Jeremy - The Times

[eshalda]

I like flying, especially taking off, I could do that all day. I agree with you Wy about air and nothing. I am facinated by sound waves and wave patterns and how they travel through the air.

[Vivienne]

If you get a chance read Jeremy's column in the Times, very good has to do with his son and playing table tennis. Funny as usual.

[Vivienne]

Jeremy took his eldest daughter to the Sudan. The column was right on and to the point. More like the continual decline of Africa and its population. Those asses that take the money instead of helping their people. Excellent column.

[Vivienne]

Good column this week. Waiting til the morning to comment as I usually do.

[Vivienne]

Very benign and nice column about the Princes. For the nitpickers there is always something. I hope this one makes up for some of the other stuff. Good grief they're even posting ytube videos saying he died.

[Vivienne]

No one has made a comment on his article but he has 25 recommendations.

[dit]

Bit of a bump, but apparently there's an excellent article in today's Sunday Times which is being trailed as

Liberté, égalité, animosité: what happened when Jeremy Clarkson and AA Gill went to France in a canal boat

I don't (and won't) pay for the privilege, so can anyone find a way of getting it onto here? (Not that I've asked, of course.)

[dit]

The Sunday Times is letting us have a freebie today - Jeremy's typically understated views on the Olympics.


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1085592.ece?shareToken=00918d3c96c4a27b1b3e4ab7f18346c7




(Apparently it's only free for a limited time! Tightwads.)

[pie]

Loved it, thanks for posting. "London's forthcoming running and jumping competition." ;D
Not being a Brit, there are always bits and pieces that I don't understand (e.g. references to people well-known in that part of the world but not here) but I still find myself laughing.

[dit]

Another freebie, for as long as it lasts.


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1158564.ece?shareToken=73b7e3f382633b311daaac06a6e04896

[devil-may-care]

Thanks for the link, dit. Great column. ;D

[RedMoon11]

You can read Jeremy's columns and car reviews for free here:

"Clarkson's Sunday Times columns will be posted on here a week after they appear in the newspaper. If he's been on holiday, there'll be no columns, sorry!"

www.reddit.com/r/clarkson

[RedMoon11]

The Sunday Times Published: 2 March 2014



Cheer up, Piers. You Can Always Get A Job As My Punchbag

I was going to write about Angela Merkel this morning. I really was, I promise. But then I thought: “Nah. Come on, Jeremy. Piers Morgan’s lost yet another job. He really is down this time. So why not fire up the laptop and kick him a bit?”

As you may know, the ghastly little weasel and I have history.

He ran some unpleasant stories about me on the front page of the Mirror several years ago, and whenever we met afterwards he thought it was all a huge laugh. A joke. No harm done.

My wife thought otherwise. And at the British Press awards gave him one of her hard stares from across the room. “Why’s your f****** wife looking at me like that?” he thundered. So I punched him. And then I punched him again.

And then I thought: “You know what? I don’t think this would ever get boring.” So I punched him again. And, annoyingly, broke my finger.

In another encounter, on the very last flight of Concorde into London, he was seated in the row behind me, droning on about his brilliance, so as we began our descent into London, and an inevitable encounter with the waiting bank of television cameras, I turned round and emptied a glass of water into his crotch.

“Look,” I said to journalists as we walked down the aircraft steps, “the idiot’s wet himself.”

We’ve tried over the years to shake hands and make amends but he always ends up doing something moronic and the feud starts all over again. Only recently he wrote in his truly amazing Mail on Sunday column about how he’d been chatting at a party to Samuel L Jackson and various other big-name Hollywood stars when I’d walked over.

Apparently I stood on the fringes of their matey chat until the humiliation of being a small fish in a big pond was too much to bear and I sloped off. That simply didn’t happen.

It makes you wonder about all the other events that Morgan writes on. All those chance meetings with “Bobby” De Niro in swish Los Angeles restaurants. All those clever put-downs to his detractors. All that Hello! magazine back-patting bonhomie.

How much of it happened only in his imagination? It’s more likely he spends his evenings in a hotel suite, on his own, with all the TVs tuned in to his CNN show in a one-man quest to shore up the ratings.

God, they were low. This was a show, remember, that was being aired round the world. Billions had the ability to watch it but few did. In fact Morgan attracted a global audience smaller than the BBC daytime show Cash in the Attic. He was even beaten by Kerry Katona: The Next Chapter, an ITV2 programme that followed the downward spiral of the dimwitted cocaine enthusiast.

I heard that he was going to be dropped about six months ago. And have been sitting here for all of that time, loving his stupid Twitter boasts about his huge fame and lavish lifestyle, knowing that he didn’t know what I knew.

Things aren’t much better for big M, little organ, back home in Britain. Because here his show Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, in which he makes orange people cry, has obviously run its course.

Gone are the days when he could get the prime minister to come on and sob; now it’s Tony Blackburn and Beverley Callard (nope, me neither).

This, then, is a man who was fired from the Mirror for publishing obviously faked pictures of British Army bods abusing Iraqi prisoners. A man who was accused of insider dealing. A man who is about to lose his show on CNN and who might very well hesitate over returning to Britain because the police may want to talk to him, again, about phone hacking.

He is a friendless, broken shell. So you might imagine that with his life in tatters, he’s sitting in his condo, crying his eyes out over pictures of himself.

But no. Instead he’s busy telling everyone that he now has more Google pages than the Pope. Yup. He really does believe that there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. And he thinks that so long as he can keep his name in the papers he will get another job. Yeah, right.

Morgan probably thinks he’s cast himself as a sort of pantomime baddie, and in time he may indeed end up at the Swindon Wyvern doing just that, throwing sweets into the audience and then trying to duck and weave when they are thrown back — along with all the chairs.

But actually he isn’t a pantomime baddie. He really is genuinely awful. It’s something we’ve all known since we first clapped eyes on him with his arm round some teenage pin-up in the showbiz pages of The Sun. “My ‘pal’ Simon Le Bon”, the caption would read. Really? So why doesn’t Simon have his arm round you?

Later we saw him strutting his stuff on a Simon Cowell talent show and we won’t go into detail here about how he got that gig.

And today he’s trying to argue his CNN show failed because the Americans didn’t take kindly to his misguided attempt to spark a debate on gun control. Nonsense. His show failed because the viewers hated him. Everyone hates him.

And that’s a big problem when you are trying to play the fame game. You can upset some of the people some of the time and survive — thrive even. But if you upset all of the people all of the time, you will fail.

And he has. And I couldn’t help but notice that as the news broke, it stopped raining and the sun came out.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1381563.ece

[RedMoon11]

My Kingdom For A Horse Hitman
19 February 2006

If a newspaper columnist wants to live an easy life, then it's sensible to steer clear of certain issues. Laying into Jesus is right out. And it's probably not a good idea to say the poor should have their shoes confiscated. But the greatest taboo - the biggest landmine of the lot - is the touchy subject of horses.

I once wrote a column suggesting that nobody should be allowed to keep a pet unless their garden is big enough to exercise it. Under no circumstances, I argued, should you be allowed to put your animal in a lorry and drive it on the public road at 4mph.

This went down badly. It turned out that there are three million horsists in Britain and each one of them wrote to me, hoping that I would die soon. So I made a mental note to skirt round equine issues in future.

Sadly, though, there are now three million and one horsists in Britain because my wife has just bought a brace of the damn things. I don't know how much they cost but since they were imported from Iceland, I'm guessing it was quite a lot.

Not as much, however, as they're now costing the National Health Service. The first to fall off was my nine-year-old
son. He'd seen his sister trotting round the paddock and, being a boy, figured he could do it, too.

Sadly I wasn't around to stop him so I've only heard from the ambulancemen what happened exactly.

The next casualty was our nanny, who disproved the theory that when you fall off a horse you should get straight back on again. Because having done that she promptly fell off a second time. We had to mash her food for a while but she's better now.

So what about my wife? Well, as I write she's skiing in Davos.

Except she's not because 24 hours before she was due to go she came off the nag, spraining her wrist and turning one of her legs into something the size, shape and texture of a baobab tree. So actually she's in Davos, drinking.

Apparently the accident was quite spectacular. On a quiet road, just outside David Cameron's house incidentally, she took the tumble with such force that she was incapable of moving. And had to ring the nanny who, as a result of her fall, could only limp to the scene of the accident.

Needless to say the horse, with its walnut-sized brain, had been spooked by the incident and had run off. Neither of the girls was in a fit state to catch it, which meant a ton of (very expensive) muscle was galavanting around the road network, as deadly and as unpredictable as a leather-backed Scud missile.

After it was returned by a sympathetic neighbour, I offered to get a gun and put the bloody thing out of my misery. But no. The accident was not the horse's fault, apparently. And nor will my wife take the blame, because she's been riding since she was an embryo and hunting since foetus-hood.

What happened was that the horse skidded on the tarmac. I ee. An Icelandic horse, capable of maintaining significant peed over lava fields and sheet ice, couldn't stay upright on asphalt. Of course. Stands to reason.

So now all the female members of the Clarkson household are busy joining internet campaigns to get every road in the land resurfaced with special horse-grip tarmac.

This, it seems to me, is the problem with horse ownership. You can't have one half-heartedly. Every morning you must go and clear its crap from the stables, and then you must spend the afternoon combing it and plaiting its tail and feeding it tasty apples. And then each night, as you get into bed, each bruise and aching joint serves as a painful reminder of that day's accident. Horses take over your life as completely as paralysis. You can think of nothing else.

And this gives the horse fraternity a sense that the whole world revolves around their pets, too. That's why the hunting crowd are so vociferous. Because for them it's not a pastime. It's an all-consuming life. And it's why my wife wants all roads resurfaced.

More than that, she comes back every day white with apoplexy with something a "motorist" has just done. Not slowing down. Not moving over enough. Not coming by. Not turning the radio down. This from a woman who refuses to drive any car with ess than 350 brake horsepower.

Of course we're told often and loudly that roads were originally intended for horses, and that's true. In the same way that the royal family was originally intended to govern. But times move on. The horse was replaced by the car and became a toy. And now it should be allowed on the roads, in the same way that the Queen is allowed into parliament. Briefly, and by invitation only.

I've always said that if a boy comes to take my daughters out on a motorbike I shall drop a match in the petrol tank. And that if he buys another I shall do it again. But in the past month I've learnt that four legs are infinitely more dangerous than two wheels. So if he turns up on a horse I shall shoot him, and it.

In the meantime I have to content myself with the behaviour of my donkeys. All they do, all day, is run up to their new, bigger field-mates and kick them.

For Crying Out Loud: The World According to Clarkson Volume 3
Publisher: Michael Joseph Ltd (October 2, 2008)

[RedMoon11]

Dear Uncle Tim, thank you for this opportunity to mock you for just 62p

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 9 March 2014

What with all the floods and the alarmingly sudden developments in Ukraine, it has been easy to overlook the dramatic news that the price of a first-class stamp is about to rise to 62p. Which, if you employ some rounding-up maths, means it will soon cost a quid to post a letter.

