Notes From the Hard Shoulder (2 page)

Last year, the main road that runs perpendicular to the little road I live on was
resurfaced. And I know what you're expecting me to say next.

That it's now worse than it ever was, is covered in nasty grit that destroys underseal, and has already been dug up by the GPO to lay some new telephone cables. But no. This was by far the most professional, efficient and well-managed civil engineering project I've ever witnessed at close quarters.

The work began at around 10 o'clock one night, when all the traffic had died down. The whole road was closed, and an army of stout men turned up with a gigantic fire-belching engine, a sort of mechanical version of that Norwegian cheese slicer, the one that you use to put parmesan shavings on the top of your salad if people are coming round for dinner.

This thing, moving at a speed so imperceptible that in the time it took me to drink three pints and have a game of darts it had travelled only about 30 yards, removed exactly three inches from the top of the road surface while somehow avoiding the drains and manhole covers. Once the pub had shut, and because I had no one left to talk to, I went to watch the miracle unfold and have a ride on the iron horse.

The next morning, just before the rush-hour started, the bollards, the security tape, the cheese slicer and the workers' tea tent thing were all removed and the road was opened again. It wasn't very good, because each manhole cover now assumed the proportions of Ayers Rock and the grooves left by the skimming machine tended to steer one's motorcycle into the path of oncoming traffic. But it was open.

The next night, it was closed again. Now another roaring inferno worthy of Hieronymus Bosch himself turned up to lay the new surface, inching along the street and dispensing the gleaming, sweet-smelling blacktop of hope in its wake. By morning it was finished, and this little corner of UK PLC was back in business, thanks largely to some blokes from Poland.

And the results were – and there really is no other word for this – perfect. People were on their hands and knees at the kerb examining the road and searching vainly for flaws. Small children were riding up and down on bicycles, marvelling at its smoothness. People in shops could be heard saying, 'Have you driven on the new road yet?' There had not been such a collective sense of wonderment since the invention of radio.

Even now, a year on, I can find only two small patches that have been disturbed, and these have been mended almost invisibly. It really is a pleasure to arrive home by car.

So can someone explain the appalling Horlicks that's been made of the side road running parallel to mine? It was closed and excavated for the purposes of installing a new water main, although for the most part it was simply closed. The job is now complete, and in fairness the contractor has made good the road, in the sense that I don't actually fall down a hole when I'm making my way home from the pub at night. But, God in heaven, it's unsightly. The new tarmac is the wrong colour, the wrong texture, and it isn't flush with the old stuff.

How can I portray the sheer horror of these road repairs? Let me put it this way. If one of the perfectly laid green tiles from my bathroom floor was broken, this lot would come around, affix a slightly smaller brown tile of half the thickness, fill in the gaps with the wrong colour grout and then stand back and say, 'Yep, that looks pretty good.'

It's not even an isolated case. Since noting this, I have been walking around with my head bowed, ignoring the cheery greetings of my neighbours, totally absorbed in studying the road surface. Everywhere I look it's a patchwork of cack-handed repairs completed so shoddily that it's a mystery the place isn't littered with spilled bicyclists. Why is this? It can't be any harder or more expensive to repair a road properly than it is to do it badly.

Tadek, Jarek and Marik have shown that first-class road repairs are possible in Britain. Yet, for some reason, we don't seem to think it matters beyond the main thoroughfares. The people around here studiously mend their window frames, grow brightly coloured shrubs and flowers in their front gardens and paint their front doors in amusing colours. Yet this model of English urban splendour faces a road that appears to have been imported from 1990s Bosnia.

The side roads of England are a disgrace. Can somebody please explain why?

Some time ago, the national press published the findings of a report in which continental Europeans denounced the British as 'a nation of
coffee philistines'.

An important point was missed in all this. We are not coffee philistines at all; we have become philistines because of coffee. There is now barely a corner of a British high street that hasn't been commandeered by a bean-bashing multinational of some kind, and within them can be found people talking in a strange and subversive code. You'd be forgiven for wondering how the nation had survived until now without a regular double skinny latte mocha choca top before work.

