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Post by RedMoon11 on Dec 5, 2017 10:19:11 GMT
Jeremy Clarkson on the making of The Grand Tour series 2
WHY WE HAD TO DELAY THE GRAND TOUR SEASON 2 AIR DATE
Between breaks and the hospitalisation of its three presenters, it seemed the second instalment of the globetrotting car show was never going to hit the screens in time, but finally everybody put the pedal to the metal and the cameras rolled, says Jeremy Clarkson Published 19/ 29 November 2017 By Jeremy Clarkson  Clarkson relaxes in St Tropez ELLIS O’BRIEN When the first series of The Grand Tour finished, we couldn’t pat ourselves on the back for two reasons. First, Amazon doesn’t release viewing figures, so we had no idea whether it had been a success, and second, we knew that if we were to have 12 shows ready in time for the October launch of series two, we’d have to get cracking. So everyone in the production office immediately went on holiday. When we all returned, we called an emergency meeting to discuss ideas for the films we’d need to make. But James May phoned on the morning of the meeting to say he had a tummy ache and was going to the doctors. It turned out he had a virus and was admitted immediately to hospital. We learnt the next day that he was actually quite poorly and had been advised by doctors that he must pay careful attention to his diet in future. So to cheer him up, Richard Hammond and I called the nearest Indian restaurant and asked it to send him a steaming chicken jalfrezi and a nice bottle of cold Tiger beer. Without James around the table to slow things down, we quickly had all the ideas we needed to fill the next series. It’d be a struggle to get everything done in the time available but provided nothing went wrong, we should just about make it. And why should anything go wrong? I mean, we’d already had our bad luck with James’s tummy-related hospital stay . . . One of the first big films we made was in Switzerland. I harboured a sense that it might be good enough to show in the all-important first programme because it would feature mountain roads, sunny skies and a comparison of Lamborghini’s latest Aventador, Honda’s NSX and the Rimac Concept One, an all-electric supercar from Croatia. It would be a contest between the past, the present and the future. The dinosaur, the hybrid and the spaceship. To sort it out, we went to a hillclimb event and of course we will never know which one won because on the last day, on the vital last run, Hammond rolled his Rimac down a hill and was pulled from the burning wreck with a broken knee. Later, at the hospital, doctors discovered he’d need pins inserting — something I volunteered to do, with a hammer — and that he’d be out of action for six weeks. Maybe more. This meant that all of the big three films we’d planned had to be put on hold until mid-July. Which is when James decided to have a two-week holiday. His logic was sound. He doesn’t have children so can get a cheaper deal at the Margate B&B* if he goes away in term time. When he returned, all the production staff — and me — and everyone who does have children went on holiday and while I was away, I came down with pneumonia. So I had to go to hospital, where doctors said I’d be unable to work for eight weeks.  The Honda NSX, Lamborghini Aventador and Rimac Concept One prepare to do battle ELLIS O’BRIEN It is astonishing that all three of us had been confined to hospital beds in the space of six months. Except of course it isn’t astonishing because we are now very old and starting to disintegrate. However, because I’m made largely from wood and stone, I made myself better in a fortnight and finally we were ready to get cracking. But it was early September by this stage, and with the best will in the world, you can’t make 12 hours of television in six weeks. Well, you can if it’s a show about couples looking round houses they can’t quite afford but you can’t if you run a shooting ratio like we do: about 1,200 to one. That’s 1,200 hours of film for every hour we show. As our producer, Andy Wilman, says: “That’s how unfunny and uninteresting you lot are. I have to throw away 1,199 hours of your material every week.” Plainly, Andy would have to call Amazon and explain that we would not be able to meet its carefully worked-out deadline. He explained that all three of the presenters had been incarcerated in hospital at various points in the year and that, as a result, we’d worked out a new timetable that would mean a three-week delay.  Clarkson receives treatment for pneumonia Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with corporate America but it doesn’t really understand the concept of “a missed deadline”. You think “failure is not an option” is a Hollywood cliché. But actually in California, it’s a business mantra. So Amazon listened to Andy explain everything and said: “Yes. But we’d like to go with the original launch date.” He explained again that this would not be possible and it said again: “Yes. But the original launch date works best for us.” The company gave in eventually but only after we’d run up a phone bill of £16m. Despite the extra time, flat out doesn’t begin to cover the way we are working now. Home is a distant memory and my children are nothing more than well-thumbed photographs in my wallet. Terminal 5 is where I live now as I race from New York to Toronto, then back to France and Spain before hopping back on a plane to Vancouver. I’m writing scripts into the night and answering emails on the bog. Eating? I can’t remember when I last did that. But in the way that football teams who are behind with five minutes to go suddenly find another gear, we have too. And without wishing to sound boastful or anything, some of the stuff we’re filming is quite good.  May in deep trouble in Mozambique ELLIS O’BRIEN We’ve driven three old Jaguars down various ski runs — some of them black — at the Telluride resort in Colorado. I’ve done 400 miles, on the road, in the new Ford GT while racing James and a wheelchair-bound Richard in a plane. We have attempted to end world hunger by setting up a fish transportation business in Mozambique, and I’ve thundered round our track in Wiltshire in everything from a Jaguar XJ220 to a Tesla Model X. I’ve done a Ken Block-style video, remade the infamous 1976 film Rendezvous in a Bugatti Chiron and while James turned a Lada into a fire engine, I went road racing in an Audi TT RS in Croatia. Richard? Well, he’s been learning how to walk. And drive. Then there’s our tent studio. We all know certain things didn’t work in the last run, so they’ve gone and in their place will be exciting new stuff. All of which will be announced just as soon as I’ve thought of it.  Flock and roll: Clarkson joins the wool pack at the wheel of a Subaru in Rye, East Sussex
ELLIS O’BRIENBut one thing won’t be changing. The Christmas special. The highlight for many of the televisual year. As usual, we shall be showing that in about July. *When I say Margate, I mean the Maldives. And when I say B&B, I mean five-star resort
The Grand Tour begins on Amazon Prime on December 8, with a new episode being released weekly
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-grand-tour-crash-bang-wallop-now-get-busy-chaps-g8rr3m2pdwww.driving.co.uk/news/jeremy-clarkson-why-we-had-to-delay-the-grand-tour-season-2-air-date/
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Post by RedMoon11 on Dec 5, 2017 10:27:58 GMT
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Post by RedMoon11 on Dec 16, 2017 10:02:59 GMT
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Post by RedMoon11 on Dec 16, 2017 10:11:42 GMT
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Post by RedMoon11 on Feb 7, 2018 9:03:41 GMT
Jeremy Clarkson gets plucked at Grayshott Health Spa 21 January 2018  GETTYThe final hangover from last year was still coursing through my head when I arrived with a face the colour of a motor torpedo boat at the Grayshott health farm, which is located in the part of Surrey the ashamed locals call the Surrey-Hampshire borders. This is not the sort of spa, we are told, where hen-nighters spend all day in a whirlpool bath giggling about anal bleaching. It’s billed as a “medical” spa, and it’s owned by the Lanserhof group, where Germans and Austrians go to follow a strict regime of fasting and doing star jumps. And picking up divorcees. The place is full of people from north London, who are mostly on a week-long course that involves lectures on how to chew everything 30 times before swallowing it. Every weight-loss and health routine has a USP. Some say you shouldn’t eat carbs. Some that you should fast for two days a week. There’s even one in Georgia where you lie for a day in a bath full of red wine. Really, to choose which one is best, you need to visit the website I use for weather forecasts: www.whatyouwanttohear.com. Then you have places that practise Chinese medicine, which all sounds very sage. But let’s not forget that in China, it’s a commonly held belief that erectile dysfunction can be cured by snorting rhino horn. At Grayshott, you learn that exercise is not important (deep joy); on the downside, though, you must never again eat grain, potatoes or sugar. Even apples are not allowed. You’d certainly pick Grayshott if you love a lentil. Lentils are tremendous, apparently. I hadn’t the heart to point out that they form part of the staple diet in India, where the average life expectancy is about five. Whereas in southwest France, where they live on foie gras, everyone lives to be 112. I also learn that I have 4lb of bacteria in my gut and that there’s more bacterial DNA in my body than there is human. It was all quite interesting, but I hear some of the other lectures are a bit happy-clappy armpit hair. I went with my girlfriend, Lisa, who loves all this stuff. She believes in chakra points, and that acupuncture can be used to cure radiation sickness. I, on the other hand, would rather put my trust in the Swiss drug companies. Hearing the word “wellness” actually makes me ill. Over dinner, she had some socialism in a Corbyn sauce. I had duck. There was wine on offer, but we were being good so, despite the sugar risk, had something called “lime cordial”. Chewing everything 30 times is annoying. And if it’s a mushroom, it’s impossible, because it’ll just sort of slip down after only a very short time. Plus, when you are chewing, you can’t talk, which makes mealtimes a miserable experience. For many of the guests, this didn’t matter, as they were dining with nothing for company but a book called Watermelons in Greece, and their Golders Green hair. And if we’re honest, it didn’t matter to me, because in between the Trappism of feeding times, there’s much to keep you occupied.  A room at Grayshott Health SpaTennis and swimming and t’ai chi (which is slow-motion kung fu) I can do at a proper hotel, so I decided to have a massage. I went to our room — decorated very much in the style of my mother — changed into a dressing gown and some slippers that didn’t fit, and shuffled off to a dimly lit under-stairs cupboard, where a Polish woman asked me to undress and lie down on a large piece of polythene. “Oh no,” I thought. “I’ve seen Dexter. She’s going to murder me.” But the music suggested otherwise. It was a curious mix of panpipes and whale song, and once I’d got over the fear that I was about to be wasted, it wasn’t so bad really. I’ve had massages before, of course — two, in fact. The first was on the eighth floor of the old Caravelle hotel in the centre of Saigon. This was a popular haunt among American officers during the Vietnam War, so let’s gloss over that and move to the second. This was conducted in Barbados by a big German woman who had learnt all she knew from torturing downed airmen in the war. God, it hurt. The Polish woman’s efforts were somewhere in between the two. At one point, she put me in a half-nelson and dug her elbow into my kidneys, which was a bit horrible, but then she pulled my pants down and played an imaginary piano on my buttocks, which was quite nice. Well, it would have been had I not been consumed by an eye-crossing need to break wind. This would become a constant problem for my girlfriend, especially on her left-wing diet of pulses and beans. After 40 minutes or so, I was wrapped in the polythene I’d been lying on and, as I lay there like a supermarket lettuce, she played This Little Piggy with my toes. Happily, because I was in a bag, I was able to let one go, knowing that it’d all be contained. Perhaps that’s what the polythene is for.  The spa at Grayshott Health SpaThe next day, we went for blood tests, which revealed that my girlfriend scored 17% for body fat, whereas I got 29%. I also won the gamma GT contest, scoring 110 to her laughable total of seven. But it doesn’t work like that. Big figures, I was told, are a bad thing. This caused an argument because the gamma score measures the health of your liver. And my girlfriend is Irish. So a low score for her, on that front, is actually impossible. In a huff, I went to have the sewage flushed out of my bloodstream. This involved lying down in a room full of George Harrison sitar noises, while a woman stroked me with a brush like a dog. Later, I went for some eyebrow shaping. To do this, a woman pulled out the hairs one at a time. It was extremely painful, so after she’d done the right one, I asked her to stop. Hence I now look a bit lopsided. Occasionally, I’d pass my girlfriend skipping down a corridor in the opposite direction, beaming because she’d had a cranial orgasm and her knees were all tingly. She was loving it all. Grayshott is like any other holiday hotel, but instead of separating meals with sunbathing and snorkelling, you are rubbed and wrapped in polythene. It sounds silly, but as a way of launching myself into dry January, it worked quite well. Whisper this, but I rather enjoyed it. That said, I still maintain the best advice I ever had about living a healthy life came from a dietician in Toulouse. “Always sit down when you eat, and over dinner, laugh and take your time. Don’t share the table with ugly people. Drink red wine and eat the fat from birds.” It’s better than lentils and silence, that’s for sure. …And what it’s like to spa with ‘the neanderthal’, by Jeremy’s girlfriend, actress Lisa Hogan ISAAC PERAL PHOTOGRAPHYWhen you start writing affectionate emails to the marketing manager of the farm you’re about to attend, you know you’re in need. I’m the only person I know who hadn’t been to Grayshott Spa, but that’s not surprising, as healthy minibreaks are not high on the getaway list for the Neanderthal and me. However, after a gleeful festive period of painting every town and field red, it was time. On arrival, I go for a de-stress massage, but the Neanderthal, in his sophistication, is aghast as I leave our room in a waffle dressing gown and slippers. “Have you no sense of decorum?” he bellows after me. After his plastic-bag detox, he arrives back glowing, but not in a good way. Anything he brushes against or drips on turns toxic. On the upside, he is quickly institutionalised and looks well cute in his seersucker twinset that matches what all the other inmates wear all day.  Lisa and Jeremy in matching dressing gowns at Grayshott Health SpaOn the first morning, we do our blood tests before breakfast to see what we are allergic to. I already avoid dairy, most old cheese and, having not had alcohol for the past two days, the Neanderthal. We have both stopped boozing for the month but, for sanity, are freebasing nicotine gum. The blood is squeezed into small phials via a tiny pinprick to the finger; my blood seems reluctant to leave, as it takes three fingers to get the small amount needed. Later, Elaine, who has been here for 30 years but looks about 28, tells me from the state of my Chinese pulse diagnosis that my liver has been “overworked”. She pops in some acupuncture needles, then starts on cranial osteopathy that feels like spearmint coursing through my body until it whooshes out through my feet. She is known as the white witch; rather wastefully, the Neanderthal remained utterly resistant to the amazing feeling of healthiness she casts over me. During her talk, Stephanie emphasises the importance of sugar management, how to retrain the 100 trillion bacteria that live in our gut, why cooked food is better than raw, and the advantages of breaking your fast at lunch several times a week, to give the gut more time to repair. Then lo, a miracle happens: the Neanderthal asks why we are having lime in our fizzy water as it has sugar in it, and holy moly, the next morning asks for honey in his coffee instead of a kilo and a half of white sugar. We spend our last day playing tennis and having facials. In a selfless act of compassion for the dear Neanderthal, I give him the eyebrow-shaping slot. The time had come to tame the Clarkson two. The result is wondrous, both in terms of how the therapist made such progress, and how adorable he looks with just the one perfect eyebrow. Need to know Grayshott SpaThe seven-day Health Regime starts at £1,950 per person (based on two sharing a room; £2,150 for single occupancy), inclusive of accommodation, all meals and £550 worth of treatments; grayshottspa.com www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-claudia-winkleman-and-india-knight-amongst-others-review-the-best-treatments-from-around-the-world-5q2f3t3sb
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jul 24, 2018 15:09:34 GMT
JEREMY CLARKSON 17 June 2018, 12:01am, the sunday times
Jeremy Clarkson: See the ruins of a lost civilisation before the tourist hordes arrive – in Detroit I was recently in a bare-brick-and-zinc-type restaurant in Detroit, enjoying a bowl of duck dumplings in a light broth, when I noticed I was only a couple of hundred yards from the city’s derelict railway station. It was in there, just 20 years earlier, that an angry drug addict had held a semi-automatic shotgun to my head.
The next night I was in a Shoreditchy-type bar, sipping an excellent Chilean rosé, when I realised it was located on Michigan Avenue, and that back in the 1990s you would not even think about going there unless you were in a tank.
Most of us know the story of Detroit. It was the Motor City. Motown. It made a lot of cars that are now made in Mexico and music that is now made in Los Angeles. So the city withered, went bankrupt and died. Except my recent visit there demonstrated that it didn’t die. And that now it is far and away the best tourist destination in the whole of North America.
Yes, according to the FBI, it is still the most violent city in America. Most people there are killed at least three times a day. But that means very few foreigners pay it a visit, which in turn means there are no queues at passport control. And, what’s more, you don’t get a surly official who knows for sure you’re a terrorist and is determined to prove it. You get a guy who stands up, hugs you and thanks you profusely for coming.
