Notes From the Hard Shoulder (10 page)

Regular readers will know that I'm a great fan of inventing new games with my TV colleague, TV's Richard Hammond. One of my favourites is called
Airport Shopping Dare, and here's how to play.

It's really very simple. When you're at the Heathrow departure terminal with a chum and a few hours to kill, you will inevitably abandon every tenet of real manhood and end up walking around the shops together. Now you must spot something you think the other bloke could be persuaded to want and then, through subliminal psychological torture, force him to buy it. Nothing too elaborate, usually, just daft T-shirts, sunglasses, that sort of thing.

There really is no feeling more satisfying than being responsible for making a good mate look like a total pillock at his own expense. And I'm pretty good at it. My best result to date is cajoling Hammond into buying a pretty expensive wristwatch with the money he would be earning the following week from opening an orphanage or something. Soon afterwards he got me back with a brown jacket that makes me look like a driving instructor.

But this week I've had my best game of Airport Shopping Dare ever. It wasn't actually played in an airport but a Lamborghini dealership, and this time I was with my other TV colleague, TV's Jeremy Clarkson.

Now, Clarkson has decided he rather likes the
Gallardo Spider. I rather like it too; the difference, though, is that he might consider chopping in his Ford
GT for one. He certainly would, I decided, if I had anything to do with it.

And that bit wasn't too difficult, because he clearly wanted one already. I could point out that his new book was selling very well (unlike mine) and that he had earned, both financially and morally, the right to a new Lamborghini. In fact making him buy the thing was clearly a job for a Shopping Dare amateur.

So now the game took a new twist. Clearly he didn't need persuading to buy the car, but he would need to be steered, gently and subtly, into buying it in the right colour scheme. Orange, ideally, or that new '70s bathroom-suite blue they're doing. Either of these would combine quite nicely with a neutral sort of interior leather. Cream, perhaps, or maybe even plain old black.

Jeremy, however, got it into his head that the car would look right in dark green, black, or something called black/green. This he would combine with an interior in orange perforated leather.

And I know what he's thinking of. He's thinking of those Paul Smith brogues that are dark and accountanty on the outside but lined in lime green; respectable and restrained at a casual glance, but revealing a sense of gay chromatic abandon to anyone who gets close enough to see inside. Or maybe it's one of those dinner suits by Ted Baker: completely uniform (as a dinner suit should be) in normal use, but revealing a tantalisingly enigmatic purple lining when removed and cast aside in a moment of attempted seduction.

But we're talking about a Lamborghini here, and this isn't how it's going to come across, in my view. I think it's going to be like a merchant banker who wears a grey suit with a 'funny' Homer Simpson tie. Or an Information Technology professional who wears a grey suit and has a sign above his desk saying, 'You don't have to be mad to work here' and so on. Or a senior hospital administrator who wears a grey suit and says, 'Leave a massage' on his answering machine.

The whole point of a Lamborghini, as we've explained ourselves many times, is that you want one because you're not interested in buying into racing heritage or thoroughbred provenance. That's for
Ferrari and
Maserati owners. Lamborghini is a bit of an upstart, and you have to demonstrate that you realise as much. A black one suggests that you believe in it, which would be ridiculous. Lamborghinis are a bit vulgar and as such should be celebrated openly with something like the orange. Or that bathroom-blue. But he just didn't get it.

And this is what surprises me. Jeremy is a self-styled champion of vulgarity. I happen to know that he has a very large television set, for example, and electronic garden gates. He goes to footballers' parties and once boasted of going to London's 'biggest restaurant'. But here he is, on the verge of acquiring the automotive medallion of gauche, and he's suddenly concerned about drawing too much attention to himself.

But no worry, because, as with most posh car showrooms, the Lamborghini one provided a selection of painted metal strips and upholstered squares with which the discerning customer can experiment with
colour combinations before signing the order form. Playing with these is a pretty good game in itself, and almost as much fun as trying on the frames in Specsavers.

So, out of interest, I tried the green/black paint with the orange leather. It was awful. It made me think of coffee mugs with 'world's greatest golfer' written on them, or 'amusing' doorbell chimes. On the other hand, the orange paint with the creamy pale perforated leather looked like the colour scheme of a man who didn't give a bull's arse about what other people thought, and this, I decided, was what Jezza should have.