For confirmation of this, look no further than our obsession with
in-car cup holders. Over its brief history, the cup holder as found in European and Japanese cars has evolved from a token fixture intended to persuade Americans to buy the car (US sales of the Jaguar
XJ once suffered for the car's want of one) to a device of such cunning and complexity that it can embody more engineering and design expertise than once went into a whole vehicle. And yet the only thing that will fit safely into a cup holder is a cardboard cup from a coffee-shop chain.

Meanwhile,
tea – the drink that made Britain great – has been virtually forgotten. Tea is the sustainer of honest toil and remains the second most important commodity of the British building trade after sugar. Some historians believe that the mildly medicinal quality of tea actually encouraged industrialisation,
because it allowed our manufacturing centres to proliferate quicker than the bowel disorders that would otherwise have destroyed their populations. Apart from anything else, a Frenchman or Italian, fuelled by espresso that could be used to build roads, would have been far too jittery to sit down patiently and invent the steam engine or the flying shuttle.

Of course, a nominal cup of tea can be bought from Cafe Nation or Buckstars or whatever these left-wing chattering houses are called, but it is a dismal offering in which bag, tepid water and milk have all been introduced to the vessel simultaneously. Furthermore, tea cannot really be enjoyed out of cardboard. It should be served in a chipped ceramic mug (if engaged in something manly, such as roofing or restoring an old sports car) or a bone china cup and saucer (if there is any risk, however slight, of a visit from your mother). Curiously, neither of these things will fit in a car's cup holder.

The cup holder, then, can be regarded at best as the perpetrator of a dangerous fad; at worst as the cradle of the enemies of Britishness.

The problem becomes even more acute if you fancy a proper drink. The instant I joined
Salim Khoury at the
Telegraph
Motor Show, I sensed that he would go home a disappointed man. We had come to test the versatility of cup holders.

Khoury is manager of the American Bar at The Savoy, where he has worked since 1969. He came to Britain from his native Beirut, where he learned the subtleties of cocktail making in response to the demands of a then enormous American hotel clientele.
Yet despite the predominantly American image of drinks such as the Manhattan and the Cosmopolitan, he maintains that 'Britain really comes top of the world in cocktails; in making them and in creating them.' His most recent invention is the Telesuite, a new cocktail to celebrate the inauguration of the Savoy's electronic virtual-conferencing arrangement with New York's Waldorf Astoria. The ingredients include absinthe, which is known to be conducive to brainstorming.

Khoury comes equipped as a sort of roving international ambassador of correct cocktail etiquette. His briefcase is a beautiful wood-inlaid aluminium job divided into foam-lined compartments for measuring jug, log-handled stirring spoon, fruit knife, ice bucket, a strainer for taking the pith, ice tongs, a champagne stopper and, of course, the silver shaker itself. 'I stir my Martinis. I never shake,' he says, in response to the inevitable comparison with Bond.

He also brings a selection of glasses, some of them traditional, such as the typical champagne flute, and some of them the trademarks of his bar, such as the Savoy's own more generous champagne goblet, the Martini glass that has been an unassailable feature of the hotel since the '20s, and a huge cut-glass balloon suitable for cognac – a particular favourite of Churchill, apparently.

Sadly, none of them fit in a cup holder.

Cup holders can be divided into two basic types. There is the first phase of development, where they took the simple form of a tapered cup-shaped hollow somewhere on the facia, there to satisfy the supposed
demand for cup holders at minimum expense. The most pathetic example of Phase One cup holders probably occurred on a Seat Arosa I once owned, in which the inside of the glovebox lid boasted two vague circular indentations. They were little more than a desperate grasp at cup-holder credibility, a sort of visual indication to Place Cups Here, nothing more. But that was in the mid-'90s, a time when it was suddenly believed that not having a cup holder was like admitting to still having drum brakes at the front.