Hotels. This is a new concept in modern Detroit, which means none of the staff have been infected with that overbearing American niceness. Most days at the converted fire station where I stayed they ran out of orange juice at breakfast and made it very plain that this wouldn’t have been an issue if I’d ordered something else.
If this doesn’t appeal, you could buy a house. Many are on the market for about $10, but these are a bit run-down and some smelt of crystal meth. However, further up the scale I found an absolute gem for £40,000.
This, said the particulars, came with “multiple ballrooms”. And that raises a question. How many ballrooms must a house have before the estate agent gets bored counting them? These low prices are attracting lots of young people, who are starting up tech companies and microbreweries and cool restaurants. In my experience only New York can match Detroit for food these days. Only in New York it isn’t actually growing in the streets, whereas in Detroit it is.
The urban farming initiative is nowhere near as big as you might have been led to believe. We’ve been told that huge swathes of the city have been turned into allotments, but the fact is that of the million or so available acres, only three are being used to grow organic peace vegetables.
The other 999,997 acres beggar belief. You drive for mile after mile and every building is either burnt out or boarded up. Many have gone altogether and have been replaced with hay. It’s like Chernobyl, only bigger and more empty. You’ll do more Instagramming here than anywhere else in the world.
Occasionally you come across a giant factory, which back in the day made Packards or Cadillacs but is now just a creaking, groaning shell full of nothing but drips and the faint whiff of asbestosis. People travel for thousands of miles to see the ruins of Siem Reap in Cambodia and none is as eerie or as impressive as those in Detroit.
And when you’ve looked round, and it’s evening time, you can visit one of the city centre’s many lap-dancing bars, all of which take equal opportunities so seriously that even the cleaning ladies are encouraged to get up on stage and give it a go.
There are also some shops. I counted three. And that’s good, because no one wants to waste their time buying stuff they don’t need from exactly the same retail cathedrals we have at home. What we do not have at home, however, is the very beautiful Detroit Institute of Arts.
Built and filled when Detroit was pretty much the richest city in the world, it’s enough to cross the eyes of even a philistine like me. In one room there’s a Picasso just hanging there. No guards. No alarms. No bulletproof screen like the one they use to protect that cracked stamp known as the Mona Lisa in Paris. And this is the best bit: it wasn’t even straight. Who has a Picasso and puts it on the wall cock-eyed?
Then there’s a Rodin you can stroke and countless other priceless pieces that are displayed like the trinkets in a Stow-on-the-Wold junk shop. You can forget all the world’s other museums; if you want to get up close and personal with a Monet, Detroit’s where you need to be.
Further up the road, there’s the Henry Ford museum, where you can lean on the actual car in which John Kennedy was shot, and there’s also the financial district, where the grit-and-grind four-square skyscrapers now sit cheek by jowl with little greenhouses selling more kale and artisan T-shirts.
Many bore the encouraging slogan “Say nice things about Detroit”, which is what I’m doing here. Even though I do slightly miss the attitude on the shirt I bought last time I was there. It said simply: “Detroit. Where the weak are killed and eaten.”
I spoke to one waiter who said that without noticing it he’d walked home the other night. “For the first time in my life, it didn’t occur to me not to,” he said. So, yes. Detroit is still a cracked and unused car park, but now there’s a rose growing out of it. A sense that life will prevail.
Which raises an interesting point. If Detroit can go to the brink, peer over the precipice of doom and then stage a comeback, maybe we shouldn’t worry quite so much about those industrial towns in the north of England that seem these days to have no real point either.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jul 24, 2018 19:28:51 GMT
8 July 2018, 12:01am, the sunday times
Jeremy Clarkson: I’d rather take another six-day battering in Mongolia than a World Cup penalty
On Wednesday I woke up in a tent, in a field, in Mongolia, and as I sat on the aluminium bucket that had been provided for my morning ablutions I ruminated on how I could possibly survive the coming day. It was just past six in the morning and after I’d eaten a boil-in-the-bag army breakfast, it was time to adopt that camper-man stoop and thrash about in my tent, huffing and puffing as I squeezed all my mysteriously damp things into a suitcase. And then the day began.
First up, we had to film the sort of scene that would cause most American actors to demand three weeks off in the Bahamas, but because we were against the clock we had it done by nine and were ready to film a river crossing. It was a big river and it was fed by melting snow, so it was what people who’ve just dived into an unheated pool and want you to follow suit call “very refreshing”.
Sadly, the car got stuck after about six inches so I had to get into the water, which wasn’t refreshing at all. It was bloody freezing, and it was travelling so quickly that by the time I surfaced I was about a mile from the action. Happily, though, I was soon caught up in some shallow rapids, which meant that after a lot of light bruising I was back where I’d started. Only with one shoe instead of two.
By eleven I had stumbled and swum and sworn my way over the boulder-strewn river and was faced with a cliff that I’d have to climb. Until this point, my six-day camping trip across Mongolia had been lovely. There had been no noticeable temperature, the whole place smelt of a herb garden and there hadn’t been a single insect of any kind.
This is because they were all on that cliff face. And they were the sorts of insect that are only really bothered about getting into your ear. So you’re clinging on to a rock, and you’re thinking that you’re nearly 60 and you’re frozen from the river and hurting, and all of a sudden you have a panicky fly in your ear and you can’t dig it out because you’d fall to your death.
But eventually I was at the top, in what looked like Julie Andrews country, and the herb fragrance was back and all I had to do was drive 70 miles to the town of Moron. Unfortunately, there was no road of any kind. So it was 70 miles of absolute violence. At one point, after I’d hit a particularly enormous marmot hole, I really did think my spine was sticking out of the top of my head.
We stopped for lunch in a thunderstorm and I had a boil-in-the-bag army curry before taking on the last leg of what had been a six-day orgy of exhaustion, animal lavatory facilities, discomfort, dirty fingernails, damp camping trip clothes, army food and James May’s spinnaker-sized sinuses.
At eight in the evening, though, it was all over . . . except it wasn’t. Because after a glass of wine — the first for a week — it was time to make for Moron’s airport and a flight to Ulan Bator, or, if you prefer, Ulaanbaatar, which would be a very handy bad-Scrabble-hand clear-out if only proper nouns were allowed. Here I checked into an airport hotel, where the receptionist showed me to my room and spent half an hour explaining to me how the door to the minibar worked and what I might find inside.
I just wanted a shower. So, having interrupted her spiel on what Heineken tastes like and ushered her out of the door, I put on my broken spectacles to examine the plumbing setup. It turned out that the shower had two settings: off and scalding.
Even though my head was burnt off and my lips were cracked and bleeding, I selected scalding and stood in the jets for a full 10 minutes, soaping away at all my small, delicate places until I was clean. Except, after drying myself off and examining the now grey towel, I realised I wasn’t. So I went back into the lava and tried again. And after that I turned another towel grey, so I tried again. But the water had run out. So now there were still two settings but both of them were off.
No matter. I put on clean clothes, went downstairs and, after explaining to the disappointed receptionist that I hadn’t touched the minibar, checked out and went into town to find the Moustache bar, where the film crew was meeting up to listen to a Russian commentator talk us through the England match.
It was two in the morning when that started and getting light when Colombia equalised. Watching the half an hour of extra time would have meant missing the flight to Beijing, so off we went to the airport, where we arrived just in time to see Eric Dier do his thing.
Two hours later I was in China, using the three-hour stopover to write a script for the film we are making in Switzerland on Tuesday. And then it was time for the 10-hour flight to London, where I reflected on what I’d done in the past 24 sleep-free hours.
Climbed. Swum. Wrapped a show. Driven. Flown. Drunk. Watched a football match. Flown again. Written a script and then flown some more. And all of this after a week that would have flattened Sir Fiennes.
It had been the busiest day of my life and I was so tired that some people in the plane stopped to ask if I was all right. I wasn’t, if I’m honest. I was broken.
But I’ll tell you what. I’d do that every day for the rest of my life rather than stand in front of a billion people thinking: “Right. Half the people in this stadium hate me, and if I can’t make this ball go past that man and into that net, everyone will.”
That is the definition of pressure. And let’s not forget, shall we, that those World Cup footballers give their international earnings to charity.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jul 25, 2018 18:41:54 GMT
Jeremy Clarkson, Claudia Winkleman, Rod Liddle and more share their tales of summer holiday woeDodgy electrics, downpours in the desert, run-ins with children’s entertainers: Sunday Times star writers reveal their worst holiday experiences
The Sunday Times, July 15 2018
Jeremy Clarkson: Brittany
Almost all of my childhood summer holidays were exactly the same. We’d drive from Yorkshire to Cornwall, where we’d sit in a cafe for a week, peering through the steamed-up, rain-lashed windows, saying occasionally: “I think it’s brightening up.” It never did.
But the worst summer holiday was spent in Brittany. This was my first-ever foreign trip, and every single aspect of it excited me: the restaurant on the Townsend Thoresen car ferry, which served a choice of fruit juices as a starter, the sunshine and the chips, which were little and crunchy, and nothing like the chips I got at home in Doncaster, which were all covered in soot.
On the beaches, I saw my first-ever topless girl, which was exciting, and in the evenings, there was a circus that featured a donkey with what appeared to be five legs. I was very happy. They even had a lemonade called Pschitt. But on the fourth day, my dad fell over on the shoreline rocks and cut his hand.
It was a Sam Peckinpah wound, so he had to go to hospital for stitches. But the next day, his hand looked like a cow’s udder, so the doctor x-rayed it and, finding nothing amiss, simply changed the stitches.
The next day, his arm looked like the R101. Only a purply green. And so it was back to the hospital, where the only word we understood was “amputé”.
He decided that he’d rather have his arm off in Yorkshire — you couldn’t drink the water in France back then — so off we set in his brand-new Ford Cortina. Which rattled to a halt with the big end in bits just outside Peterborough.
When we finally reached Doncaster, the local surgeon took another x-ray and came into the ward smiling at what the French had somehow missed. He squeezed my dad’s hand and a live winkle spurted out.
Dad recovered eventually, but his Ford Cortina never did. And that, to this day, makes me sad.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Feb 6, 2019 5:53:05 GMT
27 January 2019, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Jeremy Clarkson: Anointed with Piz Buin and ordained by magical thinking. God save our royal family!
If we’d never had any sort of government and suddenly decided we needed one, it’s highly unlikely we’d come up with a system where the position of head of state was hereditary. Imagine trying to sell the notion on Question Time. Not even the brilliant and eloquent Diane Abbott could hope to make it fly. It’s nuts that Prince Charles is going to be our next leader simply because his mum was. Lots of people think that way. And I agree that, logically speaking, they have a point. But what if we decided to get rid of the royal family and have a president instead? I think we’d almost certainly end up with a palace full of Ant & Dec. Or, if it had to be a woman — and in the current climate it would — we’d have President Rachel of Countdown. So while I know that the hereditary system is silly and that we could one day end up being led by someone who talks to his lunch, I still prefer it to the alternative in which you end up with Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or that bottom feeder in Venezuela. Did you see what Mrs Queen had to say last week on the divisions caused by Brexit? “I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view . . . and never losing sight of the bigger picture. To me these approaches are timeless, and I commend them to everyone.” Obviously that is neither possible nor desirable at a football match, but in the country as a whole she’s dead right. And I’m glad we have her and her wisdom and not President Dec with his “Let them eat grubs”. The problem, however, is that in a hereditary system some poor sod gets the gig simply because he came out of the wrong womb at the wrong time. Imagine having to sit down with your child when they are eight or nine and explain that they will have to spend their entire adult life being polite and wearing a seatbelt and going to Middlesbrough on a Wednesday afternoon to open the civic centre’s new disabled lavatory. Yes, they get a lot of houses and a man to warm the lavatory seat before they use it, but I’d rather live in a tent and do my business in the woods than have some chinless adviser called Nigel telling me that I must marry a clotheshorse and never once go home with a traffic cone on my head. It’s not a life. It’s a life sentence. And there’s more. To make the whole system work, the royal family have to convince proles such as you and me that there’s some mystical reason they are in charge and not, say, Huw Edwards from the 10 o’clock news. During the actual moment of a coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury sthingys special oil from an eagle-shaped bottle onto the monarch, and to make sure you and I don’t see this, it all happens underneath an embroidered tent that’s carried to the spot by a gaggle of cross-dressers who were definitely bullied at school. The reason this part of the ceremony is hidden from the public’s gaze is simple. If we actually saw it happening, we’d know the oil was basically Piz Buin factor 10. And then the whole divine-right, appointed-by-God-Himself thing would be ruined. It’s already ruined, if I’m honest. Most of us don’t believe in God, and we certainly don’t believe that more than a thousand years ago he found a man called Theo in Germany and said: “Your sperm, my son, is holy, and it will be used many years from now to provide a system of government in Great Britain.” We know it’s all just a magic trick, and, as with a magic trick, we don’t really want to know how it’s done. So if they want to claim that someone goes into the embroidered tent as a man and comes out on the other side as a king, fine. As I say, it’s better than having Ant & Dec or Donald. The problem is that when the ordinary person comes out as a king, he’s got to keep the whole charade going. He’s got to be aloof and covered in medals he didn’t win and good at waving, and all his opinions have to be nice and calm and sensible. Everything that happens in his head has to stay there. That’s just about doable, but not when you have the tabloids running around saying that the royal family must be aloof and good at waving and so on but that in addition they must be like us. So now we have poor old William, who’s stuck. On the one hand he’s got the Nigels telling him that he must behave like a king and be carried around in a velvet-lined sedan chair by six oiled eunuchs, and on the other he’s got the Daily Mail saying that he must go down to the Dog and Duck on karaoke night and get pissed. Only last week he spoke in Davos to a roomful of people who are nowhere near as influential as they like to think, saying that the British habit of stiffening the upper lip and keeping calm and carrying on meant it was difficult to deal with the horrors he experienced as an ambulance driver. Doubtless this is true, and doubtless it was an important message for the nation’s mental-health charities. But, while opening up and weeping and talking about stuff is fine for normal people — and especially Americans — it undermines the fabric of royalty. Happily, there’s no serious movement in the UK right now to get rid of the Windsors, but unless they sit down soon and work out how to keep the magic going in a cynical world where there are no witches or unicorns, such a thing might get traction. It would only take something small like a road traffic accident to get the discussion going, so let’s keep our fingers crossed that such a thing never happens.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Feb 6, 2019 6:04:40 GMT
Jeremy Clarkson The Clarkson Review: Alfa Romeo Stelvio QuadrifoglioA lunatic let loose among the sheep
![]()  The Sunday Times, 27 January 2019 In the olden days I would often walk round London, usually because I was coming back from the pub. Or because I was on my way to the pub and knew there was no point taking the car because I’d have to walk home afterwards. And then in the morning I’d have to walk to the police pound to give a gormless person in an armoured booth a hundred pounds to get my car back. And then there was the casino on Lower Sloane Street. It was run by an oily Frenchman called Roger and had just two card tables and one roulette wheel. I loved it in there, but afterwards I would have to walk home because I had not a single penny left for a taxi. As I said, I did a lot of walking back then, which is probably why I had a 28in waist. Coupled with a 38in inside leg, it made me look like a telegraph pole. I’m surprised a stalk never nested on me. Mind you, I had so much hair in those days, it looked as if one had. Today, in an effort to have a 28in waist once more, I’m back on foot, using my legs wherever possible to get from A to B. It’s much more difficult than it was back then, mainly because I now weigh more than most moons, which means after a very short distance I get terrible backache. Also, I am stopped very often by someone who wants a selfie. This always takes an age, because they have to explain why they want one. “I’ve just been on a hockey tour of Canada, and I met this guy in Toronto who had multiple sclerosis, and he had this old Honda he couldn’t use any more, so I borrowed it and I said that if I was ever ...” And on and on and on it goes until I just want to jump under the next bus. A word of advice. If you see me in the street, ask crisply and efficiently for a photograph. I will then tell you to eff off and we can both go about our business with minimal disruption. The other problem withwalking today is that there’s nothing much to look at. Back in the Eighties the streets would be filled with mid-engined Renault 5s and Alfa Romeo Alfasud Sprint Veloces. Then you had rear-drive Toyota Corolla rally cars and Supras and Mitsubishi Starions and even the odd BMW M5. It was like walking through an art gallery, only there was a growling, buzzing, throbbing soundtrack as London wriggled itself free from the gnawing misery of Seventies socialism and embraced Margaret Thatcher’s vision of getting up, getting on and getting a Golf GTI. Now, though, it’s just an endless parade of dreary SUVs. It’s my job to know what they all are, but on a walk yesterday I couldn’t name a single one. They were just grey shapes, like frogspawn. Plainly this sort of car is what you’re all interested in these days, and that’s good news because the car I didn’t use very much the week before last, owing to my new walking habit, was the Peugeot 5008 Allure. It had a 1.5-litre engine, could go from 0 to 62mph in a certain length of time, ran on diesel and cost just shy of £30,000. In every way it’s just another SUV, except you don’t look through the steering wheel at the dials. You look over it. And if that’s what you want — if it’s what’s been missing from your life, a new way of mounting the steering wheel — then this is obviously the car for you. Eventually the Peugeot was taken away — and a few days later I noticed. The car that replaced it was another bloody SUV, but this one was an Alfa Romeo. And if anyone can make this sort of car interesting, Alfa can. 
