Clarkson on Cars (10 page)

Wait a little longer and the kangaroo petrol-powered BMW will be in front of you, complete with a driver equipped for the next month with the best ‘guess what happened to me’ story any Londoner could wish to relate.

Strangers to the city (yes, they exist) will be baffled by this scenario, but it isn’t as crazy as it sounds. In London you do not let people in, make no allowances for the elderly or infirm, treat red traffic lights as no more than advisory stop signals and, if you plan to survive with your wings intact, you become bloody arrogant.

London is, of course, an exception: to some, horribly frightening; to others, a challenge that needs mastering. There are those who will drive miles to avoid any contact with its streets and yet also those who regard the new traffic lights at Hyde Park Corner as the brainchild of a spoilsport.

It is not, of course, only London that offers the motorist an insight into its inhabitants. It works on a worldwide scale. If one encounters a crashed or broken down vehicle in Pakistan, one simply makes a new road round it. In America, one wonders how on earth drivers can direct their huge automobiles through the haze of cigar smoke and the glare from oncoming sports jackets. In France, they haven’t yet learned that you no longer yield to the right, and in Italy no one yields to anyone.

Nor is the phenomenon peculiar to capital cities. Ignoring London for the time being – have you ever been to Reigate? During the day, when husbands are away trying to save the Pound, their wives populate the town centre with VW Sciroccos and massive hairstyles. Their boutiques, bought to discourage them from seeking affairs, occupy their minds to a certain extent but meeting Sally Ann at the Bacchus Wine Bar for lunch is far more important.

For these women, the car is no more than a vanity mirror on wheels. If ever you’re driving down Reigate’s main street and see a car that’s about to pull out, for heaven’s sake, beware. Although the Laura-Ashley-clad incumbent may appear to be checking her mirror for approaching cars, nothing is further from her mind. In reality, when she glances into a mirror, all she sees is a lovely made-up face, and it probably won’t be yours.

This is why the Reigate wife likes Sciroccos. Not only is there a very local dealer to be summoned for help whenever she forgets to put that smelly stuff in the tank, but the vanity mirror (rear-view mirror to you and I) isn’t ridiculously convex. Such mirrors may improve peripheral vision but they show up every skin blemish and wrinkle.

So be very careful in Reigate. Chances are, the car in front has no idea you’re there and if its driver suddenly sees someone she hasn’t seen‘for absolutely ages’ – last night – coming out of Diana’s dress shop, she will, without warning, pull up for a chat.

Further up the road in Woking, it’s an entirely different story. Here, you’ll find old couples lamenting the day when the town they had come to know and love was shaken up by developers to become Britain’s biggest eyesore. The poor old dears in their pristine Marinas cannot work out for the life of them what a one-way system is and, while going the wrong way round it, can be seen pointing at concrete monstrosities saying, ‘Do you remember when the police station was there?’

These people, like the womenfolk of Reigate, do not understand the motor car, or indeed any laws pertaining to it. To them, the road is a grey strip and grey strips can be driven on at as leisurely a pace as may be and in whatever direction the driver chooses.

Move up to Doncaster and a whole new world opens up. Here, in the heartland of mining, pigeon fanciers and Reliant Robins, driving is an art not yet mastered by the majority of the populace. Ineptitude reigns. It’s a town where people take fifteen minutes to park in a space three times the length of their three-wheeler, where they don’t pull out onto a roundabout until absolutely nothing is in sight, where you have to look out for apprentice dole queue jumpers in maroon pullovers, desperately trying to woo Dolcis shoe-shop salesgirls by spinning the wheels of their 1972 Capris – complete with dice, stripes and two dozen fog lamps.

The local police are too busy tracing whippet thieves to concentrate on these young blades with barely detectable moustaches and receding acne, so St Sepulchre Gate – closed to those who can read the signs – is jammed on a Saturday with a battery of primer splattered Sharon-loves-Garymobiles chewing up the Acrilan-smothered tarmac.

Eighty miles further north, amid Britain’s most breathtakingly beautiful scenery, the Yorkshire Dales, lethargy abounds and in spite of the availability of some magnificent driving roads, 7 mph is the average speed. Two groups are largely responsible for this pace: the locals who crawl around in corrugated-iron Subarus collecting wayward sheep and mending walls, and the gon-goozlers who flood up there in the summer to break them and scatter them again.