Phase One cup holders still survive on plenty of cars and are at least suitable for storing mobile phones. They might even accept the base of a champagne flute or wine glass, but a lot depends on location. In the VW Beetle, for example, the diameter of the cup holes is slightly smaller than that of the base of Khoury's Martini glass, and in any case the Martini would have to be tipped on to its side in order to clear the bottom of the dashboard's central binnacle before final insertion. The only drink that can safely be turned on its side is one with a lid on it, which immediately puts us back in the hands of Cafe Nero.

The service is rather better on the
Rolls-Royce stand, and especially in the rear of the Phantom, which is a good venue for a drink. Here, the cup-holder tray – essentially still a Phase One type – extends from beneath the seat and will at least accept the pint pot Khoury brought along at my personal insistence (pints not actually being available in the American Bar), since it has sufficient headroom. Rolls-Royce will also supply a proper drinks cabinet, complete with glasses, if desired. But at £240,000 one has to wonder why it
isn't standard. You can find a mini bar in a £50 hotel room these days.

Phase Two cup holders are much more fatuous. These are the spring-loaded, extending and retracting type that testify to cup-holder oneupmanship on the part of car manufacturers. Once the novelty of simply having a cup holder wore off – and that happened pretty quickly – it became important for car owners to be able to impress passengers with cup-holder complexity. Top speeds and 0-60mph times have clearly been usurped by the number of stages in your cup holder's deployment. Some of them emerge like time-lapsed film of a daffodil opening, or expand into a sort of plastic balletic first position.

Especially idiotic examples of Phase Two cup holders – but there are many more – occur in the new BMW
5-Series and the
Saab 9-3. In the BMW, the central holder not only sprouts from the dashboard, it actually follows a curved path towards the driving seat, as if reaching an extra inch or two for your cappuccino grande might be too much effort.

But Saab can beat that. Its offering is so geometrically baffling that it stands as a testimony to the lifetime's work of Euclid. And you thought the electric hood was clever. The whole assembly collapses into a slot no broader than a disposable biro and is, in purely mechanical terms, a brilliant achievement.

But for what? Khoury's Cosmopolitan, a fine drink in which 'flavour is more important than
alcoholic content, absolutely', will either fall out or snap the device clean off. In the BMW, the base of the White Lady glass can be coaxed past the sprung lip intended
to hold your king-size Americano in check, but then, because the lip is like a barb, cannot be extracted unless it is turned on its side. It can't be turned on its side until the contents have been drunk. We are now in a cup-holder Catch 22 situation, and the only answer seems to be to turn the car upside down and empty the peerless beverage into a bucket.

This whole cup-holder thing really hasn't been thought through properly. All credit is due to Citroen, then, for maintaining, with the Pluriel, an immutable that was established with the Mini – namely, that the door pockets should be broad enough to accommodate a wine bottle. But for the glasses? Nothing.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this impromptu investigation into cup holders. The first is that the amount of wit and ingenuity being discharged in the design of them is out of all proportion to the import of their function. There isn't a car out there, no matter how good, in which the same effort couldn't be applied to something more important.

But the second is more encouraging, especially to those who, rightly, are engaged in campaigning against drink driving.

Relax. It's pretty much impossible anyway.

There are a few simple things I require of government ministers. Taking a broad view, I would be quite interested to know what they are going to do about the funding of the NHS, since it's a very complicated business and I won't pretend for a moment to understand it. A few of them have made it their lives' work, so I'm prepared to defer to them on that one.

On a more personal level, and since they are ultimately responsible for the people who might possibly be able to help me, I'd like to know what government is proposing to do about the bloke who climbed through my window and nicked my portable telly.

There are other issues that are no doubt their concern: the pensions crisis, benefit fraud, the war in Iraq, gay vicars (no, not gay vicars) and what the Monty Python team called the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow. These are all worthy of detailed study by suitably qualified people.

