Don't Stop Me Now (31 page)

Anyway, the ginger idiot announced the very next day that the best thing he can do to bring peace and tranquillity to the streets of the nation is barge into middle-class executive homes and bust everyone for taking cocaine. For their own good? I should cocoa. According to Blair, it’s for the good of people in the ‘developing world’, who somehow have their legs blown off every time someone in Chelsea buys a gram.

The message here is simple. Sir Ian is prepared to ignore the Turkish heroin smugglers and Albanian people traffickers in his quest to rid the capital of hideous middle-class white people. He hates their children, their institutionalised racism, their la-di-da accents, their private schools and their weekend cottages, and if they’re going to liven up a Saturday night with some marching powder he’ll be on hand to make sure their Volvos are confiscated.

Unfortunately, if you’re middle class you may as well take cocaine and spend Saturday night talking to yourself because there’s bugger all else to do. You can’t go into town because it’s been overrun with drunks and all the police are too busy filling in hazard assessment forms to do anything about it. And you can’t stay at home because there’s nothing you want to watch on the box.

This is because the Islingtonites who run television these days don’t really like the middle classes either. I was told the other day by a senior bod in the industry not to use the phrase ‘dinner party’ on
Top Gear
because it’s ‘elitist’. For the same reason I was told by a director last month it’d be best if I didn’t mention my children’s nanny. I gave him one of my special hard stares.

Interestingly, however, whenever a middle-class programme is shown on television, and I’m thinking here of
Have I Got News for You
, or
Who Do You Think You Are?
, the viewing figures shoot through the roof. And everyone in the TV business calls hurried meetings so they can work out why.

‘We put out a programme last week about a disabled Somali woman whose benefit cheques have been stopped and no one watched that. So why did 5 million tune in to see Stephen Fry wandering around some sugar beet fields in Suffolk?’ I wonder. Could it have something to do with the 40 million middle-class people in Britain who are so starved of entertainment they’ll tune in to anything with proper vowel sounds? No, really. How well do you think
What Not to Wear
would have gone down if it had been presented by two fat slappers for whom the letter
‘h’ was as difficult to master as that clicking sound made by African bushmen? No one likes a thicko to sit in the corner of their front room, which is why the people who do well in that celebrity jungle thing are usually well-spoken and bright. Tara P-T. Tony Blackburn. And, of course, Carol Thatcher. Then there was Jack Dee, who won the first
Celebrity Big Brother
, a result that plainly alarmed the producers so much they subsequently ensured that all future contestants aren’t even middlebrow, leave alone middle class. The last lot, so far as I can tell, were essentially zoo animals.

And who can forget the moment when Judith Keppel, the woman from Fulham, was first to scoop a million out of Chris Tarrant’s pocket. You could almost hear the Blair brothers screaming: ‘Aaaargh. Why couldn’t it have been someone with one leg from the Taliban?’ There’s a quiet war being waged against the middle classes. All this talk, for instance, about what might be done to stop people buying second homes in the country: you think that’s because of the locals being priced out of the market? Really? So how come no one’s bothered about kids in the inner city who can’t afford to get on the property ladder either? No, I’m afraid second homes are under attack for the same reason they decided to save the fox. It’s payback for Judith Keppel. And Arthur Scargill.

You may think the reason people spit at 4×4s these days has something to do with Greenland’s blanket of ice. It isn’t. It’s because you’re well-off. And that’s not allowed.

So, what’s to be done if you want a nice car but don’t want to drive through a blizzard of phlegm every time
you go to the shops? Well, obviously you could buy a van, or a Hyundai, but what we’re really after here is a cheap car that doesn’t feel it. And that leaves us with a choice of one. The Mini.

The lovely thing about the new Mini is the very same lovely thing about the old Mini. When one goes by you have no idea what sort of person is at the wheel. It is hard to think of any product that is quite so classless. Branston Pickle, maybe, but that’s about it.

So what about the convertible version? Well, even though it’s been around for 18 months I’ve never driven one. However, having written about the new Mazda MX-5 last week I thought I’d give it a go.

