The World According to Clarkson (10 page)

By the time you read this I’ll be in Menorca, you’ll be in Turkey, your neighbours will be in Florida and a man in a mask will be in your sitting room, helping himself to your television set.

Still, it could be worse. You could have gone to Biarritz. It was the world’s first seaside resort and is to be found on the Atlantic coast just before western France makes a right-angled turn and becomes Spain. I love it there, and not just for the vast beach with those man-sized Atlantic rollers.

I love the town, which blends Napoleonic splendour with peeling Victorian modesty and I love the rolling hinterland, too, where you find the caves from which European man first stumbled 10,000 years ago. I love the cooking which tumbled into town from neighbouring Gascony. I love everything so much that I don’t even mind the crummy weather that blights these parts from time to time.

Anyway, when it rains it’s only a half-hour drive to Spain, where you can watch ballet dancers stab bulls. Then at night you can go to the town of San Sebastian, which has more bars per head of population than any other city in the world. Wellington’s troops got so blotto, they burnt the whole place to the ground.

So what’s wrong with it? Well, unfortunately, this is Basque country and that means it’s twinned with a place that’s up the Shining Path, along the Gaza Strip, past the Tamil’s tiger, round Pol’s Pot and beyond the Falls Road.

We tend to think of ETA, the Basque separatists, as a low-rent terrorist organisation which uses bicycle bombs because cars are too pricey. They’re news in brief, at best.

Not when you’re there, they’re not. They raise money not by jangling tins in far-away Chicago but by making everyone, up to and including international footballers, pay a revolutionary tax. And if you don’t pay, they blow up your car, your house, your wife, your budgerigar, your bar and everyone in it.

That’s why I left the place behind and have come to Menorca.

Since the recent troubles began they have killed nearly 900 people and as a result there’s a policeman on every street corner dressed up like Robocop, wielding a heavy machine-gun and sweating the sweat of a man who is very, very frightened indeed.

I saw one poor copper, a kid, probably eighteen years old, and I swear to God that if I had snuck up behind him and said ‘Boo’, he’d have had a heart attack. I’d only been there an hour before one of them was shot.

I’d only been there a day before I came round the corner to find myself at the scene of a car bomb. Now I’ve seen most things that can be done to a car, but it was quite a shock to see how far you can make one go,
and in how many different directions, if you put a bit of dynamite under the driver’s seat.

Needless to say, the driver in question had been turned into a veneer.

So that was two dead in a day and not even the Palestinians are at that level.

Yet ETA is still news in brief – unless British tourists are delayed flying home by the odd bomb, as in Malaga on Thursday.

How can this be? Spain is our next-door neighbour but one and yet, so far as I can tell, nobody in Britain has the first clue what these Basques actually want.

To try and find out, I spoke to Karmelo Landa, who is their equivalent of Gerry Adams and who quoted extensively from the book entitled
What To Say When You’re the Spokesman for a Bunch of Terrorists
. It was all democratic this and political that and I must confess I got rather cross with him.

The fact is that the Basque region, apart from a short spell during the Spanish Civil War, has never been an autonomous state. They may be descended directly from those early cave dwellers but the Romans, the Vandals and the Visigoths passed them by. Since then, they claim to have discovered America, which is unlikely, and that they built the Armada, which sank. They also maintain that they gave the world the word ‘silhouette’. But this isn’t exactly up there with putting a man on the moon, is it?

The Basques have the same defining characteristics as the Welsh. The Welsh can sing. The Basques have big
earlobes. The Welsh are good at moving stones. The Basques are all blood group O. And both have a militant core that wants autonomy primarily to protect a language that doesn’t really work.

Welsh is burdened by an almost complete lack of vowels but it’s nothing compared with the language of the Basque. Even the name of it is unpronounceable. Let me give you an example: the literal translation of ‘I am writing’ is ‘In the act of writing, doing. You have me’. And to make matters worse, it seems that the only three letters in the Basque alphabet are X, K and X again. It’s so hard that pretty well everyone, even in the Basque hill towns, prefers to use Spanish, despite the lisping and spitting.

