Born to Be Riled (53 page)

Even now, the Internet isn’t working, there’s a new machine on my desk which apparently does nothing, I can’t send e-mail and, every time I ask the computer to print something out, it says I have performed an illegal operation and will shut down. What I should do, of course, is take the whole damned thing over to Seattle and shove it up Bill Gates’s arse. But I don’t have the time because I’m learning how to use my new mobile phone, which is the size of a pube.

It’s funny, but all I want from a telephone is the ability to converse with people who are a long way away. But this mini-marvel can do so much more. I can have conference calls, receive the Internet and, best of all, there is voice-activated dialling. However, if you record someone’s name and number in your house, it won’t work if you try to recall them in the car or the street. So that’s handy.

And tell me this. My last phone was an Ericsson, and this new one is an Ericsson. So why are the connection pods completely different? Why have I got to buy a new hands-free set for £40? Not that I will, because hands-free is one of the most dangerous inventions since the shark. No matter how carefully you lay out that wire on your passenger seat, and no matter how steadily you drive, I guarantee that, when the phone actually rings, the earpiece will be in the seatbelt clip, the microphone will be stuck under the handbrake and the wire itself will have tied itself in a double reef knot round the gear stick.

I’d like to send someone a strong fax about this, but I can’t because all fax machines don’t work. I am on my third this year, and even the latest version, which is the size of a helicopter gunship, makes origami animals out of every piece of paper that goes near it. Or if you stand there with a hammer in your hand and murderous intent in your eyes, it pulls the paper through neatly, but 84 sheets at a time.

The simple fact of the matter is this. No piece of modern technology works… except your car. No, really. Think how cross you’d be if your engine died as often as the signal to your mobile phone. Or if your heater broke down with the regularity of your printer. Nowadays, we just get in our cars and expect them to work. And they do.

Unless they’re Toyotas. I bought a three-year-old Landcruiser in the summer, partly because I thought it would be safe for the children, partly because it is an eight-seater, partly because you don’t need to slow down for Mr Prescott’s speed mountains and partly because I knew it would be more reliable than a Discovery. Which only goes to show how much I know.

Now I know it could have been owned previously by a man with butter fingers and ham fists. I know it could have spent its entire life taking fat people up Ben Nevis. But it’s a Toyota Landcruiser, for heaven’s sake. It’s built to head-butt the Kalahari and arm-wrestle the Outback. This car is designed so that it can sidle up to the Sahara Desert, call it a poof and escape with its differentials intact.

So why is it the most unreliable piece of junk I’ve ever had the misfortune to own? It judders, creaks, lurches every time it stops, the electric windows have broken, and
last week I was faced with a £400 bill for new brake discs. If it really has only done 30,000 miles, that’s pathetic.

Obviously, I’m angry but, conversely and rather perversely, I’m also delighted. You see, like all the other motoring writers, I’ve always been happy to peddle the story that Japanese cars are reliable because… well, because they just are. But I now have first-hand experience, and it’s rather nice to find that our inscrutable little friends make mistakes too.

Obviously, it has to go, but what should replace it? My first choice is a Range Rover – from Belgium, where they cost 40p – but some of me fancies an M-class Mercedes. American colleagues tell me that early models were made by mad people in blindfolds and that an endless catalogue of faults would give me acres of good material for this column. And you’d be surprised to find how important that is.

I mean, I’ve clocked up 20,000 miles in my Jaguar XJR and absolutely nothing has gone wrong; 15,000 parts continue to work in perfect harmony, which makes it great to own. But not so much fun to write about.

I love this time of year. As the temperature drops, Jack Frost does dot-to-dot drawings on our windowpanes and we’re greeted every morning with a visible reminder that we’ve woken up breathing. Even the countryside manages to look interesting, with a Technicolor blaze in the treetops and a crispness that makes the air almost brittle.

