The World According to Clarkson (15 page)

Take Britney Spears as a prime example. Occasionally you hear what is obviously her own voice but for the most part it’s a computer interpretation and, as a result, it sounds as if she’s coming at you via an answering machine.

What about Mary J. Blige, about whom everyone seems to be raving. Frankly, I’d rather listen to a pneumatic drill. She’s nothing more than a spelling mistake – it should be Mary J. Bilge.

However, the other day they played a song that was spellbinding. ‘At last,’ I thought, ‘here we have a new talent that can actually sing and a new song that’s going somewhere.’ But I was wrong. The song was ‘Morning Dew’ – which is old – and the vocalist was Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s gnarled and wizened front man.

Admitting that I prefer Plant to Mary J. Bilge is probably not allowed these days, any more than it’s allowed to say that you prefer the Conservative Party to His Tonyness. Certainly I know that I’m not allowed to say I went all the way to Wembley last week to see Roger Waters, the former Pink Floydist.

Indeed, lots of people asked where I was going on Wednesday night and I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth. ‘I’m doing some canvassing for the BNP in Burnley’ would have sounded better. ‘I shall be downloading pornography from the internet’ or ‘I’m going to kill a fox’. Anything except saying I had tickets to see the anorak’s anorak.

But do you know, it was brilliant. Brilliant and properly loud. Rick Mason, as he was called in the
Evening Standard
’s glowing review, guested on ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, while Snowy White and Andy Fairweather-Low gave it their all on the six strings. There was even a drum solo.

Best of all, the songs were long, which meant they had time to breathe. There was a beginning, a fifteen-minute crescendo in the middle and a gradual descent to the end. What’s wrong with that? Who says songs have to be fast? – not Mozart, that’s for sure.

I’m sorry to bang on about the Slow Food movement again but most people seem to think it’s a good idea. These guys have decided that Europe should be defined by long lunches and that the American sandwich is nothing more than fuel for the devil.

They want to see towns full of coffee shops and squares full of people passing the time of day with one another, not rushing off to make another phone call. For them, Vesta is the Antichrist, and they are getting enormous support. Most people like the idea of small shops selling high-quality local produce, even if the queue stretches out of the door and it takes a week to be served.

Yes, a supermarket is convenient and a Big Mac hits the spot when you’re in a hurry but why does music have to be this way? Why is three minutes acceptable and twenty minutes pretentious? Would ‘Stairway to Heaven’ be improved if they cut out the bustle in its hedgerow? I think not.

They say that radio stations prefer short songs and that
Bo’ Rap
, as Ben Elton calls it, simply wouldn’t get any airplay if it were released today, but I can’t for the life of me work out why. Jimmy Young’s an old man these days and there’s no way he could get from his studio to the lavatory and back before Britney was over. He needs a scaramouche in his fandango if he’s to stand a chance.

Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.

I shall be doing just that today, however. If you’re in Chipping Norton and you hear a strange noise, it’ll be me listening to ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. And I won’t be, either. I like 1970s rock music and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Sunday 30 June 2002

My eldest daughter is not sleek. In fact, to be brutally honest she has the aerodynamic properties of a bungalow and the coordination of an American bombing raid.

She puts a huge effort into running. Her arms and legs flail around like the Flying Scotsman’s pistons but despite this you need a theodolite to ascertain that she is actually moving forwards. She’s a bit of a duffer at the school’s sports day.

Luckily, the school tries to operate a strict ‘no competition’ rule. The game starts, children exert energy and then the game finishes. This doesn’t work terribly well with the 50-metre running race but often there are never any winners and consequently there are never any losers.

That’s the theory, but round the edge of the sports ground there’s a communal picnic for parents. I had been asked to bring along a potato salad, which sounds simple enough but oh no. My potato salad was going to be creamier and made with higher-quality potatoes than anyone else’s potato salad. This is why I got up at 4.30 a.m. to make it.

Nobody was going to scoop my potato salad quietly into the bushes. Nobody was going to make joke retching noises behind my back. I was out there to win, to crush the competition like beetles.