So I gathered them up and dived between him and the salesman, waving them around. But he snorted, and then continued talking to the dealer about the price of the cup-holder option.

So I tried the bathroom-blue paintwork with a dark-blue plain leather, which I can assure you would look utterly glorious. Again I approached the man with the Bang & Olufsen mobile, only to be dismissed because he was deep in conversation about service intervals.

In desperation, I even tried white paintwork with the black leather. I found him discussing residual values. I really do think the man may have lost it entirely and turned into an executive.

This is the first time I've ever failed at this game with someone I know well. I have a recurring dream in which Jeremy is on fire and I have the fire extinguisher but can't get the pin out. Even so, I can't stand by and watch him buy the wrong Lamborghini.

So it's over to you. Write to Jeremy at the
Top Gear
magazine address. You don't even need to include a letter. Just remember to mark your envelope, 'James is right, as usual.'

Today, from the window of my office, I have an uninterrupted view of my 1992 Range Rover Vogue SE. I think it may be the sort of thing
WB Yeats had in mind when he wrote of 'All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old'.

In case you weren't reading two years ago, or you have since found something more interesting to contemplate, I should explain that the Rangey was bought in strict accordance with my principle that one's biff about car should not cost more than £1 per cc of engine displacement. Not the mintiest Range Rover in the world, then, and definitely not the most aromatic.

And I have never neglected a car quite like I have Old Stinker, which sits there looking positively doleful as I walk on by, averting my eyes from its cack-encrusted flanks and the pastie wrappers piled on the dash and visible through the windscreen. I'm beginning to believe that everything I have ever taken into the Range Rover is still in there, and that includes a bootful of old building materials that I was supposed to take to the dump several months ago. Trouble is, the Range Rover
is
the dump, and if I parked it with the windows open it would soon, like any other skip left around here, be full of my neighbours' garden rubbish.

This is most uncharacteristic. I carry a Hoover around in the Bentley, just in case, and I keep a small, stiff paintbrush in the
Porsche for removing dust from those little crevices around the switches. When I drive
the Boxster I adjust the air vents and heater controls not for my own comfort, but so that the overall arrangement is symmetrical. I also polish my shoes and wash up while I cook. I can't stand muck, filth and disorder, and yet I've somehow allowed the Range Rover to become completely feral.

One reason for this is that it offers a welcome opportunity to escape the rigours of modern urban life and roll about in my own ordure like Neanderthal man. This office is somewhat similar: an oasis of dirty cups, empty beer bottles, waste paper and general squalor in an otherwise spotless household, like a dog's egg in the middle of a croquet lawn. But there's a better reason for treating the Range Rover in a way that, if it were my cat, would land me in the clanger.

You see, this five-owner, 110,000-mile car is an utterly dependable old bus that I would happily drive to Australia tomorrow, and in the certain knowledge that I would get there. It has never, ever failed me. Of course, this being an old product of
Land Rover, lots of little things have gone wrong with it, but here's the weird thing: they always mend themselves.

At first, I thought I was imagining this, but it's happened so many times now that I have to acknowledge something is going on. Items that you would get a garage to attend to but for which I have allowed nature to take its course have included a broken fan, two broken electric windows, the air conditioning, the air suspension controls, the headlight main beam switch, one of the seat motors, the rear windscreen wiper, the rev counter, the central locking and a slow puncture.

I swear I'm not making this up. In fact, it's beginning to give me the creeps a bit. Yesterday, a light bulb had blown in the instrument panel. Today, it glows like the star of David. If I go anywhere near this thing with a spanner or a screwdriver it immediately crosses that invisible line that separates the merely poorly from the dead. But if I leave it alone it eventually recovers. It's a bit like having a spot. Squeeze it and you will be left with a scar, but leave the job to time's patient skill and eventually it will disappear, leaving you with a completely unblemished nose. If I drive the Range Rover when several things are not working I can feel that it's slightly out of sorts, because some of its qi energy is being directed to the task of healing.

And to think that the occasional sandalled leftist has scrawled 'climate crime' and 'environment nazi' on its heavily soiled bonnet. Nothing could be more inappropriate, since what I have in my Range Rover is the world's first organic and alternative therapy vehicle; a truly living machine with the antibodies to mechanical ague coursing through its metal metabolism. It is, in fact, the most ethically correct, GM-free and plain greenest vehicle I have ever come across.