It’s called the Stelvio, which means it’s been named after a famous bit of road that twists and turns its way up an Alp in Italy. I tried the diesel version last year and it was sort of all right, but this time Alfa sent the full-fat, 503-horsepower Quadrifoglio version.
Now. I adore the engine in this car. It’s a twin-turbo Ferrari V8 with two cylinders lopped off, and it’s a masterpiece. Genuinely, an all-time great. If it were music, it would be Beethoven’s Fifth. If it were art, it would be Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed — The Great Western Railway. If it were literature, it would be Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn.
It revs as if it’s held at idle by an elastic band that the throttle just snaps, and the noise it makes can curdle blood at 500 paces. You can use it to potter about, but that’d be like playing chopsticks on the organ in the Royal Albert Hall. This is an engine that wants you to open all the stops, all the time. But would it work in an SUV? That’s what I wanted to know.
Well, to make sure the rest of the car — which is tall, because that’s what people need these days — doesn’t throw its arms in the air and panic when asked to deal with a volcanic burst of power, it’s all been tightened up. Really tightened. And then nailed down. And then fitted with tyres that have the give of steel. I’d like to say that despite all this the Stelvio copes very well with badly maintained urban roads. But it doesn’t. It rides like a racer.
Which is what it is. It has a carbon-fibre prop shaft, and most of the time all the power is fed to the rear wheels. Alfa says when they lose grip, power is sent immediately to the front, but as I exited one roundabout on full opposite lock, I can testify to the fact that Alfa’s idea of “immediately” and mine are a bit different.
A friend of mine actually bought one of these cars last month and texted me after a few days to say: “This thing is mad.” He’s right. It is. Hilariously, mind-bogglingly insane. Imagine a harbour tug with three Lamborghini V12s. It’s that.
There are a lot of fast SUVs on offer at the moment. There’s the Lamborghini Urus and the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk and the Audi SQ7, but nothing is quite as swivel-eyed as this Stelvio. And as a result it’s easily the most exciting SUV out there. Which is a bit like saying Proteus syndrome is easily the most exciting disfiguring disease.
There are some other issues too. When you zoom the sat nav in to see individual streets, it goes into what I call “moron mode” and swivels round when you turn a corner. I hate that and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. And while the carbon-fibre seats are cool, the seatbelt buckles rattle against them all the time. You can’t even fit a towbar because of the complex exhaust system. Mind you, not being able to tow a caravan is probably a good thing.
This car, then, is exactly what you’d expect from Alfa Romeo. Its best brains fitted a truly magnificent engine, and then the factory cleaning staff were left to make everything else.
I love this sort of thing. I love Alfas because there are bits of them that don’t work. But you almost certainly will find this infuriating.
I could suggest you buy the Giulia Quadrifoglio saloon, because it’s far superior as an actual car. But you don’t want a saloon. You want an SUV, because you are a sheep. So go on, then. Buy an Audi Q5 instead. Be a dullard. See if I care.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Feb 6, 2019 6:19:37 GMT
SPA GUIDE: JEREMY CLARKSON HAS WATER THERAPY AT THE GAINSBOROUGH BATH SPA
And his girlfriend, Lisa Hogan, deals with the moaningJeremy Clarkson
The Sunday Times, January 27 2019
All health resorts need a unique selling point, something that makes them more than just a few corridors full of wet idiots in towelling slippers. Last year I went to a place in Surrey called Grayshott, where they plucked one of my eyebrows and said I could eat whatever I wanted except … Actually, I can’t remember what it was.
This year I went to the Gainsborough in Bath, which is much like any other luxury provincial hotel. There’s a lounge full of couples who haven’t spoken to one another since 1952 and a dining room where the food arrives underneath a ta-dah cloche.
The USP? At first I thought it was the one functioning lift that had doors that closed like the chompers in Galaxy Quest. And that went to a floor of its choosing rather than yours. A cunning post-Christmas ploy, I figured, to make me use the stairs.
 But no. The real reason for the Gainsborough is to be found in the basement, where the Malaysian owners have built a modern take on how the Georgians thought the Romans used to live. I began my visit by filling in a form. I don’t know what it was about as I’d forgotten my reading glasses. I was then presented with what looked like a Scarface-sized bowl of cocaine lovingly infused with scents that only a dog could detect, some of which was then put into a small heart-shaped lace handbag. I’m not sure they’d had me in mind when they were developing this idea. Clutching my lace bag full of lemon-scented coke, I was invited to sit in a pool of water that is kept at 36C, and after I’d been parboiled, I was microwaved in an infrared sauna and then steamed in a small room full of hot fog. I did feel like the food at this point, and there was more. In the massage that followed, a lady vigorously rubbed what felt like salt into all of my skin before coating me in oil. “This,” I thought, “is what it’s like to be a chicken.” And despite what vegans say, it’s not so bad. The next morning I went for a walk round Bath and concluded it’s just like every other town. There’s a Poundland and a Superdrug and a few forlorn charity shops. But on the upside, there are a lot of pillars. After this, I went back to the spa to try a procedure that my girlfriend, Lisa, had suggested. I was greeted by a good-looking North African man who immediately took off his clothes and climbed into the bath with me. He said I should lie back and live in the moment. But I’m a busy man with an active mind so immediately I started to think about Brexit. I then thought about where we might go for the next Grand Tour show and then, as he pulled my head under the water with no warning, I thought about Guantanamo. I spluttered to the surface and asked him not to do that again. So this time when I lay back, he cupped me tenderly with one hand and stroked me gently with the other. And all I could think was: what if one of the onlookers takes a picture of this and puts it on the internet? I’m sure there are thousands of men who would love to be stroked by a good-looking Moroccan chap in a warm bath. But I’m not one of them. In fact, I’ve vowed that on a forthcoming trip to the Far East, I will take Lisa to one of those special Thai massage clubs, so she can have a taste of her own medicine. By which I mean, her own kind. In the baths there were a lot of ladies sitting on the Jacuzzi-style water jets, smiling. One read the same page of her book for about an hour. I, meanwhile, chose to go under a jet that shot water onto my shoulders with tremendous force. Only Parisians in yellow vests know what it’s like to be hit by a water canon of this ferocity. However, my shoulders and neck have ached constantly since I slipped a couple of discs 13 years ago. And this morning, when I woke up, they didn’t. So, it’s fair to say that I was touched at the Gainsborough, and by the Gainsborough. It genuinely restored me. And I shall for ever be in its debt. … and his girlfriend, Lisa Hogan, deals with the moaning
 Jeremy Clarkson and Lisa Hogan
Agile as the Neanderthal appears, it’s surprisingly difficult to budge. Unless you have a cunning plan. January health kick to a spa? Forget it. But if it’s journalism, legitimate work, we’re on.
Our suite looked over the blond stone buildings of the most stunning city in England. The rooms, with high ceilings and tall Georgian windows, are cosy, and the bathrooms are neat but luxurious, with a solid marble look.
The treatments, meanwhile, are excellent. My massage was a sensory novelty. The nerves below my right ear went berserk when salt was massaged into my left leg, and vice versa. Droplets jumped from my face during the stomach massage. Magnesium oil followed, which cured the twitch in my eye. Neanders had a ginger version, moaning about being served vegetables after the infrared-sauna visit. He complained about everything here. In fact, so much, I swapped his facial for a Freedom pool experience, in the little Speedos I’d sweetly purchased for him. As he drifted off to sleep he groaned on about how all spa getaways are ridiculous. Then woke up after an unprecedented 10 hours straight.
■ Jeremy Clarkson was a guest of the Gainsborough; rooms from £285 a night; spa treatments from £60; thegainsboroughbathspa.co.uk
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Post by RedMoon11 on Feb 6, 2019 6:24:33 GMT
3 February 2019
Jeremy Clarkson: Cheat, love, bray — let me put my ass on the line and tell you that the donkey sex scene was real
There’s no easy way of saying this, so I’ll just jump straight in. While driving through Colombia last year, I encountered a man who was making love to a donkey. Further investigations revealed that he was not an escaped lunatic and that a lot of the men in his village do the same thing when they’re bored or lonely.
Now I know the programme that I make for Amazon is supposed to be a car show, but I thought the donkey story was interesting. So we broke out the cameras and filmed one of the men making the two-backed beast with Eeyore. And then we spoke to his mates, who were at pains to point out that they only had sex with the female donkeys, because doing it with a boy donkey would be weird, obviously.
The scene was part of a show that was released recently and almost immediately the Pop Idol winner Will Young responded by saying something about how the car I’d been using was gay. Or not gay. Or that it was gay but we shouldn’t have said so. I can’t quite remember. Everyone else, on the other hand, wanted to know why on earth we’d faked the donkey scene.
Yup. Everyone had looked and listened and then decided that because they had never seen a man having sex with a donkey on their way to work at a warehouse in Huddersfield, I couldn’t have seen it either. So it must have been fake.
This accusation of televisual jiggery-pokery baffled me, because let’s just say we’d wanted to film a story that was not true. Why, in the name of all that’s holy, do you think we’d come up with the idea that a man would have sex with an animal? And even if we did, then what? Do we just go up to someone and say, “Hey, mate. I’ll give you a tenner if you’ll do a bit of roadside bestiality”?
And what do you think the Colombian government would have to say about it? I once put a lavatory in my car in Mumbai, saying that it’d be useful if I got Delhi belly, and now I’m banned from India. Then I said that eastern Turkey felt less safe than Iraq, and now Johnny Turk won’t let me visit any more.
So do you really think I’d want to tell a blatant lie about Colombia? Because those guys probably wouldn’t send me a polite letter asking me never to come again. They’d send a man to cut off my arms with a chainsaw.
I’m afraid, then, the scene wasn’t faked. It was real. The interviews afterwards were real. It was all on television with subtitles. And no one believed it.
I think the problem started with poor old Bear Grylls. Until then everything on the television was true and real because the person doing the talking was Sir Robin Day or John Noakes. A sensible man with sensible clothes and sensible hair. But we learnt that the bear that attacked Bear in one of his camping programmes was actually a member of the production team in a bear suit, and this opened the floodgates.
The BBC was forced to admit that a scene in its epic Human Planet series showing a tribal family in Papua New Guinea living in a tree house had been a setup, and it previously had to concede that footage of a tarantula in a Venezuelan jungle had actually been shot in a studio.
Oh, and then there was “Wolfgate”, when the Beeb said the wild wolf it had just shown was actually a partly domesticated one. Everyone was very angry, and I can’t see why.
It costs a fortune to send a film crew to a remote location and an even bigger one to house it and feed it while it trudges about looking for its quarry. You want to pay for that? Or would you rather the producers set something up in advance so that they weren’t wasting your licence fee on a scene you aren’t going to believe anyway?
It’s now reached the point where people don’t even bother telling the truth. You had Boris Johnson and his merry bunch of cohorts running round in the run-up to the referendum saying that if we left the EU we’d be able to give the NHS an extra £350m a week. That was a complete fabrication.
Then you had Donald Trump, who’d seen photographs of the crowd that turned out to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and photographs of the measly crowd that turned out to watch his. He knew we’d seen them too, but even so he apparently asked the government photographer to edit the photos to make his crowd seems larger. He’s the most powerful man in the world, and he’s forever lying.
I look now on the internet at all the stuff that’s been written about me in recent times. And a huge amount of it is wrong. So we must assume that a huge amount of the stuff about everyone else on the internet is wrong too. It’s scary.
Later this year we will show you a Grand Tour programme we made in Mongolia. We will explain that we are in the most sparsely populated country on Earth and that there is not a single shred of evidence in any direction for hundreds of miles that man has existed.
We will drive across this wilderness in a car we have built ourselves, and we will be seen living like animals, for days, in the frozen expanse of nothingness. It is all true and it is all real. And at the end I guarantee someone will write to say that it was faked and that we stayed in hotels.
It’s a shame, really, because when we don’t trust anything we see or hear, we lose our ability to be amazed. You can’t stand back in childlike wonderment at something if you automatically think it’s computer-generated imagery. And how can you form an opinion when you don’t believe anything anyone says or anything you read?
Sometimes it’s healthy to believe that man walked on the moon, that Facebook has some good points and that in Colombia there is a small group of men who shag donkeys.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Feb 6, 2019 6:50:45 GMT
Meet the real Jeremy Clarkson, the “carbon-neutral” farmer and conservationist from Oxfordshire
Farming might not seem the natural habitat of our petrolhead columnist, but the former Top Gear presenter is ploughing a new furrow as a conservationist, he tells Nick Rufford
TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO ALASTAIR HETT AND THE MORETON-IN-MARSH SHOW
The Sunday Times, 3 February 2019
We all know Jeremy Clarkson, the tell-it-straight TV presenter and Sunday Times columnist whose snappy one-liners and less than snappy dress have made him as popular with fans of fast cars as they have made him unloved by eco-minded types, especially those with a disdain for dad denim. So who is this country gent in wellingtons and a Barbour, striding over ploughed fields among hedges and copses he’s planted, pointing out species of wild bird that have recently returned to this part of Oxfordshire?
“When I first came here the skies were empty,” Clarkson explains. “It took a while to establish the right vegetation and feed crop. The yellowhammer is listed as endangered, but there must be a hundred living in the hedge just 200 yards up from here. I’ve seen bullfinches, chaffinches, goldcrests. I’ve got owl boxes around the place, and lots of fieldfares come swarming by. In the space of five years it’s started to look like Slimbridge [wildfowl reserve] without the geese.”
On cue, a scarf of wood pigeons unfolds against the winter sky, and a solitary raptor hangs in the distance. Birds of prey are frequent visitors, Clarkson says. “I woke up the other morning and took a picture of a kestrel on the post outside my bedroom window. That would be a rare sight in London.”
 Clarkson the ornithologist
TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, ALAMY
Rarer still, surely, is this glimpse of Clarkson the ornithologist, far from his natural habitat of a racing circuit or TV studio and way outside his west London comfort zone. Has he quit the fast lane? Definitely not, he says, though he has taken the first step towards a different style of TV car show, which means he’ll be spending more time on his farm — nearly 1,000 acres of rolling arable land in deepest Oxfordshire.
It’s a proper muddy, working farm, growing three staples: wheat, barley and oilseed rape. Previous owners paid little attention to native plants and animals. Clarkson, 58, replanted hawthorn and beech and cleared streams and ponds to create new habitats. One irony, Clarkson says, is that his land consumes more carbon dioxide through photosynthesis than he has ever generated driving gas-guzzling supercars. “I didn’t buy a farm to offset my carbon footprint, [but it’s] a happy coincidence that, should I ever get into a debate with a climate-change enthusiast, I can say I’m carbon-neutral.”
He shares the farm cottage with Lisa Hogan, 47, his partner. There’s an Aga in the kitchen and a telescope in the living room for birdwatching. Outside is a hole in the ground where the old farmhouse stood (Clarkson’s former BBC co-stars Richard Hammond, 49, and James May, 56, blew it up for a TV stunt). Clarkson is planning to start constructing a new house this year, which news reports have described as a mansion with tennis court, swimming pool and media centre. Clarkson insists it’s untrue. It will have six bedrooms, though, as reported, and be “lovely, but not Blenheim Palace”. It’s being designed to last the couple through to old age. “I’ve been careful to include wheelchair access. There is a gradient change over the site, and Lisa pointed out that we should avoid having a step, so we can zoom about in our wheelchairs without a problem.”
