And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (21 page)

However, since death is preferable to golf, I’m not really bothered by the ‘when’.

I’m more concerned with the ‘how’. And I’ve decided I definitely don’t want to drown, or be murdered with an axe by someone who wants my watch. Most of all, though, I don’t want to meet the Reaper with a tube up my nose. I don’t want my last staging post on Earth to be a hospital ward full of old, grey people. Because that would be boring.

And I’m not alone. One chap I spoke to said he didn’t care how he died so long as it was in a fireball of some kind. Another said he dreamt of dying while doing some good. Charging a machine-gun nest perhaps, or rescuing a group of schoolchildren from a tiger. Me? Well, I’d like it to be the basis of a damn good anecdote.

Last week, for instance, I crashed a racing hovercraft.
As is the way with these things, it all happened in slow motion. The front end dug into the ground and as I was catapulted from my seat, astride the fuel tank, I actually thought: ‘Ooh good. My wife should be able to turn this into a rip-roaring story on
Parkinson
. She’ll have them rolling in the aisles.’

I had a similar experience a few years ago while flying into Havana on board a 1950s Russian aeroplane that had seen service with the Angolan air force before being sold to the Cubans. It wasn’t in very good nick before the pilot flew right into the middle of a massive thunderstorm.

So anyway, there we were, upside down, with our ears being assaulted by that whining noise you always hear on films when a plane is crashing. And I thought: ‘Fantastic! My kids will be able to grow up saying their dad was killed in a Russian plane, in a tropical storm over Cuba. They’ll be the most popular kids in the class.’

Perhaps this is why 45-year-old men buy Porsches. It has nothing to do with testosterone’s losing battle with an ever-expanding waistline. And everything to do with a need to die while doing 180.

Certainly, I’m staggered that only 21,000 people have applied for a place on Richard Branson’s new Virgin Galactic spaceship. Of course, with each ticket costing around £100,000, the price is high. But the vast majority of those who can afford such a sum will be at the height of their powers, facing nothing but a steady spiral into incontinence and phlegm. So why don’t they sign up and go for the ultimate thrill: a ride into space.

It can only be a fear of death that’s holding them back; but what do you want instead? The carriage clock? The
secateurs? The coach tour of north Wales? Or maybe 30 years on a golf course, and your last recollection of life on Earth being the burly paramedic’s tongue sliding down your throat.

No thanks. Being blasted to the heavens, quite literally, by a couple of tons of rocket fuel is almost certain to get your demise on the news. You’d bring a little excitement to the lives of millions and that’s even more selfless than saving schoolchildren from a tiger. It’d also be quick.

And that really is what I’m after most of all. I want to be drunk, and happy, and then I want to explode.

Sunday 20 March 2005

I suppose we all dream about the day when George Clooney calls to say he’s in the area and would like to drop by for lunch. We fantasise about the Dover sole we’d make for starters, and the sparkling conversation we’d serve up with the coffee and mints. And we know it’s never going to happen.

Well, last week it sort of did. I was at a seaside holiday cottage when someone I’d invited for lunch rang to ask if they could bring a friend.

Who turned out to be my favourite actress in the world. I dislike the word ‘gobsmacked’, but that’s what I was. Utterly and absolutely bowled into a stuttering, quivering stupor.

And then the practicalities set in. She would be bringing her three children, which meant there’d be 22 for lunch and the Aga was broken. To make matters worse, it was a Sunday morning, which meant all the supplies would have to be bought at the local ShopRite.

And then there are my culinary skills to consider. Given time, and only three small children to satisfy, I can make a fairly decent fist of a Sunday roast. Providing no one wants gravy.

But we were talking here about catering for 22, including a Hollywood superstar, in a small back-up oven, and
the only ingredients I could find initially were six bananas. And some ginger.

Is there anything so depressing as a small village shop on a Sunday morning, after the local dopeheads have been through the place with an attack of the munchies and there’s hardly anything left?

Well, yes there is, as it turns out. Being confronted with all those empty shelves when your heroine is due for lunch in two hours. It was a good time to panic.

