The World According to Clarkson (23 page)

We see a similar sort of thing with live events. While the vibrant London Motor Show, with its bikini-clad lovelies, coughed up blood for a few years and then died completely, the Chelsea Flower Show continues to be a huge attraction. This year, it even managed to attract me.

I needed a fountain and perhaps a statue for a bit of garden that I’ve just paved.

I like paving. It doesn’t need mowing and unlike grass, which is vindictive, it doesn’t give me hay fever on purpose.

Unfortunately, at Chelsea this year, the most impressive water feature on display was the sky, so everyone was forced into a tent full of flowers. Flowers bore me.

They do nothing for 50 weeks of the year and then on the other two they continue to do nothing because you planted them somewhere that was too hot, too shady, too high up or too near sea level. And the soil was wrong too. And the wind.

Happily, the people weren’t boring at all. At a motor show you queue with men called Ron and Derek for a pint of brown in a plastic glass. At Chelsea they give you champagne every time you stop moving and you get to see Cherie Blair in real life.

I was also interested to note that the whole event was quite smart. It’s all sponsored by bankers on the basis, I suppose, that if people are interested in shrubs at £3,000 a pop, they might have a bit of floating lolly that needs licking into shape.

However, because it’s smart, everyone was in a suit, which meant it was hard to spot the bankers coming. Is it Rowan Atkinson? Is it Prince Andrew? Oh bloody hell, it’s a bloke from Merrill Lynch with news of his Swiss supersava scheme.

I escaped by seeking out the garden that had been done by peoplein prison.I don’tget this. We’re forever being told that prisoners are only allowed out of their cells for a moment’s man-love in the showers, yet every year at Chelsea one nick or another turns up with a full-scale model of Babylon.

How, when they’re not allowed outside? And where
do they get the soil? No really, if I were one of the guards, I’d have a look under the stove because I bet they’d find Charles Bronson down there in ‘Harry’, the
Great Escape
tunnel.

Eventually it stopped raining and I went outside to look at the statues. Why are they all of Venus? How come every single sculptor sits down with a block of stone and thinks: ‘I know. I’ll do that bird with no arms.’ Why can’t someone make a statue of Stalin? Or Keith Moon?

And if they do an animal, it’s always an otter. Come on. You’re artists. Use your imagination. If it has to be an otter, make it
Ring of Bright Water
’ s Mij, with a shovel in the back of its head. In fact, why not make a statue of Hitler beating an otter to death. That’s something I’d buy.

Then I got to the fountains. Oh deary me. Some of them were very clever. The silver and purple waves with a gentle cascade tippling down their flanks were marvellous and will undoubtedly look good when they end up where they belong: in the foyer of a businessmen’s hotel at Frankfurt airport.

The thingis, I like a fountainto roar, not tinkle. What I want in my back garden is the Niagara on Viagra, and despite extensive searching, Chelsea couldn’t help.

In fact, I saw nothing there that had any relevance at all.I stoppedfora momentto admire one flowerbed that was filled with crushed blue glass. It looked wonderful, a cheerful alternative to the dreary brownness of soil or bark.

I was just about to plunge my hand into the blueness for a feel when a man leapt out of nowhere. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he warned, showing me his hands, which looked like they’d been through a bacon slicer. So what possible use is glass, then, as a substitute for mud? Unless you want to chop your dog’s legs off?

I went home that night a bit dejected. And my mood darkened when I reached the house. Two years ago I planted a mixed hedge to separate my paddock from the road. It was just getting going, the little whips had become mini toddler trees.

But some berk in an untaxed, uninsured Sierra had lost control on the corner and smashed the whole thing to pieces. Damn the boy racers. Damn them all to hell.

I feel sure the bods at Chelsea could advise me on a new hedge. A bonsai perhaps, which needs watering with Chablis every fifteen minutes and grows best if set in dappled shade on a bed of uncut diamonds.

Sunday 25 May 2003

It’s starting to look like Australia maintains a modern navy only to pluck hapless British explorers from their tiny upturned boats.

Last week an Aussie frigate sailed thousands of miles to rescue two chaps who were attempting to row across the Indian Ocean. No, I don’t know why either, but as far as I can tell, one of them got a headache from a freak wave and decided to call it a day.