Yes, I love the autumn, but what I love most is the torrent of advice we get from motoring organizations about the preparations we must make if our cars are to survive the winter. We’re told that, before every journey, we should check our shock absorbers, our headlights, our wipers and that there is a thermos of hot coffee in the boot in case we break down on a moor. They even say we should clear all the frost from all the windows before setting off, but that’s stupid. As soon as I have made a hole big enough to see through, I’m off. It’s far too cold to stand around doing pre-flight checks when the most I’ll be doing on the way to work is 4mph.

Only this morning, Goodyear sent me a missive saying that in wet and possibly freezing conditions the only contact your car has with the road is four small patches, each no bigger than a postcard. So… what exactly are we to do about that, then? Well, it seems we must check our tyre pressures regularly because, as the thermometer falls, so does the pressure in our tyres. This increases the rolling resistance, meaning fewer miles to the gallon and curious handling anomalies.

Well, now, look. I’m very sorry, but I’m a busy man, and I really don’t have the time to check how much air is inside my tyres. If the steering goes all wobbly and the car starts to veer wildly, I’ll be aware of a problem but, until then, leave me alone.

Going to a garage is one of the most unpleasant experiences a human being will ever encounter. It’s so awful that, when my petrol gauge is down beyond the red, and I’ve just driven past a sign saying ‘Services 1m and 27m’, I will always, always, go for the gamble. And when I get there, I’ll gamble again.

I have driven past garages with the fuel needle bent around its bump stop. I have felt the first cough of doom and still kept right on because the station forecourt looked a bit dirty. This drives my wife insane with rage. Indeed, I’m on my final warning. I’ve been told that, if she climbs into my car once more to find the tank is full of nothing but air, she will kill me. And, to put that in perspective, an affair will only get me broken knees.

I hate filling up. And there is nothing in life that annoys me more than a slovenly petrol pump. Or one that cuts off every two seconds. Or an attendant who won’t reset the counter until you’ve been into the hut and called him a fat, gormless waste of the world’s resources.

You can imagine, then, that after I’ve put £50 of petrol in the tank, quite the last thing I want to do is buy a token for the air machine and grovel around in a sea of diesel getting brake residue all over my fingers. And why, when you drop a dust cap on the floor, does it evaporate? They do. They just disappear.

I wouldn’t mind, but it’s all so pointless. I remember reading a report recently which said that all garage air pressure gauges are out by as much as 20 per cent, which means you stand absolutely no chance of keeping pace with the law, leave alone microscopic fluctuations in barometric pressure.

Not that there are any nowadays. Goodyear paints this picture of winter as a looming asteroid, an extinction-level event heading our way, and that there’s diddly squat we can do to prevent impact some time in late November.

Well, look. I have not seen a single snowflake for four years and, even if we do get a light dusting, the radio will immediately fill with police messages warning us all to
stay at home. Why do they do that? We pay £30 billion a year to Mr Prescott for our road network, and we expect him to provide, in return, a selection of gritting lorries and snowploughs. I mean, they can keep the roads open in Alaska and Lapland, so surely it isn’t beyond the wit of a nation that gave the world Brunel to clear a motorway in Kent once every five years.

The fact is that cars have helped to make the world nice and snuggly warm these days, which in turn has made the roads much safer. But if, by some miracle, you encounter some black ice, or perhaps a little sleet, don’t think, as your car slithers towards a ditch: ‘Oh, no. I wish I’d checked my tyres.’ Because it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. You’re in a two-ton car, and a bit of air pressure here and there is no match for the laws of gravity and momentum.

Why don’t you go catch a burglar? For 50 years or more it’s been the automatic, kneejerk reaction of any errant motorist who’s been pulled over by plod. It’s even become a music-hall joke, a ritual in the tired old plots of 8 p.m. sitcoms. But it’s true. Why don’t they go and catch burglars? I mean, the only reason we drive too quickly is because we want to get home and catch one before he deposits a large turd on our Bukhara rug.

CCTV has driven teenagers out of the city centre, so now they queue outside remote farmhouses waiting for their turn to defecate on an heirloom. And where are the police?

