Born to Be Riled (59 page)

Buying a diesel-powered Jeep rather than the 4.7-litre petrol-driven V8 would save perhaps £1500 a year in fuel, but it will add half an hour to every journey. And half an hour twice every working day equates to five hours a week. And that, in a lifetime, is 9000 hours – 375 wasted days. Just to save a few quid. It’s like cutting your hands off to save money on gloves.

What’s really annoying is that the diesel engine spoilt what I suspect is rather a good car. Oh, it’s too expensive and luxurious for the gamekeeper and it’s way too small on the inside for the school run. Furthermore, its jiggly ride and plasticky switches, allied to some truly disgusting World of Leather seats, means it’s no match for the Range Rover. But then it doesn’t cost fifty grand, and you get a lot of toys as standard, from he-man stuff like permanent four-wheel drive to light-in-the-loaf features like a CD player. It also looks good and, with a V8, it will do 0 to 60 in 8 seconds.

Unlike the Japanese competition, it’s not a utilitarian box. It can cope with the rigours of a grouse moor and works, too, in the executive bathroom.

I’m therefore such a fan that I decided to leave the pheasants I shot in the boot, as a sort of present to the public relations man who lent it to me. Shame it was a diesel, though, in the same way that it’s a shame he’s a vegetarian.

When I first began to write for a living, I used a manual typewriter that provided very little in the way of distractions. You could type in black ink, and when that became boring you could type in red ink. And that was about it.

But now, I’m simply staggered that I’m sitting here writing anything at all, because my new computer can do so much more. When I turn it on in a morning, knowing that I must write something before lunchtime or I’ll be killed and eaten, I still get waylaid by the promise of a quick game of FreeCell to get me in the mood.

And what’s this? Heavens, it seems I can also sit here all day watching DVD movies with CD-quality sound. So now I face a choice. Write, or spend half an hour or so on board
Das Boot
.

Das Boot
won, but now I’m back and the deadline is getting awfully close. But I fancy looking for pictures of naked girls on the web, so I’ll just do that for a while, if you’ll excuse me.

Right. Now the thrust. I heard a chap on the radio saying he’d just bought a car on the Internet. He’d found a dealership, negotiated a price, chosen a colour and had the whole transaction done and dusted within seven days. Well, I bet he’s fun on a night out. You can’t buy a car
over the Net, you idiot. You’ll never know whether the seat gives you backache, whether the salesman’s a git, or if you’re talking to a silicone Maxwell who’ll take your credit card number and fall into the sea with it.

And what about second-hand cars? Even if you could find something for sale that isn’t in Minnesota, how could you possibly know what it’s like without taking at least a tiny test drive? Something that’s impossible online.

I know Ford has built a hologram car for Tony’s Dome, but this won’t give an accurate picture at all. In fact, it is the most useless invention I’ve ever heard of. What is the point of a car that doesn’t exist? Sure, you could make it go into town, but why, if you can’t go with it?

Now, where was I? Ah, yes. What if you decided to do all your shopping via computer? Think. You could work from home, watch the latest movies and have everything you need brought to your door. You’d never need to go out. So then you’d lose your social skills, become covered in boils and, eventually, you’d die. No one would know until goo started to seep into the flat below. And your holo-car began to pixelate.

For me, though, the biggest risk with the Net is fraud. I have been asked many times for my credit card number and, occasionally, I’ve felt tempted to tap it in. But I never will, because, for all I know, the vendor is a Colombian drug lord who will not be willing to uphold any money-back guarantee.

So, if I’m not going to buy anything on the Net, why is every Internet-based company worth £2000 billion? If they can’t sell anything, they’ll go bust. It’d be like opening a restaurant and refusing to unlock the doors. Or,
more accurately, like hiring Ronnie Biggs to take people’s credit cards after dinner.

As I see it, the Net has two purposes. First of all, it’s a giant library that can tell you anything at any time of day or night. But none of the information contained in the silicone-nerve centre can be trusted. So far as I can tell, there’s nothing to stop me setting up a web site that says that Tara Palmer-Tomkinson is 47 and has a degree in robotics from Cambridge University.

Try it. Go into the Net tonight and ask for biographical details of, say, James Garner. You’ll find that every site contradicts the next, whereas if you look in a book you know every fact has been checked and then checked again. And most books are not written by 14-year-old boys with apple-sized zits.