His new-found green credentials are unlikely to make Clarkson any more popular with his critics. Last month he upset them again by declaring that the BBC was “up itself” and made programmes only for “seven people in Islington”. Plus, its obsession with political correctness meant it was unwilling to hire men. “Honestly, poor old Nick Robinson going for an interview,” he said, referring to the appointment of Fiona Bruce as the new host of Question Time. “No chance he [was] going to get it. Anyone who has got a scrotum — forget it.”
It’s a classic example of Clarkson humour, which his defenders say merely expresses what other people privately think. Detractors say his views are a throwback to a bygone age — and he doesn’t necessarily disagree. “Maybe I am just a big old dinosaur,” he has said. “The world isn’t mine any more; it belongs to people my children’s age [daughters Emily, 24, and Katya, 20, and son Finlo, 22]. They live in a secret world, on their phones and social media. I listen to them talking and think, ‘This is an alien planet. I’m William Shatner and I’ve just beamed down somewhere.’ ”
 Filling his boots: Clarkson grows wheat, barley and oilseed rape on his 1,000 acres
TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Nevertheless, Clarkson’s viewing figures have never been higher. For a start, 5m-plus people tune in to watch him host ITV’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — as big as the average audience for Top Gear, BBC2’s motoring show, even when he was on it. Then there are the repeats of old Top Gear episodes such as the Polar Special, the Winter Olympics and the attempt to cross the Channel in home-built amphibious craft, which are still shown back to back on satellite channels and attracted big audiences over Christmas.
When the BBC refused to renew Clarkson’s contract after a catering-related punch-up, Amazon snapped him up, along with Hammond and May, in a £160m deal to make The Grand Tour. The show pulled in more than 1.5m “first streams”, meaning people signed up in droves to watch it, though the company won’t release exact figures. Clarkson has just been commissioned for a further series, spread over two years, but the studio format of the show featuring celebrity interviews in front of a live audience has come to an end. Clarkson says it’s because he’s now too fat to climb on stage. Instead, the trio will be filming road-trip specials. Will life on the farm be enough of a challenge?
“Yes, absolutely. Nothing fills me with more pleasure, as I head towards 60, than stomping about here on a winter’s day, or even a summer’s day. Any day, in fact. It’s just, honestly, the nicest thing you can do. Even pulling a fallen horse-chestnut tree out from the pond is just deep joy.”
Watching the new series of The Grand Tour, you could be forgiven for thinking that the change of direction has something to do with the tetchiness between Clarkson and May, nicknamed “Captain Slow”.
In an episode yet to be broadcast, they have to assemble an off-roader to escape the Mongolian wilderness. At one point May grows so infuriated with Clarkson, he looks as though he might bludgeon him to death. But no: off screen they remain the best of friends, even after 16 years of working together — though they would be the first to deny that a bromance between the presenting trio underlies the appeal of The Grand Tour, as it did Top Gear before it.
What’s behind his decision to downshift? Clarkson’s family lived at Home Farm in Burghwallis, South Yorkshire, when he was a boy in the 1970s. It wasn’t a working farm, but the house was set in peaceful countryside. Is he returning to his roots? No, it’s the punishing schedule, he says. No sooner do the three presenters stop work on one series than they begin on the next, a regime that has kept them away from their homes and families for as long as they can remember.
“I’ve had it up to here with Heathrow. I can literally go through that airport now with my eyes closed. I know where all the gates are. I know the security people. I’ve been going through twice or three times a week for 20 years, and I’ve just had enough. So the idea of somebody saying, ‘You don’t have to go through Heathrow any more; you don’t have to get in a car; you don’t even have to put on a pair of trousers in the morning,’ is a blessing. You saw me this morning with no socks on. OK, I have shaved, but I’m covered in spots from five solid days of filming in a studio where you have to wear make-up. So it does fill me with joy, the notion of spending large chunks of the year up here farming.”
Farmer Clarkson, it turns out, is already an established member of his community and popular with his Chipping Norton (population: 6,337) neighbours. “I used to tell him off for buying unhealthy food,” says one motherly sort at the till of a farm shop. “Now he’s eating local produce he’s looking much better.”
He’s a regular at the village pub, where some drinkers think he should be the local MP — or prime minister, both positions once held by a local, now forgotten, politician called David Cameron. Clarkson has consistently dismissed the idea of involving himself in politics, even when 50,000 of his fans voted via the government’s e-petition website for him to be prime minister (the petition was rejected on the basis that governments don’t decide who gets to No 10). Nevertheless, the idea refuses to die. When a picture of Clarkson meeting Cameron, then prime minister, at a country show was published locally on a newspaper website, one reader commented: “The prime minister and the ideal prime minister.”
The affection is mutual: Clarkson declares that the cafe in nearby Chadlington is “better than Fortnum & Mason’s. You can’t go in there and not have a conversation with them. It was once the post office, but now it sells the best carrot cake in the world. It says so on the label and you think, ‘That’s a ballsy call’, but it actually, genuinely, is the best carrot cake … in the world. We’re very spoilt here.”
 Easy to swallow: Clarkson backs up his local cafe’s claim about its carrot cake
Sometimes, though, the two worlds of fast motoring and slow living collide, as when he drove home in a battery-powered Jaguar I-Pace, plugged it in to recharge it and fused all the lights in his cottage. A neighbour lent him the use of an electrical socket for the night so Jeremy could collect the car the next morning, fully charged.
He becomes quietly enraged when the local hunt blocks the road. “It’s the pomposity of huntsmen: they stand in the road. I mean, they stand in the road, stopping the traffic on their — well, it’s glue in an early state — enormous horses, blocking traffic and believing the whole world must stop so they can indulge their passion for hunting. Well, that’s just ridiculous. I mean, if I decided I wanted to indulge in a pastime or hobby that stopped them going about their daily business, they’d be furious.”
Even more infuriating, he says, is the government red tape that has sabotaged his efforts to lift the farm out of subsidies and make it more of a going concern. When he tried to grow crops on land that previous owners had put into stewardship (making them eligible for payments under the “set aside” scheme), he found himself mired in bureaucracy. “An official came with a sort of wooden square, like a fold-out ruler, and flung it at random into a field. Then she examined every blade of grass and plant in that metre square to see if there was anything protected. They find a rare grass and they say, ‘You can’t farm this field, but we’ll pay you as though you were farming it.’ It’s called stewardship, but the idea seems to be that I’m unable to be a steward of this land but some civil servants are able to.
“Well, I take the global view that there’s a lot of starving people, and the bigger the world’s population gets, the more food we’re going to need. So it’s slightly mad to not farm things because there’s a rare grass growing.”
Likewise, his attempts at grazing sheep ran headlong into caps on livestock density. “I’m limited by the government to 0.6 of a sheep per acre. It’s something to do with nitrogen going into the soil from their urine. I tried to get round it. I have a field surrounded on three sides by woods, so I said [to the farm agent], ‘We could put as many as we like in that, because you can’t see it from the road or any footpath.’ And he said, ‘No, they’ve got a satellite.’ What? The government has a spy in the sky so officials can count sheep? How do they stay awake? I’m sure if you interviewed a proper farmer, they’d give you examples of a million idiotic rules. I’ve encountered one or two. You roll your eyes and think, ‘There’s probably a very good reason for this’, but I just don’t know what it is.”
Clarkson insists that turning cars into ploughshares did not happen overnight. Ten years ago, when it seemed the unexpected success of Top Gear must surely be short-lived, he bought some arable land near Chipping Norton. “I was only going to buy a tiny bit, and then, when I came to look round, it was so pretty I just thought, ‘Let’s go all in.’ ”
Since then, the Cotswolds has become fashionable and in parts resembles a rural enclave of Chelsea. Clarkson’s neighbours include Prince Harry and Meghan and David and Victoria Beckham. He is keen to point out that the country-house-chic set live on the other side of Chipping Norton. He bought where he did to get away, not to arrive. When he examined the farm’s books, it was clear it was financially barren, so he renamed it Diddly Squat. “Someone came to look at it in 2009 and said it was the sh*ttiest land he’d ever seen. This is not East Anglia: the soil isn’t rich in antediluvian deposits and volcanic nourishment. There’s a light dusting of soil on top of solid Cotswold stone.”
Having fallen under its spell, he set about trying to restore the flora and fauna. “When I bought it, there was an awful lot of grass but very little farming or wildlife. We planted maize and sunflower and mustard, and now the skies are absolutely rammed with birds.”
Just in case he gives the impression he’s become a vegan and started reading The Guardian, Clarkson is prone to walking round his estate with a 12-bore shotgun and blasting things out of the sky — mainly game birds — as well as dismantling dreys (squirrel nests, for the benefit of non-country folk) to protect trees. He invites his neighbours along to wander round taking aim at pheasants, which, if they don’t get out of the way, end up in Jeremy’s pot. He calls it more of a mobile cocktail party than a shoot. An overabundance of good cheer, especially on New Year’s Day, means the pheasants stand a better than even chance. “We all meet up, have some breakfast, wander about, moan about the hunt and then go to the pub for lunch.”
Clearly he’s not in favour of horses and hounds. It turns out not only do they block the road but they scare his flocks. “You get all the birds in the right place, then the hunt comes through and moves them again, which you don’t want,” he sighs. “It’s all part of country living; you either shoot or you hunt.” Has he considered banning the hunt from his land? “No, there are some people round here who would be very angry. What I thought would be fun is to one year invite the hunt and the antis and watch them have a massive battle.” He quickly adds that he’s joking, lest his critics take him at his word.
Having experienced the down-to-earth reality of farming life, he worries that TV nature programmes present an idealised version of an existence that’s often wet, cold and barbaric. “Take Countryfile. I absolutely love it. But when Matt [Baker] has a go at, say, building a dry stone wall, he puts a couple of stones in and goes, ‘Oh, I wish I could stay here all the time and just do this for a living.’ The trouble is, what he means is, ‘I’ve got to get back to London to go to the Ivy tonight with all my friends in media, and I’d have to take a massive pay cut.’ There was one where a man was boiling wood to make fork handles and he says, ‘Ah, I’d love to stay here and boil wood’, and you thought, ‘No you wouldn’t. You can buy them for 99p from a pound shop.’ ”
It turns out that Clarkson harbours a secret ambition to present his own show — one that would lay bare the realities, “including life, death and form-filling”. He says: “No one realises how much form-filling you have to do as a farmer. Yes, an actual, realistic version of Countryfile, where there was death and blood and opinion, would be a great show.”
The idea of Clarkson at the wheel of a plodding tractor instead of a 200mph Lamborghini is not as far-fetched as you might think. At the BBC he proved he could turn his hand to pretty well any type of presenting, including documentaries on the wartime Arctic convoys, on a British raid on German U-boat pens and on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Since he left, the BBC has struggled to match his audience-pulling power. As if to prove it, a BBC Top Gear DVD released for Christmas last year features not the show’s new presenting team, but resurrected highlights of Clarkson’s antics. The BBC’s strait-laced reputation provided the perfect foil for Clarkson’s humour, while its finger-wagging management helped by repeatedly admonishing him for lapses in taste (“His clothes, for example,” Hammond once suggested).
Interestingly, the take-no-prisoners humour that got Clarkson into trouble at the BBC has created scarcely a ripple at Amazon. “The difference is, Danny Cohen [the former BBC executive whom Clarkson accused of being obsessed with political correctness] isn’t at Amazon,” says Clarkson. “The Corbyn army is not there, so we just get much less bother.”
There may be a hint of double standards in Clarkson’s criticism of rural programmes — he’s not about to give up his London social life or his penthouse. He’d miss the bustle and the noise. In the city, he says, you sleep through police sirens and car alarms without a care. In the country, the slightest sound at 4am is enough to have him reaching for his gun cabinet, even if it is just a badger on patrol.
While he’s in town, he employs others to do the nitty-gritty stuff. “I have a chap who has a farm down in the village, [who] has got all the kit. I just pay him to put the seeds in and nourish and harvest them. In the fullness of time I’d ideally love to do that myself.”
When he has turned his hand to the heavy lifting, he’s made mistakes. “One year I decided to store [grain] on the runway of an old airfield at the top of the farm. But when it was scooped up, tiny bits of gravel came up with it, and it was worthless. I looked into the cost of building an actual grain barn — one where the floor is ventilated, so you dry the grain from underneath. It was a quarter of a million pounds. How many years do you have to farm just to pay off the barn? In terms of return on investment capital, I don’t see how farming pays at all. How big does a farm have to be if you can’t make money on a thousand acres? If it floats, flies or farms, rent it, seems to me.”
Another lesson he has learnt is how many gambles there are in modern farming. “You harvest your crop, put it in store, then wait for the opportune moment to sell. You’re betting on the futures market. Storing grain is very expensive, and if you make the wrong call, you can lose big time. A lot seems to depend on the weather in Russia.”
Even if Diddly Squat farm makes no money, and even if he can’t grow more crops or graze more livestock, tending the land and preserving it as a wildlife refuge is reward enough — with the occasional cull to keep numbers in check, naturally.