Happily, I’d been joined by the producer of
Top Gear
, who knows how to reduce a jus. But even he was stumped by what on earth could be achieved with nothing but bananas and ginger.

‘What about roast banana with ginger sprinkled on the top?’ I suggested imaginatively.

‘What about shutting up?’ he replied, and set off for the meat counter, where we hoped to find something she’d like: a swan, perhaps, or maybe a bit of peacock.

We were to be disappointed. All they had was a jumbo family pack of steak and kidney pie, and a quiche, which, according to a bright green starburst on the packaging came ‘with 26% less fat’.

Neither seemed appropriate. But there was a Pork Farms pork pie, and some sausages.

So, a grated pork pie on a reduction of sausage, garnished with a banana and ginger jus. Mmmm. And we also managed to find a jar of mustard, some Branston pickle, a tub of coleslaw, which was perilously close to its ‘best before’ date and some limes. We had the bones of a lunch here, we felt. If we had been in a Sudanese refugee camp. Rather than catering for a screen diva, a goddess,
a globally recognised, Oscar-nominated, drop-dead gorgeous superstar.

Don’t you think this is odd? If it had been you turning up for lunch, I’d have invited you to eat whatever you could prise from the cracks in the kitchen table.

I certainly wouldn’t have spent the morning painting a mustard sauce on to the Wall’s sausages.

And nor would I have filled the fridge with the staple diet of all actresses: gently carbonated mineral water, into which I’d squeezed a bouquet of my ShopRite limes. You’d have had whatever was in the tap.

Fame sends us all into a complete tizzy. I even broke a golden rule and shaved on a Sunday. I think I may also have slipped out of my jeans, and into a smart pair of slacks.

And then she arrived. You’ve no doubt seen those television commercials where someone wearing a new kind of antiperspirant runs through the jungle without breaking into a sweat.

Well, I use that brand, and, be assured, it doesn’t work when you’re trying to offer your heroine a drink, only to find that your tongue, which has worked perfectly well for 44 years, has chosen this moment to become as bent and as twisted as a pig’s tail.

What if she wants a glass of Dom Perignon ’64 with a dash of yam juice? Because this would be the perfect aperitif for the swan and peacock she’d been expecting.

‘On Tuesday,’ she said, answering a question my tongue had asked all by itself.

‘No. What would you like to drink?’

‘Oh, mineral water if you have it.’

Thank God. At this rate, the next thing she’ll say is that what she really wants for lunch is a pork pie.

‘Ooh, Branston pickle,’ she said, having spotted the jar on the table. ‘I love that with pork pie.’ At this point, my whole heart exploded.

Behind the dazzling eyes, and the porcelain skin, she was normal, as down-to-earth as your mum, or mine.

I was expecting a prima donna because we are forever reading about Wayne Rooney’s minders, and that bloke from the Halifax commercial who goes everywhere with an entourage. We have grown to believe that celebrities are too busy quaffing champagne in London’s glittering West End to be capable of dealing with a sausage.

So each time I meet a famous person, I’m always staggered that they can cut up their own food. Last Sunday hammered the point home even further, so now I can offer you some valuable advice. If George Clooney does call, open a tube of Pringles and give him a can of beer.

Sunday 27 March 2005

My last mobile phone was useless. Oh, it could take pictures and connect itself to the interweb, but its battery went flat every 30 seconds, and when it came to the business of wanting to make a call I had to be actually sitting on a phone mast.

Which has probably given me cancer of the bottom.

And then – and this is the worst part – its speaker was so microscopic it was absolutely impossible to hear what the person on the other end was saying. I wanted a tuba, but I’ve almost certainly ended up with a tumour.

This drove my wife mad, listening to me shouting ‘What?’ over and over again, so last week she bought me a replacement.

Now, I could, I know, have inserted the battery and been connected to the outside world immediately. But I didn’t. I made a mistake. This being a toy, and me being a man, I thought that it might be a good idea to disable the predictive text facility, which is the single stupidest invention since Sir Clive Sinclair’s electrical slipper.

