The World According to Clarkson (26 page)

While you were being bollocked for missing your eighteenth lecture in a row, I was being hauled over the coals for misreading my shorthand notes and as a result getting my report of the inquest disastrously wrong. And all you had to do to set things right was sleep with your tutor. I could not solve my problem by sleeping with the libel judge.

When you’ve been educated by the university of life you arrive at the top completely worn out.

Real university, on the other hand, gives you a leg up so everything is less exhausting.

Then there is the question of friends. I know people who went to university with Stephen Fry and Richard Curtis and Boris Johnson. Let’s not forget that Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman were at Cambridge together, and what must a night out with that lot have been like? More fun, I should imagine, than a night out with the friends you made while stocking shelves at Safeway.

Let me try to intellectualise it for you. At the beginning of the ceremony in Wembley the Vice-Chancellor of Brunel addressed the audience saying that there are 50 institutions in Europe that go back more than a thousand years.

There’s the Catholic Church, the parliaments of Britain, Iceland and the Isle of Man and a few quasi-governmental organisations in Italy.

All the rest are universities. They work. And I missed out. And to my dying day I shall regret it.

Sunday 27 July 2003

‘No.’ That’s what I said when the producers of a programme about the jet engine asked if I’d like to fly round the world in five days.

‘Yes.’ That’s what I said when they pointed out that we’d be breaking the journey with a day on the beach in somewhere called Moorea, which is a small tropical island five minutes from Tahiti.

On paper, French Polynesia sounds like one of the most exotic idylls anywhere on earth, a collection of 120 or so islands dotted over an area of the south Pacific that’s the same size as Europe. In reality, it takes 24 hours to get there and it’s not worth the bother.

At the airport everyone from the customs man to the bus driver gave me a necklace of flowers, so that by the time I arrived at the hotel and conference centre I looked like a human garden centre and had a spine the shape of an oxbow lake.

Here, after they’d given me another necklace or two, they wanted to know about breakfast: not what I wanted, but whether I’d like it delivered to my room in a canoe.

And therein lies the heart of the problem with all these pointy lumps of volcanic residue that were pretty much a secret until the jet engine came along. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Mauritius or the Maldives,
Tahiti or the Seychelles. They are all the same: completely overdone.

All of them are advertised in the brochures with a picture of what I swear is the same palm tree. You must have seen it: the horizontal one, wafting its fronds gently over the turquoise waters and white sand of pretty well everywhere.

Then there are the hotels, with their increasingly idiotic ways of giving you a taste of life on a tropical island.

This means sharing your bath with half a hundredweight of petals and finding your bog roll folded into the shape of a rose every morning and having a monogrammed Hobie Cat moored to your own manservant. Is that what it was like for Robinson Crusoe? How do you know? Because when you’re there, one thing’s for sure, you won’t set foot outside the hotel grounds.

To complete the picture, the staff are dolled up in a ludicrous facsimile of what once, perhaps, might have been the national dress. Even the blokes in Tahiti had to wear skirts, and to complete their humiliation they had to walk up and down the superheated sand all day in bare feet.

Unless of course they were trying to deliver a mountain of bacon and eggs, in a canoe, on a choppy sea, without letting it blow away or go cold or fall into the water.

Small wonder they behaved like everything was too much trouble. Give the poor bastards some shoes, for crying out loud. And some strides.

Did I mention the dolphin? As a unique selling point
the boys in Tahiti had caught themselves a big grey beasty which spent all day on its back, in a lagoon, being pawed by overweight American women with preposterous plastic tits and unwise G-string bikini bottoms. ‘Would you like to see his penis?’ asked the man in a skirt when I climbed into the water.

No. What I’d like to do is spear you through the heart with a harpoon and let the miserable thing have a taste of freedom. But instead I tickled its belly and whispered into its ear: ‘Call that a penis, acorn crotch.’