Clarkson the conservationist. Who would have thought it from a man who in his days on Top Gear once declared: “Norfolk people are so inbred, they can’t tell the difference between a Ferguson tractor and a Ford Capri”? Yet stranger transformations have taken place. Who knows, the man striding off to repair an owl box could one day be the new Sir David Attenborough.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Oct 9, 2019 7:48:05 GMT
Take those chocks away, Biggles — your noisy little plane’s a pain in the alpha, Romeo, sierra, echo
JEREMY CLARKSON September 29 2019 Is there anything quite so selfish as taking up a hobby that ruins life for everyone else? For example, how many babies have been born at the side of the road because the car taking the mother to hospital was stuck behind a teenage girl doing 4mph in a gigantic horsebox? Then you have that view across the Camel estuary in Cornwall, spoilt completely by the 18 lime-green splodges of artificial awfulness that is St Enodoc golf club. And then there’s motorcycling. Yes, it’s very noble to wear an all-in-one leather bag that keeps all your valuable and much-needed internal organs in one place when you fall off. But the noise you make as you hurtle towards the pearly gates is horrendous. The absolute worst offenders, though, are those who fly around in light aircraft. When I first moved to the countryside 20 years ago, I’d occasionally hear a Piper Cherokee forging a lonely path through the sky above my house. It was a mournful sound, like that of a sad dog, and it was fitting, really, because I just knew the pilot was a friendless and unhappily married lost soul who wanted to spend his free time totally alone. Today, though, things are very different. I spent a few days trying to film at my house recently and there was not a single moment when we could record anything, because of a constant conveyor belt of airborne miserabilists. The sound recordist would hold up his hand, waiting to give the all-clear, and then as one Piper finally went out of earshot, another would come along. And so it went on until dark. The figures are alarming. There are now 28,000 people with private pilot licences in the UK, and 21,000 light aircraft, which between them clock up 1.3m hours of pointless noise pollution every year. And as aircraft get cheaper and less complicated, the growth is likely to accelerate. I understand the need for helicopters, because they are used to take people from A to B quickly and conveniently. But, as a general rule, light aircraft, and appalling microlights, are flown for what the owners call “fun”. Let me explain what this entails. They turn up at the airfield where the plane is kept, imagining that they’re Douglas Bader. They wear flying jackets bought as Christmas presents by their wives, who desperately want them out of the house. And they spend most of the morning sitting outside the club house, chatting to other Eeyores about their “old kites”, imagining that at any moment a bell will ring and Trevor Howard will tell them to scramble. Eventually, after this hasn’t happened, they will climb into their stupid plane and do pre-flight checks, which makes them slightly aroused. And then they will key the radio so that they can talk in a weird phonetic code to a man in a jumper, who’s located in a nearby hut, imagining he’s Kenneth More and he’s responsible for keeping the Jerry hordes at bay. Our hero will then take off, and fly into the wind, which means he has a speed over the ground of about 14mph. He’s even being overtaken by horseboxes. For miles in every direction, sound recordists are holding up their hands, millions of pounds are being wasted and peaceful picnics are being ruined, but Biggles isn’t bothered about any of that. He’s now talking to Kenneth More about vectors and remembering to use acronyms and say “niner” instead of “nine”, and he’s so excited by all of this, he’s actually got two joysticks. Soon he will land at another airfield, where he will have a terrible cheese sandwich and a mug of tea, and he will sit about with the pilots based there, swapping stories about near misses and how you need to vector your VIR round niner niner at Biggin, and then he will have to rush to the lavatory for a bit of me time before flying home again. Yup. Tens of thousands of people have had their days ruined by the noise, and the man who isn’t Douglas Bader has ended up back where he started, having produced nothing. Apart from a bit of unnecessary carbon dioxide. He hasn’t even had any excitement. No land-based creature can think that this is acceptable, and yet when an airfield near where I live was threatened by plans to build a Norman Foster- designed museum housing a collection of prewar French cars, a staggering 180 or more local people objected. Are they mad? Because even if all the prewar French cars ventured onto the small track at the same time, they would create less din than a single one of the Biggleses. Happily, the council agreed that the car museum was a good idea and planning permission was granted. But now the local MP, Robert Courts, has stepped in and referred the matter to the secretary of state. I went to see him to argue my case, but when I noticed the back of his car was festooned with RAF roundels and the back of his phone case bore the insignia of Brize Norton, I figured I might be in for a spot of heavy disappointment. It got worse when he told me that the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, is very much in favour of keeping as many airfields as possible out of the hands of developers. This may have something to do with the fact that Shapps is a keen amateur pilot and has a light aircraft of his own. So now, here I am, wondering what on earth to do. I don’t want light aircraft to be banned because banning things is mean-spirited and socialist. I suppose I could ask the local flying clubs to go and do their practice restarts and their droning somewhere else, but that shifts the problem. It doesn’t solve it. So I’ve decided that in my advancing years, I’m going to take up a new hobby of my own. It’s called “shooting light aircraft down with a surface-to-air missile”. Of course, after I’ve got the hang of it, it’s possible there won’t be any targets left. Which means it’s win-win.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Oct 9, 2019 8:01:42 GMT
The Beeb’s editorial police chief has always been a fair cop. It’s a crime to throw him under the bus
JEREMY CLARKSON 6 October 2019 Last week the BBC tied itself into a new kind of completely inextricable knot when it announced very firmly what it thought it should be saying, and then, when everybody got cross with it, decided very firmly that it shouldn’t be saying what it very firmly believed it should be saying. Here’s the history. A few months ago, Donald Trump told some Democratical ladies of colour that they should stop whining about the awfulness of America and go back to where they came from to sort out the mess there. This was discussed on a BBC sofa by two of the corporation’s news stars: a man whose name has gone from my head and a woman called Naga Munchetty, who said such remarks were “embedded in racism”. At a rough guess, I’d say about 95% of the population would agree with her. I certainly do. But someone from a rest home for retired Brexiteers in Eastbourne did not, and complained to the BBC, which, after an investigation, partially upheld the complaint, saying: “Our editorial guidelines do not allow for journalists to . . . give their opinions about the individual making the remark or their motives for doing so. Those judgments are for the audience to make.” All over Islington, people went crazy. They were frothing at the mouth and twitching so violently it looked as though they’d caught rabies. And at the BBC it was much the same story. People were incredulous. A woman of colour had been reprimanded for questioning the motives behind Trump’s remark. “Of course he is racist, for God’s sake,” they cried. “And racism is worse than paedophilia. It’s nearly as bad as being a climate-change denier.” So in stepped the director-general, who said that the complaint should not, in fact, have been upheld, even a tiny bit. Which is a bit like a defendant listening to what the judge has to say and then leaping onto the bench to announce: “Actually, I’m not guilty after all, and now I’m going home.” I get the problem. We all live in a bubble, surrounded by people who think like we do. It’s why I was absolutely convinced “remain” would win the referendum. And it’s why no one at the BBC could get it into their heads that people in their own building had sided, albeit partially, with the halfwit in Eastbourne. What disturbs me most of all about this sorry saga, though, is that the BBC has thrown its chief of editorial policy (ed pol), a man called David Jordan, under the bus. It’s well known that, towards the end of my time at the BBC, I was embroiled in many noisy arguments with various bits of the management machine, but in all my time there, I never had a single cross word with David or the department he ran. When I left Top Gear and signed with Amazon, everyone said: “It must be great to be out of the BBC, because now you’re free to say what you want.” And I always used to reply: “Have you actually watched Top Gear? Right. So how could we have caused such upset every week if we’d been in a PC straitjacket?” Of course, I couldn’t just say or do what I wanted and then hand the DVD to a divorcee in a cardigan, who’d slot it into a big machine and press a button marked “Transmit”. Everything had to be scrutinised by the ed pol police — but they were never the enforcers of management diktats. They were the guardians of free speech, and now their boss is under a Routemaster simply because he and his team analysed what Munchetty said, calmly removed the hysteria of the subject matter and concentrated only on the issue of impartiality. I watched them do this every week for 10 years. Once, we asked ed pol if we could team up with a production company that was shooting a cinema remake of The Sweeney. We wanted to make a Top Gear film about how we filmed the movie’s big car chase. Think about that for a minute — that’s us, using licence-fee money to make a car chase to slot into a non-BBC film, which would then go on to make profits for someone else. Where on earth do you place your first foot in that political minefield? Believing it to be an unsolvable riddle, we went to ed pol, and the arrangement it went on to construct between us and the film company was so huge and complex you could see it from space. But using grey, painstaking diligence, it got the BBC and the film company to a position where each would share equal benefits. Which meant we could go ahead and blow up some caravans. The ed pol department is like John Gielgud in Arthur. It runs everything, but its personal opinion is never known. It may be thinking behind its passive face, as you describe something you want to do, that it’s the stupidest nonsense ever to come out of a mouth, but you would never know it, because its job is to stick to the rules. And that’s it. I’ve worked elsewhere, where a management type will call to say: “Can you take that comment out? Some people in the office were offended by it.” But at the BBC, ed pol is always on hand to stop all that nonsense. It uses its cold detachment and lack of opinion to make sure the boat stays upright. People complained after the Munchetty ruling that the ed pol police were not considering what the situation felt like for a woman of colour. The truth is, though, that when they come to do their job, they don’t see colour. They just see a BBC news person implying the president of America is racist. There may be only a few hundred people in the country who think Munchetty is wrong. But it is not the BBC’s job to ignore them or their views, abhorrent though they may be. Management often loses sight of that simple fact, but ed pol never does. And proroguing the department on a whim, no matter how popular that whim might be, is foolish.
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Post by RedMoon11 on May 16, 2020 5:02:32 GMT
Worthy books won’t see a chap through lockdown. Give me explosions, Nazi gold and reviewers’ tears
Jeremy Clarkson
Sunday 03 May 2020
New research shows that men usually give up on a book by the time they’ve got to page 50. Hmmm. I’ve never not finished a book. Obviously this doesn’t include instruction manuals. I’ve never read one of those to the end. But when it comes to proper books, I’ve always kept going.
Even when they were worthy and terrible and full of people in ruffs and bonnets, I continued to sail on HMS Optimism through the sea of turgid reality, praying that eventually the dreary Victorian heroine would have mad sex and then get eaten by a shark.
The trouble with this policy is that she never was. So I’ve wasted a large chunk of my life doing something I wasn’t enjoying. And as a result, I’ve grown to fear books. I’m 60 now. At best I have only 87,000 hours left before I die, and I don’t want to spend any of them being avoidably miserable.
In the past five weeks I could have read maybe 30 books. But the number I’ve actually read is nought. This is because I’ve been doing hard manual labour, and after a tiring day in the fields, I’d rather shoot a Nazi zombie in the face than read the “searing and poignant” tale of a Romanian woman’s 50-year search for her hat. Which is what all books are about these days.
Examples I may have made up include The Duvet of Blossoms by Pandora Treacle. Set in a remote Cornish village, Pandora’s sweeping new novel looks at the lives of two elderly women who occasionally meet when they’re posting letters. Or there’s How Dare You! by Milly Lennial. Milly’s first novel, published by All Men Are Bastards Books, is a meticulously researched account of how powerful white males such as Prince Philip and “Bomber” Harris are responsible for all the plastic in the oceans.
I’ve had a canter through all the most talked-about books at the moment and what we have is Dilly Court’s The Summer Maiden, which is about women doing something or other in the 19th century. Then you have Wilde Like Me, which is about a woman trying to be less dull, and The Cows, which is about three women who want to be heard. It doesn’t explain what they’re saying but I bet it’s nothing of any consequence.
My daughter is raving about The Beekeeper of Aleppo, about which I know nothing except that the author’s previous work was called A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible. And that really, really doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. It sounds, in fact, like the sort of tea women drink that isn’t tea at all, because it’s made from nettles.
What I must know, before I begin a book, is that I will definitely enjoy it. If there’s any doubt, it goes straight onto the bookcase that I, like Tory MPs, use as a backdrop when doing a Skype interview on television.
But how can you know you will definitely enjoy a book before you have started it? Reviews are no help because all of them are written by weird fedora people in corduroy who would actually enjoy the searing and poignant tale of a Romanian woman’s 50-year search for her hat.
I have nothing in common with book reviewers. They want nuance and elegance, whereas I want Apache helicopter gunships. They look for what’s not being said. They look for hints and suggestions. Whereas I look for speedboats and submarine evasion manoeuvres.
If you gave a reviewer a book with an explosion on the front cover, and a gold ingot embossed with a swastika, and a girl in a bikini playing baccarat, you can be assured she’d give it one star. Give her a book about a Dutch girl’s flower-arranging class and she might need to go off for some me-time. We, in the real world, like Jilly Cooper and Jeffrey Archer and EL James. But none of their books are reviewed well. They are sneered at because they are populist, and populism in the arts is always seen as vulgar. To be truly great, a writer must die at the age of 42, alone and penniless. To achieve this, you must write books that only reviewers like.
I devour books when I am on holiday, but this has been getting harder in recent years. Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler and Arthur C Clarke are dead. Wilbur Smith is pushing 90. Worst of all, Lee Child announced recently that he’s hanging up his pen and letting his brother write the Jack Reacher books.
To make matters worse, when you are on a beach you cannot lie there reading something with an explosion on the front cover because everyone will think you’re a moron. Biographies work quite well, but I’ve enjoyed only two. There was Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon and Keith Richards’s memoir Life, written with James Fox. I seem to have a thing for people called Keith.
That said, I’m lucky because I have a local bookshop — Jaffé & Neale — whose owners, Patrick and Polly, give me a cup of coffee while they scurry off to find a pile of books they know I’ll enjoy. They’ve never been wrong.
They gave me a book about Mexican drug cartels called The Power of the Dog, and it was breathtaking. And then there was Matterhorn. That’s a book where you’re very tempted to give up on page 50. The Vietnam War dialogue is impenetrable. But as usual I persevered and, ooh, I’m glad, because it’s the second best book ever written. After The House at Pooh Corner, obviously.
Don’t argue. It is. Anna Karenina. The Great Gatsby. War and Peace. These are the books Mark Twain was on about when he observed that a classic book is “something that everyone wants to have read, and no one wants to read”.
That, I guess, is why so few men are capable of getting past page 50. Everyone is trying to write classic books rather than great books full of global annihilation and Cylons coming at Mach 5 out of the sun.
Stick a cork in it, wine bores. I’d much rather get horizontal on the terrace with a Blue Nun Jeremy Clarkson Sunday 10 May 2020Good news at last. Some experts have decided that the age-old practice of opening a bottle of wine a couple of hours before you start drinking it is old-fashioned nonsense. And that there’s nothing wrong with removing the cork with a screwdriver and necking it on your way home from the off-licence. I love wine. I love to ingest vast quantities of it in the sunshine, and while I prefer the pink kind, I’m perfectly happy with a pint of white at lunchtime and a balloon of red before bed. I’ve drunk so much over the past six weeks that we are now embarrassed to put the bottles by the bins in case the neighbours think we’ve been hosting illegal parties. But despite a 30-year love affair with wine, I know absolutely nothing about it. Some say this is because my taste buds don’t work properly. And it’s true. Having smoked three-quarters of a million cigarettes, I am unable to tell the difference between fish and cheese. So I have no chance of being able to tell a burgundy from a claret. In a blind tasting many years ago, the wine I preferred turned out to be Red Bull. But not being able to tell one wine from another is not the reason for my ignorance. No. That comes from my dad. I’m not quite sure why, but he developed a loathing of wine bores. If someone in a restaurant swilled wine round the glass before tasting it, or smelt the cork, or even peered at the label, he would begin to mutter under his breath. Usually about freemasons. He had it in his mind that anyone who talked about wine in a pompous fashion had a secret apron in his office drawer. Once, we were eating at the French Horn in Sonning and absolutely everyone was swilling their wine around and sniffing corks and nodding sagely whenever the sommelier spoke, and eventually my dad had had enough. So when our wine was poured for him to taste, he stood up, removed his jacket, undid his cufflinks and carefully rolled up his right shirtsleeve. Then, with everyone in the restaurant looking on, he dipped his elbow into the wine and left it there for a good 20 seconds before turning to the wine waiter and in a booming voice saying: “Mmmm. That’s delicious.” I was only 14 and I explained afterwards he’d caused me great embarrassment. To which he replied: “Not as much embarrassment as you’ll endure if you end up like that lot, pretending to know about wine.” I now know lots of people who pretend they know about wine. They post pictures of what they’re having for supper, and their friends — probably masons — reply, making appreciative noises. The other night one of them said the wine he was opening was only 7% alcohol, so he could drink the whole bottle. No, mate. If it’s only 7%, you’ll need to drink three bottles to make it worth your while. Seven per cent? You may as well drink milk. The wine cellar has always been a thing in big houses. But now it lives in the kitchen and it has glass doors so that visitors can peer inside and swoon with amazement at the man’s impeccable breeding and knowledge. I’m having a glass-fronted wine fridge built in the kitchen of my new house and I’m going to fill it with Blue Nun. Which, if you’re wilfully ignorant like me, is a German wine that wine buffs don’t like. At parties I shall serve a special version sprinkled with bits of gold leaf, which sparkles when you shake the bottle. Which brings me back to this business of opening a bottle an hour or so before you want to drink it. And the claim it’s not necessary. That has to be correct, because if you pull the cork out to let the air in, the only bit of wine that’s exposed is a tiny area about half the size of a stamp, at the top of the neck. Air doesn’t penetrate liquid if the liquid’s not doing anything. Put some fish in a tank of water and in the morning what you’re likely to have is some dead fish. You really need a pump to blow bubbles if you want them to live. Maybe that’s what I’ll do with my Blue Nun. Make guests wait while I pump air into it. This is what wine enthusiasts like: waiting. I go to their houses and wait while they slowly read the label and then even more slowly pull out the cork before slowly pouring the contents into a decanter. At this point you might think there’s no more waiting to be done, but you’d be wrong because a proper wine bore will, after an hour or so, pour the wine back into the bottle before serving. It’s called “double decanting”, and it’s why, when I’m at a mason’s house, I always make sure I take a large gin and tonic to the table before sitting down. It’s something to drink while you’re waiting for something to drink. I am aware, of course, that there are people in the world who can tell one wine from another in the same way as there are people in the world who can saw a woman in half and put a playing card in your wallet. I’m even sure there are those who could tell a double-decanted wine from one that has been served down a garden hosepipe. These people have a name. We call them “the French”. If you are a man whose hedge fund has done well, you are not French. You are simply a man with a secret apron who is showing off, a man who thinks that a knowledge of wine makes you sophisticated. That’s wrong. When some Georgian chap first discovered wine 8,000 years ago, he didn’t think: “I wonder if this would taste better if I planted the vine on a hill.” What he actually thought was: “Ooh. I feel giddy.” And what he then thought was: “I wonder if I can feel even giddier if I have a bit more.” www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2020-05-10/news-review/stick-a-cork-in-it-wine-bores-id-much-rather-get-horizontal-on-the-terrace-with-a-blue-nun-3pdm2qw3q |
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Post by RedMoon11 on May 16, 2020 5:03:51 GMT
Farmer Clarkson: Jeremy mows his meadow with a Lamborghini tractor
Unable to test cars, key worker Jeremy Clarkson is ploughing his energy into his farm. In the first in a new series on rural life, he takes his giant tractor for a 25mph spin
Jeremy Clarkson Sunday May 10 2020
Jeremy Clarkson driving his Lamborghini R8 270 DCR tractor
EMILY CLARKSON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Back in 2008, I bought a thousand-acre spread in Oxfordshire and employed a local man to do the farmering. But last year he decided to retire, so I thought I’d take over myself. Many people were surprised by this, as to be a farmer you need to be a vet, an untangler of red tape, an agronomist, a mechanic, an entrepreneur, a gambler, a weather forecaster, a salesman, a labourer and an accountant. And I am none of those things.