Ethel and Albert, too old by about fifty summers for Club 18–30 holidays in Benidorm, flock to the Dales to remind themselves of a lifestyle and pace not seen since 1473. Their spotless Maxi – ten years old with 900 miles on the clock – dithers around on the Askrigg pass with Ethel wondering whether her pallid demeanour is a result of Albert’s driving or the dizzy heights, while Albert spends his time worrying about the stopping distance from 6 mph should a sheep wander into view on the horizon.

His mental meanderings are inevitably brought to an abrupt halt by either clouds of steam belching from his much-loved engine or a head-on collision with a corrugated-iron Subaru whose driver has been looking at broken walls and not the road. Either way, it’s a relief for the incumbents of Albert’s eight-mile tailback who are desperately trying to reach the Farmers Arms in Muker before it closes.

Birmingham you might liken to one of those ‘power’ houses that used to be an expensive but essential extra with a Hot Wheels set. You remember, the little toy car could be pushed into the ‘house’ where two rapidly spinning rubber wheels would shoot the projectile out of the other side. Theoretically, the car would be given enough oomph to complete a circuit of the track and reach the spinning wheels for a second boost before its momentum ran out. Perpetual motion, until the batteries gave up.

In reality, the poor car shot out at such a rate it could never negotiate the first corner and would leap off the track to an expensive collision with the coffee table.

So, you want to go to the centre of Birmingham do you? Like scores of others, you will leave the M6 where a bold sign says ‘City Centre’ and you will find yourself on the grand-sounding ‘Expressway’ thundering towards the skyscrapers under the ever watchful eyes of a succession of video cameras. Presumably, the tapes from these cameras can subsequently be watched by the traffic police amid great hilarity as they’re bound to depict scenes of strangers trying desperately to work out which lanes of the ‘Expressway’ are for northbound traffic and which are for those going south.

Anyway, after negotiating a couple of tunnels, you’ll find yourself in Kidderminster.

So you do a U-turn and head back towards the skyscrapers again, but your perseverance will simply put you back on the M6 again and if you’re dreadfully unlucky that could spell an encounter with the infamous Gravelly Hill interchange – Spaghetti Junction. Once here, no matter which way you try to enter Birmingham, you will be ejected out of the other side puzzled at how you managed to miss all of Britain’s second-biggest city completely.

But don’t worry, it’s not just you. Glance into any other car as it shoots through the tunnels and over the overpasses and you’ll see the occupants are unshaven creatures, gaunt and undernourished through lack of sleep and food.

If Ranulph Fiennes is looking for another challenge after his dangerous Transglobe Expedition, he could do worse than set out to find Birmingham’s city centre without leaving the road system…

Where is New Street? What about the Bullring? What kind of people are stuck in this once great city: indeed, is there anyone in there at all? Come on Ranulph, these questions need answering.

Why can’t Birmingham Council’s Highway Department pay a visit to their counterparts in Bournemouth – surely the best-signposted town anywhere – and while they’re at it, could they take along the idiots who dreamed up Oxford’s one-way system as well? Whereas with Birmingham, no one can get in, quite the reverse applies in Oxford. Approach it from the east and you’ll find yourself at a crossroads where you have to turn left. Do so and you’re on the inner ring road with no exits. You’re on it till you run out of petrol or sanity.

This is presumably why Oxford is a city of cyclists. The crazy one-way system, the labyrinth of bus lanes, and the traffic wardens who, with their little moustaches and greased-down forelocks (even the women) all resemble a famous German leader, combine to make the motor car in Oxford as welcome as Marlboro sponsorship at an ASH convention.

Perhaps the powers that be believe, and they have a point, that very pretty girls who have a penchant for wearing very short skirts and riding bicycles could raise accident statistics among male drivers to unacceptable levels.

Not too far away, in Cirencester, the danger looms in another form – swarms of tweed-clad hooray Henries in Lhasa green Golf GTis who, if asked, say they’re students at the agricultural college, though their lecturers wouldn’t know them from Adam.

