Notes From the Hard Shoulder (16 page)

It's not often we have a hanging in
Top Gear,
so I'm pleased to be able to present one here, for the entertainment of the crowd.

In 1816, long before the motorbike was invented, a man called
Isaac Harley was strung up at Ely, along with four other miscreants, for his part in the famous Littleport Riots. They'd only been protesting about the price of bread, for Pete's sake. It's not as if they killed anyone, although one Mr Speechley is said to have died later from the shock of the mob smashing his furniture up. They would probably have butchered a farmer called Martin had they been able to find him, but as they couldn't they settled instead for waving a meat cleaver over his aged grandmother's head. This and a few other minor misdemeanours were sufficient to condemn them to the drop.

From the newly erected gallows near the Ely workhouse, on Friday, 28 June 1816, rioter
John Dennis confessed his crimes and implored the assembled people to 'avoid drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, whoremongery and bad company'. Isaac Harley stated only that he met the death he had expected. Then they were despatched.

Good. It's the only language these people understand.

I hope you enjoyed the hanging as much as I did. Unfortunately, it may not actually be relevant to the story. It all depends on what else is unearthed by the
Littleport Society, resident and highly active in the Fenland village of the same name. I wouldn't want to
get on the wrong side of local historians. They know exactly what everyone's been up to for the past 500 years and might avenge themselves by tracing my ancestry and uncovering someone who was hanged. So we'll come back to Isaac the rioter later.

For now, let us move forward 19 years to 1835, when another
Harley, William, was born on Victoria Street on the outskirts of the ancient village. The house is no longer in existence – and probably wasn't much more than a hovel, anyway – but
Bruce Frost, treasurer, membership secretary and 'family tree surgeon' of the society, knows roughly where it would have stood. He pauses in silent awe for a moment at the spot that links this quiet rural road with what I thought was an all-American legend.

You see, in 1860 William Harley emigrated to America, where, as well as fighting in the Civil War on the side of the Union, he fathered several children with
Mary Smith. One of these,
William Sylvester, born in 1880, was the co-founder of Harley-Davidson in 1903 and the engineering brains behind its motorcycles. So there you have it.
Top Gear's
Harley-Davidson
Dyna Super Glide Sport is not, after all, the product of the great American dream; it is the product of Fenland seed, a commodity that was hitherto thought to yield nothing more than turnips.

I didn't know any of this. Neither did anyone else until 1996, when the Littleport Society revealed the connection. So when the editor of
Top Gear
said, 'We want you to take the long-term Harley home,' I envisaged the endless expanse and warm sunshine of Wisconsin, USA. Thanks to the pesky meddling Bruce
Frost and his Merrie Men, I got the vast expanse and leaden skies of East Anglia instead.

We've had the Harley for a year.
Top Gear's
Road-test bloke
Tom Stewart has been using it on and off for commuting and has pronounced it perfectly usable around town, which is quite a compliment when you consider that he normally rides one of those annoying little scooters. The magazine's 'art' bloke Marcel rode it to a Superbikes race meeting but ended up feeling a bit of a chump. I'd never been for a proper cruise on it.

'You may find,' said Tom Stewart as he handed me the Harley's keys, 'that you actually end up liking it. I did.' But he forgot to remind me that the Glide's ignition works independently of its steering lock. I therefore inserted the key under the seat, fired up the 88 cubic inch (l,449cc) beast, rode around in a small circle in the
Top Gear
garage, stopped, turned off, removed the key, unlocked the steering, reinserted the key under the seat, restarted the engine and finally headed out for Littleport.

I'd also forgotten that our bike has the optional Screaming Jessie ... sorry,
Screamin' Eagle
exhaust pipes. When I pressed the starter, I thought one of the cylinder heads had blown off. The first firing stroke sounds like a pistol discharging next to your ear, after which the 60-degree V settles down to a more general exchange of small-arms fire and road drilling. For a few seconds after starting, a warning light proclaiming 'engine' illuminates on the speedo. It should really be prefixed with 'Don't worry, that's only the'.