My bosses at Amazon were so surprised, they commissioned an eight-part show that would enable viewers to enjoy the “hilarious consequences” of my attempts to manage the woods and the meadows and the fields full of wheat and barley and oilseed rape. I’d called the farm Diddly Squat because that’s what it makes.
Still, I was confident I’d manage. Man has been farming for 12,000 years, so I figured it must be in our DNA by now. You put seeds in the ground, weather happens and food grows. Easy.
Unfortunately I could not have picked a worse year to begin. We had the wettest planting season on record. It started raining in October and did not stop for seven weeks. Then there was the uncertainty about Brexit. And then, just as the sun came out, everyone was told to go indoors and stay there, possibly for ever.
This has had a catastrophic effect on prices. When I first began delivering my 140 lambs a couple of weeks ago, they were worth £100 each. Now that’s down to £30. Spring barley, meanwhile? It’ll be hardly worth harvesting, thanks partly to a weather-driven glut and partly to the fact that barley makes beer. And all the pubs are shut.
Despite the problems, however, I’m sitting here on a lovely spring day and, apart from 10 acres of oilseed rape eaten by flea beetles, everything seems to be growing quite well. And only three lambs have died. And as there’s so much to do, I’m not wandering around the house, glugging wine from the bottle and watching reruns of Cash in the Attic. I’m a key worker.
And better yet, I still have something to write about, here in the motoring section of your newspaper — my tractor.
I could have bought a Fendt. Everyone says they’re the best. Or I could have bought a Fastrac, because I’m friends with the JCB family. But obviously I wanted a Lamborghini. So that’s what I’ve got. An R8 270 DCR, to be precise.
Lamborghini was a tractor-maker long before it made cars, but the business was sold — along with the rights to the name — in 1973. Today they’re made in Germany but they still look Lambo-mad. If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you’d end up with.
It’s huge. Even the front tyres are taller than me. You have to climb up a four-rung ladder to reach the door handle and then you climb up some more to get into the cab, and then up again to get into the seat. It’s so vast, in fact, that it wouldn’t fit into my barn. I therefore had to build a new one. Every single farmer type who’s seen it says the same thing. “That,” they intone with a rural tug on the flat cap, “is too big.” But in my mind tractors are like p*nises. They cannot be too big.
Yet the farmers are quite right. It is too big. Not only will it not fit into my barn, it won’t fit through the gate onto my driveway. So I’ve had to build a new driveway. It is also too powerful. The straight-six turbocharged diesel produces only 270 horsepower, which, in car terms, is Golf GTI territory, but there are 775 torques. This means that when you attach a piece of equipment to its rear end, it is immediately ripped to shreds.
Not that I can attach anything to its rear end. It’s all heavy engineering back there and I just know that if I tried, you’d be reading about yet another farmer walking for four miles across his fields with his severed arm in a bag. To put cultivators and rollers and drills on the back, I’ve therefore had to employ a man called Kaleb. Who also says my tractor’s too big. He reckons his Claas is better. We argue about this a lot.
I concede the Lamborghini is a bit complicated. You start it and there’s an almighty roar from the vertical smokestack, which is a full 7in in diameter. And then you put it in gear. And then you put it in gear with the other gearlever, and then you let the clutch in, before you realise you haven’t selected forward from the other gearlever. To change gear on the move, though, you use a fourth gearlever.
There are, I’m told, 48 gears forward and reverse. Happily, there are only two brake pedals and two throttles. But I did count 164 buttons before I opened the arm rest and found 24 more. None of them is labelled, which is a worry as all of them are designed to engage stuff that will tear off one of my arms.
Eventually, though, it all began to move and I discovered something unusual. The tractor has suspension and so does the seat, but they are designed to operate independently, so when the tractor is going up, the seat is always coming down. This means you alternate between severe spinal compression and a banged head. I clung so desperately to the steering wheel that after just three minutes it came off. Literally, off.
I’ve never been terrified at 25mph before, but in that tractor I really was. Since then, I’ve driven it very slowly … into six gates, a hedge, a telegraph pole, another tractor and a shipping container. I think I’m right in saying that I have not completed a single job without having at least one crash. Doing a three-point turn at the end of a cultivating run? I’m bad at that. I always go through the fence.
I’m also very bad at “drilling”. This is the word we farmer types use for “planting”. Mainly this is because, to do it properly, you must install the type of computer that Nasa uses for calculating re-entry angles. That’s another aspect of farming I can’t do: computer programming. Which is why some of my tramlines are 10ft apart and some are in Yorkshire.
However, despite all this, when I’m trundling along and the air-conditioning is on and there’s a constant dribble of socialism coming from Radio 4, I confess I start to understand why Forrest Gump was happy, after all his adventures, to end up on a tractor mowing the school football field. I’m especially happy when the engine is under load, because the stupendous noise coming from that exhaust pipe drowns out Marcus Brigstocke.
And when I finish a field and I climb down the ladder and sit on a fence I’ve just broken to enjoy a bottle of beer and a chicken sandwich, I can look back at the work I’ve done and feel a tiny bit proud. It’s not nursing or doctoring, I understand that, but growing bread and beer and vegetable oil is somehow a damn sight more rewarding than driving round corners while shouting.
As I am not able to write columns about cars until this virus issue is solved, I shall be bringing you more news from the farm each week
SEED MONEY
Cost of tractor Second-hand from Germany: £40,000
Cost of barn to put it in £28,000
Cost of driveway it can actually use £23,000
Cost of man to fit things to it every morning His business, not yours
Cost of repairing the damage I’ve done so far £215,000,000
But it does run on red diesel
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 3, 2020 23:59:48 GMT
Jeremy Clarkson’s girlfriend Lisa Hogan: he’s working me like a dog on the farm. Can I be furloughed?
Building dams and putting up fences is not how she imagined spending lockdown with her partner
The couple on the farm
EMILY CLARKSON
Lisa Hogan
Sunday May 03 2020
I’ve played it all wrong from the start, this lockdown with Clarkson on the farm. In the early days, hearing Jeremy shout, “I have just had a genius idea!”, my ears would prick up. I would listen, in full meerkat alert pose, as he explained, for example, how we could reroute a dribble of a stream into a pond. Then, day after day, we would trundle to the dam, and Jeremy would bellow instructions while I lugged wheelbarrows full of clay over a series of old doors that served as a makeshift bridge.
“Get your act together, Elastigirl,” Jeremy boomed as the door with the wheelbarrow on began sliding away from the door with my feet on. The last thing I saw was the exasperation on his face as I fell into the freezing water.
Jeremy’s energy has always been extraordinary. He whizzes between his seven jobs (or is it 11 now?), flicking a two-fingered salute at the fact he had his 60th birthday a few weeks ago. I am a decade younger, athletic and have always been a willing partner in his creative ideas on the farm. But now I’d like to check into Slothdom, please. I can’t keep up. Can’t I be furloughed?
Take the saga with our old Aga. Not long after confinement began, beastly easterly winds blew down its vent and from then on its cooking temperature would barely rise above tepid. After eating dinner post-midnight a few nights in a row, Jeremy had a brilliant idea.
“Why don’t you fix the Aga?” he said to me. “All you have to do is disassemble the cupboard under the sink, unscrew the engine and see whether there’s any soot stuck.”
I did not want to do this. We have a farmhand who normally deals with this kind of thing, but he’s not allowed in the house under the present circumstances. The cupboard under the sink is scary, and if it turns out it’s not soot that’s the problem, Jeremy will come up with many other excellent suggestions that could well singe what’s left of my grizzled hands, or blow me up. So I refused to fix the Aga.
On Sunday, I put lunch in the oven at 9.30am. It wasn’t ready until 4pm. Ha, that will teach him, I told myself as he sat oblivious on the terrace, reading in the sun with a glass of rosé.
 Clarkson and Hogan at an awards ceremony in London in 2017
WEIRPHOTOS/SPLASH NEWS
With us on the farm is Ali, my 18-year-old daughter, who is confused about why she’s sad about not having to sit her A-levels. She has been my little helper: my sous-chef in the kitchen, on constant dishwasher duty and in charge of the chickens. I’ve only found one dead and only occasionally discovered them still sweltering in their coops at 9am when Ali’s slept through her sunrise alarm.
Out of pity, we decided she could have a friend to stay and work on the farm and help with the ever-growing list of “brilliant ideas” Jeremy sets as tasks. But we would have to apply some strict self-isolation rules: Ali and her friend would stay away from me and Jeremy for two full weeks.
Initially, I suggested they stick to the older, separate part of our cottage, but Jeremy thought this was just a cunning plan for me to get out of being his laundry bitch, since the washing machine is in that part of the house. I was annoyed with myself that this ploy hadn’t crossed my mind.
There may have been alcohol involved when, instead, we decided to buy an isolation mobile home for Ali. When it arrived, I thought, “Holy Moly! How drunk could we have been?” The horror is two-tone green, with green carpet and green sofas. It’s an eyesore with conjunctivitis.
“Have you got the water supply, gas check, gas supply, electricity, grey and black water plumbing worked out?” Jeremy wanted to know. I wasn’t sure what any of this meant, or how to achieve it, but I do now know why people check into fully equipped caravan sites. It took pretty much the entire two-week isolation period to get it set up properly.
The girls could in theory come back into the cottage now, but they’ve found the barn where the booze is stored and refuse to do so. I’m allowed to visit if I need to use their oven.
Before lockdown began, Jeremy had been filming a new farming series for Amazon. But the 15 or so crew that used to pile into the house, and whom I adored, are gone, along with the delicious film-set catering. So now it’s me filming wobbly scenes on a little video camera. Jeremy gets in position, says his bit, shouts “Cut!”, then pff, he’s gone. Half the time I haven’t got round to turning the camera on.
Around week four, I hit a slump. It was a hot, windless day, the kind that used to make sailors jump into the sea with madness. “I know something’s wrong,” Jeremy said. “Tell me.”
But I stay silent. My hands are cut from putting up fences to stop our lambs from jumping out of the field, but it’s not that. It’s 7pm and I’m looking vacantly into the fridge for something to cook for dinner that doesn’t require an oven, but it’s not that either.
“It’s just the Groundhog Day routine, Jeremy,” I say. “There’s no fun. Every day it’s full on, then every night I cook, we watch a movie, then I clean the kitchen.” Now it’s Jeremy’s turn to be silent. He works so hard at everything and he loves it — and he thought I was loving it too.
The next evening, at dusk, he takes me deep into a wood. We climb up onto a wobbly plank high in a tree opposite a badger hide. Our badger-watching plan doesn’t get far because we chat too much. Jeremy loves nothing more than to tell an interesting story he’s read or heard, then I tell him something that he doesn’t find interesting at all, but we natter on our perch until it’s too dark to see anything.
Back at the house, he lights the fire in the party barn, puts on the disco lights and plays me his favourite vinyls from the 1970s. I dance my heart out. Even though he thought it would be funny to put my daggy dancing on Instagram, I’m back in high spirits the next day. I’ve been sleeping well, and snoring lots. Last night I dreamt I was in an actual snoring competition. Waking after the deepest sleep, I found Jeremy awake, bleary-eyed and shattered.
To make up for it, I cut his hair, which grows outwards. At one point I could hear it brushing the door frames as he walked through the cottage. Using some groovy buzzing clippers, I’ve done quite a good job.
Now he wants to return the favour. I’m about to fire up my home waxing kit (let me point out, this is for me), when he offers to assist me with the parts I can’t reach. I look warily at his enormous hands. “Can’t you fix the Aga instead?” I ask, but he’s adamant.
Who would have thought it? As it turns out, we’ve both acquired new skills during the lockdown.
Read Jeremy Clarkson’s new column on farming, in next week’s Magazine
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 4, 2020 0:52:35 GMT
I now see the appeal of the caravan holiday. All it took was a global crisis and zero other optionsJeremy Clarkson Sunday 17 May 2020 In my day job on television, I have destroyed hundreds of caravans. I’ve dropped them onto things, blown them up, fired missiles into them and towed them round racetracks at high speed until they fell over and disintegrated. I’ve made it very plain that I hate them. And now I’ve bought one. Here’s why. My house was blown up a few years ago, so I’m living in a cottage that’s very small. The sitting room is nine feet by nine and the kitchen is eight by four. So when my girlfriend’s daughter announced she wanted a friend to stay, I had to point out that social distancing would be mathematically impossible. The only solution was a caravan, and as all caravans are fundamentally the same, we simply opened up the internet and ordered the first one we saw. Built in Grimsby in the 1990s, it’s a 35ft Cosalt Rimini. And it’s no ordinary Rimini. It’s a special version called the Super, and that’s odd, because it isn’t. Finished in a shade of green that I’ve seen before only in sick, it is trimmed with the sort of materials that were discarded by the rest of humanity in 1972. Pleblon and vulgalour abound. Even the tassels have tassels on them and the wood is varnished to the point where it looks like real plastic. My girlfriend’s daughter, however, was not bothered about any of this. She and her friend loved their new home, right up to the point they discovered it didn’t have wi-fi. Naturally, they were gone within the hour. That means I was left with a four-grand hole in my bank account and, for no good reason, a sick-green caravan in the yard. I was cross. And I remained cross right up to the point that Matt Hancock, who is the health secretary, announced last week that “lavish” foreign holidays would not be possible this summer. Doubtless many people will have heard this and decided they would instead rent an agreeable house in Cornwall or the Lake District. This, however, isn’t going work, for two reasons. One, they were all snapped up back in March, and two, the weird angry people who live full time in these rural idylls have developed a frothing hatred for townies who come into their little world with money to spend, good looks and all their own teeth. However, while rich people are not allowed into this sexless chocolate-box world of bitterness and petty-minded rage, for some reason the poor are welcomed with open arms. Which is why caravan parks will be opening up again very soon. Of course, you don’t want to go on a caravanning holiday. Your skin’s not thick enough, so you’d die of shame, holding up all that traffic as you trundled down the A303 like a 12mph snail. And what the bloody hell would you do when you finally got there? It’s not like you can pop down to Le Club 55 or that bar in Cala Deià where they filmed The Night Manager. Well now, let’s just think about that for a moment. You’ve spent the past eight weeks living like your grandparents did, playing board games with your kids and cards with each other in the evening. So you’re now match-fit for an old-fashioned holiday with drizzle and rock pools and flying kites. And there’s more. You’d gnaw your own arm off to spend a couple of weeks on a gin palace in the Mediterranean, and yet you pooh-pooh a caravan. Why? Both have awful furnishings, uncomfortable mattresses, not enough head room and gas appliances that constantly smell like they’re on the verge of exploding. In some ways the caravan is better. It doesn’t make you seasick, you don’t need a ladder to get off and there are no jellyfish. I’m not being fatuous. And anyway, the fact is you’re simply not going to the Greek islands this year. And you’re not going to be able to stay in a hotel in Britain. And you’re not going to be able to rent a cottage. If you want a holiday, you’re going camping. I urge you to look on the bright side. You will not need to pack any sun cream or mosquito repellent. In fact, you won’t need to pack at all. You just chuck all the kids’ toys and your barbecue set and a barrel of wine in the caravan and set off. You won’t even have to leave your dog behind. No security guard will want to touch your genitals. There will be no queues for immigration. You won’t get deep-vein thrombosis and you won’t have to spend two hours in a packed foreign airport trying to rent a car because the hot, coughing minibus driver your travel company sent looks like he may be a heavily infected psychopath. Sure, British caravan sites are usually full of rampant Brexiteers who keep koi carp. And I’m sure it will be annoying, trying to explain to your children every morning why the couple in the next-door van were making piggy grunting noises the night before. Plus, you will need to empty the lavatory yourself, which is obviously disgusting. But think of the freedom. You can go anywhere. Not Cornwall, obviously, or the Lake District, because the local gonks will throw mud at you. But there’s northern Norfolk, which is lovely, and northwest Scotland, which is even better. And you don’t even have to worry about the poor-quality McFood, because all the pubs and restaurants are shut. When the sun shines, north Devon is about as pretty as Britain gets, which means it’s as pretty as anywhere in the world. Or how about the Cotswolds? You could be David Beckham’s neighbour, and how exciting is that? I even know where you can rent a caravan. She’s a beauty. Finished in a striking shade of Grimsby green, she has two bedrooms, a kitchen and a spacious living room, and she is available right now at very reasonable rates... What? You didn’t think I was going to use the godawful thing myself, did you?