My daughter did not understand. ‘You told me it doesn’t matter if I come last in the race,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t,’ I replied.

‘So why,’ she pressed on, ‘are you trying to win a competition for potato salads when there isn’t one?’

There bloody well was. And a competition for pasta salads, too. And quiche. But all of these paled alongside the brownie wars.

Obviously, I chose the ones made by my wife but pretty soon I was surrounded by a gaggle of women. ‘Try mine,’ they said. ‘Try mine.’ It was just like the old days when schools had teams and competition and everyone crowded round shouting: ‘Pick me, pick me.’

I was never picked. I was always left at the back like the spring onion in the bottom of the fridge: ‘Oh do we have to have Clarkson, sir? He’s useless.’

I was therefore determined that no brownie should be left out, but this wasn’t enough. I was being pushed to decide, publicly, whose was best: my wife’s with the creamy centre; the ones made with chocolate that had been specially imported from America; or the ones with pecans floating in the middle. ‘They were all lovely,’ I said, sticking to the spirit of the day.

What spirit? What’s the point of protecting children from the horror of failure on the sports pitch when their parents are all giving one another Chinese burns on the touchline? ‘My brownies are better than yours. Say it! Say it!’

I spoke last night to a man who bunged one of the teachers 50 quid at his daughter’s sports day, saying:

‘Look, if it’s close for first and second, you know what to do.’

The following year his daughter wrote to him saying: ‘Dear Dad, please let me come where I come. Don’t try to bribe anyone.’ He did as asked and she came in second. But he wasn’t finished. He took the cup she won to the engravers and had it inscribed with a big ‘1st’.

It’s not as if children don’t understand the concept of losing. Mine regularly have their stomachs blown open by aliens or their heads kicked in by a Russian agent.

Of course, you could be good parents and turn up at sports day with a bowl of tinned prunes. You could force your children to put the PlayStation away and stick to Monopoly, which has no winners and losers because nobody in the whole of human history has ever had the patience to finish a game.

Think about it. If your child has no understanding of failure, how will he cope when he walks round the back of the bike sheds one day to find his girlfriend in a passionate embrace with Miggins Major? There’ll be a bloodbath.

I don’t want my children to be unhappy. Ever. It broke my heart when, as predicted, Emily was last in her running race, thumping across the line like a buffalo. I couldn’t bear to watch her fighting back the tears of humiliation.

But what do you do? Well, why not teach them that losing is better than winning. Certainly, it’s impossible to make someone laugh if you’ve come home first. ‘So anyway, I got the deal, won the lottery and woke up in
bed the next day with Cameron Diaz and Claudia Schiffer.’ That’s nice but it’s not funny.

Furthermore, arranging your face when you win is impossible. You have to look proud but magnanimous and that’s hard even for Dustin Hoffman. Michael Schumacher has been winning since he was eight and he still can’t pull it off.

All the funniest people in life are abject and total failures. There’s no such thing as a funny supermodel or a successful businessman who causes your sides to split every time he opens his mouth.

This is presumably why I felt a certain sense of pride as we trudged home from the sports day picnic. Everyone else was carrying empty bowls that had been licked clean. And me? Well, my bowl was still full of uneaten potato salad.

And I got a column out of it.

Sunday 7 July 2002

Let’s be perfectly clear, shall we. The fox is not a little orange puppy dog with doe eyes and a waggly tail. It’s a disease-ridden wolf with the morals of a psychopath and the teeth of a great white shark.

Only last month a foxy-woxy broke into someone’s council house and tried to eat a baby. I’m not joking. The poor child’s parents found their son’s face being mauled by one of these monsters as he slept on the sofa. And worse, I woke up last Tuesday to find a fox had pulled Michael Owen’s head off. For fun.

Perhaps I should explain at this point that Michael Owen is one of our new chickens, which were bought, and it pains me to say this, because stuff from the garden does taste better than stuff from the shop. Even to a man who can’t tell fish from cheese. If I could, they’d get rid of Mr Dyslexia and let me do the restaurant reviews as well.

