And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (5 page)

I am dull and unimaginative because when I was little two of my tortoises, Sullivan and Bubble, died. That left me with Gilbert and Squeak, which made me a laughing stock and gave me a profound respect for a sensible naming policy.

This is why I admire the Icelandic system so much. Up there, your surname is your father’s Christian name with either ‘son’ or ‘dottir’ tagged on the end. So Prince Charles would be Charles Philipson and Nigella Lawson would be Nigella Nigelsdottir.

It’s not a policy supported by feminists, but it has worked for centuries and they don’t want to see it being abused by people who suddenly get it into their heads that their son ought to be called Snowmobile. Because then his
daughter, if he were similarly inclined, might well end up being called Fifi Trixibelle Peaches Snowmobiledottir.

That would be ludicrous, so the government has drawn up a list of approved names from which you must choose.

If we had such a system here, we could use it to maintain the beauty of traditional English names. There’d be no Tiger Lily and no Anastasia. Mr and Mrs Beckham would have been told to stop being so stupid. And my children would have been called Roy, Brenda and Enid.

Sunday 14 March 2004

For 150 years, people have been arguing about what or who should be immortalised on the empty plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. And then last week came the news that we’re to get a statue of a disabled and pregnant woman called Alison Lapper.

My first reaction was: why not the Flying Scotsman? It’s for sale at the moment for just £2 million and would be ideal, since it fits in with Ken Livingstone’s much publicised love for public transport and genuinely reflects Britain’s glorious engineering achievements of yesteryear.

The trouble is that whatever you choose will be used as a pigeon perch and then vandalised. And it would be a shame to see the lovely old engine treated this way – so how about my next brainwave? If it’s to be a bird bog and a magnet for drunks and yobs intent on ruining it, then why not put a statue of Piers Morgan up there?

You may have heard that at the British Press Awards last week I strolled over to Piers, the editor of the
Daily Mirror
, and punched him in the middle of his face.

That, however, is only partly true. I also punched him on the jaw and on his cheek.

Why? Well, he seems to think that if someone appears on television it is all right to publish photographs of them kissing girls goodnight and appearing on the beach while fat.

I disagree.

Which is why I haven’t and won’t spoil his fledgling career on the box by revealing details of his complicated private life.

This disagreement has been running for some time. It all started when I refused to jump ship and write for the
Mirror
, saying I’d rather write operating manuals for car stereos, and the feud became public on the last Concorde flight, when I emptied a glass of water into his lap.

So when everyone noticed we were both at the press awards, an air of expectancy fell on the room like a big itchy blanket. In recent years this do has become a back-slapping festival of bonhomie and fine wines, and everyone felt that here, at last, was a chance to go back to the old days of fisticuffs and abuse. Journalists behaving like journalists and not businessmen.

Nobody came over and said, ‘Piers says you stink,’ but there was a playground mood nevertheless.

The problem was, I’d never hit anyone before. I may not have the intellect of Stephen Fry but the reason I don’t have his nose is that I have enough nous to know that if I punch somebody they will punch me right back.

Besides, fighting is so undignified. Who can forget John Prescott, his face all screwed up, as he lashed out at the protester in the run-up to the last general election? And then there was Jimmy Nail, who invited A. A. Gill outside for a spot of pugilism last year. You just wanted to say: ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

The first time Piers and I came close, he was talking the talk of the terraces, saying that I might be big but I’d go down like a sack of potatoes.

Sadly, I don’t speak ‘football’ and by the time I’d worked out what he was on about, the editor of the
News of the World
had stepped in and was asking us to break it up.

I honestly can’t remember what it was that finally triggered the action. One minute we were trading insults and the next I felt the hot surge of adrenalin and punched him.

At this point the
Sun
’s diminutive motoring correspondent waded into the arena, addressing nobody in particular with a menacing: ‘I’m warning you. I’m from Newcastle.’

Off to my left, a fat man in a white tux and with a huge Cuban cigar was drawling, ‘Finish it. Outside. Finish it,’ over and over again.