The racket is, in my view, embarrassing and deeply anti-social, but I seem to be alone in thinking this.
Everyone else in the
TG
office likes the noise, and even Bruce Frost, a non-rider but an admirer of Harleys, says, 'The noise is all part of the fun.' This is a strange attitude to adopt in a village that takes such a notoriously dim view of public disturbances.

In any case, the character of the Milwaukee lump is best appreciated through the arse, not the ears. The firing pulses are mercifully subdued through the bars and pegs, but through the seat of one's cowboy trousers an enjoyable relationship can be built up with the lazy torque characteristics, and one that renders the tachometer about as useful as the proverbial ashtray on a motorbike. The low-rev throb also seems to have a curative effect on minor aches and general early morning stiffness.

Then again, after an hour on the M11 I was convinced that I could wave goodbye to that other form of early morning stiffness as well, thanks to the sterilising frequency of the V-twin vibe. The Harley is not at its best on a motorway. The assault from the wind on the rider's partly reclined body is exhausting and the front wheel is prone to weave around a bit. On the back roads to Littleport, on the other hand, it felt remarkably at home, which only helps reinforce the idea that Harley-Davidson is imbued with Fenland breeding. A 50-60mph bimble suits its riding position and temperament much better, and I can see what editor Blick meant when he said, 'It's good at doing what it does best.' East Anglia, being flat and sparsely populated, even looks a bit like my perception of the great American outdoors.

Except that there are bends in the fens, they can conceal agricultural machinery, and the Harley has the
worst brakes I've experienced on a road-going vehicle since I last drove a traction engine, which had brake blocks made of poplar wood. And this 'Sport' version of the Dyna Super Glide has
two
front discs where most Harleys have just the one.

Poor brakes are simply inexcusable on a new motorcycle. Barely more palatable are the price (£10,495), the lacklustre performance and the shocking detail finish. For a 3,000-mile bike that spends much of its life garaged, our Harley is looking pretty scruffy. There is chrome peeling off the rear spring hangers, the forks and wheels are flaking, the plastic trim is coming off the tank and the engine cases are adorned, like many of the bike's owners, with unacceptably furry nuts. I can see the theoretical appeal of a Harley – easy riding, low stress, a quirky nature – but by the time I arrived at the offices of the Littleport Society I was merely bored and irritated by it. I was also bent double by the whole experience and would have welcomed being hanged by the neck for a bit, though only until straightened out.

Which reminds me. The provenance of Harley the bike builder is beyond doubt. But what of Isaac Harley the rioter? Is he by any chance related? Bruce Frost hopes so. The year 2003 will be the centenary of Harley-Davidson, and the people of Littleport like to think that the company will want to conduct some celebrations in this, its spiritual home. If they do, Bruce has a slogan ready: 'Littleport – from rioting to riotous riding'. All he has to do is establish a connection.

Extensive lurking in graveyards and poring over parish records has revealed this much. There were two
Harleys, Jobe and another Isaac, living in Littleport in the 1700s. William, the father of the co-founder, has been traced back to Jobe; Isaac the rioter has been traced back to the earlier Isaac. 'I have the family tree with me if you want to see it,' says Bruce. I quickly stop him. It's about six feet long and compiled in a typesize more normally associated with insurance cover notes.

But if these two elder Harleys can be shown to be brothers, then bingo, Bruce's Harley jigsaw is complete. He is visibly excited at the prospect.

Then again, if several thousand Hog enthusiasts descend on this sleepy village with their Screamin' Eagle pipes and leather chaps, he may regret that he ever dabbled in this local history lark. He may even wish he could invoke the powers of those special constables appointed after the riots to ward against 'parties standing idly in the streets of the parish of Littleport'.

He may even end up thinking, as I am inclined to, that they hanged the wrong Harley.