So this leaves us with the Net’s only real purpose: pornography. If you want to see what can be inserted in whom by what, then there is a bewildering array of photographic evidence. Every star has been disrobed for your pleasure, and every act, no matter how deranged, is reproduced in full grisly detail.

Which brings me back to the original point. Why is every Internet company worth £2000 billion? Why, if I paid a visit to a venture capitalist this afternoon with some half-baked Internet-based idea, would he be willing to give me his house and all its contents?

I suspect we are looking at the emperor’s new clothes here, and that no one has yet stepped forward to say, Hang on a minute. This is all b******s. And breasts, bosoms and pubic hair.

Vauxhall recently offered a thousand-pound discount to anyone who bought one of their cars over the Internet,
and I’m absolutely dying to see just how many people take them up on it. And more than that, how many people meant to but were distracted en route by the promise of some Hot Asian Babes. Or even a game of FreeCell.

The sooner we all remember that a computer is a tool, like an electric drill, a hammer or a washing-up bowl, the better it will be for everyone. And the sooner we remember that cars need to be tried before you buy, the better it will be for your peace of mind.

We’ve never needed an excuse to go to France. The food, the wine and, in the south at least, the sumptuous climate are enough. But now the allure is even stronger, because you can go over there and, between mouthfuls of foie gras, wave wads of sterling at their unemployed youths. Then, after lunch, you can go into one of their job centres and stand in the middle of the room laughing.

Do not, however, go there through the Channel Tunnel, because they will think you’ve been eating beef and are an idiot. If time is tight, you are better off flying, and if it is not, why start your trip in a box? If you were a veal calf, they wouldn’t allow it.

But, you will now wail, the ferries are so much worse. They are full of French schoolchildren sent to England to steal from the rich, or sarf London darts teams who bought 30,000 cans of extra-strong lager on the outward trip and drank it all on the way home.

Not any more. Duty-free shopping was abolished in
June, and afterwards ferries became little islands of Victorian calm between hurly-burly Britain and the poverty and despair of France.

On a ferry, your umbrella becomes a parasol and you are filled with an overwhelming urge to take up bee-keeping. You park your car and pop up on deck to wave goodbye to the white cliffs with a Dunkirk spirit of adventure in your heart. Seagulls floating on the salty breeze, a quick promenade to the front to make sure the doors are shut, and then inside for lunch at one of Langan’s brasseries.

Sadly, however, I fear that this Jane Austenesque idyll may be short-lived, because this week P&O decided to become a car dealer. It will buy cars on the Continent, which it will sell in Britain at Continental prices. So, you ring them up, choose the car you want, the colour, the spec, and 12 weeks later it will be delivered to your door. You can even get part exchange.

Some of the discounts are breathtaking. A Mercedes CL500, which would cost £83,000 in Britain, is available from P&O for just £69,900. You can save £7300 on a Range Rover, £6500 on a Jaguar XK8 and £2000 on a Golf. And remember, they come with right-hand drive and warranties that British dealers are bound to honour.

Now you’re probably thinking that this is nothing new, that hundreds of companies have been doing the same sort of thing ever since the rip-off Britain stories began. Well, yes, but we all watch
Watchdog
, and we know that some of these guys will get our deposit cheques and enjoy dinner that night in Rio with Ronnie Biggs. You could, of course, remove the risk element by going over there and ordering the car yourself, but let’s be honest. Hand on heart, do you speak Flemish?

I have spoken to hundreds of people about buying cars on the Continent. I’ve told them about the savings and the ease with which it can be done. I’ve explained that Ford in Britain will even give you a factsheet to facilitate the buying of a car in Belgium. It lists not only individual dealers but also an English-speaking contact. But the response is always the same: ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered.’

We’ve been told that personally imported cars from the Continent have hit new-car sales hard and that soon the car makers will have to lower their prices. But they won’t, because it’s not true. Car sales are not really down at all, while it’s easier and less risky to buy a new car here.