Certainly, I need the extra money to pay for my new-found organic love affair. Pigeons have eaten all my sweet peas, scale insect has infested my tomatoes and now Michael Owen has been decapitated.

The children were hysterical and blamed me for not buying a secure henhouse. Obviously, I tried to convince them it was all Tony Blair’s fault, but it was no good.
So I had to spend £150 on a hut that looks like Fort Knox, and a further £100 on a cage for the hens to run around in.

The next morning we skipped down the garden like something out of
The Railway Children
. We knew Daddy would be on the train and that everything would be rosy. But it wasn’t.

Sol Campbell was gone and finding out how this had happened did not require much in the way of detective work. My garden looked like Stalag Luft III after Charles Bronson had been let loose with the gardening tools. One of the tunnels, I swear, ended up in Burton upon Trent.

Even I was angry, so that afternoon I went to one of those spy shops in London and blew £350 on a pairof infrared night-vision goggles. Unfortunately they were made in Russia, which is another way of saying: ‘Made badly by someone who’s drunk.’ So they don’t work very well.

At close range they’re fine, but at anything more than three or four inches everything’s just a blur. Certainly, if this is the best Russia can come up with now, we really didn’t have anything to worry about in the Cold War. Its tanks would have ended up in Turkey after its air force had spent the night bombing the bejesus out of the Irish Sea.

However, if you concentrate hard you can just tell what’s an organic life form and what’s a stone mushroom. And so, as the last vestiges of sunlight faded from the western horizon and the sky went black, I was to be
found at my bedroom window with a 12-bore Beretta at my side. Foxy-Woxy was going to die.

By one in the morning I’d nearly polished off a bottle of Brouilly and it was becoming increasingly hard to figure out what was what in the green world of infrared. But, yes, I was pretty sure there was a glow in the garden where before all had been dark.

I made a mental, if slightly drunken, calculation about where this was in relation to various trees, before putting the night-vision goggles down, picking up the piece and firing.

The next morning my wife was distressed to find that her Scotts of Stow chair had been blown to smithereens. And I’m afraid she could not be persuaded that through night-vision goggles it had looked like a fox. ‘Maybe through beer goggles,’ she said.

So the next night I was forced to stake out the garden sober. This meant I was still awake and alert at three when I noticed movement by the cage. I raised the gun and once again the serenity of the still night air was shattered as the weapon spat a hail of lead.

Over breakfast the next day there was a scream from down the garden. ‘You f
******
idiot. You’ve shot David Beckham.’ And I had. I tried hard to convince the children that she’d been savaged by vermin but it was no good. Luckily for the world’s police forces, there’s a big difference between a gunshot wound and a fox attack.

So now I’ve been banned from late-night sentry duty and I’m stuck. I can’t put poison down because the dogs
will eat it. And I can’t use the dogs to get the fox because Mr Blair will be angry. What’s more, I can’t simply let nature take its course, because then all my hens will be killed and we’ll end up eating supermarket eggs and dying of salmonella, listeria or whatever it is they say will kill us this week.

This is what the metropolitan elite don’t understand: that the countryside is a complicated place and that pretty soon they won’t be able to buy organic nut loaf because a bunch of foxes will have held up the delivery truck and eaten its contents long before it reaches Hoxton.

The simple fact of the matter is this. I’ve tried to do my bit. I’ve tried to become organic. And all I have to show for it is a cockerel called Nicky Butt and a hen called David Seaman.

Sunday 14 July 2002

For me, there is no greater pleasure than lying on my back in the middle of a deep, black desert, staring at the night sky. I simply love having my mind boggled by the enormity of the numbers: the fact we’re screaming around the sun at 90 miles a second, and the sun is careering around the universe at a million miles a day.

Then there’s the notion that one of those stars up there could have ceased to exist a thousand years ago. Yet we’re still seeing its light.