From about 2,000 feet I could see, from the window of the aeroplane, that the landscape was pretty uninviting. Frosted, treeless, volcanic, desolate and rising only vaguely from the heaving grey bosom of the North Atlantic. I had my penknife and my compass; my adventure hat and my stout boots; my spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. But, I suddenly realised, I'd forgotten my coat.

Maybe this wasn't surprising. If things had gone according to the original plan, I'd have written this on the sun-drenched terrace of a posh hotel in Johannesburg, with a flunky standing by ready to bring me another gin and tonic.

As it happens, this is a Land Rover drive story, and experience should have told me that anything less than an untimely death miles from civilisation would be a fair result. Let's have a look at the scoreboard to date: I nearly drowned in a Land Rover on the Defender Challenge, I got lost in a desert in one and thought I'd have to eat the photographer, I once left home in a Land Rover only to return on foot 12 hours later, leaving the thing teetering on top of a huge boulder somewhere, and I successfully drove a
Discovery all the way to the northern tip of Alaska only to then lose it in a snowdrift.

Despite all this, I've become something of a fan of the Land Rover 'expedition'. So when Richard
Newton and I were given the opportunity to drive the new Range Rover 12 weeks in advance of its launch, along with permission to go 'anywhere within reason', it seemed like a good scheme to spend four whole weeks
driving all the way from London to the heart of South Africa. A couple of events served to quash this idea. Firstly, and quite by chance, I met a bloke in a pub who had made precisely the same journey in his own Land Rover, and it had taken him six months. Then another bloke called Bin Laden started a war, as if to reinforce my late grandmother's contention that you should never trust a man with a beard. It was thought that at some point on the trip the priceless prototype luxury off-roader might suffer a fate normally reserved for unattended packages at airports and be destroyed in a controlled explosion.

So I closed my eyes, Newton spun the globe and I stopped it with my fingertip. Risky, but I paid enough attention in double geog to know that the warm bits are round the middle. My intrepid index finger alighted on Pakistan. Most excellent. As a significant part of our old empire, it was the obvious place to put this triumph of Anglo/German engineering through its paces. And so, to cut to the chase, we went to Iceland.

We were, nevertheless, still mildly excited when we finally gained access to Reykjavik's container port to collect our sea-freighted vehicle. The customs docket proclaimed 'one piece Range Rover' but in fact we got the whole thing. This was the first time I'd seen it and I thought it looked pretty good; sort of still like the old Range Rover but not quite the same. I couldn't quite see what all the fuss over the headlights had been about, but that might have been because they, along with much of the rest of the car, were still plastered with the gaffer-tape disguise it had worn on the clandestine journey from Solihull to Grimsby docks.

I learned something curious about gaffer tape. In its normal role as the essential fabric of the May household it seems barely able to stick to itself. Yet at minus five or so it acquires great tenacity and a tensile strength slightly above that enjoyed by fingernails. Every hour or so a customs man dressed in Ernest Shackleton's own coat would emerge, watch for a few minutes and then retire to his geothermally heated office equipped with some interesting new Saxon words.

By the time we'd cleaned the car up it was pitch black. I looked at my watch and it was 4.30.

Besides the requirement for a decent coat, there are other factors to consider about Iceland in general and in winter in particular. What seems to be the world's most aptly named country could readily have been called something else.

Priceland, for example. There appears to be but one Indian family in Reykjavik and, joyously, they own a restaurant. Normally, foreign curry is a wishy-washy affair modified for timorous local palates and not like proper British curry at all, but this was pukka stuff: flavoursome, authentically spicy and altogether good enough to generate the phenomenon of a 'curry coat'. But then we got the bill, and it came to over £70. Even a pint was almost a fiver. No wonder hardly anyone lives there.

It could also reasonably be called Windland, since the fierce, icy breath of the Nordic gods could be unleashed suddenly and horribly upon the quaking, coatless carcass of your hapless correspondent at any time. Even Rainland would have sufficed for the day of
our arrival, when the capital looked unnervingly like Manchester, but populated with fewer and more comprehensible people.