Factor in the cost of some headed stationery and a decent envelope, and the cost of writing to thank someone for a party now exceeds the cost of throwing it.

Of course there are those who will think that more than 12 bob for a stamp is ridiculous and that the boss of Royal Mail should be flogged to death immediately. But I’m sitting here in a state of head-scratching bewilderment wondering how on earth it can possibly be so low.

There is simply no industry that has been hit quite so hard and quite so fast as the Post Office. Only 15 years ago if you wanted to communicate anything at all to anyone, anywhere, you had to use the post. And the Royal Mail was geared up to deal with that. It had a mind-blowingly enormous infrastructure of trains and ships and vans and sorting offices and postboxes on every street corner. And it meant you could post a letter in Cornwall late in the afternoon, knowing that it would be delivered the following morning. Even if the recipient lived up a mountain in the Scottish Highlands.

But then, in the blink of an eye, electronic communication came along and demand dwindled to virtually nothing. So let’s do the maths. If 16 letters are being posted every day — and it really can’t be many more than that — then the revenue with first-class stamps at 62p works out at £69.44 a week. And how do you maintain an army of vans and ships and postboxes for that?

Or, more importantly, why do you maintain an army of vans and ships and postboxes for that? One of the world’s last two typewriter makers went west a couple of years ago, so why doesn’t Royal Mail throw in the towel as well? Why not admit defeat? Why not let the posties go to seed: let Postman Pat become Postman Fat?

Because, these days, why send a postcard when you have Instagram? Why send a bank statement when most people have one of those calculator communicator jobbies? Why spend money writing when you can email for nothing? Today the postman is nothing more than an irritant who comes round in the morning to annoy your dog and jam up your letterbox with details of a new pizza takeaway service. He’s a pest.

Except he isn’t. He’s vital. Because the simple fact of the matter is this: children cannot thank their grandmother for the present she sent with a text.

I am probably alone on this one but I like writing thank-you letters. Always have. Indeed I remember actually relishing the challenge at the age of 10 as I sat down to write a letter of thanks to an uncle who had given me a book called Christian Art.

I knew that even the Archbishop of Canterbury would struggle to express any form of sincere gratitude for such a dreadful, ponderous anything-will- do gift, but I was determined not to be beaten. So I turned it into a game: writing a letter that sounded grateful but actually said, “You utter bastard. I hate you nearly as much as the present you gave me.”

First of all, spell their name ever so slightly wrong. And don’t worry if they are called something simple such as Tom. Just call them Tim. This sends out a subtle message that you have written them a letter, and paid 62p for a stamp, but that you aren’t even remotely close.

Next, tell them their gift was “amazing”. This is one of the most cunning words in the English language. It comes dripping with connotations — of Joseph’s dreamcoat and many wondrous things — but the truth is that if you really want to congratulate someone, you will use the word “brilliant” or “fantastic”.

Amazing is only used to describe your host’s soufflé, when it tasted of petrol, or an eight-year-old’s bassoon solo, on speech day, when it sounded like a dying wildebeest. Amazing means “amazingly bad”. You can smile and open your eyes wide and look as though you are showering the recipient with praise, but what you’re actually saying is, “You are a dog egg.”

Next, having said their present was terrible, you need to put it in context. For me as a child this meant listing all of the other things I had received for Christmas. So the letter would go something like this: “Dear Uncle Tom. Thank you for your book on Christian art. It was amazing. I also got a working crane, a complete Hornby 00-gauge railway set, a 6ft bear and a speedboat.” None of this was true but he wasn’t to know that.

You can apply a similar technique when thanking someone for a dreary party. Simply say it put you in mind of another party you both attended, and pick one that was absolutely fabulous and ended up as an orgy in the swimming pool.

You will then need a sign-off. I used to say, “It’s a shame I’m at boarding school because that means I can never see you”, but that’s tricky when you are 46 and the chief financial officer of a petrochemicals company. But don’t despair. Simply say how work keeps you in Nigeria a great deal these days and there’s so little time to catch up with old mates.

Once you get into the swing of this, writing a thank-you letter can be as much fun as playing Call of Duty or sitting in front of the television watching Manchester United lose.

And the cost of delivering this letter, if you pen it on a bit of photocopier paper, in your worst handwriting — which you should — is less than a pound.

In terms of value, that’s up there with a McMeal, the BBC licence fee and indeed this gigantic newspaper.

And there’s a whole army out there waiting to help you humiliate someone you no longer want as a friend. Don’t waste it. Get writing.


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1384246.ece

www.reddit.com/r/clarkson/comments/214wxr/sunday_times_column_9_march_2014_dear_uncle_tim/

[RedMoon11]

My Plan for Bringing Putin To Heel: Mutually Assured Derision

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 16 March 2014

In a moment of boredom last week I solved all the world’s problems. A bold claim, I know, but if my plan were implemented, there would be no more war, no more hijackings and no more jealously, bitterness or rage. And it’s so simple: there just has to be a lot more teasing.

At present teasing is seen as a dangerous midpoint stepping stone on the way to the dark shores of full-blown bullying.

It is frowned upon and in some cases completely illegal. You can actually go to prison for teasing someone about their religion or their skin colour. And at school expulsion awaits those who refer to a ginger as a “mutant” or a short person as a “Richard”.

But having spent last weekend in Australia, I know that, actually, teasing is a healing balm of righteousness. You see, deep down, the Aussies hate us Poms on a cellular level. They hate our culture and our brilliance as deeply as we hate their ridiculous passion for cooking in the garden. But our differences never come to anything because we tease one another relentlessly.

Walk into a Sydney pub and it begins immediately. “Backs to the wall, everyone. There’s a Pom in the bar.” “Ha. Nobody ever moved to Australia because of the success they made of life somewhere else.” “Hide your wallet under the soap — he won’t find it there.” “Jonny Wilkinson.” “The Ashes.” “Peter Andre.” “He’s one of yours.” “He bloody well is not.”

Sometimes it can be two hours before you actually get round to ordering a beer. And then it starts all over again. “It’ll be cold. I know you fellas like it warm.” “Better that way.” “Only because it never stops raining where you come from.”

We see a similar sort of thing in the upper echelons of the Premier League. At Chelsea we tease Manchester United fans for living round the corner, Liverpool fans for the cannibalistic nature of their striker and Arsenal fans for never quite winning anything. And they tease us for the magnificence of our football and the handsomeness of our manager. And as a result there’s rarely any fighting these days.

Which brings me on to Syria. Because one man is not allowed to make up football-style chants about another man’s interpretation of Muslim history, they are all rushing about in the streets, eating one another.

Good-natured banter obviously wasn’t allowed in Ukraine either, and consequently we now have half of Russia’s Black Sea fleet at anchor off the Crimean peninsula and Ed Miliband making adenoidal noises about taking very firb action.

Who knows? When Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler met, what if they’d spent the time teasing each other about their moustaches? Maybe if they had, there really would have been peace in our time.

Of course at this point people with sandals and a fridge full of weeds will be jumping up and down saying that teasing only really works when the two parties perceive themselves to be equal. That we can tease Australians because we’re sort of the same and Chelsea fans can tease Manchester United fans because both support big clubs. But it would be wrong for a 22-stone man mountain to tease a small boy.

Well, I’m sorry but this is exactly what’s wrong with the world. We feel we can tease only those who have never been persecuted in the past. So it’s fine to tease the Germans or the French but it’s absolutely not all right to tease Jewish or Irish people. That it’s acceptable for the poor to mock the rich but not for the rich to mock the poor.

This makes life almost totally impossible for Americans. Because they are king of the hill, the richest country on earth and the world’s only proper superpower, they do not feel they have the right to tease anyone. And with their African- American, Native American, affirmative-action attitude, they don’t even tease themselves. Which means the whole concept of ribbing has been pretty much erased from their culture. The result is that if you call someone from the States fat, his natural response is to fire up the gunship.

Right now they are feeling impotent in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. They know they can’t have a fight and they know they can’t not. So they feel stuck. As if they can’t do anything. But they can. Obama Barrack can go on television and say, with a bit of a smile, he won’t be pushed around by a country that thinks beetroot is a delicacy.

Hopefully this would cause Vladimir Putin to respond by saying Budweiser tastes like mouse pee, and pretty soon they’d be engaged in an Aussie/Pom-style banter war that would lead to nothing more harmful than a couple of back-slapping pints and an agreement that the scallywags can have Crimea if they leave the rest of the country alone.

If Mr Barrack wants some practice I think we’d all be happy for him to start on us. We really won’t mind. Make fun of our teeth and our pasty complexions. Then tell us the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine only really worked when it was put in a P-51 Mustang and “soccer” is for girls.

And when we come back to say that baseball is basically rounders and that the tune to your national anthem was written by a Brit, don’t get mad; get on the phone to The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin and ask him to come up with a witty response. Maybe something about how Fleetwood Mac were rubbish till Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham came along.

When you get a taste for it, have a go at the French and work your way down until eventually you’ll be laughing at the Afghans’ headdresses instead of dropping bombs on them.

I really do believe this: if every country, religious group and social class modelled its relationship with every other country, religious group and social class on the one enjoyed between Australia and Britain, the world would be a much better place.

It’s not hard. You just turn centuries of resentment into a good-natured argument about sport and beer.


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1387530.ece

www.reddit.com/r/clarkson/comments/214x0r/sunday_times_column_16_march_2014_my_plan_for/

[RedMoon11]

Saturday Morning Man’s Little Bit Of Rough

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 23 March 2014


Subaru Outback 2.0D Lineartronic SX, £31,495

WHEN IT comes to driving in Britain, Saturday morning is the new Sunday afternoon. Today’s Saturday morning driver is so hopeless he makes the Sunday afternoon dawdler look as if he’s Kimi Raikkonen.

The only reason he owns a car is for suburban drives to an antiseptic cathedral of primary colours, low, low prices and special offers. He loves going to the supermarket in his little car and he adores taking it to the garden centre. But what he craves most is a trip to B&Q because he can buy a large white good that fits in the boot of his hatchback.

His neighbours are sure to be impressed with the commodious nature of his car, and are deeply jealous at the way he plainly knows how to install the white good himself. Saturday morning drivers love DIY so much that many actually get an embarrassing stirring when they think of it.

Saturday Morning Man doesn’t drive during the week, which means he gets very little practice. Which means he is no good at it. What he is very good at, however, is obeying the letter of the law. He sticks rigidly to speed limits, accelerates gently to save fuel and applies his handbrake whenever he’s stationary. Naturally his car is always spotless. This is because he loves cleaning it almost as much as he loves installing a new boiler.

