The World According to Clarkson (22 page)

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Ebola eats you alive and then, to make sure you don’t die in vain, it finishes you off with a huge epileptic fit, splashing eight pints of massively infectious blood all over anyone within 20 feet or so.

Nobody dies of Ebola with dignity and very few victims get better. Unlike SARS, the most virulent strain of Ebola, called Zaire, kills 90 per cent of those who get it.

Now at this point you are probably thinking: so what? There is no Ebola in the world at the moment. Oh yes there is, but despite a twenty-year, multi-million-dollar hunt nobody has been able to find where it lives. Some say the host is a bat, others say it’s a spider or a space alien. All we know is that occasionally, and for no obvious reason, someone comes out of the jungle with bleeding eyes and his stomach in a bag.

Tests have shown that the virus is simple and ancient. It has probably been hanging around since the days when Rio de Janeiro was joined at the hip to Cameroon. Over the years, therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that it has killed thousands of people. But because it kills so fast it could never travel. Now, though, with Zaire connected to the worldwide web of airline routes, an infected person could reach London or New York before he knew he was ill.

We saw this with Aids. Who knows how long this had been hanging around in the jungle, playing jiggy-jiggy
with monkeys? When they paved the Kinshasa Highway that bisects Africa from east to west and the trucks started to flow, Aids burst into the world and, 25 years later, about 22 million people were dead.

It may be that in years to come, when Aids has killed more people than the First and Second World Wars combined, historians will look upon the building of this road as the most significant event of the twentieth century.

HIV, remember, is another pathetic virus. It can live for only twenty seconds in the air, it travels from person to person only if they engage in vigorous sex, and it takes ten years to do to a person what Ebola manages to do in ten days.

SARS has shown us just how devastating the jet engine can be as a carrier. A doctor gets poorly in a Hong Kong hotel and within weeks there are outbreaks all over the world. Even Canada got itself on the news.

Like HIV, SARS is also difficult to catch. Ebola is easy. In the 1990s scientists in America put an infected monkey in a cage on one side of a room and a healthy monkey in a cage on the other. Two weeks later the healthy monkey was dead.

Following a spate of Hollywood films, most people believe the human race is at greatest risk of annihilation from a giant meteorite or some kind of religious nuclear war. But if Ebola ever gets on a plane, experts say that 90 per cent of us will be dead within six months. It is known in America, where they are good at names, as a ‘slate wiper’.

This is why I’m slightly nervous about the world’s reaction to SARS. We like to think that governments have contingency plans for every conceivable disaster. But I got the impression over recent weeks that a lot of people have been sitting around in rooms saying ‘ooh’ and ‘crikey’ and ‘you can’t do that – think of the shareholders’.

What we need is a scheme that would allow scientists and medical experts to impose, at a moment’s notice, a total ban on all flights and a global curfew. But who would run such a thing? The World Health Organisation doesn’t even have big enough teeth to take a bite out of that political colossus Canada.

The Americans? I fear not. Any disease that has a fondness for eating stomachs would head there first. Besides, if they can’t find Saddam and Osama, what chance do they have of finding something so small that there could be a million on the full stop at the end of this sentence.

So it’s the United Nations then. We’ve had it.

Sunday 4 May 2003

It seemed like a foregone conclusion. A panel of arty types was asked by a local council whether a statue of Nelson Mandela should be erected in Trafalgar Square, right under the portals of the South African embassy.

Astonishingly, however, this week they said that no, it shouldn’t. Now a selection of Labour MPs and Ken Livingstone have written to the
Guardian
to express their dismay.

I’m rather pleased. If we’re going to have a Nelson theme in Trafalgar Square, I would rather see a bronze of Elvis wannabe Ricky Nelson, or the old tax dodger himself, Willie Nelson. Actually, come to think of it, what I’d really like is a stone immortalisation of the Nelson’s Nelson, the Brazilian racing driver Nelson Piquet.

As you can see, my objections are not based on jingoistic principles. There are 30,000 statues in London and numbered among these are Gandhi in Tavistock Square and Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square. I seem to remember there’s a bronze of Oscar Wilde kicking around somewhere, too.

