The World According to Clarkson (3 page)

Too right, matey, but on television they’ll see you coming and switch channels.

On the radio, for some extraordinary reason, they won’t.

Sunday 28 January 2001

A small tip. The border between Switzerland and Austria may be marked with nothing more than a small speed hump, and the customs hut may appear to be deserted, but whatever you do, stop. If you don’t, your rear-view mirror will fill with armed men in uniform and the stillness of the night will be shattered with searchlights and klaxons.

I’m able to pass on this handy hint because last week, while driving in convoy with my camera crew from St Moritz to Innsbruck, a man suddenly leapt out of his darkened hut and shouted: ‘
Achtung
.’

I have no idea what ‘
achtung
’ means, except that it usually precedes a bout of gunfire followed by many years of digging tunnels. I therefore pulled over and stopped, unlike the crew, who didn’t.

The man, white with rage and venom and fury, demanded my passport and refused to give it back until I had furnished him with details of the people in the other car which had dared to sail past his guard tower.

I’d often wondered how I’d get on in this sort of situation. Would I allow myself to be tortured to save my colleagues? How strong is my will, my playground-learnt bond? How long would I hold out?

About three seconds, I’m ashamed to say. Even
though I have two spare passports, I blabbed like a baby, handing over the crew’s names, addresses and mobile phone number.

So they came back, and the driver was manhandled from the car and frogmarched up to the stop sign he’d ignored. His passport was confiscated and then it was noticed that all his camera equipment had not been checked out of Switzerland. We were in trouble.

So we raised our hands, and do you know what? The guard didn’t even bat an eyelid. The sight of four English people standing at a border post in the middle of Europe, in the year 2001, with their arms in the air didn’t strike him as even remotely odd.

We have become used to a gradual erosion of interference with international travel. You only know when you’ve gone from France into Belgium, for instance, because the road suddenly goes all bumpy. French customs are normally on strike and their opposite numbers in Belgium are usually hidden behind a mountain of chips with a mayonnaise topping.

But in Austria things are very different. Here you will not find a fatty working out his pension. Our man on the road from St Moritzto Innsbruck was a lean, frontline storm trooper in full camouflage fatigues and he seemed to draw no distinction between the Englander and the Turk or Slav. Nobody, it seems, is welcome in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The camera crew, who were very disappointed at the way I’d grassed them up and kept referring to me as ‘Von Strimmer’ or simply ‘The Invertebrate’, were
ordered back to Switzerland. And me? For selling them out, I was allowed to proceed to Innsbruck.

Which does invite a question. How did the guard know where I was going? We had never mentioned our destination and yet he knew. It gets stranger, because minutes later I was pulled over for speeding and even though I had a Zurich-registered car, the policeman addressed me straight away in English.

This puzzled me as I drove on and into the longest tunnel in the world. That was puzzling, too, as it wasn’t marked on the map. What’s happening on the surface that they don’t want us to see?

Finally I arrived at the hotel into which I’d been booked, but a mysterious woman in a full-length evening gown explained menacingly that she had let my room to someone else. And that all the other hotels in Innsbruck were fully booked.

Paranoia set in and took on a chilling air when I learnt that one of the army bobsleigh people I was due to meet the following day had been kicked to death outside a nightclub.

I ended up miles away at a hotel run by a man we shall call ‘The Downloader’. ‘So, you are an Englisher,’ he said, when I checked in. ‘There are many good people in England,’ he added, with the sort of smile that made me think he might be talking about Harold Shipman.

Something is going on in Austria. They’ve told the world that the Freedom Party leader has stepped down, but how do we know he’s gone and won’t be back? Let’s not forget these people are past masters at subterfuge.

I mean, they managed to convince the entire planet that Adolf Hitler was a German. Most people here do think Haider will be back. As chancellor. And that’s a worry.