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 4, 2020 1:43:20 GMT
They’ve found a new galaxy 12bn light years away. Fantastic — now how do we make it blow up?
Jeremy Clarkson Sunday 24 May 2020
On Wednesday evening, after a few wines, I found myself in the garden, on my back, looking at the stars. They were particularly bright, partly because I live high above the layer of smog that blankets the rest of the country, and partly because the only light pollution comes from a far-off village, where the solitary streetlight is a Toc H.
And, of course, when you are on your back, after a few wines, looking at the stars, it doesn’t take long to say out loud that we cannot be alone in the universe. And then, shortly after you’ve failed to grapple with the concept of infinity, you will be feeling morbid and philosophical so you will start talking about your long-dead father and how you hope you’ve made him proud.
I love looking at the stars, and I get squeaky with excitement when the International Space Station slides by. It’s only a skip with some shiny wheelie bins tacked onto the sides, and it’s full of space nerds in polo shirts and chinos, and it’s only 250 miles away, which means it’s less distant than Carlisle, but somehow it’s impossibly exotic.
Two years ago I was given a telescope by an extremely generous friend and I was priapic with excitement because it wasn’t the sort of telescope that Bret Easton Ellis types use to spy on lady neighbours from their penthouse apartments in New York.
It was the real deal, with many lenses and a remote-control device that allowed me to steer it electronically to the star or a planet of my choosing. I could even drive it via wi-fi and look at the images on my phone while sitting in a meeting in Los Angeles. And, naturally, all of this means I haven’t been able to make it work at all.
Once, I think, I managed to line it up on the church in a village a couple of miles away. But the image was so blurry, it could have been an ear of corn. Or David Cameron’s left leg. In desperation I called my local telescope society, which sent round two chaps whose names I can’t remember. They were almost certainly called Doug, though. Doug is the right name for a man who likes to stands outside at night looking at the rings of Saturn. I should have been called Doug.
Unfortunately, however, my telescope was too complicated even for the Dougs, so now it’s in a storage barn waiting for the day when I’m rich enough to have a personal space butler who can point it at what I want to see and then pour endless glasses of wine while I talk to him about my dad. Don’t mock. People have personal trainers, so why can’t I have a personal Galileo?
I bring all this up because last week it was reported that some Dougs in Chile have found a galaxy 12 billion light years from Earth. Let me try to make that number live for you. The sun is 93 million miles away, and the light it emits reaches us in eight minutes. The light from the galaxy El Doug has found takes 12,000 million years to get here.
It can only be seen if you have a really big telescope, which is what they’ve got there in Chile. It’s 10 miles wide, sits on a plain in the Atacama desert that is higher than Mont Blanc and consists of 66 dishes — 54 of which are almost 40ft wide and 12 of which are about 23ft across — which are moved around on massive 28-wheel, 130-ton robotic lorries. Since it became operational nine years ago, it has photographed the dust inside the tail of a comet and was part of a network of telescopes that produced the first image of a black hole. But its most impressive achievement came six years ago when it helped produce pictures of two galaxies crashing into one another.
I very much enjoy watching video clips of cruise liners having parking accidents on YouTube. The action is always pedestrian, but the devastation that results is immense. It’s hilarious watching an entire harbour being reduced to rubble after a ship full of chlamydia crashes into it at 2mph, so I cannot begin to imagine how wondrous it would be to see a head-on between two star systems.
In four billion years the people of Earth will have a front-row seat when our Milky Way plunges into the Andromeda galaxy, but for now the collision between NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, as the crashing galaxies are romantically called, is all we’ve got.
It’s an accident that’s been going on for at least 300 million years and it’ll still be going on 400 million years from now. At some point the galaxies’ nuclei will collide, and I can imagine the damage caused by this will not buff out. Stuff is going to get dislodged, that’s for sure. I guess if you put 2,000 tons of C-4 explosive in a ball pit, and imagined the balls were stars, you’d get an idea of what sort of havoc will result.
And here’s the juicy bit. Even though this crash is happening just 45 million light years from Earth, we won’t feel a thing. Billions of new suns will be created in an instant. Others will be catapulted zillions of miles from their usual course.
Planets will implode. Trillions of tons of gas will solidify. Gravity fields will collapse. And you’ll be lying in your garden, in Cheadle, blissfully unaware that anything of any consequence is happening at all.
We’re also unaware that the Earth is spinning at a thousand miles per hour and going round the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. The sun, meanwhile, is orbiting the centre of our galaxy at half a million miles per hour, and the galaxy itself is tearing through space at 1.3 million miles per hour.
Which means that as you lie there, with your nice bottle of merlot, you’re careering at 250,000 miles per hour towards a massive crash with another galaxy. It’s useful to remember this next time you are worrying about whether the furlough scheme will extend beyond September.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 4, 2020 7:11:29 GMT
The vegetable crisis on Jeremy Clarkson’s farm
When he was warned veg wouldn’t grow on his Chipping Norton hill farm, Jeremy wanted to prove the naysayers wrong. Now he’s stuck with soaring costs, a wilting crop and no one to pick it
Jeremy Clarkson Sunday 24 May 2020
Marrow escape: Clarkson avoided losing a limb while planting veg with his girlfriend, Lisa Hogan
CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
There was a brouhaha recently about a planeload of Romanians who had arrived here to pick vegetables. “We don’t want their diseases,” said people in tracksuits. “And why can’t the jobs be given to proper English people?”
Hmm. Farmers have been screaming for weeks about how their vegetables will die unless an army can be raised to pick them. They’ve been begging “proper” English people to get off their flabby arses and help out, but apart from a few middle-class parents who’ve signed up Giles for a week on his hands and knees, the response has been pathetic. There were 90,000 jobs on offer; 6,000 people got as far as an interview. Hence the plane from Romania.
Ordinarily I would not be interested in this story, because my farm is on a hill in the Cotswolds. When I come here from London, the temperature gauge in my car drops like the altimeter in a crashing airliner. It’s cold here. Bitter. And that’s the wrong weather for veg.
I’m also informed that the soil’s no good. “It’s brash,” say the locals who wear overalls and Viyella shirts for a living. Many also wear ties. I’m not sure why. A tie is just something else that can get caught up in farm machinery. But anyway, they say “brash” is good only for cereal crops. And maybe sheep. Not vegetables.
Last year, to prove them wrong, I decided to plant a couple of acres of potatoes. Eventually, after filling in a stack of forms about 4ft high, the government gave me permission (in farming, you have to get permission from the government to get up in the morning) and four months later I had 40 tons of spuds in the shed. This was the wrong amount: not enough to make it worth a merchant’s while to send a lorry, too much to sell at the side of the road. I managed to sell one ton; 38 tons rotted; and I’ve given the rest away to old people in the village.
Financially, then, my attempts to become the potato king of Chipping Norton ended in failure. But it did prove to the locals you can grow vegetables up here in the freezing troposphere, in soil that’s nine parts stone and one part dust.
That’s why, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to take half a field earmarked for spring barley and use it instead to grow broad beans, beetroots, leeks, cabbages and all the other things people use as an accompaniment to food.
This meant buying a planting machine. Most, these days, are designed for planting a whole county in a morning and Canada by nightfall. But I had only a four-acre plot, so I ended up buying one from the 1950s. It’s tiny. And brittle. If I attached it to the back of the gigantic torque mountain that is my Lamborghini tractor it would explode. I therefore needed a smaller tractor. So I cleverly bought my girlfriend, Lisa, a present. It’s a dinky little 1961 Massey Ferguson.
 Aboard Lisa’s new tractor
EMILY CLARKSON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
But despite my ingenuity, there was a problem. You need someone to drive the tractor and two people to sit on little chairs in the miniature planting machine, feeding the vegetable sets — as the seedlings are called — into the machinery. And there is no way that’s possible when everyone has to be 6ft apart.
I called my children, who, despite the lockdown, immediately decided they had work to do and essays to write. So I got my tractor driver, Kaleb, to sit on the Massey Ferguson and we decided he was very nearly 6ft in front of the planting machine. Therefore Lisa and I could sit in it, doing the work.
It’s said that deep-sea diving off an oil rig is dangerous work and soldiering is worse. But the fact is the fatality rate among people in agriculture is almost 20 times higher than the average for all industries. And when you sit in a planting machine you can see why.
In front of you, mounted vertically, is a heavy motorcycle-style chain, and attached to it, every 4in or 5in, are little V-shaped platforms onto which you place the vegetable plants. As the tractor goes along, the chain turns and you start to get an idea of what it might be like to be inside a gearbox. It is phenomenally easy to get your hand trapped. And because the tractor is so loud, its driver would not hear your screams.
The planter is fitted with a plastic cover. Initially, I thought it was to shield the occupants from the sun and rain. Now I’m fairly sure it’s to make life easier for the coroner.
The most amazing thing, though, is that the machine doesn’t work. It either buries the sets a foot down where there’s no sunlight or it doesn’t bury them at all. This means you have to go over the ground you’ve covered and do it all again by hand. Until eventually you realise it’s easier to plant everything by hand in the first place.
So that’s what we did. Planted by hand, for hour after back-breaking hour. And for what? So some spoilt little fat kid can push the fruits of our labours to the side of his plate and demand a Twix instead.
Ha. Chance’d be a fine thing. We are not experts in market gardening. We aren’t even on the bottom rung of the market gardening ladder, but even we were able to deduce, the day after we’d planted the first acre, that something was wrong. Our new plants were kind of leaning over. “Wilting”, I believe, is the correct word.
It turned out they needed water. And how do you get water to a field that’s half a mile from the nearest tap? Well, you need a digger, a pipe-laying machine, a dam across one of the streams and a pump, and after you’ve done all that, a couple of men to come along and do it all again. Only properly. At this rate, the only way I can achieve profitability is by charging £140 for each broad bean. And £400 for a cabbage.
And that doesn’t factor in the amount of time I’m giving to the project. Which is all of it. Ten times a day I move my four sprinklers to new positions — and they are running constantly, demanding so much water from the stream that there’s very little left to supply my house. Most days I feel like Jean de Florette.
I woke yesterday to the sound of rain and for the first time in my life I was glad. But now it’s sunny and windy and the forecast says it will be 24C by the end of the week — 24C in effing spring. After the wettest autumn on record. How come no one has noticed this sort of thing is happening?
The weather, however, is not my biggest issue. That’ll come in the summer, when the vegetables that haven’t died will need picking. If I use Romanians, Nigel Farage and his Hackett army will go berserk, and if I use Lisa’s daughter, who’s keen, the Daily Mail will accuse me of employing child labour. So it’ll be down to me.
It’ll kill me for sure. I’ll become a farming statistic. But I guess I’ll be able to crawl through the Pearly Gates knowing that I have the gratitude of Joan Armatrading, Jeremy Corbyn, Lewis Hamilton, Paul McCartney, Captain Sensible, Miley Cyrus and all the other celebrities who’ve chosen to follow in the footsteps of Adolf Hitler and lead a meat-free life.
They think they are being kind. But they aren’t. Because eating vegetables is bloody cruel to the people who have to grow the damn things.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 4, 2020 7:17:01 GMT
Let melodrama rest in peace. Unless Jaws is involved, there’s no need to make a meal of death
Jeremy Clarkson Sunday 31 May 2020 Cornwall. Bank holiday Monday. The sun is shining and the winds are gentle. It’s a beautiful day. Think of the town of Amity before the shark comes. And then hold that thought, because, in the space of just one panic-stricken hour, there were three incidents, in which two people died and a third was seriously injured. Hell had arrived out of nowhere. With the coastal emergency services’ control room looking like the CIA command centre after Jason Bourne has just peered through the window, police, the coastguard rescue helicopter and a flotilla of lifeboats were dispatched in a flurry of noise and full-speed determination. The coastguard dealt with incidents at Treyanon Bay, Constantine Bay and Harlyn Bay, and lifeboats were launched from Rock, St Agnes, St Ives and Padstow. At some point I like to think someone looked up from his radar screen and shouted to no one in particular: “Hostiles inbound!” And all this seemed a bit weird because these places were where I used to go on childhood holidays with my mum and dad, and nothing dangerous ever happened at all. Nothing at all ever happened at all. We’d sit in the café Dad had found and, every hour or so, Mum would rub a bit of condensation from the window and say, “I think it’s brightening up”. But it never was, and it never did. So we’d have another cup of tea and I’d while away the hours, wondering which droplet of water would get to the windowsill first. Sometimes, when the rain had slowed to a point where it was simply torrential, we’d go to the beach and I’d mooch about looking for things in the rock pools. Occasionally I’d even go in the sea, where my dad would warn me about rip tides and undertows and all sorts of other things. But I could never hear what he was saying above the sound of my chattering teeth. Yes, sometimes I’d be picked up by an invisible wave of torque and moved a little way from the beach. But I’d solve this issue by deploying something called “swimming”. What’s changed? Why have Cornwall’s beaches gone from being the most benign places on earth to being so dangerous that Robert Duvall’s airborne cavalry and a fleet of 40-knot rescue boats are not enough to keep everyone alive. Padstow? It seems to me it should be twinned with Basra. I’m surprised the locals haven’t yet come up with a way to blame Gordon Ramsay. Since he decided to spend lockdown in his house in Cornwall, he’s been blamed for every other damn thing. The Corns even follow him around, waiting to photograph him strangling a dog or stabbing a postman. He’s Rebecca from Manderley and the vicar from Jamaica Inn rolled into one. But the truth is, the accidents in Cornwall last weekend were not Gordon’s fault. They were no one’s fault. And really, they weren’t even a story. I’d love to say that when I holidayed in Cornwall in the Sixties, nobody ever died while swimming and no one was ever injured. But I bet they were. An unfit northerner with a belly full of beer, two lungs full of coal dust and a heart encased in bacon fat leaps into an ice-cold sea with nothing more than a bronze swimming badge: it’s a recipe for disaster. I bet the fishermen were catching more dead miners every weekend than mackerel. But it wouldn’t be reported because someone had died, and where’s the news in that? Back then, we accepted that dying is like going to the dentist’s or buying a Volvo. Everyone gets round to it sooner or later. Today, of course, thanks largely to social media hysteria, things have changed and we aren’t allowed to die any more. And if we do, there must be an inquiry of some sort to ensure that no one ever need die of anything ever again. The fact is, though, that every single thing that has ever lived on earth has, at some stage, died. Or it will do soon. And before we get it into our heads that holidaying in Cornwall is more dangerous than holidaying in a Boko Haram training camp, we need to remember that Padstow over the bank holiday wasn’t Hue in ’68. It was not Jaws 6. Hell didn’t come and there were no hostiles, inbound or otherwise. There were some sea accidents and that’s it. At present, many newspapers run obituaries. Sometimes there will be three in one day. That’s three people whose lives have been deemed interesting enough to warrant a half-page look-back. The other 1,500 people who died in the UK that day? Nope. It’s reckoned they haven’t done anything in their entire life that’s worthy of a mention. It’s not that they haven’t charged down an enemy machinegun nest armed with only a pearl-handled butter knife, or invented fertiliser. They literally haven’t done anything of note at all. We mourn them if they were close to us, but we don’t expect their deaths to be front-page news. Or even page 27 news. And that’s how we should treat the manner of their death. Yes, if someone spontaneously combusts while teaching a class of six-year-olds or is shot by an alien in the Arndale centre, it’s definitely interesting. But if they drown while swimming or fall off a horse or crash into a telegraph pole, it’s not. And if we report it, along with pictures of sobbing relatives, it’s actually quite dangerous, because then there will be calls for beaches to be closed and riding to be banned and speed limits to be reduced. And the myth that death is avoidable will go on. Who knows, we may even get to the point where we encounter a new virus that can really kill only people who were doing to die soon anyway, but, because we are so weak-minded and timid, we react by shutting everything down until a cure is found. Which may be sometime shortly after never.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 4, 2020 7:25:15 GMT
Farmer Jeremy Clarkson — and the sheep sent to torment him
“What I’ve learnt about is that they are vindictive. Even in death”
Jeremy Clarkson Sunday 31 May 2020
Lamb post: Jeremy Clarkson takes a selfie with a couple of new arrivals
Last week one of my pregnant sheeps watched one of its mates give birth and decided that the new and very slimy lamb was hers. So, much to the distress of the actual mother, she started to lick it and offer up her nipples — is that the right word?