Drink-driving laws do not seem to have a bearing in Cirencester, where these students spend 85 per cent of their time with Moët in hand, 14 per cent playing silly buggers in their Lhasa green GTis and 1 per cent at college. Thus the local residents must approach each bend with extreme caution because there’s no way of knowing which side of the road Henry will choose to occupy as his blurred vision tells him the strip of tarmac is no longer quite so straight.

Happily, much of the sillier stunt work like trying to get the GTi up the college steps is executed away from the public highway but there’s always a chance of the brogue-wearing masses being equally daft in the High Street so you can never be too careful.

Henry chooses his particular shade of GTi so that; when he careers off the road – and he does, frequently – he can abandon the wreck without fear of its colour spoiling the countryside, particularly once the rust gets hold. He’ll get hold of another GTi from surely the richest VAG dealer in Britain the next day.

Henry’s elder brother, a stockbroker in the City, also drives a Lhasa green GTi but when he comes off the road, just as frequently as his sibling, it isn’t a field of wheat that breaks his fall. It’s usually a lamp-post in Parsons Green, London SW6.

Here, he has to mix it with Camilla taking the children to school, Reg, Ron and Arthur in the builders’ truck, Ahmed in his Porsche Turbo and a whole host of Surrey-based commuters as well. All of these people are far too busy with their own hassles and Mach-4 lifestyles to be bothered with the finer points of driving technique so every street corner in Parsons Green is littered with broken glass – a sure sign that Camilla hit Ron and in the ensuing argument, Henry ran into the back of Ahmed.

The Parsons Green recipe, however, is nowhere near as dangerous as the concoction to be found on Britain’s motorway network. Here, every weekend the whole lot, from Ethel and Albert to Henry, from Sally Ann to Gary, are thrown together in a massive uncertain bond. Suddenly everyone is taken from his or her own particular niche, where everybody behaves in the same way, and is thrown into a six-lane high-speed highway with thousands of others who are used to behaving quite differently.

Statistics show motorways to be the safest roads on which to travel. This must be because Sally Ann is unlikely to see a friend with whom she must have a chat, the old dears from Woking can’t get unduly confused, Gary has no one to impress, there are no broken walls to be mended or lost sheep to be rounded up, Ethel and Albert are still waiting for the RAC in the Dales, the good folk of Birmingham haven’t been seen for years so they can’t mess things up and neither can people from Oxford who are still stuck on the infernal inner ring road. Henry is probably sober after a spell on the motorway and surprise, surprise, he’s quite a good driver; his brother, Camilla, Ron and Ahmed are exchanging insurance particulars in Parsons Green and very pretty girls, on bicycles, in very short skirts, are a very rare sight indeed.

On 15 October this year, wine connoisseurs the world over will focus their attention on a small, riverside village a few miles south-east of Bordeaux.

They will hope to hear that the day dawned to a blanket of fog which, during the morning, gave way to gorgeous autumnal sunshine.

Each subsequent day for the next few weeks, they will expect to receive reports that such weather conditions are persisting and that not one drop of rain has fallen on the plethora of precious vineyards.

If these conditions are met, there’s a better than evens chance that we will be treated to a vintage crop of Barsac.

Barsac, evidently, is the world’s greatest sweet wine. It is produced in comparatively minute quantities and an average bottle currently costs the off-licence punter here in Britain around £8 – double or treble that for a vintage Château Climens.

Now, I must be honest, I don’t much care for white wine unless I’m drunk, in which case I don’t care at all. Particularly though, I don’t like sweet white wines. And Barsac is the sweetest of them all.

To the uninitiated (me), it looks like the kind of sample policemen take if you’re frightened of needles, and tastes like a pound of diluted Silver Spoon.

However, if the figures are anything to go by, my views on the subject are not universally shared. In 1984, Barsac wine producers exported 4263 hectolitres of their ‘deep golden nectar’, nearly half of which reached the UK. America took a miserable 339 hectolitres which, in a funny sort of way, has to be a feather in Barsac’s cork.

Generally speaking, if the Americans like something, I don’t, and vice versa, but in this instance, grudgingly, I support their apathy.

What’s more, the British are apparently buying the stuff more and more. According to Catherine Manac’h, PR person to Foods and Wines from France Ltd – an organisation set up twenty years ago to promote edible French produce on these shores – the average Briton is becoming more sophisticated. Has she seen how many Nissan Micras roam our roads I wonder?