And who can forget the epic tale of Tony Bullimore who started to eat himself after his yacht capsized in the Southern Ocean. Luckily, he’d only gnawed his way through half of one hand when
HMAS Adelaide
steamed into view.

It all sounds very
Boy’s Own
but the Australian taxpayers are starting to get a bit cross, and I can’t say I blame them. Their navy was involved in the recent bout of Middle Eastern fisticuffs and has a torrid time patrolling the waters off Darwin in an endless search for desperate Indonesians who’ve been drifting on cardboard for fourteen years with nothing to eat but their fingernails.

Then, every fifteen minutes, they have to break off and sail 1,500 miles in rotten weather, and at vast
expense, to rescue some weird-beard Englishman who’s down to his last Vesta.

The problem is that humans have already climbed the highest mountains and sailed on their own through the wildest and loneliest stretches of ocean. But though the records have gone, the world is still full of Chichesters and Hillarys and Amundsens.

As a result, these people have to think of stupider things to quench their need for a spot of frostbitten glory. So, they insert a few sub-clauses into the record and set off from Margate to become the First Person Ever to Pogo-Stick Round the World – Backwards.

Did you see base camp in the Himalayas last week? It was a smorgasbord of dopamine and lunacy, with people in silly outfits from all four corners of the globe. ‘Yes, I’m attempting to be the first Chinese person to climb Everest in a tutu.’

‘Oh really. I shall be the second Peruvian ever to go up there in a scuba suit but I’m hoping to be the first not to come back down again.’

Then we have a chap called Pen Hadow. Plainly, it’s in his biological make-up to have icicles in his eyes, so he has to go to the Arctic. But what record is left to beat? We’ve had the first person to drive to the North Pole, the first person to walk to the North Pole unaided and, probably, the first to jog there, from Russia, in a kilt. But Pen wasn’t going to be defeated before he’d even set off.

So he pored over the record books and spotted an opening. Eureka! He would become the First Person
Ever to Trek to the Geographic North Pole from Canada, Unaided.

This meant skiing, clambering and swimming through open water, while towing a 300-lb sled. But he made it, a point verified by the tourists who will have watched him arrive from the warmth of their helicopters and their cruise ships.

Sadly, though, he wasn’t able to make it back and, as a result, some poor Canadian pilot who was just sitting down to a nice moose sandwich with his family had to effect a daring and spectacular airborne rescue.

This is my biggest beef about explorers today. When Shackleton’s boat was crushed by the ice, he didn’t think: ‘Crikey, it’s a bit nippy out. Let’s get the Argies on the sat phone and have them bring a destroyer.’ No, he ate his dogs, sang some songs, rowed like billy-o and emerged from the event an enduring national hero.

Now compare this with the case of Simon Chalk. Last year he had to be rescued when his rowing boat bumped into a whale. And now he is attempting to become the Youngest Person Ever to Row from Australia to an Island Nobody’s Ever Heard Of, On His Own.

I know someone has already rowed the Pacific so I have no idea why we’re supposed to get excited about some bloke who’s rowing a much shorter distance, and in some style by all accounts. According to the BBC: ‘He will run out of drinks on day 85 and after that he will have to survive on water.’

I’m sorry. What drinks? Washe mixing himself a little gin and French after a hard day’s tugging?

This sounds like the kind of record I’d like to attempt: The Most Luxurious Crossing of the World’s Smallest, Warmest Ocean, Eating Only Quail’s Eggs and Celery Salt.

Meanwhile, I havea suggestion for allof you who are only happy when you have gangrene and only feel alive when you’re less than an inch from death. Stop messing around in your upturned bathtubs in the southern oceans. If you really have to perform endurance trials at sea, do it near America.

Then when it all goes wrong, it’ll be the US Navy who’ll come to the rescue.

And if an American naval vessel is employed picking up Mr Scott-Shackleton who was attempting to swim underwater from San Francisco to Tokyo, it won’t be able to rain cruise missiles down on whatever unfortunate country George W. Bush has heard of that week.