Thinking that this sort of thing is giving you a taste of life on a tropical island is as silly as thinking you can get a taste of beef from licking a cow. On a real tropical island, like Tom Hanks in
Castaway
, you have to smash your own teeth out with ice skates and talk to footballs, and there are insects, huge articulated things with the head and upper torso of a hornet and the rear end of a wolf.

I stayed at one hotel, can’t remember where, where they made the locals trample about in the flower beds all day with Volkswagen Beetle engines on their backs spraying the bushes with insecticide.

Occasionally one of the poor chaps would gas himself to death, or catch his skirt in the machinery, and have to be carted off. But soon there’d be another in his place. And for what purpose? To sanitise paradise? It didn’t work. So far as I could see, the spray seemed to make the insects a little bit bigger.

Don’t be fooled by the sun either. It may look nice in the pictures, dipping its feet into the sea after a hard
day warming the solar system, but in reality it’ll cause you to sit in the shade all day until you look like a stick of forced rhubarb. And it’ll melt the glue in the spine of your book, allowing the last ten pages to blow away just before you get there.

There’s no respite at night either. You won’t be able to sleep with the air con on, it’ll be too noisy. And you won’t be able to sleep with it off because then all you’ll hear is the squeals of the honeymoon couple in the authentic bungalow next door.

Only once have I been to a tropical beach that was completely unmolested. It was in Vietnam and it was perfect. Except that after twenty minutes or so I wanted a girl in a skimpy ao dai to bring me a cold Coke.

And there’s the thing. We dream the tropical dream. But we’re built to live in Dewsbury.

Sunday 31 August 2003

A report in the paper last week said that the world is running out of scientists as pupils opt for ‘easy’ subjects like media studies rather than difficult ones like the effect of fluorocarbons on methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosyl glutamylserylleucylphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyl lysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamylglycylalanylphenyl anylvalylprolylphenylalanylvalylthreonylleucylglycy laspartylprolylglycylisoleucylutamylglutaminylserylleu cyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucyl…

Sadly, I shall have to call a halt to the actual name of this natty little protein at this point because I’m paid by the word. And I don’t want to get to the end of the column having written only one. It illustrates the point neatly, though. Which would you rather do? Hang around in Soho, drinking skinny lattes with Graham Norton, or emigrate to somewhere like Durham and spend your life teaching hydrogen how to speak?

That’s not such a silly idea because underneath the report about a shortage of scientists was another which said that a professor of acoustics at Salford University has proved that, contrary to popular belief, a duck’s quack does echo.

Though only faintly.

Who gives a stuff? Apparently, the professor in
question was trying to solve the problem of echoey public address systems in churches and stadiums. But quite what the duck has to do with this, I have no idea. I mean, what’s he going to do? Give the vicar’s job to a mallard?

Elsewhere in the world, other scientists have been monitoring 25 sites in America’s Great Basin. And they’ve found that the pika, a small and useless relative of the rabbit, is not coping as well as might be hoped with global warming. Oh dear.

Here at home, scientists have discovered that children who gorge on fizzy drinks in the morning have the reaction times of a 70-year-old. Only, I should imagine, if the fizzy drink in question is champagne.

Ooh, here’s a good one. Two British teams of medical researchers have generated a human cell. Sounds spooky, so should we be worried? Not really. They say this is the first step to growing replacement livers, but this seems a trifle farfetched since there is no way of telling a cell what to become. You may hope for a liver and end up with an ear. Only God can decide, and thanks to science all his representatives on earth are soon to be replaced with ducks.

I know it must be depressing when Greenpeace rolls around on your important and juicy discoveries, like GM food, but why have you spent so long determining that women who take pain-killers at the time of conception are more likely to miscarry? Even you, in your freezing lab, must realise that conception cannot happen unless something takes the headache away first.

It gets worse. In America, scientists have spent $1.2 m (£750,000) of public money trying to prove that conservatives are nutty. In Canada, they’ve studied 2,000 Pisceans and determined they’re not all wetties who are still crying over
Born Free
. And in Holland, they’re examining a prehistoric slug that has no brain or sex organs to see if it’s some kind of evolutionary missing link. Unlikely, if it doesn’t have a penis or a womb.