And then there was the brother of a former famous editor of the
Sun
, rushing hither and thither as thought he had inadvertently trodden on 6 million volts. In other words, every single man in there was suddenly seven years old.

It’s funny. Over the next couple of days women asked with a look of disdain why I hit him. Men, on the other hand, asked with barely disguised glee where I hit him.

Piers fell into the man camp magnificently. Much as I don’t like him, I have to hand him full credit for saying after the third punch: ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

Later, he explained he’d had worse drubbings from his three-year-old son.

And me? Well, I seem to have broken one of my fingers. It’s bright blue, won’t move and looks like a burst sausage. How can this be? Bruce Willis finished off a whole skyscraper full of baddies without so much as tearing his vest, whereas I hit one middle-aged bloke and came away broken.

I’d like to say this is because I’m weak and fragile and unskilled in the ways of the ruffian. But actually I suspect it has more to do with the strength of Mr Morgan.

That’s why it’s such a good idea to immortalise him with a statue in Trafalgar Square.

You can insult it, throw things at it, get birds to foul it and punch it from now to the end of time. But it’ll always emerge completely undamaged.

Sunday 21 March 2004

So Nasa has smashed the speed record for plane flight. In a test last weekend, an unmanned ‘scramjet’ was dropped from the belly of a B-52 bomber and reached a speed of Mach 7, or almost 5,000 mph.

Pundits are talking about planes that could get from London to Sydney in two hours and from Paris to New York in 30 minutes. So well done, America, for making it work and God bless Mr Bush.

Except for one small thing. Two years ago a British scramjet quietly, and with no fuss, reached similar speeds over the Australian outback. Yup, like everything else, scramjets are one of ours.

For 40 years scramjets have been the holy grail for the world of aviation. Unlike in a normal jet, air comes into the front of the engine, is mixed with hydrogen, ignited and then hurled out of the back. There are no moving parts, no harmful exhaust gases and, best of all, the faster you go, the faster it goes.

Theoretically, they have a limitless top speed.

The British version was developed by an operation called QinetiQ which, over the years, has come up with stuff like microwave radar, carbon fibre and liquid crystal displays.

Today, in their unheated pre-war prefabs, with nicotine-yellow walls and damp concrete stairwells, men with
colossal brains and plastic shoes are working on power systems for America’s new joint strike fighter and a huge sail that harvests fog. (It’s based on a sub-Saharan beetle, the stenocara, which collects moisture from the night air on its back and then has a handy water supply through the day.)

Do you remember reading recently about the millimetric scanning device that can see through clothes? It was designed for airport security, but there was much tittering about other applications. Either way, that was one of theirs, too, so I should imagine that a simple little thing like a scramjet gave them no problems at all. They probably did it in a coffee break.

The big question, however, is why they didn’t make more of a fuss when the test was successful. Is this a return to the days of the jet engine and the hovercraft, yet another example of British inventiveness being thwarted by British corporate and governmental apathy?

No. No fuss was made because, contrary to what you’ve been told by the over-excited Americans, you will never go to Australia or anywhere on a scramjet.

‘Anyone who tells you different is in an election year,’ one expert said last week.

Here’s why. First, the hydrogen needed for a 12,000-mile trip to Sydney – and hydrogen is light, remember – would weigh more than the plane it was fuelling.

Next, scramjets start to work only when the plane is doing Mach 5 (3,810 mph). And how, pray, are you supposed to reach that kind of speed?

The Nasa plane in last weekend’s test was taken to an altitude of 40,000 feet by the B-52, where it was dropped.
A rocket then took it up to 90,000 feet and Mach 7. At this point the scramjet took over and yes, there was minimal acceleration, but it was out of fuel in just 11 seconds.

You may recall the British Hotol project from the late 1980s. This, it was said, would use scramjets and rockets. Brilliant. Sydney would be just 45 minutes away.

But not even Britain’s boffins could figure out how it would get off the ground in the first place.