But personally, if I'd discovered the place in winter, I'd have gone for Darkland. Whereas the rest of us live through a year of alternate days and nights, Iceland effectively has just one of each and they're both very long. This may go some way to explaining why all the locals were a bit squiffy. In November the sun doesn't come up until gone 10 o'clock, and then only just, and five hours later it's gone again. If, like us, you can't afford to go to the pub, you end up back in the sack by nine.

It's a great excuse for not getting up early and it's a pity the traffic warden didn't see it that way. It's as well that a parking fine is one of the few things that could be considered good value in Iceland, with what would be a £40 or £50 ticket in London weighing in at just over a tenner. This seemed a trifling amount by local standards, so I threw it in the Reykjavik municipal bin. Bloody Vikings.

We needed a plan. A glance at the map showed that there is a road running all the way around the periphery of the island, Route One. There is no Route Two. From Route One various unmade roads, marked in brown on the map, lead off to what might be termed areas of outstanding natural beauty. We would complete a lap of the ring road, absorbing local culture as we went, and peel off occasionally to bring you pictures of the new Range Rover with a famous waterfall, geyser or whatever. This would give a thorough on- and off-road assessment and allow me to
draw fatuous parallels between herring smoking and the workings of the transfer box. Job done.

And so we left Reykjavik. After about 500 yards we were stopped by a Land Rover enthusiast in a Defender fitted with balloon tyres that would refloat the
Titanic.
I outlined our itinerary and he looked at me as if I'd come outside without my coat on.

'These roads are closed,' he said, dismissing two thirds of the map with a sweeping gesture. 'These hotels are not open in winter' – that was most of the north and east. 'These are not the right tyres. You must drive in pairs. You need radio and you must tell police. You will need,' he said, tugging at a giant puff a jacket stuffed with albatrosses, 'proper clothing.' So these people inherited dour logic as well as hairy faces from the Scandinavian settlers of 1,200 years ago.

'We do not like it when the tourists die,' he said kindly. He had a point. Perhaps if I actually bothered to read
The Vehicle-Dependent Expedition Guide,
a gift from Land Rover and about as subtle as a deodorant at that, I would be a lot better at this sort of thing. Instead, I've resorted to things like DIY in a bid to put it off and remain, as a result, a complete off-road bonehead.

Still, as Magnus might say, we'd started, so we'd finish. If we could just reach the tip of the famous glacier at Myrdalsjökull in the south we could still feel pretty chuffed with ourselves. To begin with, though, we'd make a brief and exploratory foray to the Blue Lagoon geothermal power station and hot tub complex.

Occasional breaks in the all-enveloping fog revealed a landscape in which one wouldn't be entirely
surprised to see a dinosaur. Volcanic activity has much to do with it. Iceland is something of a geological upstart at a mere 20,000,000 years old and is to the planet what an especially angry spot is to your nose. One day it, too, will erupt but in the meantime it provides limitless free energy. There's so much of it tapped at the lagoon that there is enough left to create a giant outdoor spa. It smells a bit eggy but it's hot enough to poach you while, absurdly, your exposed hair freezes into a single solid entity like the clip-on hair of one of those Lego people.

This is hardly intrepid stuff. Back aboard the Range Rover I located, amongst a lot of buttons that at first didn't seem to do anything, one that made the steering wheel heat up. This was most welcome, as it was a bit parky and I hadn't felt the benefit of my coat when I went outside after my bath, as my mother would say.

We drove through the troll-infested darkness towards Hvolsvöllui, from where certain operational patterns began to establish themselves. Firstly, the hotel was shut, but when we rang the number pinned to the door a man appeared, opened up a couple of rooms, muttered something from deep within the hood of a much-coveted snorkel parka and disappeared into the eternal night.