It’s madness. I can see why someone would fight for their freedom, god or country. But it’s hard to see how a language can be worth a life. And nigh on impossible to see how Basque could be worth 900 lives.

Sunday 29 July 2001

The ninth week of my trip around Europe brings me to Menorca, where there is a harsh, laser edge to the shadows. The heat sits on everything out here with such oppressive force that even the crickets can’t be bothered to sing. It should be relaxing.

Except it’s not, because of course in the garden of the house I am borrowing there is a swimming pool which, after voicemail, is the single most exasperating rung on the ladder of human achievement.

It’s funny, isn’t it: nobody ever dreams of putting a pond in his garden. Ponds are for those who think it’s safe to let their children play with electricity. Ponds are for pond life.

Barely a week goes by without a garden pond killing a toddler somewhere. But take away the lilies and the dragonflies, add a little depth for added danger, dye the whole thing vivid turquoise and suddenly we perceive the whole wretched thing to be as harmless as Lego.

The problem, however, with the pool out here in Menorca is not that it might kill the children. It’s that it might kill me. There’s a cover, you see, which adheres to the first rule of anything to do with swimming pools: it doesn’t work. Not unless you dive underneath a wooden
platform in the deep end and unjam the mechanism, a process that takes ten minutes – exactly nine minutes and fifty seconds longer than Mr Marlboro Man can hold his breath.

I’ve been down this road before. Five years ago I rented a house in the south of France which, it said in the blurb, came with a pool. And indeed it did. But on the second day of our holiday we awoke to find that half the water had escaped.

Keen to preserve what was left, I donned my Inspector Clouseau scuba suit and ascertained that the only possible way for water to leave the pool was via a big hole in the bottom. Unaware that this had something to do with filtration, I covered it with a large dinner plate and went to the beach.

Certainly, my brave and swift actions meant that no more water leaked away, but unfortunately they also meant that the pump was sucking on nothing for eight straight hours. People say the resultant explosion could be heard in Stuttgart.

I vowed there and then, and again this morning, that I would never have a pool at home, but unfortunately my wife really wants one.

‘Why?’ I wailed. ‘You’re Manx. You’re supposed to have taste.’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but I was born in Surrey.’

There are other problems with installing a turquoise slash in our garden, chief among which is the fact that we live in Chipping Norton, widely regarded as the coldest town in England. Even when the whole country
is basking under a ridge of pressure so high that everyone’s eardrums are imploding, the only pool I ever want to immerse myself in is a nice hot bath.

But my wife is adamant and haughtily dismisses my suggestion of a skip filled with rainwater and slightly upended to create a deep end. I even suggested that we could heat it from below with a brazier, but she hit me over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. So I have been doing some research and it seems you can put in a chlorinated child-killer for £20,000 or so. That is less than I thought, but it’s not enough.

There is a level of one-upmanship in pooldom that would leave a Cheshire car dealer breathless with envy. First of all there is the issue of temperature. Your pool must be warmer than anyone else’s in The Close. But to win this game you end up with something that’s hot enough to boil a lobster.

Then there’s music. Moby must be piped into underwater speakers for reasons that I have yet to understand completely.

Let’s not forget depth. A friend of mine called Jumbo recently installed a pool at his home on Hayling Island only to discover that it’s impossible, when you’re so close to the sea, to dig down more than 4 feet. He has ended up with a pool that has two shallow ends, connected in the middle with a shallow bit. You don’t swim in it so much as stroll around looking like Jesus. It’s social death.

The only way round it, I’m told, is to employ a pool man of such devastating beauty that nobody notices they
are gathered round what is basically the most expensive puddle in Portsmouth.

But let’s say that you have got a pool that is deeper than Lake Tahoe, hot enough to fry the underwater speakers, attended to by Hugh Grant and served by a pool house which is a full-scale model of the Taj Mahal. Then what?