Whatever, women tell me that the birth process is something they tend to remember. So how could a sheep think it had given birth when it hadn’t? There’s an obvious answer. Sheeps are the stupidest animals on God’s green earth. Except for one thing. They’re not.
I bought mine last year at an auction in Thame, Oxfordshire. I had no idea what I was doing. Sheeps were brought into the ring, the auctioneer made machinegun noises and I went home with 68 North Country Mules. I’ve no idea what I paid. I couldn’t understand a word anyone said.
I then bought two rams, which are basically woolly ball sacks, and in short order, all but three of my new flock were pregnant. The failures? I ate them, and they punished me for that by giving me heartburn.
And this is what I’ve learnt about sheeps in the nine months I’ve had them. They are vindictive. Even in death.
Sheeps know that human beings are squeamish. As a result, they never die of something simple, such as a heart attack or a stroke. No. A sheep’s death has to be revolting. So they put their head in a bit of stock fencing and then saw it off. Or they decide to rot, from the back end forwards. Or they get a disease that causes warts to grow in their lambs’ mouths. A sheep’s death has to be worthy of a Bafta. Remember Alec Guinness at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai? Well, it’s that. With added haemorrhagic enteritis.
My sheeps clocked me immediately as a chap who’s eaten too many biscuits, so when I had to move them out of one field into another, they’d do exactly as they were told. Then they’d wait for me to close the gate and walk home, before jumping over the wall, back into the first field. Did you know they can jump? Well, trust me on this: if a sheep wanted to annoy you, it could win the Grand National.
I bought a drone eventually and programmed the onboard speaker to make dog-barking noises. This worked well for a day, but then the sheeps just stood there, staring at it. So I had to move them by running about. And as I trudged home with a bit of lung hanging out of my mouth, they jumped over the wall again.
Today I have 142 extremely delicious-looking lambs boinging around in the fields. The walkers still won’t put their wretched dogs on leads but at least they now look guilty when I glower at them. Although, actually, the biggest problem is not the dogs. It’s the mothers.
Last week one of them decided that, to annoy me, it would abandon its lamb. I found the poor little thing in a hedge, shivering and hungry, and any attempt to reunite it with its mother ended with the lamb, and me, on our backs. The ewe was having none of it.
So I had to bring the lamb to the barn and make a bed for it near the wood-burning stove and sit up all night with bottles of warm milk. And then, in the morning, because it’s a sheep and it wanted to upset me, it died.
The only good news about this is that there’s no financial loss. Owing to the double whammy of Brexit and Covid-19, lambs today are worth about the same as a barrel of oil — minus £30.
Still, at least I now know how it must have felt to be a guard at Stalag Luft III. Because what those sheeps are doing when they’re standing there in a perfectly nice field is thinking of ways to escape. If they were people, they’d be Gordon Jackson, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen.
They constantly probe for any weakness in the fences. They keep tabs on my routines. And I’m bloody sure they are imperceptibly turning one of the cross-country fences into a rudimentary vaulting horse. And it’s not because they want to get out. They’re in the best field with the best grass. They just want to get on to the road so they can be hit by a bus, and burst.
Their latest game is very irritating. Somehow they’ve worked out how to open the doors on the hen houses. Even though I have opposable thumbs, I can barely do this; the latches are very stiff. But they can. And at night, they do. This means the hens can escape, and that means they are killed by nature’s second most vindictive animal — the fox.
I cannot work out why the sheeps open the doors. It’s not as if they’re after the eggs, or the hens. Which means they must be doing it for sport. They actually enjoy watching the hens being eaten. And, as an added bonus, it pisses me off, which they enjoy even more.
It’s the same story with their water bowser. They’ve worked out how to break the tap so all the water leaks into the soil. This means that either I have to mend it, or they die of thirst. So for them, it’s a win-win.
Last night they gnawed through the wire providing power for the electric fence. So they could get out? Nope. So I’d have to stop what I was doing and fix it.
As I was doing that, I noticed something odd about one of the lambs. Its ears had come off. And as I stood there with my hands on my hips, asking myself how that was even possible, I got a pretty good idea of what life was like for my teachers having to deal with me and my troublesome friends. “Why have you rubbed linseed oil into the school cormorant, Clarkson?”
That’s what sheeps are, I’ve decided. Woolly teenage boys. And that’s why they are so annoying.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 13, 2020 5:24:01 GMT
Prince Harry and his missus want low-key security, lads. Let’s make sure everyone knows about it Jeremy Clarkson Sunday 07 June 2020
So reports suggest Prince and Princess Harry will soon be spending more than £2.5m a year on a team of crack security experts who cut their teeth in the FBI, the CIA and the NSA (not the National Sheep Association — that’s something different). This means that wherever they go, the couple will be accompanied by a highly visible squad of men with curliewurlie earpieces, who will keep the sleeves of their expensive suits fully informed about what’s going on at all times. This will make the prince and princess feel very important.
Should there be an incident of some kind, the couple will have been told that one of the team will leap into the path of the oncoming bullet — and they’ll have believed this, of course. They will also have believed the guarantee that a full refund will be paid if the agent decides at the last moment that he’d rather not take the bullet after all.
Plus, they’ll be deeply impressed when Curt — one of them is bound to be called Curt — scans the rooftops for snipers as he holds open the princess’s car door. He isn’t doing any such thing, of course. He’s just looking up because if he looks down, it will appear he’s trying to cop a glimpse of some royal gusset.
Of course, Harry and his wife are close family members of the Queen, but I’ll be honest: I’m not sure they need protection. Because if you wanted to make a terrorist statement of some kind, why would you think, “I know. I’ll go for a woman who once appeared in a television show that no one watched, and the sixth in line to the throne of a country most people in America have never heard of.” They’d be better off targeting Amal Clooney’s florist.
Or Gordon Brown. As a former prime minister, he is entitled to round-the-clock protection from a crack team with sub-machineguns and Roger Moore skills in hand-to-hand combat. And can you imagine what the officers in the protection division say when told they’ve been given Brown to look after? “Oh sir. Can’t we have Sir John Major instead? Nothing will happen to him either, but at least, with him, we’d go to a cricket match once in a while.”
Also, if we look back over the whole of human history, it’s hard to think of a time when a notable person’s life has been saved by his or her security detail. There was that chap who was told to look after Princess Anne while she was driven down the Mall. He had all the training and all the reflexes but, come the moment, he was shot by the assailant and then his gun jammed. And, yes, in case you were wondering, it was a Walther PPK.
Then there was Michael Fagan, who broke into Mrs Queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace one morning. And where was her security man? He’d knocked off at 6am at the end of his night shift.
Further down the evolutionary scale we find Tamara Ecclestone, who was using the same company that Harry and Meghan are considering when someone swiped £50m of jewellery while she was on holiday.
Then there was Kim Kardashian, who is famous and rich for no reason I can see. She was robbed at gunpoint in Paris while her bodyguard was reportedly at a nearby nightclub, protecting her sisters.
In a past life, when Top Gear did a live show, we were always accompanied by a security man who gave us coded “handles” in case his sleeve-based radio network was hacked. So, after work, it’d be: “Traveller’s just ordered a glass of wine.” Followed a few minutes later by: “Traveller’s just ordered another.” I insisted on being called “Traveller”. James May was “Acebiscuits”. Richard Hammond was “Richard Hammond”.
I have no idea why we used security. There must have been some insurance reason, because no one in the world was going to convene his or her terrorist cell and say, “Right. We could go after the president of the United States. Or Gordon Brown. But instead let’s kidnap those halfwits from that car show.” I can’t tell you the guy’s name as he was in the Special Boat Service but I can tell you what happened in Moscow one night. I think it gives a pretty good insight into what the security industry is all about.
We were dining at one of those places that are wallpapered in actual gold and that use Cristal champagne to flush the lavatory. Only one other table was occupied, and it was the standard Muscovite fare. There were two insolent-looking yobbos with big watches and stupid shoes surrounded by perhaps 12 pneumatic Ukrainian women.
I popped outside for a cigarette at one point, and our Kevin Costner elected to stay inside with Acebiscuits and Richard Hammond. Which was a worry, because in the street the Third World War was raging. Our fleet of Range Rovers was parked right outside the restaurant, which was causing some distress to the drivers of the fleet of blacked-out Cadillac Escalades that obviously belonged to the yobbos inside.
These very angry guys figured they should be in “pole position”, and as they were in full paramilitary uniforms and carrying machineguns, I’d have been inclined to agree. But the growly Russian FSB guy running our squad of drivers was having none of it, so there was much screaming and poking. As it was Russia, it looked like an explosion in a potato factory.
I settled into a doorway to enjoy my Marlboro and watch the scene unfurl, and I remember thinking that this is what it must be like for people who have an idiotically unbalanced world-view: you employ actual, real-life soldiers to have meaningless wars on your behalf. You literally pay them to fight to the death, with guns, over the best parking spot in town.
It’s the kind of thing that attracts attention, which I guess is what these people want. If you don’t want attention, you should just go out by yourself with no security at all. It’ll be interesting to see which way the princess jumps.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 13, 2020 5:31:32 GMT
FARMING
Farmer Jeremy Clarkson is let loose in the great outdoors
Jeremy goes on a 10-mile country stroll. What could possibly go wrong?
Jeremy Clarkson Sunday 07 June 2020
Jeremy decided to go for a country stroll. What could go wrong?
I’ve been told many times by fellow farmers that it’s important once in a while to do a “perimeter walk”. And obviously I’ve nodded enthusiastically and left the conversation thinking, “Well, that’s not going to happen.”
I can walk for miles in a town, but I’ve never really seen the appeal in the countryside. What’s the point of going for a walk when you just end up back where you started? You go past a tree and then, shortly, you go past another exactly the same. And then you get hay fever.
However, I was recently told that if you go to a Covid-19 hospital with a body mass index number that puts you in a category called “obese”, then you are put straight in the bin. I therefore decided to walk all the way round my farm immediately.
People who walk in the countryside have got it into their heads that it’s a sport, like deep-sea diving and ice hockey, so they reckon it needs specialist clothing. But it isn’t a sport. It’s a pastime, like cricket or Scrabble. Which means you can do it in a suit or swimming trunks. You don’t need ski poles or materials that make a noise when you walk, and you definitely don’t need to tuck your trousers into your socks.
To prove the point, I got up from the breakfast table and set off in what I happened to be wearing at the time, which was a T-shirt, a pair of jeans and some off-road training shoes I have had for 10 years. Lisa, meanwhile, went for tracksuit bottoms, which she teamed with a pair of Dr Martens Chelsea boots.
We left at 11 in the morning, with me already thinking about the cold lunchtime pint I’d have when I got back. The sun was shining and the going, to begin with, was only mildly uphill. Soon I saw some wildlife. It was a fat ginger youth in an anorak, walking right through the middle of a field of spring barley.
“Please don’t do that,” I said as he came close. “What are you going to do about it?” he replied. We discussed the options of shooting him or smashing in his face with a spade and, pretty soon, it all got rather heated. And that’s odd. I’ve never had an argument with another pedestrian in London, yet in the sticks I was having a full-blown row with the first one I came across.
Later I came across another. I asked her politely to put her dogs on a lead as there were sheep in the next field, and was told I couldn’t throw my weight about just because I’m on television. Interesting. On the evidence to hand, 100% of people who walk in the countryside are argumentative and unpleasant idiots.
Still, these debates gave me a chance to get my breath back before resuming the endless uphill slog to the most northerly point of the farm. Here, for complicated reasons, there is a gigantic model of James May’s head, which has been viciously attacked by walkers with hammers and their bare fists. I have no idea why.
It had been two hours since we set off and we were still going uphill, through a field of brambles that grow out of the ground and then, after forming a hoop, plunge back into it again. You know when Steve McQueen was stuck in that fence? Well, it was like that.
Then we found a Second World War underground air-raid shelter. That was pretty cool, finding out that you own one of those. Less cool was discovering in a nearby wood that other things I own include a fridge freezer, a car door, a sofa, six worn tyres and several hundred empty bottles of cider.
Soon I came across a deer. It had the most adorable face, with the biggest, soppiest eyes I’d ever seen. I stared into them and thought I detected a hint of sadness, which could have had something to do with the fact that behind its head there was nothing but a licked-clean spine. I have no idea what manner of beast killed Bambi in this way. I’m guessing it must have been a lion.
Two fields later I found another dead deer. This one had not been eaten but it had somehow snapped in the middle, so its left buttock was nestling against its cheek. I’m not sure, after seeing it, that I’d let a child walk in the countryside. There’s an X-rated surprise at every turn.
Soon I found a broken gate. It had obviously been smashed to smithereens by an out-of-control car. There was a bit of “Police Aware” tape holding what was left of it to the gatepost, so I called the police, who said that, yes, they were indeed aware of the crash in question.
I then asked for the name of the driver, so I could sort out the insurance, but Plod wouldn’t hand that over. He was aware of the name, but he wasn’t allowed to share it. Good job he’s not developing a vaccine for Covid-19.
Five more uphill fields and we reached the big wood where the nettles were up to my nipples and I trod in a badger sett every 17 seconds. It was like a Petri dish of tuberculosis in there and I was glad after two hours to reach a small pond.
It’s fed by a spring that looked very inviting. But I don’t really like water. It’s unnecessary. I know 20-year-olds can’t get to the other side of their bedroom these days without “hydrating”, but I’d walked for miles on a hot day and I wasn’t thirsty at all. I did, however, clean the wounds caused by the brambles and, for a moment, I felt a bit like Bear Grylls.
Lisa, however, felt like going home. She said she had a blister the size of a space hopper on her right heel and that it hurt. I pointed out that it could be worse. The blister could have grown on my foot.
Onwards we went, and upwards, until, after five hours, we found a deer that was extremely unusual for these parts. Mainly because it was alive. Interestingly it had managed to get its head through a hole in the stock fencing, but thanks to its antlers it couldn’t pull it back out again.
The poor thing was in a desperate panic. And what do you do in a situation like that? Yes, that’s right, you film it and upload it to Instagram as soon aspossible. Unfortunately, however, before I could get my camera working the deer was free and on its way.
Then Lisa was too. Nine years younger than me and fit enough to do a marathon while carrying a photocopying machine, but she couldn’t take the pressure of a walk round my farm. I was knackered, I admit, but, spurred on by a need to finish what Dr Martens girl could not, I plodded on with no one for company except Bob Seger.
It took seven hours in total to get back to where I’d started. And my phone’s fitness app revealed I’d covered just over 10 miles. Slow going, but in my defence much of it was through brambles or streams or over margins that are peppered with ant hills. And more bloody badger setts.
Hateful? I’d love to say it was, but the truth is I loved it. I’d seen a tortoiseshell butterfly, two rabbits, a hare, an amazing thistle-type thing and a squadron of goldfinches. I’d nearly had a fight. I’d seen one snapped deer and one that was just a head and a spine. And most importantly I’d learnt something useful about my farm. All of it is uphill.
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