James in The Big Issue

[lindenchase]

Good reason to buy the Big Issue this week. 

James features in the present issue. They have a feature called "Letter to My Younger Self". There is an article online about it, but not the letter itself. I hope someone can upload it. I promise I will buy an extra copy of the Amsterdam edition in return!

Article in The Big Issue

[jmsquared]

Same here. I'll buy the Aussie one. :-)

[lindenchase]

Problem solved. I found out that you can actually buy and download the magazine online. You need to download the free "Big Issue" app, and then you can buy whatever issue you want. They apparently wait until the next issue is out, cause this current issue isn't on sale yet.

[RedMoon11]

JAMES MAY INTERVIEW: "CARS REVEAL THE SOUL OF HUMANITY"

Top Gear's James May, 50, talks adolescent girl worries, the Italian Renaissance, and his 'terrible human failing'

My memory of being 16 is hazy. It feels like the memory of a memory, as one of the poets said – possibly Larkin?

I think I was a bit messed up in the head as a teenager and probably needed a good kicking. I was f**king rubbish, actually. I was feeble. I was torn in my interests. One half of me liked building bicycles, metalwork, making things, and the other half was studying music, playing piano and sitting around in trees reading Tennyson. I didn’t pursue one or two things avidly, I flitted about. I still do it. So I ended up being mediocre at many, many things. It’s a terrible human failing to be a jack-of-all-trades.

I’d tell my 16-year-old self that girls like sex, too. That’s impossible to believe when you’re a teenage boy. I was fairly hopeless around girls but teenage boys who are good among girls are as rare as a Rembrandt in a junk shop. We all worried about girls and no one told us anything. Girls are completely fascinating to teenage boys; nothing will ever be that fascinating ever again. But you can’t imagine they would ever be interested in you.

I think even at an early age I recognised that things we’re taught to separate – science, art, poetry, mechanics – they’re all part of the same thing. As the Italian Renaissance assumed. The notion that you must be an arty person or a techy person is rubbish. Vehicles are interesting because they reveal the soul of humanity: our requirements on one hand, our aspirations on the other. Cars are for getting around but we’ve also made them sculptures, palates for interesting colours, statements of social mobility and embodiments of our follies. They’re a window on the human condition. Also, ultimately, I’m just a boy: boys are supposed to like cars.

If I met the young James now I’d think, here’s a boy with a tiny amount of promise but it’ll come to nothing. And he needs a bit of a wash. If I told him I was his future self he’d look at my life and say, well it looks great but I don’t believe I’ll get to do any of that. That was my problem. I was bereft of ambition. Life was something that happened while I wasn’t making any other plans. I left university drifting, went to the civil service, then worked on some magazines until I was offered my own column on Car magazine, which to me was the most fantastic thing in the world.

I was very nervous when I did my first TV, and I was pretty bad. I was a presenter on the early Top Gear, which was a total failure, and got axed and everyone lost their jobs. When they brought Top Gear back they tried a new guy but he didn’t work out so they called me and grudgingly and reluctantly offered me my old job back. I think I’m a bit better now. I’d tell my old self to relax, stop trying to emulate other presenters and just talk about the stuff you really know. There’s no secret formula; no one really knows what will work.

I still come home and look around and think, gosh, this is my house – I actually own a house. Sometimes I think if I’d been diligent and focused on having the life I have now it wouldn’t have happened. There were many opportunities for my life to go wrong. I’ve talked to Richard Hammond about this. He feels the same. It’s like I’ve been running across this big field and lots of people have been shooting at me with bullets labelled with things like ‘making a terrible career choice’ or ‘shacking up with the wrong woman’. But somehow I’ve got to the other side and they’ve all missed me.

In 1979, the year James May turns 16… Margaret Thatcher becomes Britain’s first female PM... Sex Pistol Sid Vicious dies of a heroin overdose... Council house tenants are able to purchase their home... Lord Louis Mountbatten is killed by an IRA bomb...

www.bigissue.com/features/letter-to-my-younger-self/3408/james-may-interview-cars-reveal-the-soul-of-humanity

[RedMoon11]

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