Well, then you’re going to need a pool cleaner. The best I ever saw was a huge spidery thing that waved its arms around, sucking up anything that drifted past. Its owner was very proud, and then very angry, when a friend of mine fed it a burger and it sank. ‘What did you do that for?’ he bellowed. ‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘it serves you right for buying a cleaner that only eats leaves. How was I supposed to know it was vegetarian?’

So swimming pools can be summed up thus: they take all your money, all your sense of reason, all your time, and if you leave them alone for a moment they take your children as well.

Sunday 5 August 2001

I knew, of course, that a charter flight from some low-rent Spanish holiday resort to London’s Stansted airport was never in a million years going to take off on time.

To make matters worse it had a scheduled departure of 11.30 p.m. which meant it would have had an entire day to get out of sync. And sure enough, when we arrived at the airport we were told it was still in Essex.

‘So what’s the problem this time?’ I inquired with the world-weary resignedness of someone who has heard it all before. ‘Technical problems? Wrong type of air? Leaves in the sky?’ ‘No,’ said the rep, ‘the captain got stuck in traffic on the M11.’

I see. Because the hopeless git did not set off for work on time, I now have to spend four hours in an overheated, understaffed departure lounge with seventy children under eight, none of whom is mine. Great.

I don’t know who you are, captain, but I sincerely hope you have a penchant for Thai ladyboys and that your colleagues find out. I am not a vindictive man but it is my fervent wish that from now to the end of time all your itches are unreachable. And that someone writes something obscene in weedkiller on your front lawn.

To keep us all happy and to help to while away the
hours, we were assured that free soft drinks and snacks would be provided.

They were not. What was provided was a styrofoam cup of hot. Hot what, I’m not sure. It could have been tea or it could have been oxtail soup. The snack was a sandwich filled with a piece of pink that was thinner than the paintwork on a 1979 Lancia. Then I discovered that the batteries in my Game Boy were flat.

To my left, a fat family clad from head to foot in Adidas sportswear had managed to find some chips. An amazing achievement this, since all the shops were shut. But you could put people like that on the fourth moon of Jupiter and within fifteen minutes they would find a sack of King Edwards and a deep-fat fryer.

To my right there was a much thinner family, also clad in Adidas sportswear, attempting to get some sleep and using their Manchester United football shirts as pillows. Sleeping was difficult because every five minutes King Juan Carlos himself came on the Tannoy to explain very loudly that by royal decree smoking is prohibited.

Then it got more difficult still because a team of heroically lazy Spanish cleaners finally woke up from their afternoon siesta and decided that the floor needed a damn good polish, using a squadron of machines that were designed by the Russians in the 1950s and had been in service with the Angolan air force ever since.

By 1.30 a.m. I was reduced to reading the instructions on the fire extinguishers and contemplating starting a food fight. I decided against it because the bread in the
free sandwiches was hard enough to kill and the filling was too light to fly properly. It would just sort of float.

At 1.45 a.m. we were asked by the king again to board buses which would take us to the plane. Yippee. At long last, Captain James T. Berk had arrived. We were on our way.

Oh no we weren’t. After fifteen minutes of standing on the stationary bus, we were forced to endure 50 minutes of sitting on the stationary plane where there was no air conditioning and, worse still, no explanation or apology from the flight deck.

Only after we had become airborne and fallen asleep did Captain Fool come on the PA system to explain what had gone wrong. It had been too hot, he said, for the plane to take off and, as a result, some of the bags had been removed from the hold.

Oh, that’s marvellous. So you get us home four hours late, you separate us from our luggage, you never say sorry and then you come up with the worst excuse I have ever heard. How can it have been too hot, you imbecile? Because of your shoddy timekeeping, it was three o’clock in the bloody morning.

The thing is, though, that I (mostly) kept my temper because I knew I could come home, write this and therefore make his life as miserable as he had made mine.

What staggered me was the patience of my fellow passengers. They never complained. They quietly sat at the airport eating their meat veneer. They quietly stood on the bus, sweating. They didn’t even squeal when the stewardesses poured boiling water into their laps,
told barefaced lies about the luggage being on board and generally treated us as if we were a nuisance in the smooth running of their aeroplane.