It’s win–win for Mr Templeman-Ffiennes. If he succeeds, he becomes the First Person to Cross the Pacific on a Bicycle. If he fails, he saves the world.

Sunday 8 June 2003

If there’s any more fighting on the terraces, the England football team will not be allowed to take part in the Euro World Olympic Championship Cup 2004.

This came as a bit of a surprise because I thought football hooliganism had gone away.I thought the stands were all full of families saying things like ‘Ooh, look at Michael’s dribbling skills’ and ‘Gosh, have you seen David’s new Alice band?’

But it seems not. Things are apparently so bad that President Beckham addressed the nation recently. No, honestly, that’s what it said in the papers – that he ‘addressed the nation’ appealing for calm in the run-up to whatever championship it is that we’re going to lose next.

It’s a good time then to pause a while and think a little bit about why people fight and how they might be stopped from doing so.

The other day I was staying in a northern town. I shan’t say which one because the local newspaper will spend the next six months pillorying me, so let’s call it Rotherhullcastlepool.

Anyway, opposite the hotel was a nightclub and outside that was a lengthy queue of people who, despite
the chill, appeared to be as-near-as-makes-no-difference naked.

It seemed odd queuing to get into a nightclub at 11 p.m. when, obviously, it was full. And it was going to stay full, surely. Nobody leaves a nightclub at 11, not when the nearest one is 40 miles away in Donfieldgowon-Trent.

I was wrong. Every few minutes two more lads would come flying out of the door in a flurry of fists and torn T-shirts. After they’d been calmed down by some kicks from the bouncers, two more people were allowed in.

I watched this for a while and began to speculate on what might be causing so many fights in there. Drink? Girls? Drugs? Gangsterism? I think not. I think the root cause of the problem was unintelligence.

I’m told that if all creatures were the same size, the lobster would have the smallest brain. All it knows to do is eat and snap at something if its pint is spilled.

Well, this is what you find in northern nightclubs. Someone looks at your girlfriend, you hit them. Someone looks at you, you hit them. With really stupid creatures, any stimulation whatsoever provokes a lobster response.

My older children have the mental age of eight- and seven-year-olds, because they are eight and seven years old. So they hit each other pretty much constantly. When the boy refuses to give his big sister a Pringle, she doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to formulate a reasoned argument. So she whacks him.

We see the same story in America. As a relatively new
country, full of relatively daft people, it doesn’t have the wisdom or the experience to construct a sensible response. So when it’s prodded, it lashes out with its jets and its aircraft carriers.

I’ve never hit anyone. I may not have the mind of John Humphrys or the nose of Stephen Fry, but even I, with my six O levels, know that if I punch someone, they will punch me right back. And that, because this will hurt, it’s best in a tricky situation to run like hell.

Only once was this not an option. A girlfriend had been pinned against the wall by a wiry, tattooed man whose speech was slurred by a combination of drink and being from Glasgow. He wanted very much for her to kiss him.

So what was I to do? The sensible answer was ‘nothing’ but I feared a terrible row when we got home so having weighed things up for a while, I tapped the drunken Scotsman on the shoulder and said, as politely as possible: ‘Excuse me.’

He whirled round, his eyes full of fire and his hands balled into steel-hard fists. But the blow never came. ‘Christ, you’re a big bastard,’ he said, and ran off. It was the proudest moment of my life.

In fact, I have only ever been hit once. It was a big, rounded, fully formed punch to the side of my head and it was landed by someone who was Greek, right in front of two policemen. Who then arrested me for being beaten up. Like I said. Daft as brushes, the lot of them. But would the Greek have punched me in the first place if nobody had been looking?

Are fights like the light in your fridge? Do they go on when nobody else is there? Or does there have to be an audience to both light the spark and then pull the opponents apart when things turn ugly and the claret starts to flow?

I’ve just been outside to speak with my builders who know about such things and apparently in all their years they’ve never heard of what they call a ‘one-on-one’. Two blokes, jackets off, fighting to settle something quietly round the back of the pub.

So if the England football team want to avoid trouble at future events they have to play without an audience, live or on television. And it’d probably be for the best if President Beckham, clean living and well meaning though he may be, stops addressing the nation.