And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (28 page)

Mind you, you still have to apply suncream to your children who, by 8 a.m., are already covered in sand and won’t sit still. And why does children’s sun protection have to have the texture and spreadability of Evo-Stik? I make mine play on the beach in frogman suits.

My wife disagrees with this. She will happily spend an hour smearing buttery sand into a child and then another hour rubbing herself down with what, so far as I can tell, is cooking fat. And no, I won’t rub it on your back.

Afterwards, she goes to the beach and, using celestial alignment, organises a sun lounger so that she need not move all day. And she doesn’t. She just lies there, like a
roast potato, basting. The effect, though, I must say, is stunning. In just two weeks she changes from a dark-haired beauty into a leatherback turtle.

And then, of course, two weeks after we come back to England, she changes back again. Which means she may as well have spent two weeks in the Aga.

My message then is simple. If you want a tan, get a job mending the roads. Then you can go on holiday to Iceland. It is a fabulous place; but one word of warning. On one day the sun did come out, and because I was standing within the Arctic Circle, I didn’t bother with protection. I still have a slab of heat rash on my neck today.

Sunday 4 September 2005

I’ve taken up knitting, or ‘fishing’ as you may know it. This is not because I don’t like my wife any more and would rather spend six hours playing with maggots on the side of a canal. And nor is it because I want to eat the catch. It’s much easier, and tastier, and less bony, to buy fish from a shop, as a finger.

No. I’ve taken up knitting because I am now a lobster fisherman. I have five pots, which is the legal maximum, and each morning they need rebaiting with something that gives off the oily aroma of a fish in distress.

So, rather than get in the Volvo to buy more mackerel from the fishmonger, I thought it might be nice in a natural-food-chain sort of way to buy a rod and catch my own.

The man in the shop said that the best way to catch mackerel where I live is to use feathers. Righty-ho. So I shoot a seagull and use its plumage to catch the fish to attract the lobsters. Great. And wrong. Feathers, actually, are little strips of tinfoil, each of which hides a hook.

So I bought a packet, tied them to the line and flicked them into the sea. Where they became attached with ferocious limpet tenacity to a piece of seaweed. I pulled and tugged and yanked until the line broke, so then I went back to the shop and bought some more.

Soon this became a routine. Get up. Go to bait shop.
Buy feathers. Throw them into the sea. Lose them. Go back to bait shop. Eventually, however, I met a man who said I’d be better off with live bait and a float.

This involves a lot of tying things to other things; but soon, with a lot of making everyone stand back, I made my cast and watched as all the knots I’d tied came undone and the whole shooting match sank. Then I went back to the bait shop again.

Honestly, it would have been easier and cheaper to have thrown my wallet into the sea every morning. The shopkeeper said that in 30 years he’d never known anyone lose so much equipment. And that was before the whole reel came off on one vigorous cast and was lost as well.

Even the short walk to the sea was fraught with complications, because usually the hook would somehow attach itself to some crucial component and all the line would fall off the bobbin and become tangled. This, then, was a typical day. Get up. Walk to sea. Undo knots. Come home.

Luckily, there were many locals on hand to explain what I was doing wrong.

Everything, it seems. Standing in the wrong place. Wearing the wrong-coloured T-shirt, casting in the wrong way.

‘You don’t want to use sand eels,’ said one gnarled and salty sea dog. ‘You want mackerel.’

‘Pah,’ said another. ‘What you use isn’t as important as when you use it. Slack water’s best.’

‘No it isn’t,’ argued his mate.

This was astonishing. Man has been fishing since the beginning of time and yet still there is no definitive list of
do’s and don’ts. It’s been 20 million years of solid arguing.

Eventually, one bloke told me to try spinners, which are shiny pieces of metal with hooks on the end. You toss them into the sea, reel them back, toss them into the sea, undo some knots, reel them back. And so on. Until you die.

It worked. Sort of. Time and time again the rod would shudder as a fish took a snap at the spinner, but since the Spanish have helped themselves to everything larger than a stickleback, all that’s left in our waters is a selection of aquatic insects. And plainly my 3-inch spinner was too big to fit in their micro-mouths.