He loathes what’s become of Radio 2, hates immigrants and detests Top Gear. He cannot understand why anyone might find a car exciting. In his mind it isn’t. It is nothing more than a drain on his carefully managed finances. If he didn’t have to go to B&Q every Saturday he’d get rid of the damn thing.

Driving dynamics, exhaust noise, styling — all of these things are for fools and show-offs. A car is somewhere to sit while waiting for a space to become available in the garden centre’s car park. Engine off, of course. Handbrake on.

This explains why the cars you see on a Saturday morning are universally terrible. Certainly it’s the only time of the week when you will see Rover 200s, and Austin Metros. “What’s wrong with that? Modern cars are all built by foreigners and you can’t service them yourself any more,” says Saturday Morning Man.

Of course when the wheezing, asthmatic rot box is finally carted off to the scrapheap he is forced to buy something new. And the choice of what he buys is based on five things: price, a good review in Which?, price, price and “Is the boot big enough to swallow a fridge-freezer?”

A popular choice is the Toyota Yaris Verso. Or the Suzuki Wagon R. Or one of those Citroëny things, or a Fiat Doblo. Which? loves this sort of stuff. And Which? to Saturday Morning Man is a delicious combination of a health and safety leaflet and Razzle. All those diagrams. All that sensible advice. No long words. “Mmmm. Brenda, dear. I have to pop to the bathroom for a bit . .  .”

So.The Subaru Outback. If Saturday Morning Man was reading this — and he isn’t, because to him I am the devil — he would have fainted at the mere mention of this wondrous car. Because what you see in the pictures this morning is among the most economical 4x4 estates money can buy, with a combined fuel- consumption figure of 44.8mpg. For a large, five-door, four-wheel-drive estate car. And prices start at just £29,995.

There’s more too. It is not available with a petrol engine, it is not fitted with stupid satellite navigation — I don’t need the American military to tell me where B&Q is, thank you very much — and there are only four colours from which to choose: metallic silver, dark grey, deep blue and satin white.

And now we get to the critical make-or-break issue of oddment stowage space. Well, it’s not as good as a Citroën Berlingo Multispace, which comes with airline-style compartments in the roof — porn to a DIY enthusiast — but because so little equipment is fitted you do get an endless array of cubbyholes in which to store all the things you need for a trip to B&Q. Boiled sweets. Water. Wallet. And a back-up supply of boiled sweets.

There are also big door pockets into which you can put your proper road map, and a glovebox that is large enough for your documents and a copy of the Highway Code. “Best book ever written, in my opinion,” says Saturday Morning Man.

Apart from the fact that it was built by the same people who put Alec Guinness in a box, this car ticks all the boxes for Saturday Morning Man. It’s well made and economical, there’s no flimflam and the boot is huge. Plus it’s a little bit ugly as well.

For people who drive on other days of the week, however, there are a few issues. First of all, the gearbox. Instead of fitting a proper automatic you get what Subaru calls Lineartronic. Pah. It’s continuously variable transmission (CVT), a technology that has never really worked. And you’re not fooling anyone with those flappy paddles either.

The problem is that in a normal car the revs rise as your speed increases. But with CVT your speed rises to match whatever revs you have selected. So as you set off there’s a sort of mooing noise. Sometimes it sounds like they’re filming an episode of Bonanza under the bonnet.

The other problem with CVT is that it highlights the diesel engine’s roughness. It shouldn’t be rough. It’s a boxer — the four cylinders are horizontally opposed — which theoretically means better smoothness.

The ride’s not brilliant either. It’s not bumpy but it’s a bit jiggly. And while I know that £31,495 for the car I tested does represent a lot of metal for your money I do think it’s a bit spartan inside. And the equipment provided is wrong. I mean, cruise control? Here? In Britain? Why? And what are those three buttons for on the bottom left quadrant of the steering wheel? The top one tells you how long you’ve been driving. The middle one shuts down the bit of the dash that tells you how long you’ve been driving. And the bottom one turns it on again. Seems a bit pointless.

It’s strange. The old Subaru Legacy Outback was one of only three things that all three of the Top Gear presenters liked. It was a properly good car.

In many ways the new model is good too. On a farm or an estate it would be brilliant, I suspect, thanks to good ground clearance, all-wheel-drive grip and that amazing fuel economy. The only real drawback here is that it can’t tow much more than a small wheeled dog.

Elsewhere? Well, you can’t get anything else that does quite so much for less. Yes, it’s boring to drive, dismal to behold and the toys you get you’ll never use. But it’s sensible. That’s what it is. Sensible. Grown up. The sort of car that would say, “I like a joke as much as the next man, but . .  .” Which means, of course, that it doesn’t like a joke at all. It’s not built to be funny or amusing. It’s built to get your new washing machine home, even if you live up a muddy track.

Subaru Outback 2.0D Lineartronic SX

Engine
1998cc, 4 cylinders
Power
148bhp @ 3600rpm
Torque
258 lb ft @ 1600rpm
Transmission
CVT automatic
Acceleration
0-62mph: 9.7sec
Top speed
121mph
Fuel
44.8mpg
CO2
166g/km
Road tax
H (£285 for first year)
Price
£31,495
Release date
On sale now
Verdict
Mr Boring will love loading it up with fridges and boiled sweets

CRITIC'S RATING
**

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1389601.ece

[RedMoon11]

Welcome Aboard the Nasty Rash, Cruiser Loser. Let’s Go Spoil Venice

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 23 March 2014

Every time I visit a Pizza Express restaurant, I am torn between the Sloppy Giuseppe and the American Hot, but when the waitress turns up, I always order a Veneziana because, as the whole world must surely know by now, a percentage of the bill will then be spent on keeping the world’s most amazing city out of the sea.

Pizza Express’s backing of the Venice in Peril fund is almost certainly the longest continuous support of a single charity by a business. It’s been running since 1975 and to date £2m has been raised. Most of it by me.

But now, it seems, all of that is going to be wasted because the regional authorities have decided to overturn a ban on giant cruise liners entering the city’s famous lagoon.

This is the same as allowing coaches to enter the inner circle at Stonehenge. Or quad bikes into Westminster Abbey. It’s bonkers.

Environmentalists, of course, are howling more loudly than anyone else, saying that these huge ships damage the local ecosystem. But they’re missing the point. There is no ecosystem within 50 miles of Venice. It’s just one big turd soup. Nor is there a problem with wash, since the ships are nudged through the lagoon by tugs.

No. The big problem here is aesthetics. Because some of these ships are a thousand feet long, they are actually bigger than St Mark’s Square, so they totally dominate the view. Putting the MV Chlamydia in the middle of Venice is like putting a severed horse’s head in a bowl of pasta. The chef can waffle on as much as he likes about the delicate seasoning and momma’s recipe and the light drizzle of truffle oil, but all you’ll be thinking is, “Yes, but there’s a horse’s head in it.”

I’ve just realised that my simile doesn’t work. Because while a severed horse’s head is fairly grotesque, it is nothing compared with the eye-watering ugliness of a modern-day, slab-sided, top-heavy cruise liner. In fact, I’m struggling to think of anything that man has ever created that looks worse. The city of Archangel in northern Russia is a bit of an eyesore. And Paul McCartney’s hair is fairly dreadful. But these are trivial baubles next to the full-bore horror of the MV Legover.

Cruise liners are revolting and they have no place in Venice. In fact, they have no place in any of the world’s cities. I was in Sydney recently and my view of the opera house was completely obliterated by a 10-storey monster called the MV Diarrhoea. Much the same effect was achieved in St Tropez last year by the MV Hip Replacement.

And things are only going to get worse because last year the number of people who took a holiday on a cruise liner jumped by 10% to more than 20m. About 1.7m of these were British. And that staggers me because think of the holiday opportunities these people turned down. They could have gone on a coach tour of north Wales, or visited the mining museum near Barnsley. They could have gone to one of those enema and wheatgrass health farms in Norfolk, or spent a week being stung by wasps. All of these things would have been cheaper, and better, than going on a liner. Surely.

I know that the people on board imagine they’re living the life of Billy Zane in Titanic, in a wing collar, saying “Bzzz absurd” when the teasthingy is the wrong shape, but the truth is that a modern-day cruise liner is more like a big floating Pontins.

Genuinely, I cannot think of anything I’d like to do less. A long, vomitous week in a giant shopping centre, trying desperately to avoid the attention of a lascivious sixtysomething divorcée, knowing that soon either you will get food poisoning or you will crash into Sardinia or you will be cornered by a party of four people from Rhyl who want to talk about all the other cruises they’ve been on.

And what’s the upside? Not the view, that’s for sure, because every time the sea does something interesting, you will be in the bathroom, talking to God on the great white telephone, and hoping with all of your heart that you do crash into Sardinia as soon as possible.

This is entirely likely, because as far as I can tell, most of the crew on a cruise liner spend most of their time giving all of the passengers thrush.

You may imagine that the captain is a smart Edward Smith-type figure, up there on the bridge, scanning the horizon for obstacles. But he isn’t. He’s called Giovanni, he’s 35 and he’s in his cabin with an orange X Factor runner-up called Michelle.

Doubtless the brochure will speak of many exotic stopping-off points. Venice may be one of them. But the truth is that in most places you’ll park in a container port and then you’ll be told to be back on board by six. Which doesn’t give you time to do anything even remotely interesting.

In Barbados, for example, there is much to see and do, if you go by plane and stay a while. But the best thing you can do is pop into the rather nondescript capital and spend a couple of hours laughing your arse off at the cruise liner people mooching about saying, “Well, we’ve seen the Caribbean’s oldest synagogue. And now it’s time to leave.”

I suppose in some ways cruise liners do the rest of us a service. Because they attract the sort of dullards and desperate divorcées who you really don’t want to find propping up the bar where you’ve chosen to go on holiday.

Maybe that’s why Venice’s regional authorities have decided to allow liners into the lagoon. Because if the passengers can see the city from on board, they will feel less inclined to get off and clutter up the streets with their nasty clothes and their idiotic opinions.

I’m sorry, though. No. At present, I am happy to pay 25p per pizza to help preserve Venice, because it’s not a world heritage site. It’s the world heritage site. But if its skyline and waterways become dominated by the 60,000-ton MV Shagfest, then it’s no longer worth preserving. And I’ll simply have an American Hot instead.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1390263.ece

[RedMoon11]

Abracadabra! A Cloak of Invisibility for Millionaires

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 30 March 2014

VW Golf R, £29,900

WE ALL know, because we are constantly reminded, that Boris Johnson went to Eton. And that behind the soup-stained suit and the hair that was styled by the wind and erosion, there is a lump of cash keeping the wolf from the door. And yet Boris drives a very old, very battered and extremely awful Toyota Previa people carrier.

You may imagine that this is because he doesn’t like cars. Aha. But he does. He used to write a motoring column for GQ magazine and he once said that voting Tory would increase both the size of your wife’s breasts and your likelihood of owning a BMW M3. Note the specifics there. He didn’t just say a BMW. He picked out the model that he knew would hit the voter sweet spot.