Also, I have no problem with any attempt to erect some powerful symbol about racial harmony slap bang in the middle of what was once the centre of the empire.

But if this is the goal, then I think we might be better off with a statue of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. It could even be a musical statue serenading passers-by with the duo’s 1982 hit, ‘Ebony and Ivory’.

I have to be honest. I have a problem with Mandela. I know that he has become a symbol of democracy’s triumph over evil and a hero to oppressed people everywhere, and I’m sure that Livingstone and Co. are right to say that millions of people would like to see this ‘great statesman’ immortalised for all time in the middle of London.

But he’s not Gandhi, you know. You may like what he represents – I do – but if you peer under the halo of political correctness that bathes him in a golden glow of goodness you’ll find that the man himself is a bit dodgy.

Back in the early 1960s he was the one who pushed the ANC into armed conflict. He was known back then as the Black Pimpernel. And his second marriage was to Winnie, who’s now a convicted fraudster and thief with, we’re told, a penchant for Pirelli necklaces.

Furthermore, since his release from prison and his eventual rise to the presidency Mandela has had some extraordinary things to say about world affairs.

He’s deeply concerned, for instance, about the plight of one of the Lockerbie bombers and has expressed support for both Gadaffi and Castro.

Indeed, he has singled out Cuba, praising it for its human rights and liberty. I’m sorry – what human rights, what liberty? Perhaps he should go to the Cohiba night
club and ask one of the twelve-year-old prostitutes which way her parents voted.

Once, while defending his decision to share a stage with three Puerto Rican terrorists who shot and wounded five US congressmen in 1954, Mandela said he supported anyone who was fighting for self-determination. The IRA, the Chechens, Shining Path? What if I started a movement to bring about independence for Chipping Norton; what if I blew up council offices in Oxford and shot a few policemen – could I count on Mandela’s support?

What of the people who hijacked those airliners on 11 September? They would almost certainly have argued that one of their goals was self-rule for Palestine. So does he think their actions were justified? Confusingly, he doesn’t.

I simply don’t understand why the Nobel academy gave him a peace prize or why Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh gave him a new garden. And I don’t see why he should be given a statue in Trafalgar Square, either. If we’re after someone who stands up for the oppressed, what about Jesus? I feel fairly sure that he never blew up a train.

However, what I would like to see is something to commemorate Frank Whittle. Here we have a man whose invention – the jet engine – turned the world into a village. And by bringing us closer together, who knows how many conflicts he has helped us to avoid?

More than that, who knows what might have happened in the Second World War, if only the air ministry
had listened? For year after year the ministry ignored Whittle’s invention, even refusing to pay a £5 fee to renew his patent in the 1930s.

Of course, in the latter stages of the war, when it saw jet planes shooting down V-2 rockets, it staged a serious about-face. Whittle was knighted, given a CBE, a KBE and£100,000. He was also promoted to air commodore. But he knew that Britain could have had jets before the war broke out and that, as a result, millions of lives could have been saved. In disgust he went to live in America, where he died just seven years ago.

Coventry remembers its most famous son by having a statue in the town of Lady Godiva. I’m told that Whittle has a bust in the RAF Club in Piccadilly but that’s not good enough. He should be in Trafalgar Square. And it won’t cost that much, either, since he was only 5 feet tall.

Sunday 11 May 2003

When I was a child time used to pass with the languid sultriness of a saxophone solo. Every day the sun would amble through the cloudless sky as though it were being propelled by the gentlest of summer breezes. And then, in the winter, perfect crisp snow would settle and not melt for what felt like 40 years.

At school I remember spending those long, warm evenings listening to those long, warm songs on
Dark Side of the Moon
.

One of the tracks seemed to suggest that time passed quickly and that unless I got out of my chair, took off my Akai headphones and did something with my life, ten years would flash past and I’d still be ‘kicking around on a piece of ground in my home town, waiting for someone or something to show me the way-e-yay’.