Secondly, words like Hvolsvöllui are virtually impossible to pronounce at all and especially in the correct rounded Icelandic manner. A Big John Hamburger eaten at a local roadside fuel stop was a
Big John Hamborgarar,
and if you wanted it with an egg it was
og egg
and cost £18. Liquorice Allsorts were
Apollo Lakkris,
coffee was
kaffi
and milk was
mjólk.
It's not a real language at all, it's just a sing-song version of our own brought on by too much
Viking Bjor.

Thirdly, the weather was always crap. The next day, earmarked for our first attempt at the glacier, was foggy and rainy again. If we reached our objective I wouldn't be able to see it and wouldn't be able to say, 'The vast plateau of the Myrdalsjokull glacier might have served as a model for the torque curve of the excellent BMW-derived V8,' so instead we visited the
Skogar Folk Museum.

I recommend this. The curator, who is called something like Thor, is completely bonkers. Most of Iceland as we see it today is modern – its oldest hotel was built in 1930 – but Thor entertains us with evidence of earlier civilisations, including numerous artefacts wrought in desperation from the shrivelled genitalia of animals. I recall a short rope made from an ox penis and a money bag formed from a pig's scrotum. The first settlers, he explained, were Irish monks who built monasteries from 'turds and stones'. Then he sat at the harmonium and played 'O Susannah' and 'Rock of Ages' while forcing us to sing along in Icelandic. And then we ran away.

That night, in another abandoned hotel in a place called Vik, the wind roared again. The following morning the weather was even worse. This sort of thing went on for three days, the temperature gradually falling and snow and sleet joining the dizzying cycle of wind, rain, darkness, herring, Viking Bjor, empty hotel, bed. The postcards seen in Icelandic hotel receptions are less than honest. One popular example seen
everywhere shows a brightly coloured puffin sitting atop a sunlit, moss-covered rock. The reality, as Newton's own picture records, is a rain-lashed clump of black volcanic debris with no puffin on it.

We had already covered some 750 miles around Route One in our attempts to snatch evocative pictures in rare bursts of late-afternoon watery sunshine. I was convinced of the Range Rover's luxury car credentials. The engine and gearbox are good and a suitable war reparation following the shenanigans over the ownership of Land Rover. The ride is simply outstanding for an off-roader and almost Jaguar-like at times. I'd worked out what everything on the dash did without recourse to the handbook, which in any case, this being a prototype, hadn't been printed yet. I could make it rise and squat on its magic suspension and Newton even managed to tune the telly in, though the picture was affected by what the TV repair man would call 'snow'. And so, with 24 hours remaining before the car had to be back at the docks, we finally made our bid for off-road glory and the tip of the glacier.

It started well. We scrabbled easily along the vague track leading north from Route One. We bounced over rocky mounds and forded streams; we selected low range, dived in and out of gullies and drove on for mile after breathtaking mile, a towering primaeval mountain vista to our right, a wilderness still awaiting the moment of creation on our left. This was more like it.

Everything seemed to go wrong at once. First we came to what looked as if it could be a frozen river, so I took the precaution of sending Newton ahead to probe the terrain with the extended leg of his camera
tripod. One moment he was a six-foot specimen of fine European manhood striding forth into the unknown, the next he was a legless, flailing torso. Then the temperature dropped to minus 15, it went dark, and a distant mountain that had hitherto formed the backdrop to the scene was instantly obliterated by an approaching storm. So we turned and fled.

It was the right decision. By the time we reached our night's lodging in the tiny hamlet of Skálholt a good two feet of snow had fallen. The wind was so strong that it blew me over when I climbed from the car. The worst storm the locals had seen for three years raged all night and had intensified by the next morning, so that by 2.00 p.m. we were still stranded, 50 miles from the capital.

I lay on my bed and contemplated life, the new Range Rover and everything. I said that anything short of an untimely death miles from civilisation would be a fair result, so in that sense we had succeeded. At the same time, I was haunted by a mental image of the navigation lights of the once-weekly Grimsby-bound container ship receding across the bay in Reykjavik. Bugger. Once again, there were going to be some terribly disappointed people at Land Rover.