I’m writing this now in my room, hoping to send it via email to the
Sunday Times
but each time I try to log on, messages come back to say it’s impossible. Maybe that’s because The Downloader is up in his attic, looking at unsavoury images of bondage and knives, or maybe it’s because I’m being watched. Journalists are.

Either way, I’m nervous about smuggling text like this past customs tomorrow when I’m due to fly home. I shall try to rig up some kind of device using my mobile phone, hoping these words reach you. If they do, yet I mysteriously disappear, for God’s sake send help. I’m at the…

Sunday 11 February 2001

If you are the sort of person who gets off on Greek marbles and broken medieval cereal bowls, then there’s not much point in visiting an American museum. Think: while Europe was hosting the crusades, the Americans were hunting bison.

However, I have always wanted to see the Bell X-1, the first plane to travel faster than the speed of sound, so last weekend I set out for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. The trip was not a complete success because the X-1 was swathed in bubble wrap and housed in a part of the museum that was closed for renovation. But never mind, I found something else.

There are those who think America is as richly diverse as Europe – they’re hopelessly wrong, and Washington, DC is the worst of it. I’d never realised that it is n’t actually in a state. The founding fathers felt that, if it were, the others would feel left out – and that’s very noble. Except it means that residents of the capital city of the free world have no vote.

Another feature it shares with Havana and Beijing is the immense sense of civic pomposity. The downtown area is full of vast, faceless buildings set in enormous open spaces and guarded by impossibly blond secret-service
agents in massive Chevy Suburbans. The pavements are marble and the policemen gleam.

Just three blocks south of Capitol Hill you find yourself in an area where 70 per cent of the population are gunmen and the other 30 per cent have been shot. Then to the west you have the dotcom zone, which is full of idiotic companies with stupid names and unintelligible mission statements. Half.formed.thought.corp: Bringing the World Closer Together.

You look at those huge mirrored office blocks and you think: ‘What are you all doing in there?’ The politicians will never have the answer as they all live in an area called Georgetown, which is as antiseptic and isolated from the real world as the sub-basement at a centre for research into tropical diseases.

Here, the only cannon is Pachelbel’s. It was nice to find it playing in the lobby of my hotel. It made me feel safe and cosseted, but it was on in the lift and in the bookstore next door, and in the art gallery.

It was even playing in the ‘authentic’ Vietnamese restaurant where customers can gorge themselves on caramelised pork in a white wine jus. Now look, I’ve been to Saigon and in one notable restaurant I was offered ‘carp soaked in fat’ and ‘chicken torn into pieces’. A difficult choice, so I went for the ‘rather burnt rice land slug’. I have no idea what it was, but it sure as hell wasn’t caramelised or served in a wine sauce.

Still, what do the Americans know about Vietnam? Well, more than they know about France, that’s for sure. The next morning I ordered an ‘authentic French-style
country breakfast’ which consisted of eggs sunny-side up, sausage links, bacon, hash browns and – here it comes – a croissant. Oh, that’s all right then.

What’s not all right are the people who were eating there. Every single one of them was a politician, or a politician’s lapdog, or a political commentator or a political lobbyist.

Because all these people with a common interest live together in a little cocoon, they labour under the misapprehension that their work is in some way important. They begin to believe that there are only two types of people: not black or white, not rich or poor, not American or better; just Democrat or Republican.

So what, you may be wondering, is wrong with that? Surely it’s a good idea to put all the politicians together in one place, it saves the rest of us from having to look at them.

I’m not so sure. When Peter Mandelson couldn’t remember whether he’d made a phone call or not he had to resign and it was treated as the most important event in world history. On the television news a man with widescreen ears explained that Tony Blair might actually delay the election, as though everyone, in every pub in the land, was talking of nothing else.

That was London. But in a town built by politicians for politicians, it’s much, much worse. You can’t even build skyscraper in Washington, DC, because all buildings must be smaller than the Washington Memorial. The message is simple. Nothing here is bigger than politics.