So why, you may be wondering, does Boris not actually have an M3? Simple. Because he knows that, these days, driving a flash car is as socially acceptable as laying a brownie in a neighbour’s swimming pool. And then inviting them out to look at it.
A car that leaps immediately to mind is the Maserati Quattroporte. It looks like the sort of Ford Zephyr that Detective Chief Inspector John Watt had in Softly Softly, so that’s good, but sadly it makes the sort of noise that could actually bring John Watt back to life.

And at parties, when asked what you’re driving, you have to say “a Maserati”. Which is the same as whipping out a Fabergé egg and saying, with a pantomime grin, “What do you think of that, eh?”

There’s a similar problem with BMW. Right now it is the best car maker in the world. Its foray into electric propulsion hasn’t come at the expense of the petrol-powered dinosaurs, many of which are simply sublime. And gone are the days when chintz ruled. Sitting inside, say, a 435i is a bit like sitting inside the mind of a Danish architect. It’s minimalist and sharp, and there’s no clutter at all.

But the image is lagging behind the reality. So I’m afraid that, despite the excellence of the cars, telling someone that you have a BMW is about the same as saying, “You know all that pensions mis-selling malarkey? Well, that was me.”

The upshot is that realistically you need to buy a car with a rubbish badge, which brings us nicely on to Nissan. Possibly this is the worst brand name of them all because nothing is quite as good at saying your life has been a total failure. Yup. You’ve bought a car named after a corrugated iron hut.

If you tell someone you have a Nissan, all sorts of things will spring to their mind, none of them pleasant. They’ll envisage a Micra, with its stupid Noddy face, or a Juke, which was plainly designed by a child. Or a Bluebird, a car that was notable only for having two trip meters. And that’s great because no one will know that parked outside is a four-wheel-drive, twin-turbocharged giant-killing monster.

The GT-R is fabulous. Built in a hermetically sealed factory, it sits on tyres that are filled with nitrogen for pressure stability. There is attention to detail in this thing that makes eye surgery look slap-happy.


Like the exterior styling, the cabin gives few clues to the Golf R’s capabilities

But sadly there’s a problem with the styling. Back in the days when it was called a Skyline all was well, because then it had the appearance of a Tokyo taxi. Today, though, it’s a bit “look at me”. And that is precisely what we are trying to avoid.

It’s weird, isn’t it? There’s a huge market out there for cars that are inspiring to drive but that could pass through a library without causing anyone to look up. Yet the options are so limited that today Boris Johnson is forced to go about his business in a Toyota van. And God knows what the current director-general of the BBC has — a Brompton foldaway bicycle, probably.

Happily, however, help is at hand in the shape of a new Volkswagen Golf. It’s called the R, and I shall say right at the outset that I have not yet driven it, or seen it. And yet it fills my heart with hope because on paper it looks absolutely perfect.

I spent an hour or two on VW’s online configurator this morning, adding all the things I would want fitted as optional extras, and the final price was £34,000. A lot for a Golf. But not a lot at all for what you’re getting here.

Under the bonnet it has the same basic 2-litre turbo engine as you find in the GTI. But by fiddling with the boost from the turbocharger, the valves and the pistons, the engineers have upped the power to nigh-on 300bhp. That’s almost 80bhp more than in the GTI. Which is probably why it’s been fitted with four-wheel drive.

Of course we’ve seen four-wheel-drive Golfs before, and they’ve been very impressive in a straightforward, no-nonsense, keep-you-going-in-snow kind of way. But on the R the all-wheel- drive system is allied to VW’s new electronic differential — pay attention at the back — and that is a combination that makes me drool extensively.

The grip afforded by that diff in a front-wheel-drive GTI boggles the mind, so God alone knows what levels of barnacle tenacity will be achieved by its electronic wizardry and all-wheel drive. I should imagine your face will come off before the car actually loses traction.

The word is that, to drive, this vehicle is sensational, but, better than that, it looks like the sort of Golf that your mum has. It doesn’t even get the red line on the radiator grille that you find on a GTI. You could take an R to a meeting of the Socialist Workers party and they’d embrace you as a brother. It’s that nondescript.

Which for many, many people makes it absolutely perfect.

Volkswagen Golf R

Engine
1984cc, 4 cylinders
Power
296bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque
280 lb ft @ 1800rpm
Transmission
6-speed manual
Acceleration
0-62mph: 5.1sec
Top speed
155mph
Fuel
38.9mpg (combined)
CO2
165g/km
Vehicle tax band
G (£175 for first year)
Price
£29,900
Release date
On sale now
Verdict
Goes like a rocket, sticks like a limpet

CRITIC'S RATING ****

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1392519.ece

[RedMoon11]

With A Banana and A Smile I’ll See Off Putin, Killer Dust and Ebola

Published: 6 April 2014

As I write, London is bathed in the soft pastel mist of a beautiful spring morning. Children are playing in the parks, the magnolia trees are in full bloom and all the indicators suggest that everyone’s house is now worth a billion pounds.

Sadly, though, the magic of the moment has been rather lost because we are told that a giant cloud of killer dust is on its way and that soon the streets will be full of dead pensioners, their lives snuffed out by a deadly cocktail of sand and dust from the Sahara and toxic particles from all of those poorly maintained lorries in France.

Experts have even drawn up a chart, which shows that in East Anglia the level of pollution will be a terrifying 10.

Everyone has been warned to stay indoors, do no exercise and eat seven portions of fruit and vegetables every hour. Jogging, apparently, would be “sheer stupidity”.

On top of all this, there’s a suggestion that a recent outbreak of ebola in rural west Africa has now reached the cities and could be arriving at terminal 5 within hours. And that there is nothing our Border Force can do to stop it because it has been instructed by the prime minister to spend every waking hour finding out what the sinister-sounding Muslim Brotherhood stands for and what it’s doing in Britain. And, of course, on the BBC rolling news channel there are many stories about climate change, slavery, Aids, inequality and how the bungled sale of the Royal Mail will bring poverty and disease to all corners of Britain by nightfall.

It’s strange. I thought that at lunchtime I might go for a walk in Holland Park to look at the squirrels. But instead I shall be under the bed in a hazmat suit, chomping furiously on my stockpile of bananas and wondering which of the many threats will get me first. The dust, the ebola or a Muslim extremist? Or maybe in the best traditions of multiple choice, it’ll be d) none of the above. Because we keep being told that there’s a very real threat that the problems in Ukraine could spark an all-out thermonuclear war between Europe and Russia.

In other words, life has never seemed so gloomy and pointless. It’s just layer upon layer of fear. Except it isn’t, because behind the headlines there is absolutely nothing to worry about at all.

This sandstorm, for instance. “Experts” tell us it will send pollution levels soaring to 10, but 10 is a made-up figure, designed to make the whole thing seem more serious than it really is. Yes, if you are a chronic asthmatic with one cancerous lung and you go for a long uphill bicycle ride, you will experience a shortness of breath. But for everyone else the worst that can happen is that some dust will land gently on your car.

Then there’s the business in eastern Europe, which represents about as much of a threat to our health and wellbeing as a wet vest. Ukraine was overrun by a mob. The elected president fled. And those who supported him, especially in Crimea, were left thinking, “Well, that’s spiffing.” So, in what historians will see as a political masterstroke, Vladimir Putin simply brought them under his wing with barely a shot fired. It was a brilliant solution, and the only real problem is for producers of the world’s atlases.

So what about ebola? We are informed, solemnly, that if this hideous little virus were ever to board a plane, the world’s population would be dead in two weeks. And not dead in a nice way either. Because in the late stages it liquefies your internal organs, which then leak out. That’s not a good way to go, sitting there with your liver coming out of your eyes, knowing that soon you will explode, showering all your family with blood so infected that within hours they’ll be leaking and exploding as well.

But here’s the thing. Contrary to what we have been taught by Dustin Hoffman, it’s actually quite hard to catch ebola. You either have to eat a bat or snog someone who has the disease. So, realistically, it will be contained in western Africa and will not be popping round to your house any time soon. Remember Sars? Remember bird flu? They were going to kill us all, and they just sort of didn’t, because ultimately a virus is stupid and we are not.

Unless, of course, we are talking about this Muslim Brotherhood business. Because last week David Cameron suddenly loomed out of the smog to tell us that he wanted to know everything about it. That sounded very ominous. Especially as we have now handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban. Er, sorry. I meant democratically elected government there.

Well, as I see it, the Brotherhood is a collection of wildly disparate individuals who all share the goal of wanting people to live life according to the Good Book. So in that respect it’s a bit like the Church of England. At present it’s attempting to change the government, the way of life and the minds of many millions of people in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Somalia, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, Indonesia, Sudan and so on. I suspect, therefore, that shooting Eric Pickles is a long way down the “To do” list. Big though the target might be.

Maybe this optimism is foolish. Maybe I should pay more attention to my fruit’n’fibre intake and the quality of the air and climate change and political instability on the other side of the world. Maybe we are all going to be killed by an atomic bomb or a giant meteorite and maybe Ed Miliband really is on course for victory in the next election. There are many, many dreadful things that might happen. And you could spend all of the day and all of the night worrying about them.

Or, how about this for a plan? At present many people say in their will that they would like Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life to be sung at their funeral. Wouldn’t it be better, though, if you didn’t wait till you were dead? Try singing it now.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1396469.ece

 

[Wyvern]

Jeremy's column there is utterly wonderful, and so is he.

*wanders off singing Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

[RedMoon11]

You’ll Need a Hammer to Belt the Built-in Driving Instructor
Published: 13 April 2014


Renault Captur, from £12,495


WHEN THE McLaren MP4-12C was first introduced, many commentators, myself included, noted that while it was technologically magnificent, it didn’t do much to make a car enthusiast pant and whimper. It felt, sounded and looked a bit boring.

Well, that car has gone now and in its stead we find the 650S. It’s broadly similar to its predecessor but McLaren has tried its level best to make it more raunchy. Which is why it features something called a “cylinder cut” function that causes the engine to snuffle and pop and bang on the overrun.

Sorry, but I’m not convinced. In the olden days when engines were fed with carburettors, and the polar bear hadn’t been invented, fuel was sort of hosed into the engine even when it wasn’t really necessary. As a result, it would emerge from the cylinders unused and explode only when it came into contact with the hot exhaust. The popping, snuffly sound that resulted was the sound of money being converted into nothing but noise.

There is absolutely no need for that to happen now, not when an engine is fed by a computer-guided fuel-injection system. So, if an engine is popping and snuffling and banging you, know that the sound is fake. It’s not the sound of engineering. It’s the sound of marketing. And I don’t like that.

And Jaguar, you can stop pretending to look out of the window, because you’re guilty of exactly the same crime. The new F-type makes all sorts of noises that you just know were added to the mix after the car was finished. They’re not real.