But what I don't need is politicians setting me an example, unless it's
Charles Kennedy, since he likes a drink and so do I. I especially don't want them wasting valuable Commons time worrying about what sort of car I should drive, because I can work that one out for myself.

Apparently, some of these people are being offered the option of a ministerial
Toyota Prius or a
bio-fuelled Jaguar, while at the same time supporting a special tax on 4 x 4 cars in the interests of the environment. Nothing could be more irrelevant.

Let's assume, for the purposes of argument, that
global warming is a real threat and that energy consumption is at the root of it. So that would make big, overweight and thirsty
4 x 4s a bad thing, obvious-ly.

And what difference, exactly, is a tax going to make to that? If you're rich enough to run a big 4 x 4, a bit of extra tax isn't going to bother you. More to the point, how does tax save the planet? If 4 x 4s are such a bad thing, why doesn't the government simply ban them? I conclude that they don't want us to stop driving them at all. They just want some more money.

And the same goes for smoking. If lung disease is such an issue, and the government feels duty bound to do something about it, why isn't smoking illegal? Taking heroin is illegal, after all. The answer must surely be that smoking is ultimately good for the nation's coffers, and that nobody really wants us to stop. Same goes for binge drinking and driving around in cars.

I was asked to take part in a radio debate about this 4 x 4 tax business, and I dearly wish I'd been available to do so. On the panel was a man from an organisation called something like the Federation Against All-Wheel Drive; that's not quite right but I'm buggered if I'm going to dignify their mealy-mouthed cause by looking it up and getting it right. What I would say to this man is this: if you want to do something good for the world, can't you think of something better than preaching to us about the exact technical specification of the cars we're driving? Can't you go and make some soup for the poor, or mend some old dear's central heating boiler?

I'm not here to defend the motor industry, since it's big and ugly enough to do that for itself. But I will say this. In the 10 years or so that I have been writing about cars, it has made an unparalleled effort to clean up its act. My car today is between 20 and 50 times less polluting than the ones I struggled to own as a student. It caused less pollution during its manufacture, it causes less pollution in use, and it will cause less when it's thrown away.

What other industry or area of commerce has made a similar effort? Fashion? Construction? Other modes of transport? Publishing? Consumer electronics? I can't name one. Every now and then someone comes up with a totally fatuous statistic that shows, for example, how much less CO
₂
would be produced if we turned our stereos off instead of leaving them on standby. Is that it?

Well, you might be thinking, the car was always a big culprit. But I'm not so sure. Figures I've heard state that road transport (and remember – that includes stinky Latvian tour buses as well as your Vectra) accounts for anything between 11 and 20 per cent of all so-called greenhouse gases. Even if it's 20 per cent, I'm left wondering about where the other four-fifths are coming from, and yet I hear nothing –
nothing –
about this in any populist debate about the
environment. All I hear is some sanctimonious cant about how if I buy a slightly smaller car everything will be all right.

If I were in power, and I thought taxation was the sovereign salve for all environmental ills, here are a few of the things that would suddenly start costing you a
lot more: vegetables grown in Israel and flown to your supermarket, when the same ones are growing just as well in England; replacement kitchens, since the one you have undoubtedly works perfectly well; bottled water from France, since there's perfectly good stuff in the tap; plastic carrier bags, which aren't even made here but are produced in places like China, and even if we recycle them they're sent back to China to be made into more carrier bags and then transported here in ships that burn thousands of litres of heavy fuel oil every day; and so on. These are real-world concerns at least the equal of the Volvo
XC-90's fuel consumption. Yet the only person I know who talks intelligently on these matters is, remarkably, a car enthusiast.

I'm not going to be lectured about my driving habits by people who probably haven't bothered to check their loft insulation in the last decade. I have, as it happens, and I've improved it. Leave us alone, and leave our cars alone as well.

Still no news on the stolen telly, by the way.