiday on is Corsica.

Sunday 20 April 2003

The opening of Charles Saatchi’s new gallery in London seems to have highlighted a problem. There are now so many galleries dotted around Britain that there simply isn’t enough art to go round.

We saw this first with Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, which sits like a big golden hat on the unkempt head of this otherwise unremarkable industrial city in northern Spain. It’s an astonishing building, which is a good thing because the exhibits inside aren’t astonishing at all.

When I went a couple of yearsago there was a triangle, a very small maze and a frock. Further research has revealed that the most popular exhibition ever staged there was for customised motorcycles.

Now the disease has spread. All over Britain the dark satanic mills, which fell into disrepair when the empire crumbled, are being turned into art galleries. That may sound like a good idea at a meeting. But exactly how much art is there in Gateshead? Or Walsall?

Oh sure, rural pubs often encourage us to patronise ‘local artists’. So we pat them on the head, call their work ‘amazing’, ask where they got the idea to paint with their eyes closed and then run for our lives.

The fact is that most of Britain’s art is hung in the vaults of Japanese banks.

The rest is at the Tate or the National. So while it’s jolly noble to turn a former duster factory in Glossop into a gleaming blend of low-voltage lighting and holly flooring, there is going to be a problem finding stuff to put on the walls.

The curators could turn to New York artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose recent works include a life-size sculpture of the Pope flattened by a meteorite that has supposedly crashed through the roof of the gallery. Then there’s his replica of the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, DC, inscribed not with the names of dead soldiers but with every defeat suffered by the England football team.

There is, however, a problem with Cattelan’s work. Next month, someone is expected to pay more than £200,000 for his 8-foot rabbit suspended by its ears. Were the buyer to be Walsall Borough Council, it’s fair to expect some kind of voter backlash.

As I keep saying, everything these days is measured in terms of how many baby incubators or teachers it could have bought. As a result, if a council spends £200,000 on a dangling bunny it’s going to find itself in the newspapers, that’s for sure.

Even Saatchi struggles. Obviously unable to secure a nice painting of some bluebells by a local artist, he has filled his new gallery with all sorts of stuff that to the untrained eye is food, bedding, waste and pornography.

At the opening party he got 200 people to lie naked outside the doors and such was the unusualness of it all that Helen Baxendale, the actress, said she was nervous
about talking to Tracey Emin ‘in case she wees on me or something’.

Inside guests could feast their eyes on a pickled shark, a room half-filled with sump oil and a severed cow’s head full of maggots and flies.

The high-profile nature of all this provides some hope for the owners of provincial galleries – they need only trawl their local butchers and fishmongers to fill half the space – but it’s not so good for you and me.

The trouble is that thanks to Saatchi – and, to a certain extent, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – there’s a sense that you can put anything on your walls at home and it will do. But it won’t.

I, for instance, have a very nice little picture in my sitting room. It’s of some cows on a misty morning by a river. I know this because it was painted by someone whose deftness with a brush meant he could represent cows and mist and a river.

Unfortunately, it gives off a sense that I’m not moving with the times. So really I should take it down and nail one of my dogs to the wall instead. Or maybe I should frame the Sunday joint and put that up.

It’s hard to know what to do. I could go for a picture of Myra Hindley that was painted using the dingle-berries from a sheep. But it would almost certainly cost £150,000.

With my flat in London I went for a look that’s clean and clinical and minimalistic. Bare wooden floors and bare walls painted in one of those new colours that’s nearly Barbie pink but not quite. If you were to
photograph it and put it in a design magazine, it would look fantastic and people would pay £5 to come and look round.

But every time I walk through the door I always think: ‘God, this place could do with some furniture.’ The people living below probably think it could do with some carpets, too.

There’s another problem. It’s all very well subscribing to the ‘design’ phase we are going through at the moment, but soon there will be another phase and then you’ll have to throw away your hardwood floors and start again.

It isn’t so bad when your trousers become dated because it’s only £50 for a new pair. But when you need a whole new house, that’s a different story. Which is why my misty cows are staying. Real art, like real jeans, never goes out of fashion. You’ll never hear anyone say: ‘That Mona Lisa, she’s so last week.’

Sunday 27 April 2003

As viruses go, SARS is pretty pathetic. It’s hard to catch and not very powerful.

Despite the horror stories, 90 per cent of those who become infected go on to make a full recovery. On balance, then, it’s probably sensible for schools in Britain to stay open and for aeroplanes to carry on circling the globe.

However, what if it were Ebola? Since this filovirus was first identified in 1976 it has become a bit of a joke. Reports at the time said it dissolved fat and lots of Hurley/Posh surgically enhanced women thought it might be a fun alternative to liposuction. I’m just as bad. Every time I go to the doctor I always tell him I’ve caught Ebola just for a laugh.

Actually, it isn’t very funny. It attacks your immune system – but unlike HIV, which lets something else come along and kill you, Ebola keeps on going, charging through your body with the coldness of a shark and the ruthlessness of a Terminator.

First your blood begins to clot, clogging up your liver, kidney, lungs, brain, the lot. Then it goes for the collagen – the glue that holds your body together – so that your skin starts to fall off. Usually your tongue falls out, your eyes fill with blood and your internal organs liquefy
before oozing out of your nose. Except for your stomach. You vomit that out of your mouth.