You’re no doubt familiar with the way it works. You type in ‘to’ and it spends the rest of time guessing what the rest of the word might be. Tomorrow? Today? Toyota? Topazolite? Tonsil? It just can’t understand that you want to write ‘to’ – because, of course, in text speak that’s spelt 2.

Anyway, to disable the facility meant delving into the handbook, which contains 104 pages. Yes, 104 pages. For a phone. I knew I was in trouble.

And I was, because, while searching for the chapter on text messaging, I happened upon a passage explaining how I could download music from the internet straight into my new phone. This sounded exciting, and I’m not sure why.

You see, I can currently play ‘Long Train Runnin” on my record player, my CD player, my iPod, my Walkman, my computer and while I’m in my car. It is hard to think of any environment, anywhere in the world, where I am more than 4 feet from the Brothers Doobie.

But the notion of being able to harness a series of ones and noughts from the ether and then marshal them into a recognisable tune on a mobile phone – it was just too irresistible for someone who began his journalistic career with a Remington typewriter.

So I inserted the disc that had come with my new phone into my computer and sat back while it whirred and generally went about its business. Then things got tricky, because it wanted to know how it should communicate with the mobile.

This required some input from me, and everything started to go pear-shaped. I was an hour trying to hook up Bluetooth before I realised no such thing exists in my computer’s chip. So then I took out one of the wires that came with the phone – there were about four miles of flex from which to choose – hard-linked the two devices and tried to forge a link with the net.

And up came a message saying: ‘The PPP link control
protocol was terminated.’ Now obviously, I have seen this kind of message before, usually in a film where a nuclear power plant is about to explode. But what does it mean?

I’m not a technophobe. I can work a Sky+ and tune a car radio. But I don’t know what a PPP link control protocol is and therefore have no idea how best to unterminate it.

No matter. I already had ‘Long Train Runnin” stored away in the bowels of my computer’s silicon heart, so I attempted to upload this into the phone. No joy. It was, said a message, forbidden. What is this? The music police?

It would accept ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd and I’ve now made this the dedicated ring tone for the band’s drummer, Nick Mason. How cool is that? Should he ever choose to call, it’ll actually play one of his tunes.

It would also accept ‘Summer of ’69’, which I’ve allocated to Bryan Adams. And it happily uploaded ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, which is now the personalised ring tone for Roger Daltrey. But it refuses the Doobies. Maybe it’s because I don’t know Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter’s number.

While searching for confirmation of this in the handbook – Concorde’s, by the way, was four pages thinner – I found that I could take a picture on the phone, then email it via the laptop to a friend. So obviously I tried to send A. A. Gill (who’s been given ‘Sing If You’re Glad To Be Gay’) a shot of my genitals. But this didn’t work either. I guess the PPP link control protocol was playing up again.

In fact, I spent – and I’m not joking – a whole day playing with all the new and utterly useless features on
my phone, most of which don’t work. And all I’ve learnt is that people who have personalised ring tones have far, far too much time on their hands.

I still have no idea whether the speaker is audible or whether it can receive a signal in, say, Fulham. And I also have no idea how to cancel the predictive texting facility. The handbook devotes 12 pages to this, suggesting it is so monumentally complicated that it’d be easier, and far, far faster, to send the recipient a letter.

The only good news is that the Motorola V3’s SAR is well within the 2.0 W/kg limit laid down by Cenelec. I found this nugget in the health and safety chapter, and I think it means I won’t catch ear cancer.

Sunday 17 April 2005

Plans to build a forest of wind turbines on an escarpment in the Lake District ran into problems last week when Lord Melvyn Bragg said they’d mess up his hairstyle.

There’s no doubt we need to work on a new type of renewable energy because of one single fact. So far, mankind has extracted 944 billion barrels of oil, and there are only 764 billion barrels left.

But, quite apart from the problems with Bragg’s hair, I doubt wind turbines are the answer. They mince ospreys, make a god-awful racket and, worst of all, produce only enough electricity to run half a toaster. You’d need 100,000 to provide Britain with all the power it needs, and can you even begin to imagine the visual impact that would have?

Put simply, to preserve the beauty of our green and pleasant land, we’d have to destroy it.