What a lot of nonsense, I thought. We received no drug education back then but we didn’t need it. Pink Floyd were a living, breathing example of what recreational pharmaceuticals did to the mind. Ten years, as any teenage boy knows, is a century.

Pretty soon, I was 23 and time was still ‘flexing like a whore’, floating round and round as though it were a seed pod caught in the gurgling eddy of a mountain
beck. If anything, there was even more time in my twenties than there had been in my childhood, largely because I wasted so little of it by sleeping.

However, when you get to 33, everything changes. Time straps a jet pack to its back, lights the afterburners and sets off at Mach 3. The sun moves across the sky as though God’s got his finger on the fast forward button. Blink and you can miss a whole month.

This was hammered home on Thursday night, when I met up with a dozen friends for a pizza at a favourite old haunt of ours in Wandsworth. We used to go there a lot, in the early nineties, which, we all agreed, seemed like only yesterday.

That’s weird, isn’t it? No one ever says when they’re twenty: ‘Gosh. It only seems like yesterday that I was ten.’ But my God, the time from when your dreams are smashed and you realise you’ll never be a fighter pilot to the moment when your body starts to swell up and fall to pieces really does go by with the vim and vigour of a Kylie song.

When I was 20 my friends and I went to the pub. When I was 30 we still went to the pub. Nothing ever happened. Nothing ever changed. But then, all hell broke loose.

One of us moved to France, one died, one divorced, one has taken up golf, one (me) has grown six new chins, one has had a lung and most of his bottom removed, one is in a never-ending custody battle with his ex-wife, who seems to have been taken by the breeze of insanity, and two were moved from their penthouse
flat by social services to secure accommodation in Uxbridge… for absolutely no reason at all.

Ten years ago we used to leave that restaurant whenever we ran out of money or, more usually, when the cellar ran out of wine. On Thursday we all left at eleven because we were tired.

I woke up at eight the following morning to find I had three more chins and a terrible hangover. And by the time that had gone another 30 years had whizzed by.

I cannot believe how fast time goes now. I leave the
Top Gear
studio, write this, say hello to the children and then I’m back in the studio again. It’s like God has taken the job of marking time from Oscar Peterson and given it to the mad drummer Cozy Powell.

It’s amazing. On Saturday afternoons we used to play Risk, simply to pass the time until the pub opened again. I had the space in my life to read books and not only listen to Pink Floyd songs but work out what they meant. I drove fast, only for fun. Now I drive fast to keep up with the clock.

I read with despair about people who give up London thinking that when they’re far from the Tube and the expectant wink of a computer’s cursor they can float through the days like dandelion seeds. It doesn’t work because ‘where you are’ isn’t the problem. It’s ‘when you are’.

In the olden days you got married in your teens, had children in your twenties, made a few quid in your thirties, enjoyed it in your forties and fifties and then retired in your sixties.

Now, you do nothing in your teens, nothing in your twenties and by the time you’re 40 you’re on the employment scrapheap, a seven-chinned hasbeen with a spent mind and man-breasts. This means you have to cram your whole life into your thirties.

And that’s why it passes at 2,000 mph.

Well, I’m 43 now and I want the saxophone back. I want to lie on my back, chewing grass, thinking of nothing but what my final words might be.

My dad did that and came up with: ‘Son, you’ve made me proud.’ Adam Faith kept on charging and ended up with: ‘Channel 5 is all s
***
, isn’t it.’

An apology. Last week I said that jets were shooting down V-2 rockets at the end of the Second World War. Many people wrote to say it was V-1s. I should have checked, but I didn’t have time. Sorry.

Sunday 18 May 2003

Every week I strap myself into a monstrously powerful car and hurtle round a test track in a blaze of tyre smoke and noise. It’s a constant battle with the laws of physics, and that’s a dangerous game to play. One day, inevitably, it’ll end in tears.

Still, in a good week the television programme that results attracts 3.7 million viewers, making it the second-most watched show on BBC2.

Interestingly, and rather annoyingly, we’re beaten by
Gardeners’ World
, in which a man called Monty Don moves soil from one place to another and gets all excited about his new compost heap. What’s more, so far as I can tell, he speaks mostly in Latin.