Well, this P&O deal stops all that. It is a blue-chip company, up there with Marks & Spencer and Tommy Cooper as a name you can trust. Instead of taking your money to South America, it will deliver a brand-new car, of your choosing, to your door, with huge savings. It says it’ll bring in 10,000 cars a year, but I really don’t think so. It’ll be more like 1.9 million, because anyone who buys a new car now from a main agent is not simply daft. He’s a fully certified window-licker. A loony. Madder than the result of a liaison between a March hare and Mad Jack McMad, who as you all know was winner of last year’s Mr Mad competition.

A P&O spokeswoman told me that the company had been hit by the abolition of duty free and that it needed something to fill the hole. Well, you’ve got it now, love. Because this car thing is a little bit bigger than a darts team buying booze for the Christmas party.

The trouble is that all the ferries coming back to Dover will be jammed solid with new cars, so ordinary people will have to make like moles and come home through the
tunnel. Pity, really, but it’s a small price to pay for making a worthwhile point to our poverty-stricken next-door neighbours. Les rosbifs. Not so mad after all, vieux haricot.

When we think of the French, we think of Breton jerseys, an onion necklace and a sit-up-and-beg bicycle. And when they think of us, they think of le pub. Morning, John.

The pub. A gentle murmur of Sunday morning, corduroy bonhomie. The ceaseless winking of a fruit machine in the corner and a tray of yellowed dominoes left out from the night before. Brown beer, plaice in breadcrumbs with a lemon wedge. Horse brasses. The usual, John.

That’s not the Britain I know. The Britain I know has fired-earth walls and Macy Gray on the stereo. Linen tableclothes, low-voltage lighting and a glass of Chablis. It’s not nicotine yellow. It’s ice white and garnished with a brushed-aluminium handrail. Not a clump of cress.

I was in what the French would call a traditional pub last week, and I couldn’t believe how backward it felt. The patterned carpet. The cheese and onion crisps. And that infernal winking machine.

If I ran Rover, I’d ban all my design staff from pubs. I’d make them go to Gary Rhodes’s place in the City, and I’d tell them to have one of his lamb sausages. Then I’d take them to Pharmacy in Notting Hill and I’d say: ‘Look, fools. This is Britain now. So stop trying to make our cars look like the Coach and bloody Horses.’

They don’t put an onion holder in Renaults, so why
do British car designers feel they need all that leather and walnut? This has never occurred to me before, but then I’d never driven the Audi S6 Quattro before. Now I have. And I can tell you this. It’s the most ‘now’ car you can buy.

They’ve taken a normal A6 and flared the wheel arches, not subtly, but with a swath of Healeyesque eyebrows. These shroud massive alloy wheels that sit well with the enlarged radiator grille, chromed door mirrors and brace of superfat exhaust pipes.

Of course, you don’t do all this to a car unless there is some meaningful meat under the bonnet, and there is. They’ve taken the 300bhp 4.2-litre V8 out of the bigger A8, fitted it with afterburners and dropped it into the A6. So now there’s 340bhp, and that’s enough to get you from rest to 60mph in around six seconds. Top speed, to keep the German Greens happy, is limited to 155mph.

Good car, then? Oh, yes, and inside it just keeps getting better. The seats are finished in mock suede, and the dash is carpeted. Sounds ghastly, especially when I tell you the carpet in question is fronted with polythene. But it works. Then night falls and you have to turn on the lights. And at this point you’ll want to pull over and invite perfect strangers to come and have a look. The dash becomes a teeming mass of small red lights. It’s like looking down on Los Angeles from the Hollywood hills, only in the Audi you’re doing 75mph and just moving into third.

Climbing out of the S6 and back into my Jag felt as though I’d moved back two centuries. From Conran to Wren. From Tony Blair’s New Labour to Harold Wilson’s bottle of HP sauce.

But now it’s time for that ‘however’ moment. Ready? OK, then, here goes.

However, while the Audi may well be the soup of the day, there’s a fly in it.

It costs £52,250, which makes it a direct rival to the BMW M5 and Jaguar’s recently tweaked supercharged XJR. Now I know that, in terms of ambience, the Jag is a pub and the BMW is a Harvester, and that in a traffic jam I’d much rather be in the Audi. I also know that the S6 is available as an estate, which makes it useful at the gymkhana. And when it comes to pulling water-skiers, the Audi is in a class of one. But what about those times when you’re not in New Zealand and the boat’s broken. Then what?