I don’t want to sound like a doom-monger, but think about it. You have a 15-minute bus ride from the car park to the terminal, a half-hour queue for check-in, another half-hour being laughed at by security staff as they ‘look’ through your clothes, and then an hour’s walk to the gate.

Here you’ll board a bomber that will take an hour or so to reach the right altitude, before you are loaded into a rocket which shoots you up into space. You then career back down again in scramjet mode, landing in Australia at about 14 million mph. Where you’ll be eaten by a crocodile.

‘Scramjets will never happen,’ one expert said. I told him never was a big word, but he was adamant: ‘Not just not in your lifetime. Never.’

Nasa has to smile sweetly when people talk about getting to the moon in 30 minutes because they have to whip up the imagination of Hank from Minnesota. They know that, with no bucks, there’s no Buck Rogers.

The British team members, along with their Australian partners, never made a big deal of their success because they knew it would work only on cruise missiles and tank shells. I’m afraid that we’re still stuck on our Airbuses and
jumbos, lumbering through the ozone layer at a miserable 500 mph.

Don’t despair, though. While the Americans are busy congratulating themselves for their 11-second leap into the record books, the boffins at QinetiQ have moved on to the next stage: a plane that will cruise at Mach 5. It’s called the sustained hypersonic flight experiment, it uses the proven ramjet from a Sea Dart missile and the first model, they say, will be airborne in 18 months’ time.

Expect to read about it in about five years when the Americans make it work too.

Sunday 4 April 2004

At the Last Supper Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, and for 2,000 years Christians have followed suit, going to church at Easter so the vicar can move among them with a wet towel.

This week, however, at the Maundy Thursday celebration in Sheffield Cathedral, the Revd Jack Nicholls had to use a different towel for each member of the congregation in case he passed on a bout of athlete’s foot. Welcome, everybody, to the mad and dangerous world of the Health and Safety Executive.

This is a world where army training courses in the Brecon Beacons must now be fitted with handrails in case the soldiers fall over and where baby walkers are banned in case the toddler topples into the fire.

I need to be careful at this point. The Health and Safety wallahs are a touchy bunch, saying they do important work such as stopping nuclear power stations from exploding. Almost certainly they would say, if Jesus came back to Earth tomorrow and washed two people’s feet with the same towel, that they wouldn’t prosecute him.

Unless one of them had leprosy, of course, in which case they’d have no alternative. And no, Mr Christ, we won’t take into consideration the fact that you have in the past brought people back from the dead. Also, can you stop walking on water, because that’s just stupid.

I don’t deny that the Health and Safety Executive stops children from going up chimneys, but mostly what it does is infect the nation with a sense that ‘being safe’ is more important than being happy. They even argue that ‘health and safety is the cornerstone of a civilised society’. But this couldn’t be more wrong.

Health and Safety is the cancer of a civilised society, a huge, ungainly, malignant, pulsating wart.

In the past, companies used to live in fear of the trade unions, who would walk in through the front door and usher every worker they found out through the back.

We thought the Arthur Scargills and Jimmy Knapps had been killed off by Margaret Thatcher; but no. They have simply metamorphosed into the Health and Safety Executive, and now they’re back, sticking their trouble-making noses into every single aspect of every single thing we do.

Only last week it was revealed that in the past three years 15 people have been killed on a single stretch of road in Wiltshire. One road safety campaigner greeted the news by saying, ‘It’s the same as a jumbo jet crashing every year.’

I’m sorry, matey, but if you do the maths it just isn’t.

Today, companies can get a government bribe of up to £100,000 if they employ workers’ safety advisers. But don’t be tempted, because these idiots will argue that your office carpets are more perilous than a terrorist bomb.

No, really. We’re told that 95 per cent of major slips at work result in broken bones. (Is that so?) And that somebody falls over in this country every three minutes, which, they argue, incurs an incalculable human cost.

No it doesn’t. The human cost of the Holocaust was incalculable, whereas I fell down the stairs only yesterday and it cost nothing. There’s more, too. Just last week the lift doors at the BBC’s White City building closed on my knee and wouldn’t open again. And the bruise I received was completely free.