Tinkering with the sound a car makes was first done by Ferrari, which fitted the 355 with a flap in the exhaust. In normal driving conditions, when the EU noise inspectors were listening, they were closed and all was serene. Under heavy acceleration, after the man from the EU had ticked the box, they opened and all hell broke loose.

Aston Martin’s engineers, when they first discovered this, said “the cheating bastards”. And then promptly fitted the same system on their cars. And that’s fine. That’s using engineering to push the rules. But using engineers to create sound for sound’s sake? No.

And that brings me on to the fake vents in the new Range Rover’s front doors. Why would you want vents in the door? What are they for? Styling details only work if they appear to be the result of an actual requirement.

You look, for example, at the rear of a Ford Kuga and you think: “That under-the-bumper ironmongery. Really?” Because it isn’t ironmongery. It’s just a bit of plastic, glued in place to make the car look a bit more rough and tumble.

My car has a carbon-fibre diffuser under its rear bumper and I’ve always wondered about that as well. In fact, I even asked the Stig about it the other day because he knows about this sort of stuff. “Does that make any difference to the car at all?” I said. “Well, it makes it a bit heavier,” he said.

But when it comes to cars that really are writing cheques their bodies can’t cash, the prize must go to Renault’s new Captur. Because almost everything fitted to this car is either completely unnecessary or baffling.

Let us start with the air quality read-out. At first, I thought it was some kind of device that allows the driver to select how nice he or she would like the air to be in the cabin. And I was a bit puzzled because who would ever say, “Right. For this journey, I would like the air in my car to be poor, like the inside of James May’s underpants”?

However, after I had located my spectacles, I realised that, actually, it is there to tell you about the quality of the air on the outside of the car. Right. And what am I supposed to do with this information? It’s like those signs you get on mountain roads saying “falling rocks”. Yes. And?

I wouldn’t mind but it plainly doesn’t work because during my time with the Captur, mother nature was scooping up half of the Sahara desert, mixing it up with all the emissions from Europe’s lorries and power stations and depositing the unholy cocktail all over southeast England. The newspapers were full of familiar views that were obscured almost completely by the airborne soup, and a government adviser was telling people to do no exercise and stay indoors. And yet, despite this, the Captur was saying that air quality was good.

Unless I drove past the hedge outside my flat. Then it said the air quality was bad. I don’t know what’s in that hedge. A pap usually.


The Captur is fitted with unnecessary gizmos – such as an external air-quality reader


It wasn’t just the air-quality meter that left me baffled. Because what is this car exactly? It is powered by an 898cc three-cylinder turbo engine so it sounds like it should be a small runabout. Certainly, it isn’t fast. It’s not even on nodding acquaintance with fast. The figures suggest it goes from 0 to 60 in 13 seconds but I reckon this would only be possible if you pushed it out of the back of a Hercules transport plane.

And yet despite the smallness of the engine and the lethargy that results, it looks like some kind of Range Rover wannabe. It’s raised and big and fitted with all sorts of styling details that hint of a yearning to be in the jungle. So, it’s a teddy bear dressed up as Bear Grylls.

But it’s neither of those things. It’s actually your driving instructor, because as you go along it marks you for the quality of your acceleration, the smoothness of your braking and your anticipation. It kept telling me my acceleration wasn’t very good. And I kept telling it that if it had a bigger engine I wouldn’t have to stand on the throttle quite so heavily. And that if it didn’t STFU, I’d hit it with a hammer.

You can sense this personality disorder in its name. Because the car I tested was called — and I am not making this up — the Renault Captur Dynamique MediaNav Energy TCe 90 Stop & Start. Not since Frank Zappa was let loose with a list of christening names has anyone come up with something as stupid as that.

Even the price is odd. Without extras, and there are loads, it’s £14,995. That’s a lot for a three-cylinder car. But it’s cheap for a five-door school-run-mobile.

To try to make sense of it all, I turned to Renault, which says it’s the company’s first “supermini crossover, a stylish, innovative, fun to drive and keenly priced car that combines MPV versatility with SUV looks and family hatchback refinement, ride and handling”.

Right. I see. And to whom will this mishmash appeal? Well, it’ll be “couples of all ages, young families and style-conscious single households”.

I seriously doubt that. Because in attempting to make a car that appeals to everyone, they’ve ended up with something that suits nobody. It’s just layer upon layer of marketing, smothered over the running gear of a Nissan Juke.

If you want a small car, save yourself at least £4,000 on the base model and buy a Volkswagen Up!. Because that’s just a beautifully made, well conceived, uncomplicated piece of engineering.


Renault Captur Dynamique MediaNav Energy TCe 90 Stop & Start

Engine
898cc, 3 cylinders
Power
90bhp @ 5250rpm
Torque
99 lb ft @ 2500rpm
Transmission
6-speed manual
Acceleration
0-62mph: 13sec
Top speed
106mph
Fuel
56.5mpg
CO2
115g/km
Road tax band
C (free for first year)
Price
£14,995
Release date
On sale now
Verdict
As authentic as a vegetarian sausage

CRITIC'S RATING **


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1398218.ece

[RedMoon11]

I’ve Heeded My Snob Gene Long Enough, Rembrandt — Just Point Me to the Exit

Published: 20 April 2014

Recently announced figures show that last year nearly 7m people visited the British Museum. Of course some of these visitors will have been schoolchildren who had no choice in the matter. But a great number will have been tourists and I find that astonishing because what in God’s name possesses Johnny Foreigner to say, “Right. Here I am in London. And what I want most of all is to see an Anglo-Saxon arrow head”?

Things are even worse in Paris, where 9.2m people woke up last year and set off to the Louvre simply so they could look at what is in essence a cracked old stamp with a lopsided woman on it.

I think we have a snob gene. It’s the same bit of DNA that causes us to sit on a beach, reading a book we don’t want to read about stuff in which we are not interested, because we think that if we sit there reading something with a speedboat and an explosion on the cover we will look idiotic in front of our peers.

And I fear I am a sufferer because I awoke a couple of weeks ago in the glorious city of St Petersburg. It was a beautiful, warm spring morning and I had a few hours to kill. That’s my idea of heaven: a city I haven’t been to before and nothing to do all morning but snout about in its back passages, stopping occasionally to people-watch in various pavement cafes. But no. I was gripped by the snob gene and knew that I must visit the city’s truly gigantic State Hermitage Museum. Must visit. Must visit. Must visit . . .

Upon arrival I was offered the services of a guide but I am wise in these matters and declined because guides never quite know how to throttle back on their enthusiasm, which means you must stand in front of every single exhibit for an hour while she explains in a language that is only on nodding terms with English why this tiny piece of broken pottery is in fact the single most interesting thing in the entire world.

And you stand there with an aching back, thinking, “If you were any good at languages you’d be working at the EU, earning a million pounds a minute, not working for tips in a room full of old coins.”

I’ve had trips to the Kremlin, the Smithsonian in Washington and all of the 17,000 houses in which Ernest Hemingway once lived ruined by guides who simply don’t realise I’m only there to say I’ve been. Not to actually learn anything.

I mean, take the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. People only visit that because if they didn’t all their friends would imagine they’d spent their entire time in the city smoking weed and catching chlamydia. But do the guides get that? Nope. So you’re hauled round by a bossy fat woman who really and genuinely believes that we care about the microscopic differences between Rembrandt’s paintings, all of which, so far as I can tell, were of businessmen in darkened rooms having meetings.

And don’t think the audiovisual alternatives in museums are any better, because all it takes is one moment of inattentiveness — one left when you should have gone right — and you spend the rest of the day being told that the Viking boat in front of which you’re standing is a 17th-century vase. And the only way you can correct your mistake is to go back to the entrance and start again.

“ I don’t need a guide dog,” I said as I breezed through the Hermitage’s non-wheelchair-friendly entrance and into a room that was decked out like Liberace’s bathroom and about 25 times bigger than any ocean liner.

It was absolutely vast and it was stuffed from floor to ceiling with various bowls. Some were for the storage of potpourri; others were tureens for soup. None was interesting.

As the minutes ticked by I must confess that I started to skip some of the cabinets. Because I didn’t have all the time in the world and I could see through the haze — a few miles away — there was a door into another room, which turned out to be even more enormous and even more vulgar.

And guess what. Yup. It too was filled from floor to ceiling with more bowls. And about six billion teapots.

Now I know that around the world there are many museums dedicated to slightly odd things. In Britain there is a museum for lawnmowers and in San Francisco there’s one for sex toys. The French have one for instruments of torture and the Icelanders — as I’m sure you know — have a room in which pe-nises from all of the island’s species are displayed. But teapots? I mean, come on.

Eventually, while trying desperately to find the exit so I could have a nice sit-down at a pavement cafe, I stumbled across a room full of paintings. Mostly they depicted businessmen in darkened rooms having meetings, so I knew them to be Rembrandts. But one caught my eye. It showed a naked woman lying on a bed welcoming the Greek god Zeus, who — get this — impregnates her with a “shower of gold”.

This is the trouble with museums. Each usually has one thing that makes a visit worthwhile. London’s Natural History Museum has the huge dinosaur. The Louvre has the lopsided lady. The Smithsonian has the Bell X-1 supersonic aircraft. The pe-nis museum has the sperm whale’s member and the Hermitage has a woman who’s been immortalised for all time because she told her husband she’d got pregnant after a god peed on her.

It makes me wonder. Instead of having a museum with one good thing and then filling the rest of the space with arrow heads and teapots, why not have a world museum full of all the one good things? It could be the world museum of excellence and we should put it somewhere such as Dortmund, which has no other attractions worth speaking of.

That way we could be free to enjoy our time in Amsterdam or London or St Petersburg without the constant nagging need to visit a museum simply so we don’t look as stupid as we’d rather be.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1401240.ece

Danae
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn.
Oil on canvas. 185 x 202.5 cm (73 in × 80 in)(8ft x 10ft)
Holland. 1636

www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/index.html

 

*I love art museums, I majored in art history, and would happily spend my vacation time in them*

[Wyvern]

There's a Matisse room in the Hermitage (actually, there are more than one) and on one wall is a huge piece called 'Music' which hangs opposite its companion piece, called 'The Dance'. They are very simple compositions that utilise a very limited colour palette, and in some ways pre-empt some of Matisse's later figural collages. And to a sixteen-year-old me, standing in the middle of that room, they were the most mind-blowing thing I had ever seen in my short life.

So yeah. There's a lot of stuff you can live without in The Hermitage - but if you're ever in St Petersburg, visit it anyway. Because in amongst all its treasures that interest you not one whit, you will find your Danae, or your Music and Dance.

[RedMoon11]

Today’s Explorers Only Boldly Go Where Everyone’s Gone Before

Published: 27 April 2014

Nine days ago an enormous avalanche on Everest killed 16 Sherpa guides and now their colleagues have staged a walkout, saying that the government compensation of around £240 per victim isn’t really enough. They may have a point.