You see, the Mazda was wonderful: a proper, charming and fun little sports car, but that in itself creates problems. Because it also sounds and feels like a sports car when you’re on the motorway, and it’s a Tuesday, and it’s a bit cold, and you just want to get home. That’s not a criticism so much as an observation. But it is the reason I thought I’d try the drop-head Mini – to see whether it’s a sports car without the sports car drawbacks.

Don’t laugh. Beneath the veneer of cool-this and brushed-aluminium-that the hardtop Mini has a properly good little chassis. The steering, the turn-in and what happens when you exceed the available grip are all excellent. And it’s the same story with the ragtop. Yes, there’s a whiff of dreaded scuttle shake, that awful sense the front and the back are connected with nothing more than spit and Kleenex, but for the most part this is a little car that laps up the bends and snorts rortily on to the straights.

Sure, unlike the Mazda it doesn’t have rear-wheel drive, and it’s a bit of a fatty, so the straightforward 1.6-litre engine struggles a bit, but here’s the good part. When it’s cold and wet and you just want to listen to the radio it’s fairly quiet and comfortable. Providing you don’t spec it up with the big wheels.

What we have here, then, is a fun, comfortable and, providing you don’t spec it up with anything at all, extremely well-priced car that’s so classless it could drive through Ian Blair’s legs and he wouldn’t even notice.

There are, however, two things that you really ought to consider. First of all, while it bills itself as a four-seater, there is no legroom in the back at all. And the boot is barely big enough for the gram of coke you can’t buy any more. But the worst thing is the rear visibility.

Of course, this is always an issue in a softtop car – even the Mazda isn’t all that easy to see out of – but driving the Mini is like driving with a box on your head. For parking you need to use the force. And when pulling out of oblique junctions, might I suggest you get rubbing those rosaries.

I certainly don’t recommend having a bump of any kind, either, because if the police come and find you to be in possession of the ‘h’ sound, and a Harvey Nicks credit card, you’ll be playing hunt the soap in Strangeways from now till the end of time.

Sunday 12 February 2006

At my old school, detention usually involved being asked to write a 1,000-word essay about the inside of a ping pong ball. So I’m well qualified to write about the new Volkswagen Jetta. Because I spent every Saturday afternoon for five years writing about the precise chemical breakdown of air, it’s a breeze to fill these pages with prose about what is unquestionably the most boring car in the whole of human history.

Even James May, my colleague from
Top Gear
, agrees. I spoke to him yesterday. ‘I’m driving the most boring car in the world,’ I said, and though he’s known as Captain Slow and practises the art of what he calls Christian motoring, he said: ‘Oh, you must have a Jetta then.’ I wouldn’t mind if it were awful or ugly or spontaneously combusted every time there was a day in the week. That at least would make it characterful and interesting. But it does none of these things. It does nothing.

I can’t abide bores. There’s a man I meet every week – I shan’t say where in case he’s reading this – and never, not once, in four years has he been able to make a single story interesting. Even if he’d just been mugged by a gang of Terminators or gang raped by a rampaging swarm of goblins he’d still fail to bring the tale alive. And pretty
soon you’d be wishing you were a horse; so you could fall asleep standing up.

Unfortunately, he never has been raped by goblins or beaten up by Terminators. All that happened in his life last week was a new delivery of paperclips. And staggeringly, he believed that this was interesting enough to bring up in conversation. Honestly, after a few minutes I gave serious thought to stabbing him in the heart.

I believe that the greatest gift bestowed on a human being is not beauty, intelligence or wealth. It’s the ability to make a story live. To take a tale and know instinctively what to leave in, what to leave out and when to lie a bit. If you do not have this, then you should learn to shut up.

Of course, it helps if you do actually lead an interesting life. I mean, if Ranulph Fiennes had been an office boy or an IT consultant he probably wouldn’t be much fun down the pub. But when he tells you about sawing off his own fingers using a garden-shed fretsaw – well, it’s kind of hard to mess that up.

I have such a pathological loathing of bores that, and I mean this, I’d rather have dinner with Myra Hindley than dinner with a dullard. I’d rather spend time with Richard Brunstrom, the mad mullah of the traffic Taliban who runs the North Wales police, than spend time with someone from the Aston Martin owners’ club.

