The World According to Clarkson (25 page)

He has stripped it right back so now it’s virtually naked. But even this tree porn has failed to perk the wilting red plants back into life. The oak? That was doing quite well. I think in the past seven years it had shot up by a millionth of an inch. But it’s hard to be sure because the other day a cow ate it. That’s nothing, though. The honeysuckle has strangled the cherry. Clematis has suffocated the copper beech and ivy has asphyxiated one of the silver birches. It’s like
The Killing Fields
out there.

What about my latest purchase? Six weeks ago I wrote about failing to find a statue of Hitler killing an otter at the Chelsea Flower Show. Now I’ve bought a lump of Canadian driftwood which, I’m assured, died 400 years ago.

Knowing my luck, the damn thing will come back to life.

Sunday 6 July 2003

Thursday should have been a great day. I was with the Royal Green Jackets in a small German village called Copehill Down which is to be found thirteen miles from anywhere in the middle of Salisbury Plain.

I was part of an eight-man team charged with the task of storming a well-defended house, shooting everyone inside and getting out again in under fifteen minutes.

The rules were simple. I was to stick with my buddy unless he got wounded in which case I was to leave him behind. Marvellous. None of that soppy American marine nonsense in the British forces.

So, dolled up like Action Man, I had the latest SA80 assault rifle slung over my right shoulder and, in my trouser pockets, a clutchof grenades.I was goingto kick ass, unleash a hail of hot lead and do that American war-film thing where I point at my eyes, then point at a wood and then make a black power sign, for no reason.

Unfortunately, things went badly. They had asked me to bring along the explosives which would blow a hole in the side of the house, but I forgot, which meant we all had to climb through a window. It turns out that it’s amazingly easy to shoot someone when they’re doing this.

I was shot the first time in the sitting room and again
on the stairs. Then some burly commandos picked me up and shoved me through a trap door into the attic.

Well, when I say ‘through’, this is not entirely accurate. My embarrassingly significant stomach became wedged in the hole, which meant my head and upper torso were in the loft with three of the enemy while the rest of me and my gun were on the landing below. And believe me, it’s even easier to shoot someone when they’re in this position than when they’re climbing through a window.

Happily, because everyone was firing blanks, I wasn’t really killed. Although my buddy probably wished I had been a few moments later when I threw a grenade at him, blowing most of his legs off.

The problems with doing this sort of thing are many. First, we were all wearing exactly the same clothes and full warpaint so my buddy looked like everyone else.

And second, there are so many levers on an SA80 that every time I wanted fully automatic fire, or to engage the laser sights, the magazine fell out.

But worse than this is the army’s insistence on talking almost exclusively in acronyms. Throughout the firefight the house had echoed to the sound of mumbo-jumbo, none of which made any sense at all. ‘DETCON WOMBAT’ shouted someone into my earpiece. ‘FOOTLING REVERB’ yelled someone else. Rat-a-tat-tat barked the enemy’s AK47 and beep went my earpiece to signify I had been shot again.

Things were not explained in the debrief. This, said the colour sergeant, had been FIBUA (Fighting in
Built-Up Areas) and we had done FISH (Fighting in Someone’s House). Clarkson, he didn’t need to point out, had been a FLOS (Fat Lump of S
***
).

Needless to say, this was all being filmed for television and my director was thrilled. ‘It was great,’ she said. ‘Good stuff for OOV. All we need now is a PTC or two, a BCU, then an MCU and we’re done.’

Done we were, so I asked the colonel for directions out of Germany and back into Wiltshire. ‘Sure,’ he said, starting out well. ‘You go right at Parsonage Farm, right at the church…’ and then he blew it: ‘and you’ll be at the Vetcom Spectre Viperfoobarcomsatdefcon.’

‘You mean the exit,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he replied, and in doing so exposed the lie that acronyms were invented to save time. They weren’t. They were invented to make you feel part of a club and to exclude, in a sneery mocking sort of way, those who aren’t.