Well, they know you’re only after a crime number for insurance purposes, so they’re about 40 miles away, trimming their moustaches so they’ll look good on next week’s exciting edition of
Police. Stop. Kill.
Today, the police spend all of their resources on JetRangers and sophisticated infrared cameras so they can get action-packed footage of car-azy motorists. And the Crown Prosecution Service? That’s busy sorting out the video rights.

Small wonder, then, that people are beginning to take the law into their own hands. In France recently, a much-burgled home-owner left a radio on his kitchen table and a note that said: ‘This is not a radio. It is a bomb.’ He came home later to find a burglar spread evenly around his kitchen and was promptly arrested. And now it appears to have happened here with the news that a Norfolk farmer has been charged after two youths were shot in the garden of his house.

Friends say the poor man had been driven to despair by an endless stream of burglaries and that the police weren’t interested. Well, they wouldn’t be. It’s hard to see a marketing opportunity in painstaking house-to-house enquiries. It’s late-night BBC2 at best. Nah, let’s go get another speeder.

Certainly I’d shoot anyone who broke into my house. Then I’d bury them in the garden and carry on with life as though nothing had happened.

No, really, a friend and I once staked out our street in Notting Hill, saying that if we caught the youth who’d been breaking into our cars we’d chain him up in a shed and invite other victims of car crime round to spend some time with him. And we meant it. Of course, this has to be against the law. You can’t condone vigilantes in a civilized
society. If you let home-owners shoot intruders willy-nilly, burglars will tool up to meet the threat. Then you’d arm the police, who’d shoot motorists for ratings, and it would all be like America. We might even end up with the wide-mouthed frog as president.

So what’s to be done? The police no longer feature. I know nowadays it says they’re ‘Fighting Crime. Slashing Fear. Filming Disorder’ on the side of their cars, but that’s just a slogan to inspire Bruce Willis action from the men. The reality is that in the countryside, one policeman has to cover more than 200 square miles – impossible when his superiors demand 35 motorists a night, DVD footage and format rights.

We can’t expect tougher sentences for the tiny minority that are caught, either, because the prisons are full of speeders and people who’ve shot burglars. And all the while, IslingTony is being lobbied by inner-city councillors who plead for leniency.

So the burglars who are daft enough make faces in front of CCTV cameras end up with 10 minutes of community service. Little deterrent for someone who’s being driven out of his mind by an all-consuming need for heroin.

There’s the nub of the problem. Eighty per cent of all crime is drug-related. No one breaks into your house because they need funds for music lessons. They break in because they need some smack ’n’ crack.

And I’m sorry, but we’ve got to give it to them. Legalizing drugs will bring the price down, and cheaper drugs will mean less crime. It is as simple as that. And to argue that we’ll all become junkies as a result is nonsense. You can buy drink, but we’re not all alcoholics.

The police have lost the war on crime because they’ve
been diverted by the lure of fame and fortune on television. And we aren’t allowed to blow the little sods to kingdom come, so let’s see the root cause on sale in 24-hour filling stations. Alongside the cigarettes.

You could even tax them. This would surely generate enough to get the police out of their Volvos and into something a little more big-screen friendly. But until this happens, I’m afraid, there’s a better-than-evens chance that you’ll come home one night to find a burglar peeing into your grandfather clock. And all you’re allowed to do is offer him some buns.

Dream all you like about one day owning a helicopter and a Bentley, but the sad fact is this: nearly four in every ten new cars sold in Britain come from Ford or Vauxhall. Ford is the market leader, and they may think this has something to do with a combination of good cars, a dealer on every corner and a bit of natty television advertising. Well, they’re wrong. Ford is ahead because of something that began 30 years ago…

One fine morning in June 1969, I set off for school dimly aware that my father would pick me up that night in his new car, a nothing-special Saluki Bronze Ford Cortina 1600 Super. Had he done so, I might never have become interested in cars. I might have become an astronaut. Or a homosexual. But he had a last-minute change of heart and swished up to the school gates in a 1600E, which had Rostyle wheels, extra fog lamps and a bank of
gauges set into the wooden dashboard. Well, I was smitten. From that day to this, I’ve been a Ford man.