Once, when I was working on a local newspaper,I came home at night and told my girlfriend that we’d had some new office furniture delivered to the office. Moments later, when I realised what I’d said, and how deeply uninteresting this was, I left her and the job and moved to London.

Now I have children and I’m forever to be found in the kitchen telling them that if the story they’ve embarked on has no point then they shouldn’t have begun. Simply reeling off the lessons they’ve had at school that day is just not good enough, not unless it’s an anecdotal device, some kind of calm before the climax in double Latin when the teacher exploded.

I can’t be bored. I have no ability to deal with it. That’s why I can’t do church sermons, or
Big Brother
. It’s why I was so irritated by the game of squash in Ian McEwan’s
Saturday
and why I won’t go to America any more. Those two-hour queues for immigration are just killers.

It’s also why I’m fidgety and distracted today. Because I came to London yesterday in the Volkswagen Jetta, and tomorrow I must go home in it. Which will be like spending an hour in a coma.

I’d love to meet the man who styled the exterior, to find out if he’d done it as some sort of a joke. But mostly I’d like to meet the man who simply didn’t bother at all with the interior. Because looking at that dashboard gives you some idea of what it might be like to be dead.

It’s black. And so are the buttons, and so are the dials, and so are the carpets and so are the seats. To give you some idea of how dull and featureless life is in there, put a cardboard box over your head. And leave it there for 10 years.

Then there’s the engine. This is the 2-litre direct-injection jobbie you find in various other VWs and Audis and it’s normally not bad. But like a bloke who could make a UFO encounter seem boring, the Jetta seems to suck all the life out of it.

It’s the same story with the ride and handling. It’s really not bad at all. But it’s hard to spot this when you are stuck in that vegetative no-man’s-land with a face that’s so numb you don’t even know you’re dribbling.

And now we arrive at the boot lid, which is supposed to boing up when you press a button on the key. But it can’t be bothered. It springs from the traps, rises about a foot and then just gives up.

There’s a similar lack of enthusiasm from the satellite navigation system. Every request is met with a shoulder-sagging teenage harrumph. Perhaps this is because the car’s made in Mexico: so it just wants to sit under a tree all day dozing.

Volkswagen itself was plainly bored to tears when trying to think of things to say about the car. So what you get in the press blurb is chapter and verse on the windscreen wipers, which apparently perform a number of tasks. Further investigation reveals these tasks to be (1) sitting still and (2) moving hither and thither clearing raindrops.

What I’m most interested in is why on earth this car was made in the first place, because it’s actually a Golf with a boot. Or to put it another way, a Golf that’s a bit uglier, a bit heavier, a bit slower, a bit less practical, a bit less economical and a lot more boring to drive. To misquote Mark Twain, then, it’s a good Golf ruined.

And yet the model I drove cost
£
18,500. And to that you must add another
£
1,200 for an automatic gearbox and
£
1,675 if you want leather upholstery instead of the Pleblon that comes as standard. I’d also go for the
£
13.99 ‘life hammer’, which is designed to be used to break the
windows after an accident. But it could also be used by a passenger to hit you on the head when you start dribbling. Or as a tunnelling tool, like the rock hammer in
The Shawshank Redemption
.

Because, believe me, being trapped inside a Jetta is just like being trapped in a 1930s jail. You really would want to escape, whatever the cost.

Anyway, my point is that the Jetta is a
£
21,000 car. So why not buy a bigger, better and (marginally) more interesting Passat instead?

Or why not save a few bob and buy a vastly superior Golf GTI? Or why not buy 2.1 million penny chews? What really pisses me off about the Jetta is that Volkswagen is a company that makes the Bentley Continental and the Lamborghini Gallardo. It has the flair and the panache to make the Bugatti Veyron, and we know it can make a Golf saloon interesting because they’ve proved it with various Seats and Skodas.

But what they’ve come up with here is an automotive Belgium, Tim Henman with wheels. The inside of a ping pong ball. I therefore cannot recommend it to you in any way.