An all-out strike would leave around 330 fee-paying western climbers stranded at base camp, as most have neither the skill nor the know-how to reach the summit without assistance from the Sherpas. And I’m sure at this point you’re thinking the same as me — 330!

Yup. It seems the world’s highest mountain has become something of a conveyor belt in recent years. On one single day in 2012, 234 people reached the peak, and last year an altercation between two parties climbing the mountain led to a mass brawl. To date 4,000 or more people have climbed it. Many even got back down again.

The mountain has become big business for the Nepalese government, which charges each climber £5,900 in permit fees. And that’s on top of the cost of the expedition. It also insists that each climber takes home 8kg of rubbish to try to reduce the mounds of litter that are to be found at the camp sites.

And all of this raises a question: if you want some fresh air and a bit of a thrill, what’s wrong with Alton Towers?

Hmmm. From the late 18th through to the early 20th century hardcore expeditioning made sense because much of the world was unknown. We had Roald Amundsen, the Norweigian who went to the South Pole because, well, because it was there and no one else had been. And all of those sailors looking for the Northwest Passage. And John Hanning Speke stomping about in Africa, having a wonderful time and occasionally hunting for the source of the Nile.

Back then we had chaps such as George Mallory, who stayed on at Cambridge for an extra year so he could write an essay. Yup. Twelve months to write an essay. Then he decided to climb Everest to see if there were any fossils up there. Important work.

This all sounds terribly romantic and interesting but most believe it’s no longer possible to do exploring these days. Africa is full of tourists pointing at hippos. Everest is a rubbish tip. And if you want to go up an Alp you can simply take a chair lift.

Being an explorer, then, is like being a town crier or a typewriter manufacturer or one of those men who went around at dawn extinguishing streetlamps. It doesn’t matter how much the idea appeals, it’s pointless and nobody is going to fund your expedition.

You’d expect people to move on and get jobs designing iPhones. But no. They simply think of new ways of going where absolutely everyone has been before. This is why we are forever being treated to stories in the newspapers about some steely-eyed Oxbridge chap who’s just become the first man to hop to the North Pole, just weeks after he became the first man to climb Mont Blanc wearing nothing but a jockstrap.

Expeditions are getting more and more bonkers. The Atlantic is chock- full of servicemen who had their legs blown off in Afghanistan and are now rowing to Barbados. And the Andes is awash with people licking rocks to get a bit of moisture. Soon even space will jam up with Richard Branson and various loony Austrians jumping out of their helium balloons.

I’m just as bad. When I arrived by car at the Magnetic North Pole I climbed out and thought, “Nobody’s done this before.” It made me happy. Similarly in Chile several years ago I kept on driving up a volcano, even though I felt like death, because I wanted to drive a car at a higher altitude than had been achieved. Only when we reached 17,200ft and the film crew started to faint did I see sense and come back down again.

For most people the modern world is a wondrous place full of medicine and food and fizzy drinks in vending machines. But for explorer types it’s a miserable place. Because almost everything that can be done has been done already. And our thirst for firsts is not going to be quenched by sitting at a desk designing apps.

All of which brings me on to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, which — best guess — is sitting 17,000ft beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. That’s only about three miles or so down. But realistically we can’t get there. A modern nuclear submarine, for instance, can dive to around 2,400ft before its hull collapses. And that’s not even half a mile.

In the early Sixties a manned submersible did reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which is almost seven miles down in the Pacific, but no one attempted to repeat the feat until 2012, when the film director James Cameron successfully piloted a torpedo to what is the deepest part of the ocean. It’s more than a mile deeper than Everest is high. The pressure down there, using the internationally recognised unit of measurement, is like lying on your back with 50 jumbo jets sitting on your chest.

Of all the living space on the planet 99% is under water. And we’ve only explored 5% of it. Today we know of 212,906 marine species, but scientists reckon there could easily be 25m down there in the murky depths. That’s almost 24.8m species here on our planet that no one has ever seen.

Don’t you find that remarkable? We’re building rockets so we can travel at least 35m miles to Mars while all we’ve come up with to explore the sea is a snorkel. We’re going to explore strange new worlds and seek out new civilisations before we’ve even had a look over the garden fence.

Even more strangely, the world is full of people who will climb the highest mountain and hop across the Sahara. But ask these people to check out what’s under the waves and all you get is, “Ooh no, I might get my hair wet.”

Why? Because if you truly want to be alone and to go where no one has gone before, it’s the only place left. There’s no litter. No queues. No noise. It is, as the writer Jules Verne said, “the living infinite”.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1403670.ece

[RedMoon11]

Jumping GTIs — The Beancounters Have Been at the Chilli

Published: 27 April 2014

The Suzuki Swift Sport is a hot hatch in the tradition of the 1980s greats such as the Peugeot 205 GTI and Mk 2 Golf GTI

Suzuki Swift Sport 3dr, £13,999

WHENEVER I pop into the newsagent’s to buy a paper, I am easily able to leave again without stealing a chocolate bar. It simply doesn’t enter my head to break the law.

Likewise I have never murdered anyone in a meeting. It’s crossed my mind, of course — I work for the BBC — but not once have I actually picked up one of the Fairtrade, nuclear-free peace pencils and plunged it into the chairman’s eye socket.

I suppose that I must have broken a law at some stage in my adult life, but sitting here now I simply cannot think what it may have been. I’ve never stolen anything, though the temptation is strong at those useless Tesco self-service checkouts. I’ve never mugged or pickpocketed or stabbed anyone. I’m basically Jesus, except — unlike him — I’ve never even knocked over a moneylender’s table.

Almost everyone reading this article will be in the same boat. Squeaky, Daz’n’Omo whiter than white. Until you get behind the wheel of a car. Then you break the law absolutely all the time.

You speed as a matter of course — oh yes you do. You gamble on amber and sometimes get it a bit wrong, you make illegal right turns when you think no one is looking, you park on yellow lines, you use your mobile phone occasionally and can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say that you have never driven when you think you could be a bit over the limit from the night before?

Jack Straw is a decent man. An honourable man. A law-abiding man. But he was photographed recently, sitting in his car on the motorway, eating a banana. He knows that this could put him on the wrong side of the law and yet he obviously thought, “Phooey. I don’t care.” So why when he’s walking past a church collection tin doesn’t he think, “I’ll have that”?

I believe I have the answer. It’s because almost all the laws of the land are sensible. They simply tell us not to do what we had no intention of doing anyway. Not murdering, not stealing and not coveting our neighbour’s ox are what separate human beings from the animals.

But all the rules of the road are rubbish. Straw knows when he is sitting in a traffic jam on the M6 that no harm will come to anyone if he eats a banana. I know that when I’m at that junction by the BBC in west London, if I do a right turn from Wood Lane onto the Westway, it will inconvenience not a soul. You know that if you do 85mph on the motorway, all will be well.

Killing an elephant for its tusks is bad and wrong. Pulling up on a yellow line and nipping into the shop for some milk isn’t.

Drinking? Well, we all know that it’s extremely unwise to drive a car when we can’t say “Peter Piper picked”, let alone the rest of it, but the morning after a few glasses of wine, when we feel completely normal? It’s difficult to accept that our reactions might be a bit off. They probably aren’t.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if all the country’s motoring rules were scrapped. My guess is: nothing at all.

There are those who say that rigorously enforcing speed limits saves lives, but anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that’s simply untrue. Better road design and improved occupant protection in cars are why the fatality figures keep dropping. So would we all do a million if there were no speed limits? I doubt it. And certainly not with petrol at £400 a litre.

Would we all drive drunk? No, because we realise it’s silly. Would we all jump red lights and go the wrong way round roundabouts and park in the middle of junctions? No, again. Common sense would stop us doing any of that.

It’d be anarchy out there, and I mean that in the old sense of the word: a perfect state where no government is needed. In fact the only rule I’d keep is the yellow box. Because that makes sense. In fact I’d increase the punishment for stopping on one from a penalty charge to death by sniper fire.

Anyway, I’ll let you chew on that while we move on to the road test — the really rather marvellous Suzuki Swift Sport.

There’s a tendency today to make hot hatchbacks extremely fast and large and gaudy. But all of that rather misses the point. A hot hatchback should be a normal hatchback with just a little bit of spiciness sprinkled into the mix. That’s what you got with the originals: the Volkswagen Golfs and the Peugeot 205s and the Ford Escorts. And it’s what you get with the Swift Sport.

The 1.6-litre engine has not been fitted with a turbo or supercharged with electricity. It’s simply been given high- lift camshafts — I’m drooling — so that you end up with a revvy 134bhp. “Pah,” the armchair enthusiasts will say. “My Magimix has more grunt than that.”

Yes, but because the Swift is so light — it weighs just 1,045kg — you end up with 128bhp per ton. Which is almost what you used to get from the Peugeot 205 GTI. And that car was a legend.



It’s not fast, not if you compare it with a Golf R or a Mercedes A 45 AMG, but it is fun. It handles beautifully and has a puppy-dog enthusiasm when you’re in the mood. Critically, however, it becomes just a normal small hatch when you aren’t. So, as standard you get features such as climate control, Bluetooth connectivity and so on.

There are various extras too that can be fitted either by you at home or by a dealer. I’m a bit confused by this because the cost of, say, a silver-finish trim for the dashboard is £75.97 or, if you buy the pieces and fit them yourself, £56.17. So you save £19.80 but end up with two broken fingers and a dash that’s all wonky. And covered in blood.

This brings us on to the question of quality. The Swift feels Japanese. There’s an Oriental sharpness to the brakes and a sense that all the equipment will work perfectly for seven years precisely. And then not work at all. But the Swift isn’t Japanese. It’s built in Hungary, mainly for the Indian market, by a company that’s part German.

It’s a market forces car, then. A beancounter special. And usually that’s a recipe for disaster. But somewhere along the line someone who really knows about cars was able to inject a bit of magic into the mix. And what we’ve ended up with is a fun car that is available with three or five doors for £13,999 and £14,499 respectively. That is very good value.

It even comes with space in the back for children. I know this because I had to give Richard Hammond a lift and he didn’t moan once about being cramped.

As you can probably tell, I liked this car a lot. After the more expensive Fiesta ST it’s the best old-school hot hatch there is. But you won’t buy one because it’s a Suzuki and that sounds a bit downmarket. This means you’re daft. And that, I suppose, is why you are required to drive with both hands on the wheel, at 30mph, while not eating a banana or talking on the telephone.