How many times have we seen the president in American films ordering a man in green clothes to go to Defcon 3? Hundreds. And do you know what – I still have no idea what this means, or which way the numbering goes. Even now, if someone told me to go to Defcon 1, I wouldn’t know whether to launch the nukes or cancel lunch.

The trouble is that everyone’s at it. After my day of FISH I drove to London and hosted an awards ceremony for the world’s top bankers. The organisers had written a speech which I delivered to the best of my ability even though I had no idea what any of it meant. It was full
of FIRCS and CUSTODIES and NECRS, and to make things even more complicated I’d say UBS had had a good year on the FIRM and everyone would fall about laughing. I felt excluded, an outsider. Which is the point of course.

When someone uses an acronym they want you to ask what they mean so they can park an incredulous look on their face: ‘What, you don’t know?’ Then they will look clever when they have to explain.

A word of warning, though. Don’t try this on television or you will hear the presenter ask the cameraman to fit the strawberry filter. This is a device reserved for crashing bores who’ve driven a long way to appear on the box and who don’t want to be told that they’re not interesting enough. It means: ‘Set the camera up. But don’t bother turning it on.’

Sunday 13 July 2003

I rang the Meteorological Office last week and asked something which in the whole 149 years of the service it has never been asked before. ‘How come,’ I began, ‘your weather forecasts are so accurate these days?’

Sure, there have been complaints from the tourist industry in recent months that the weathermen ‘sex up’ bulletins, skipping over the sunny skies anticipated in England, Scotland and Wales and concentrating instead on some weather of mass destruction that they are juicily expecting to find on Rockall.

That’s as maybe, but the fact is this: weather reports in the past were rubbish, works of fiction that may as well have been written by Alistair MacLean. And now they aren’t.

We were told that the heatwave would end last Tuesday, and it did. We were told that Wednesday would be muggy and thundery as hell, and it was. When I woke up on Thursday, without opening the curtains I knew to put on a thick shirt because they had been saying for days that it would be wet, cold and windy.

It is not just 24-hour predictions, either. Now you are told with alarming accuracy what the weather will be like in two or even three days’ time. So how are the
bods in the Met Office’s new Exeter headquarters doing this?

The man who answered the telephone seemed a bit surprised by the pleasantness of my question. But once he had climbed back into his chair and removed the tone of incredulity from his voice, he began a long and complicated explanation about modern weather forecasting.

At least I think it was about weather forecasting. It was so difficult to follow that, if I am honest, it could have been his mother’s recipe for baked Alaska.

In a nutshell, it seems that they get hourly reports from meteorological observation points all over the world. These are then added to the findings from a low-orbit satellite that cruises round the world every 107 minutes, at a height of 800 miles, measuring wave heights.

Other satellites looking at conditions in the troposphere and the stratosphere chip in with their data and then you add sugar, lemon and milk and feed the whole caboodle into a Cray supercomputer that is capable of making about eleventy billion calculations a second.

This system, soon to be updated with an even cleverer computer, has been operational since the middle of the 1990s, which does beg a big question: what was the point of weather forecasting before it came along? Everyone was jolly cross with Michael Fish when he didn’t see the 1987 storm coming. But it turns out that he had no satellites and no computers, just a big checked jacket.

Big checked jackets are no good at predicting the
weather. Nor, it seems, are those mud ’n’ cider bods who tramp around Somerset with big earlobes and a forked twig. Back in the spring a gnarled old Cotswold type told me that because of the shape of the flies and the curl of the cow pats we were in for a lousy July. My gleaming red nose testifies to the fact that he was wrong.

Then you have people who say you can tell when rain is coming because the cows are lying down. Not so. According to my new friend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.

There are some pointers. Swallows fly differently when there is thunder about, and high clouds have tails pointing to the north-west when you are about to get wet.

Furthermore, red sky at night signifies that hot, dusty air is coming while red sky in the morning shows it has gone away.