To explain that there’s a world outside their window, and it’s a world of dread and fear, I felt compelled to buy some spray paint and a ladder and write something appropriate in big red letters on the White House.

But when I got there I simply couldn’t believe my eyes. Put simply, I live in a bigger gaff than the president of America, and that’s not bragging because, chances are, you do too. It really is pathetically small.

All around there were television reporters revealing to their viewers some snippet of useless information that they had picked up the night before over a bowl of authentic Ethiopian pasta. And I wanted to say: ‘Look, stick to what’s important. Tell everyone that President Bush lives in a hut and, most of all, warn people that the X-1 display at the Smithsonian is closed.’

Sunday 18 February 2001

According to recent scare stories, people on the 27-hour flight to New Zealand have a simple choice. You can either die of deep vein thrombosis or you can die of cancer which is caused by radiation in the upper atmosphere reacting with the aluminium skin of the aeroplane. Both options are better than surviving.

I boarded the plane at Heathrow and was horrified to note that I was to share my section of the cabin with a couple of dozen pensioners on a Saga holiday. Great. Half were at the stage where they’d need to go to the lavatory every fifteen minutes, and half were at the stage where they didn’t bother with the lavatory at all.

But the seat next to me was free. So who am I going to get? Please God, not the girl with the baby I’d seen in the departure lounge. There is nothing worse than sitting next to a girl with a baby on a long-haul flight. I got the girl with the baby.

And then I was upgraded to first class. I didn’t stop to ask why. I just took the moment by the bottom of its trouser leg, moved to the front and settled down with my book. It was a big fattie called
Ice Station
, which promised to be the sort of page-turning rollercoaster that would turn the fat 11-hour leg to Los Angeles into a dainty little ankle.

Sadly, it turned out to be the worst book ever written. Just after the lone American marine had wiped out an entire French division single-handed, I decided to watch a movie instead. But since I’d seen them all, in their original formats, with swearing, I was stuck.

You can’t even talk to the stewardesses because they think you’re trying to chat them up and you can’t talk to the stewards either, for much the same reason. So I thought I’d get a drink, but of what?

My body clock said it was time for tea but I’d already moved my watch and that said I should have a glass of wine. But I couldn’t have a wine because then I’d want a cigarette and you can’t do that on a plane because, unlike a screaming baby, it’s considered antisocial.

I know. I’ll look out of the window. I’ll look at this overcrowded world in which we’re living. Well sorry, but for six hours there are no towns, no people and despite various claims to the contrary no evidence of global warming. Just thousands upon thousands of miles of ice.

So I went back to my book and was halfway through the bit where the lone American was busy killing everyone in the SAS, when we dropped out of the clouds and into Los Angeles.

Time for a smoke. But this being California, that meant I had to go outside, which meant I’d have to clear customs, which meant I had to get in line with the Saga louts who’d all filled their forms in wrong.

I queued for an hour while the American passport-control people, in a bad mood because work stops them
eating, barked at the old biddies and then realised that time was up. Unlike everywhere else in the world, airlines in the States are allowed to take off with your bags on board.

And so with a heavy heart and even heavier lungs I trudged back to the 747 for the next, really long leg and found that my first-class seat had gone. But then so had the girl with the baby.

In her place there was a Californian beach babe who was going to Auckland with her equally volleyballish friend.

To begin with, I didn’t think too much of the fact they were holding hands but as the flight wore on and they started holding rather more intimate parts of one another’s bodies, the penny dropped.

I know I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve been told countless times that people are born gay and that it’s not something that happens because you’re too much of a boiler to pull a bloke. So there must be good-looking lesbians, too. It’s just that, outside films, you never see one.

I tried to read my book, in which the hero was now taking on and beating the entire US Marine Corps using nothing but a rope ladder, but it was impossible to concentrate. And you try sleeping when you’re seventeen inches from two pneumatic blondes playing tonsil hockey.