For heaven’s sake people, where’s the next Concorde? Where’s the pill we can live on instead of food, and what about the dog in a space suit we were promised by Valerie Singleton? Put your ducks away and do something useful.

With this in mind, I went to see Professor Kevin Warwick in the cybernetics department of Reading University last week. He has built what looks like a radio-controlled car but in fact it’s a robot that has the intelligence, he says, of a wasp.

If you turn its power supply off, it will look for more, in the same way that a wasp will look for food. And it can be programmed to buzz around your head all day too.

Warwick is so obsessed with artificial intelligence he recently had a plug surgically implanted in his nervous system. Then he hooked himself up to a computer so, as he moved his handin NewYork, a robotic hand back home in Reading moved too.

And his point is? Well, I had no idea until he told me that he’d had his wife’s central nervous system hooked up to the web too. Now that… that boggles the mind.
The possibilities of feeling what your wife feels, and vice versa, have to be one of the most exciting breakthroughs since… since… ever. And imagine being tapped into the brain of a computer at the same time. Working on the G-spot and a system to beat the gee-gees simultaneously.

My enthusiasm was curbed somewhat when Warwick explained that a man/machine hybrid might not be satisfied with the governorship of California and could, perhaps, decide one day to wreak a trail of destruction across the world. I suggested that machines are never scary because you can always turn them off but he smiled the smile of a brainbox and said, simply: ‘Really? How do you turn the internet off then?’

If he has a point then maybe a dearth of scientists over the coming years is no bad thing. Because it would only take one to put down his duck for five minutes and destroy the planet.

Sunday 14 September 2003

A couple of months ago I wrote about books here. It was the time of the Hay Festival, which is like Glastonbury only quieter, more dusty and without Rolf Harris.

Jilly Cooper had hit out at the intellectual snobbery of it all. ‘There are two categories of writers,’ she said at the time, ‘Jeffrey Archer and me, who long and long for a kind word in the
Guardian
, and the others who get all the kind words and long to be able to do what Jeffrey and I do.’

Wise words. But not wise enough, it seems, for the panel of judges who selected this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist.

Joint favourite to win is a book called
Brick Lane
by Monica Ali, which is centred on the letters exchanged between two sisters, one of whom lives in Bangladesh and one who came to London for an arranged marriage.

Now I haven’t read it, and I never will, but I think we can be fairly sure that neither of the sisters will have a torrid affair with an unsuitable rogue called Rupert.

So what of the other joint favourite? That’s from Margaret Atwood, who has got her, I suspect, voluminous knickersina tangle over Monsanto and its GM food development.
Oryx and Crake
, her book, is unlikely to be a comedy.

It’s also worth mentioning Damon Galgut’s
The Good Doctor
, which is about a young medic who finds himself posted to a tribal homeland in South Africa. Is he dive-bombed by F-15 fighters? Is the
Nimitz
sunk? Don’t hold your breath.

I have just finished a book by Philip Roth, one of the most revered highbrow authors, and it was astonishing. It’s about the owner of a glove factory in New Jersey whose daughter came off the rails a bit.

I ploughed on through page after page of undeniably beautiful prose dying to know if he’d get his daughter back. But all I got was more and more agonising until it just stopped.

It’s almost as though Roth rang the publishers and asked: ‘How long would you like my next novel to be?’ And when they said 250 pages, he said, ‘Oh good, I’ve finished.’

Before this, I read
Gulag
by Anne Applebaum, which was mainly a letter to other people who’ve written about the Soviet camps, saying they were all wrong. Wrong, do you hear.

But worst of all was
Stupid White Men
by the Stupid White Man himself, Michael Moore.

After the first chapter – an interesting account of how George Bush stole the presidency – it degenerated into an adolescent rant from a student bedsit,
circa
1982. Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher. Big companies. Thatcher. Rainforests.