I mean it: if I leave it alone for a week, things grow on it.

People of Britain, put aside your concerns over the cleanliness of hospitals,
Gordon Brown's plans for public spending and trying to remember the name of the Liberal Democrats bloke. This election drudgery is of no more consequence than the captaincy of the local bowls club when set aside the great denouement that awaits you here; namely, the final and incontrovertible resolution of the
Great
Sports
Car Debate.

I salute you, readers of
Telegraph Motoring.
Some weeks ago I asked you to settle a debate that has reverberated through lounge bars across the land for three generations: what, exactly, and in no more than 12 words, is the definition of a sports car? At stake was the future custody of a l/43rd-scale die-cast model of a Mazda MX-5 that has sat on the windowsill of my office for the last six years.

To be honest, I expected a handful of old biffers to write in about the Austin
Healey 3000, and indeed they did. One of them even apologised. But there was more. From every corner of these sceptered isles the pithy missives flooded in; my
letter-opener is like the bread knife in a busy sandwich bar, burnished and flashing in the morning sun, worn to half its original depth by the unrelenting slicing action of over 450 openings.

I have to say, though, that simply sending in the name, or even a picture, of your own car is not really good enough. On the other hand, Ms
Hanya Gordon made it straight to the shortlist by including a bag of American Hard Gums, while anyone who had the
temerity to dismiss my old 911 was immediately filed under 'B'.

There was a man who called me a big jessie for not buying a TR6, a man who said 'sports car' was a contradiction in terms, some misleading stuff about driving gloves and bonnet straps, and quite a bit of chicanery involving complex phrases that formed the acronym SPORTSCAR. The crossword is on the back of the main paper.

There was whimsy from old ladies who yearned for the bark of a straight six and the glint of a wire wheel glimpsed with an expectant twitch of a curtain, and there was baser stuff from young men revolving around things that are or aren't possible in the cockpit of an
MG. It is famously said that 40 per cent of American marriages are proposed in a car, but it seems that the British are keen to dispense with these stuffy and outdated formalities.
Holly Burns of Glasgow sent me a treatise of mediaeval density and including some French words, which is no good to a man who needs something to remember for the pub, while the brevity consolation prize goes to
Mike Coward of Southport, who said that a sports car is 'yee-haaa'. But then, so's square dancing.

I liked the suggestion of
Reg Santer, from Horsham, that 'a sports car is all in the mind', until I realised that he was playing into the hands of manufacturers who claim sportiness for their mini-MPVs.
Maurice Davies almost won with 'A Don Quixote story fused to an engine' and
Paul Smith of Kendal seemed close with 'One being driven faster than it ought to be'. But then I realised that this would be true of a Kia Rio in any situation.

There was the philosophical, such as
Anthony Marshall of Barnsley with 'a state of mind with wheels but without remorse or thought'. The snappy: 'one designed to go from A to A', according to
Peter Gardner of St Albans. And the foreboding, from
Mike Peers of Henley: 'Every man's dream, few men's reality, and every mother's nightmare.' Then again, I had a girlfriend like that.

You see, it's difficult, which is why this debate has raged for so long. But when I read that a sports car is 'An ode to joy/on open road/Wind in face,/Grin like Toad' I realised that the poet's skill with imagery was needed to define it in 12 words or fewer. Here's
Hamish Kidd, possible former lyricist with Wham:

Free as air
Wind in hair
Heel 'n' toe
Let's go
Brrrm brrrm!

Or, drawing heavily on
Spike Milligan,
Ian Hourston of Orkney:

A sports car is
A car with fizz
Forget your quiz
It's simple, viz:
A whiz.

And
Bill Richardson of Guisborough, apparently a student of
Hilaire Belloc:

A powerful engine in a saucy shell,
Built to go like bloody hell.

But I thought I'd stumbled upon an undiscovered fragment of
Ted Hughes when I opened an offering that defines nothing precise about the sports car yet somehow captures its essence completely. The winner is
Alan Lidmila of Sheffield with 'The floored howl, dawn clear undulating blacktop wheel-gripped view ahead.'

That should silence the car bores in my local.