Suzuki Swift Sport 3dr

Engine
1586cc, 4 cylinders
Power
134bhp @ 6900rpm
Torque
118 lb ft @ 4400rpm
Transmission
6-speed manual
Acceleration
0-62mph in 8.7sec
Top speed
121mph
Fuel
44.1mpg
CO2
147g/km
Vehicle tax band
F (£145 a year)
Price
£13,999
Release date
On sale now
Verdict
The best horse ever designed by committee
CRITIC'S RATING * * * *

If you like the sound of the Suzuki Swift Sport, go to driving.co.uk to browse the used models available

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/article1402912.ece

[RedMoon11]

The mpg is Unbeatable — Until You Want It to Move

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 4 May 2014


Lexus CT 200h Advance

IN THE latter stages of my grandmother’s mental illness she would drive into Doncaster and spend a pleasant afternoon in the town’s poshest dress shop, corpsing with derisive laughter at everyone who came out of the changing rooms. “No,” she’d howl, pointing at the frock the customer had just tried on. “Nooo, noooo, noooo. Silly. Horrid. Nasty.”

I wish I had the courage to do the same thing, because some of the retail choices people make leave me perplexed. I stand in a queue at the newsagent’s watching someone buy Lambert & Butler cigarettes and I think, “Are you an imbecile?” Then they buy a copy of the Daily Mirror and I think, “Yes. You are.”

I go to people’s houses and see their sofas and think, “Did the shop not have a choice? Were your children being held hostage? Are you blind?”

It happens all the time. People who have BlackBerry telephones rather than something from Apple. People who shop at Tesco rather than Waitrose. People in flip-flops. People with an L and G TV rather than a Sony Bravia. People who buy houses in Hackney. It’s all too baffling for words — that you could have something that is excellent but you choose instead to have something nasty.

It doesn’t happen so much on the road because I can usually work out what’s what. People buy Peugeots because they know nothing about cars. People buy Hyundais because they want something sensible and cheap, Audis because they play squash, Rolls-Royces because they are Sir Sugar and Range Rovers in black because the pharmaceutical business is going well. I understand all this. But I must admit that in recent months I’ve been a bit surprised by the sheer number of examples of the Lexus CT 200h I’ve seen whizzing hither and thither.

As far as I know, it has not been the subject of an advertising blitz, and in any event this often makes no difference. Jaguar is carpet-bombing the nation’s poster sites and commercial breaks with its F-type and I still haven’t seen one on the road.

So it’s not a marketing push that’s causing people to say, “Yes, I would like to spend 25,000 of my pounds on a smallish Lexus.”

Nor is it the concept. It’s not a hatchback in the traditional sense. And neither is it a sporty coupé estate like, say, the Lancia HPE. It’s a sort of unholy blend of the two, much like the Vauxhall Signum. And from memory, Vauxhall sold only about none of those.

Styling? Nope. Oh, the designers have done all the right things, but then they’ve dropped the CT’s body onto what look like four casters from a sofa. The result is a car that resembles an aircraft carrier sitting on a pram.

Plainly, to unravel the mystery of this vehicle’s undoubted popularity I had to do some digging. So I did. And now I know the answer. Today we live in a part of the world where miles per gallon has surpassed miles per hour as “the thing that matters”. And this car is a hybrid, which means it can do nigh-on 70mpg.

I can see exactly why people would be interested in that. And I can see why their interest would be maintained all the way through the buying process. Lexuses are well made. They come with beautifully appointed cabins. The after-sales care is second to none.

And best of all, you get the Toyota Prius’s running gear without coming across as a sanctimonious, holier-than- thou, weird-beard eco-loony. This, then, is a car for people who aren’t very interested in saving the planet but would quite like to save a few quid on the way to work. That’s good common sense. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a drawback with this car. It is absolutely dreadful. Worse than anything I’ve driven in a very, very long time.



Lexus is responsible for the best car I’ve driven — the LFA — and the worst, the SC 430. So we know it is capable of a howler. And boy has it made one here.

Apparently it noted the fact that most of its cars are bought by elderly freemasons. So it decided that the CT should appeal to a younger set. Which is almost certainly why Lexus has given it a suspension that’s so hard, it could be used to smash ice. The result is a ride that’s way beyond unbearable. It’s up there with waterboarding.

Then there’s the engine, which is worse, and the gearbox, which is easily the nastiest bit of the car. Apart from the boot, which is the size of an old lady’s purse.

I wasn’t expecting it to be fast. But neither was I expecting something that barely accelerates at all. Because of the stupid stepless gearbox you just get a lot of noise every time you put your foot down — and I mean a very lot — but no actual increase in speed. Lexus says it goes from 0 to 62mph in 10.3 seconds. Autocar magazine recorded a two-way 0-60mph average of 11.1 seconds, and I don’t know how it managed that, because I got bored of waiting for 60mph to arrive and gave up.

The marketing for the CT says: “The further you go, the more interesting it gets.” But this simply isn’t true. It gets more annoying the further you go. Mainly because no matter how hard you try it won’t go very far at all. Not in the lifespan of a normal human being.

And to make the dreadful experience worse, the CT is fitted with an idiotic dashboard that’s full of readouts I don’t understand. There’s one needle that flails about for no obvious reason and a blue light that comes on every time you take your foot off the accelerator. And then there’s a message that permanently says, “Ready”. I couldn’t work that out at all. Ready for what? Armageddon? The next Tube strike? The result of the vote on Scottish independence?

I therefore consulted the instruction manual, which is longer than the Bible and makes even less sense. One passage says you mustn’t carry aerosols in the boot, and there are warnings about the dangers of leaving a cigarette lighter in the car when it’s parked. You are also told that if you take a nap in the car it may start moving. The “Ready” message apparently means the hybrid system is ready. But I knew that already. Because I was driving it.

There are some good things about the CT, though I can’t think what they are at the moment. Er . . . yes. It is capable of sipping fuel as a vicar sips tea. And there are tax benefits. But if you want to keep up with other traffic — tractors, hearses, that sort of thing — you’re going to need to thrash the petrol engine and the moronic gearbox, which will cause the mpg to tumble.

Let me put it this way. A few years ago we drove a Prius hybrid flat-out round the Top Gear test track for 10 laps. And it used more fuel than a BMW M3 that had been following in its tyre tracks . . . at the same speed.

Which brings me to the only conclusion possible for the CT: don’t buy it. If you want good economy, buy a normal car and drive it carefully.

Clarkson may not like the CT 200h but there are plenty of other used Lexuses available on driving.co.uk

Lexus CT 200h Advance
Engine
1798cc, 4 cylinders (+ electric motor)
Power
98bhp @ 5200rpm (+80bhp)
Torque
105 lb ft @ 2800rpm (+153 lb ft)
Transmission
Continuously variable
Performance
0-62mph: 10.3sec
Top speed
112mph
Fuel
68.9mpg (combined)
CO2
94g/km
Vehicle tax band
A (free)
Price
£23,995
Release date
On sale now
Verdict
The only car that makes a Prius look good

CRITIC'S RATING *

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1405659.ece

[RedMoon11]

Look at the Mess You’ve Made, Mr Executioner — Try Doing Them This Way

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 4 May 2014

I think most people now realise that I really didn’t say the n-word. But as a result of the lurid headlines I realise I must turn over a new leaf.

I’ve been told by BBC chiefs that I’m drinking at the last-chance saloon so from now on I shall arrive at work on a bicycle with a copy of The Guardian under my arm, and at lunchtime, instead of moaning about how everything on the menu is vegetarian, I shall cheerily ask for extra lentils in my nuclear-free peace soup. Also I must remember when I’m in a lift to not goose Mary Beard.

I’ve even been informed that I must maintain these standards when I’m not at work. So no more sneezing into my hand just before I press the flesh with Ed Miliband. No more drunken shooting parties. And I shall immediately change the name of my scotty dog from Didier Dogba to Tony Blair.

Here, of course, in my little corner of The Sunday Times there can be no more columns about how badgers have killed all the nation’s hedgehogs and must be exterminated immediately. To keep my job I must become like the love child of Polly Tonybee and Brian May.

So. Here goes. Did you see that dreadful story from Oklahoma about the botched execution? Orderlies spent nearly an hour trying to find a vein in the condemned man’s arms and legs before finally deciding to stick the needle into his groin.

Then, after the cocktail of drugs had been administered, a doctor noticed that the intravenous line had missed his vein and that instead of flowing into his bloodstream the drugs had been absorbed into his muscles.

So now he had half a pint of potassium chloride in him, and writhed about in unspeakable agony for a number of minutes until mercifully he was killed by a gigantic heart attack. Naturally the whole sorry affair has caused the nation to think more carefully about using lethal injections to kill people.

Obviously, like all left-thinking people, I am dead against the death penalty. It is completely muddle- headed to think that the state has the right to kill people. Unless they’ve driven into a yellow box, of course.

But in the land of the free, more than half the population — and the US president himself — supports it. And now in all the 32 states in which it is legal everyone is trying to decide what method to employ when the supply of lethal drugs dries up.

Some are suggesting a return to the electric chair. Really? Do these people really think that in the 21st century it is acceptable to shave off a human being’s hair, put a colander on his head and then feed up to 2,000 volts of electricity into his body until he is dead? This is not quick. Or pleasant.

In a 1985 court case in America the presiding justice — an opponent of the electric chair — described the gruesome process: “The prisoner’s eyeballs pop out and rest on his cheeks. He defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool. The body turns bright red. Sometimes the prisoner catches fire.”

As a result some states are thinking of using a gas chamber instead, while others reckon a firing squad is the solution. I dunno. Perhaps they could adopt the old French way of tying the guilty man to his wife and throwing them into a river.

Other methods that have been used around the world over the years include being crushed by an elephant and being torn in two by horses.

It’s strange. It’s very easy to kill a person quickly and cleanly, and yet when the job is given to a state it invents all sorts of cruel and unusual methods that verge on the ridiculous.

I mean, what was stoning all about? And what deranged halfwit thought it was a good idea to sentence someone to death by pendulum? You shall be tied down and an axe will swing back and forth over your body, getting lower and lower until eventually it cuts you in half.

Things were even worse for miscreants in various navies. Because although the captain had access to a gun, so he could shoot the guilty man, and lots of rope, so he could be hanged, many decided that the best method was to lob a chap over the side and drag him under the vessel where the barnacles would act like a cheese grater and peel his skin off.

On land, meanwhile, the king, with his manners and his airs and graces, decided that if somebody had misbehaved, he should be hanged until he was not quite dead and then placed on an operating table so that all his internal organs could be brought into the fresh air, where the poor man could watch them stop working.

Usually there was an audience for this. And in Vietnam there still is. I visited a school there once that was right next to a jail. Which meant that every so often the pupils in form VIb could look out of the classroom window and see a blindfolded man in the courtyard below being tied to a post and shot in the middle of his heart.

Countries that have the death penalty really need to address this sort of thing. They need to stop fannying about and come up with a system that’s quick and as decent as a state execution can be.