So I tried a smaller one, which flew off because I hadn’t done a good knot. But then, guess what, I caught a fish.

All the evidence in my book of fishes suggested it was a firemouth cichlid, except that firemouth cichlids are usually found off Guatemala, not in the Irish Sea.

The mystery was cleared up by yet another salty sea dog, who said it was a wrasse. And then by another, who said it was a pollock. Whatever, the lobsters loved it and that night I had a sizzling thermidor.

The next day I caught more than enough to bait all my lobster pots. And then I kept right on going. Pinching the crumbs from underneath Manuel’s big blue table.

I’m aware, of course, that most anglers free whatever they catch, but this isn’t as easy as it may sound, technically or morally. Especially when the hook has gone right through the fish’s left eye.

It seemed wrong somehow to pull it out of the sea, blind it and then throw it back again. Life for a blind fish can’t be that easy.

So I hit it over the head and put it in the kitchen sink. Where it stayed until it had made the kitchen smell very bad. And then I threw it back.

I would like to conclude at this point by saying fishing is a cruel and stupid waste of time. But each cast has the heart-pulsing tension of a blackjack hand. And there’s always time for just one more, because that could be the big winner. I loved it.

It’s good for you, too, because fishing with spinners means you have to stand up, in the fresh air, and you need two hands. Which means you can’t smoke.

Sunday 11 September 2005

This week, after getting a custard pie in the face, I thought it might be a good idea to write about the environment, so let’s kick off with the composition of sea water. There’s water, obviously, and then there’s some salt, a splash of chlorine, a hint of sulphur and a sprig of magnesium.

As a modern-day garnish, there are also some shoes, a couple of million plastic bottles, several hundred thousand disposable lighters, some Volvos and five and a half trillion miles of nylon rope.

I know this, because I recently bought a cottage at the seaside. It’s a wild and rugged place, full of seals and ospreys.

But you tend not to notice the wildlife because after every high tide the whole place is coated with a thick veneer of rubbish.

Don’t worry. The phantom flan-flinger has not turned me into a raving eco-nut. I have always had a passionate loathing for people who drop litter. Once, at a level crossing, the driver of the car in front emptied his ashtray out of the window and I became consumed with a sudden need to shave his face off with some kind of linoleum knife.

Sadly, I didn’t have one to hand, so instead I scooped up all his fag ends and sweet papers and at the next set of red lights lobbed it all through his open window, saying: ‘I think you dropped something.’

Unfortunately, it is not possible to find the people whose rubbish smothers my bit of coastline, which is a pity, because I have some questions. Like, for instance, how in the name of all that’s holy do you cretinous imbeciles manage to lose your effing shoes when you’re out for a walk?

Then there’s all the discarded wiring; miles of it. This really is weird, because if you’ve got to do some electrical work on a broken toaster, what kind of knuckle-dragger thinks ‘I know, I’ll stand in the sea to do that’?

In the absence of culprits to question and then kill, I did a survey of which products are most favoured by the littering riff-raff.

In first place it’s full-fat Coca-Cola. And then we have BIC lighters and Flora margarine, which begs another question. I can understand that you might take a refreshing beverage and a lighter with you on a seaside walk, but what’s with the marge?

‘Right, kids. Have we got everything we need for our trip to the beach? Some shoes to lose. Dad’s fags. Drinks. Something electrical to mend. And oops, nearly forgot, a tub of margarine in case we get hungry.’

I can also reveal that the litterer has a fondness for salt-and-vinegar Walkers crisps; and so a picture is emerging here: margarine, crisps, full-fat Coke, smoking… all the modern-day thicko needs to survive. And you can’t train a thicko to put his rubbish in a bin without using a cattle prod as a punishment and some dog biscuits as a reward.

So what’s to be done? Well, you can forget the notion of asking a council to clear up because it would just
wrap everything in red tape and make it worse, and you can’t rely on environmentalists because they’re too busy shoving pies into my face.