However, using the natural world as a pointer is mainly useless because it is good for showing only what weather there is now, which you know, or what is coming in a minute. Pine cones, crows and especially otters do not know what pressure systems are prevalent in the Atlantic, or where they are going.

Then I said to the man from the Met, what if a low-pressure area suddenly veers north for no reason? The computer must occasionally get it wrong. It does, apparently, but there are six senior weather forecasters at the Met Office who decide whether to believe it or not.

Now that has to be one of the ballsiest jobs in Britain today. The most powerful computer is telling you that
two and two is five. And you have to say, ‘No, it isn’t.’

There is, however, a worrying downside to the accuracy levels of this man and machine combo.

The British are known throughout the world for moaning about the weather. It is one of our defining national characteristics. It is not the variety we hate, though. That is a good thing. It’s the unpredictability. When you turn up at royal Ascot in a pair of wellingtons and the sun shines all day, it is annoying. And it is the same story if your summer dress gets all soaked and see-through at Henley.

What happens if the unpredictability is removed from the equation? If you know what the weather will be like on Tuesday you’ll be able to organise a barbecue knowing that the sun will be out. Then what will you talk about?

Inadvertently, those computer geeks are unpicking the very fabric of everything that makes us British.

Sunday 20 July 2003

Right. You’ve got to take me seriously this morning because I am no longera jumped-up motoring journalist with a head full of rubbish. I am now a doctor. I have a certificate.

Yes, Brunel University has given me an honorary degree, or an
honoris causa
, as we scholars like to call it. So now I am a doctor. I can mend your leg and give you a new nose. I am qualified to see your wife naked and design your next fridge freezer.I think I might even have some letters after my name.

Sadly, they don’t send doctorates through the post. So last Monday I had to go to the historic Wembley Conference Centre near the North Circular where they gave me a robe and floppy hat that made me look like a homosexual.

The whole event was designed to run like clockwork. I had been told weeks beforehand about every last detail, including how many steps there were between the entrance and the stage.

I knew why of course. I’d be entering as a normal man, a thicky, and I had to be told there were 21 steps or I might stop halfway, thinking I’d made it.

On the way out, as a fully fledged doctorof everything,
there were no instructions at all. It just said ‘procession out’.

In between, a man in a robe read out half a million names, most of which seem to have been a collection of letters plucked from a Scrabble bag, and the students filed past the chancellor, an endless succession of beaming brown and yellow faces, collected their degrees and set off into the world.

I was deeply, properly, neck-reddeningly jealous. Dammit, I thought, sitting there in my Joseph coat and my Elton hat. Why didn’t I do this?

You should never regret any experience, but my God, it is possible to regret missing out on one. And that’s what I did, 25 years ago when I decided there were better things to do at school than read Milton.

I used his books as bog rolls and as a result lost my shot at paradise: university.

Yes, things have worked out pretty well since – they even gave me an honorary degree for dangling around under Brunel’s suspension bridge. Yet there is a chink in the smoothness of it all. Well, more of a chip really, on my shoulder.

I am sure a university education wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to my professional life. From what I can gather, students spend their three years after school either on an island off Australia pretending to study giant clams, or being pushed down the high street in a bed. Or drunk.

Certainly I learnt more in my three years on the
Rotherham Advertiser
than some of those students who were at Wembley on Monday.

One, I noted, had studied the ramifications of having sex in prison while another had spent her time looking at the correlation between life in Bhutan and life in Southall.

But I’m no fool. Not now anyway. And I know that even the silliest university course is more fun than putting on a tie every morning and working for a living.

When I was nineteen, I was trawling the suburbs of Rotherham for stories, listening to fat women telling me their kiddies’ heads were full of insect eggs and that the council should be doing something about it.

Oh sure, I was paid £17 a week, which covered my petrol and ties. But I was acutely aware that half of my earnings was being taken away and given to students who were spending it on marijuana and biscuits. While you were settling down for an evening’s arguing at the debating society, I was poring overmy SouthYorkshire/ English translation book, desperately trying to work out what Councillor Ducker was on about.