How’s this for a plan? After the man is found guilty, he is sent to the county of Midsomer. Because one of the many murderers there could do the job on the court’s behalf. Or Sweden, where it’s much the same story.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1406594.ece


This is the latest addition to the pack. He's called Didier Dogba. pic.twitter.com/IzmtpCuy9s

/photo/1  21 Apr 2014

[RedMoon11]

You Can’t Sex Up Cricket — It Would Wake the Dead at the Pavilion End

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 11 May 2014

Well, there we are. After a rollercoaster ride in which four different teams looked set at various points to win the title, the Premier League is drawing to a close and now sports fans must aimlessly wander the streets like the undead until the World Cup kicks off in Brazil.

But hang on, I hear you say: the cricket season is now under way. And surely this will provide ample entertainment for the enthusiast of balls and men and back-slapping communal showers.

Hmmm. I’m not sure about that. As with all sports, nobody really knows how or when cricket began but we do know from records of the late 16th century that it was played in Britain.

And that makes sense. There were no computer games then, or trips to the garden centre, and cricket was a good way of passing the time until you caught diphtheria or your house burnt down.

It really got going in the late 19th century, when a great many extremely stupid former public-school boys were sent to run hill forts in various far-flung corners of the empire. They would wake every morning and think, “Right. I need to fill my day somehow. So either I shall spend it face down in a bucket of gin sling, or I shall do a game of some sort.”

Cricket was ideal because unlike backgammon, or playing hide the sausage with the maid, it went on for about six weeks.

What’s more, it was a game that could be played against Johnny Local. Until, of course, everyone realised that they were in fact much better at it than us. And that was that. People, in Britain at least, lost interest.

Today figures show that the average attendance figure at a county cricket match in England is around 3,500. Which means that in terms of popularity it’s on a par with Cypriot first division football. And far behind women’s football — or soccer — in America, motorcycle speedway in Poland, baseball in South Korea and lacrosse in Canada.

And what makes the situation even more dire is that many of the people who are to be seen at county cricket matches are dead. I went once to Lord’s and was told that there’s a 30-year waiting list to become a member.

I couldn’t understand that because there were many empty seats in the stands and there would have been even more if they’d cleared away some of the corpses.

It was a terrible day. On the pitch a man occasionally threw a ball at another man and then absolutely nothing happened while he got the ball back.

This slowed everything down and I wondered out loud how Wimbledon would get on if the players only had one ball that had to be retrieved after every shot.

Everyone was aghast. “Speed it up?” they all thundered incredulously. “No. That’s not the point of cricket at all,” they said. Well, it wasn’t in 1889, when it was an alternative to a drink problem for an Old Etonian empire-builder. But now, when we are all busy picking the kids up from school? It’s absurd to have only one ball. And no ball boys.

And why stop for tea? And how can it be right or fair that I could field a team of deeply unsporting and fat oafs against the West Indies, who in the first innings would get 1m runs for no wickets?

Our team would then go in to bat and score no runs for eight wickets. And then the whole sorry spectacle would be a draw just because it had started to rain.

There is no other sport or game in the world where you can draw against a vastly superior opponent because of the weather. They play football in the rain and do motor racing. So why not cricket?

The trouble is, of course, that cricket is part of the red phone box malaise that came close to ruining Britain. Everyone knew that they smelt of wee and the coin slot didn’t work but when a change was mooted, half of Surrey went berserk.

“You can’t abandon the red phone box,” they shouted from behind their mangles and from their Morris Minors. “It’s part of the fabric of what makes us British.”

When I Googled the phrase “make cricket more interesting” there were more than 300,000 hits. And in every one I viewed there were people suggesting ways to make the game better and faster and more exciting. And all of them will be ignored because, well, because next thing you know we’ll have a bloody president.

My hatred of cricket is not some fad. I went to a school that had 14 clay tennis courts and what at the time was the largest all-weather games area in Europe. But was I encouraged to use these facilities? No, I was not. Instead, twice a week throughout the summer, I was forced — often physically — to stand in a field so I could endure three hours of solid, uninterrupted hay fever.

As I was so useless, they’d make me stand far from the action in the long grass, where the pollen was at its worst and every so often a ball that weighed more than most commercial hovercraft would come my way at about 6,000mph. And I couldn’t see it because my eyes were streaming so I wouldn’t know it had arrived until it smashed into the end of my finger, sending the whole digit deep into my own hand.

Then, after several hours of sneezing and teasing, they’d put me in front of the stumps and make me stand still while a big boy called Phil Lovell threw what was essentially a rock at my testicles.

The only good thing about all this is that I have passed on my cricketing ability, my hay fever genes and my hatred of the club mentality that surrounds cricket to my son. This means that in the coming weeks he will not be tempted by Sky Sports’ exciting line-up of matches such as Somerset v Surrey, and Warwickshire v Yorkshire.

Which will dramatically increase the chances of him doing well in his A-levels.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1408793.ece

[RedMoon11]

Ahoy, Roller, This Aircraft Carrier Is On Your Tail


Bentley Flying Spur W12, £147,145

RIGHT IN the middle of all the brouhaha over the word I didn’t say in a piece of film that was never transmitted, I arrived at my London flat to find it surrounded by many eager young reporters, and there, on the doorstep, a man who’d come round to deliver my weekly test car. And yup. It was the Bentley Flying Spur — 600 yards of conspicuous consumption. A 2½-ton stick with which the loony left could beat me to death. Brilliant.

It’s strange. When a tramp in America sees someone glide by in a car such as this, he thinks, “One day I’ll have one of those.” But here in Britain he’ll think, “One day I’ll have him out of that.” I don’t understand the logic of this peculiarly British attitude. Because if Sir Sugar were to sell his Rolls-Royce, it would make absolutely no difference to anyone except Sir Sugar.

But I accept that many people in this country don’t like success or any of the trappings it brings. They don’t like to see vulgar demonstrations that somebody else’s life has turned out better than theirs. Pull into a petrol station in a nice car in Italy or France or Germany, and people come over to make appreciative noises. Here, all you get from the chap at the next pump is a lesson on how his Austin Maestro does more miles to the gallon than your car and how it has a bigger boot. It’s all a bit tragic, really.

Because it means that you don’t just need a thick wallet to buy a Bentley Flying Spur. You also need a thick skin.

And in the Knightsbridge area of west London, boy, oh boy, it seems that pretty much half the population is equipped with the hide of a rhino. Because in one road — Walton Street, for those of you who know the area — I saw 15 Flying Spurs. I know I’m prone to exaggeration but there were 15 on one tiny street. There weren’t even that many Range Rovers.

I was a little baffled by this, because surely if you were going to buy a big, flash car, you would have a Rolls-Royce Ghost. I can see why you’d avoid the Mercedes S-class. Brilliant though it may be, it is seen these days as an upmarket taxi — a car used mainly for dropping Geri Halliwell off at the red carpet.

I’d have the Ghost. It’s a magnificent car, an extraordinary blend of exquisite craftsmanship and world-class engineering from a group of people who know exactly what’s meant by luxury. Silence, comfort and light. And yet15 people on Walton Street had obviously looked at the Rolls and thought, “No. I shall buy the Bentley instead.” Why?

Well, I did some digging, and straight away I found the answer. A Rolls-Royce Ghost costs £201,450, while a Bentley Flying Spur is £147,145. It’s cheaper — much cheaper — and on paper at least there’s no obvious reason for this.

Under the bonnet of the car I drove was a twin-turbo, 48-valve W12 engine. Think of it as two V6s joined at the hip. The result of this union is an extraordinary turn of speed. You get 616 brake horsepower and a billion torques, and that means when you mash your foot into the deep-pile carpet, your passengers had better be holding on tight. Because it sets off as if it’s been given an electric shock. And it keeps right on accelerating until it’s doing 200mph. The Rolls, on the other hand, has an electronic nanny that steps into the mix at a mere 155mph.

The Bentley is not just faster and more powerful. It feels more alive. You get four-wheel drive and flappy paddles for changing gear, and if you wish, you can go into the on-board computer and make merry with the suspension settings. Put the car in Sport mode and the result is hysterical.

When an American aircraft carrier puts to sea, it is always accompanied by a flotilla of smaller ships. There are tankers that carry fuel for the planes and supply vessels that keep the men fed. Then there are fast-attack ships on hand to protect the meat in the sandwich and often a couple of submarines as well. But if the balloon goes up, the carrier drops its rods and sets off at more than 30 knots, or about 35mph. It’s easily as fast as all the other ships.

Well, that’s what it feels like in the Bentley. The lights go green and, whoomph, when the slightly dimwitted gearbox wakes up, you’re gone. You sense rather than feel that the engineering needed to keep this enormous car on the road is working at the outer edges of what’s possible, and you don’t care. Because you are grinning. Sometimes you actually laugh out loud. Especially when you are braking, because you’re thinking, “These discs? They must be the size of dustbin lids.”

So it’s cheaper than the Rolls-Royce and more exciting to drive. But let’s be honest, shall we? If you want a car of this type, what you need is luxury. Yes, yes, yes, Bentley Boys. The right crowd and no crowding. Fastest lorry in the world. “Blower” Bentley. Le Mans. There is a hint of all this sporting heritage in the mix, but if it was a sports car you were after, you’d have bought a Ferrari.

You weren’t after a sports car, though. You were after a limo. And on this front, hmmm. Not sure. Yes, it comes with all the modern-day equipment you would expect of a Volkswagen, and, yes, all the switches have been cunningly disguised to make them feel Bentleyish. It is a tremendous place to sit, especially in the back, where you get cupholders. In the front you don’t — well, not as standard.

But there’s a problem with the ride. My test car came with 21in wheels and very low-profile tyres, and as a result there was a constant pitter-patter. There was also an annoying tendency for the nose of the car to follow the camber of the road, which meant I had to make constant very small steering inputs. Which is probably why some of my friends who know the car report that sickness in the back is an issue.

I haven’t finished. Much work has been done to make the suspension as compliant as possible, but over potholes and ridges there’s a definite shimmy. It lets you know that you’re in a car, on a road. The Rolls-Royce and the Mercedes S-class don’t.

So I have a problem with the conclusion, because I’m going through a bit of a Bentley phase at the moment. I really do like the Continental GT V8 a lot, and the Flying Spur is pretty damn good as well. I think it is beautifully styled, beautifully made and beautifully trimmed. I think it is good value too, and I found it hugely entertaining on some of the roads near where I live in the Cotswolds. The speed is absolutely bonkers.

As a large, prestigious saloon car, then, it is pretty epic. But because of those tyres and that suspension, it’s not quite as epic as the Rolls.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Bentley Continental Flying Spurs

Bentley Flying Spur W12

Engine
5998cc, W12, twin turbo
Power
616bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque
590 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission
8-speed automatic
Performance
0-62mph: 4.6sec
Top speed
200mph
Fuel
19.2mpg
CO2
343g/km
Road tax band
M (£1,090 for first year; £500 thereafter)
Price
£147,145
Release date
On sale now
Verdict
Under the disguise it’s just a very fast VW

CRITIC'S RATING ***

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1410537.ece