I try to do my bit, but even on my tiny piece of coastline the volume is overwhelming. And if you try scooping it up and setting it alight, you end up with a field full of eco-mentalists complaining about the smoke and a sticky, glutinous stain. That’s the problem with plastic. It never goes away.

So how’s this for an idea? Car makers were told recently that when one of their products reaches the end of its life, they are responsible for disposing of it properly. So why can’t that idea be widened? If you find a discarded margarine tub, you take it back to Flora, which is then forced to pay you, I’d like to say £500, but 50p would probably do the trick.

This would have a twofold effect. It would make me staggeringly rich and it would force Flora and Walkers to think very carefully about the advantages of paper and cardboard.

And Coca-Cola? Well, what’s wrong with glass? It’s made from sand, soda ash and limestone, which means it’s all completely natural. This means there’s no taste transition from the packaging to the product, and that’s why Coke tastes better from a glass bottle than it does from a plastic one.

What’s more, when a glass bottle is dropped into the sea, it breaks into tiny pieces, which are then worn smooth by the waves until eventually they wind up in a pretty bowl from Conran on your dining-room window-sill.

You probably think the cost would be prohibitive but,
in fact, glass soft-drink bottles cost about 5.5p, while those made from plastic are around half a penny more. Of course, this saving is offset by the problems of transportation: glass breaks. But that’s where my money-back scheme comes in. It would price plastic out of the market.

It turns out, however, the biggest problem with glass is that it can be used as a weapon when the pubs shut. Already, Glasgow Council has banned all glass bottles from the city centre, and now the government is thinking of making it law.

This is idiotic, because those who go around at night glassing one another are the sort of fat oafs who are doing the littering. If therefore we switch to glass, they end up dead, and there is less litter on the beach. Everyone wins.

Sunday 18 September 2005

In these hectic times of long hours and bad traffic I do understand that it’s not always possible to be bang on time for an appointment. This is why, if I’ve arranged to meet someone in a restaurant, I always give them 60 seconds’ grace before getting up from the table and going home.

There are many ways of insulting a man. You could snort with derision at pictures of his children or you could chop him in half with a chainsaw. But I’ve always argued that the biggest insult of them all is to turn up late for a meeting.

It’s the stiletto subtlety of the message that hurts most of all, the quiet implication that your time is worth more than the other guy’s. That it’ll be OK to leave him hanging around because, hey, what else is there for him to do?

Airlines do this, insisting you turn up nine hours before the flight because that makes their life easier. Utility companies do it as well, telling you to stay at home between the hours of nine and February so that their chap can call round when he’s good and ready. It’s just rudeness. There’s no other word.

Recently, however, my eyes have been opened to something that’s even worse than turning up late: not turning up at all. It’s a disease that seems primarily to affect people in the public eye, people who are probably invited to so many red-carpet do’s that the easiest thing
for them is to say yes to everything and then make a decision on the night.

When we record
Top Gear
, I live in constant fear that the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car will simply stay at home and I’ll be forced to interview the chair.

Doesn’t happen? Oh yes it does, and from the most unlikely people. Davina McCall for instance. And, amazingly, David Dimbleby.

Of course, both had entirely proper excuses but even though it was no longer possible for them to turn up we had to find a replacement at very short notice. That’s very hard work and usually results in us featuring someone you’ve never heard of.

And, like turning up late, for me the no-show message is simple. My life is more important than yours.

For the past few weeks I’ve been helping to organise a charity go-karting event.

Companies pay to bring guests along and are given a celebrity team captain. Then afterwards there is dinner, and the edifying spectacle of watching Johnny Vegas vomiting into a teapot. Well, that’s what happened last year, anyway.

I know this is a bore for people on television. I know the last thing anyone wants to do on a Friday night is drive to Milton Keynes to be stared at by a hundred photocopier salesmen.

And so I have no problem when 99 per cent say, ‘No thanks, I’d rather spend the evening sitting in a bath full of cold vegetable soup.’