Today, youth is not satisfied unless strange metal aliens chop whole limbs off. Furthermore, those who do get de-legged do not say bother.
Then there’s sex. In the fifties, the merest hint of an ankle would have the censors reaching for their scissors whereas these days no film is complete unless it features at least six panty hamsters.
Translate that sort of progress into the real world and it becomes a damn sight easier to understand why the modern-day equivalent of scrumping is ram-raiding.
We do not need hairy social workers and do-good churchmen looking for complicated reasons why the youths of Newcastle and Oxford want to steal cars, because it’s patently obvious to anyone under the age of 100. They do it because it’s bloody good fun.
Why do you think rock stars throw televisions into swimming pools? Why can I not walk past a stack of beans in Safeway without getting a sometimes uncontrollable urge to push it over?
Glass makes a satisfying noise when it breaks but I bet it makes a hell of a more satisfying noise when you’ve just driven a Range Rover through it.
And I absolutely cannot think of anything which would be more fun than racing a Golf GTi round Woolworths.
George Carey has the bare-faced effrontery to claim that the recent spate of rioting is because of ‘social deprivation’. His sentiments, inevitably, are echoed by various beardies who have been invited to wax lyrical on Newsnight in recent weeks.
But ram-raiding has as much to do with social deprivation as pork pie. What it does have a lot to do with is risk.
I would steal apples because if I was caught, and the chances were slim, the worst I could expect was a pair of boxed ears. And I reckoned that the thrill of nicking a Granny Smith easily outweighed the possible consequences.
The youths of Newcastle drive Range Rovers into electrical wholesalers because if they get caught, and again the chances are slim when you remember Plod spends most of his time and manpower trying to catch you and me speeding, the worst they can expect is some magistrate applying a metaphorical blackboard rubber to their knuckles.
However, I am not prepared to leave it at that.
Even if the police did begin to understand that speeding is not the most heinous crime and that they are wasting precious resources trying to stamp it out, they still would not be able to patrol every shop, in every town, every night.
And anyway, they’ve let the youths get away with it for too long. When, as a child, I was told to stop doing something I’d been doing for ages, I’d have a tantrum; that was the way in the 1960s. Tell them to stop ram-raiding and there’d be a riot.
So how do we tackle it? Well, we have to ask ourselves what differentiates those who steal cars on a Saturday night with those who don’t.
We have to ask ourselves, also, why scrumping is the preserve of pre-pubescent schoolboys who stop doing it when they get older?
Why don’t I nick a car tonight and do some handbrake turns outside the pub? Why don’t you hot-wire your neighbour’s Cavalier and go for a spin in Currys at the weekend? Why doesn’t George Carey nick fruit any more?
We don’t do these things because we are intelligent. We understand about the notion of ownership and we can see that if we steal and destroy things, insurance premiums will rise, pushing up the cost of living and thus increasing the chances of a Labour victory in the next election.
Those who do indulge in ram-raiding and hotting handbrake turnery of a Saturday night are incapable of logical thought like us because they are stupid.
And how do you stamp out stupidity? Simple; you don’t allow dim people to breed.
What I propose is that at the age of sixteen, everyone has to take a simple IQ test. If they can’t name four cabinet ministers, three American rivers and two characters from Cannery Row, then it’s vasectomy time.
For sure, we won’t reap the benefit for a number of years but eventually, when Britain is freed from the shackles of having to support a whole bunch of stupid people, ram-raiding will cease to be. So too will the Church and British Rail.
Carey and his mates at the DSS believe in giving these kids what they want. They say that if a child won’t stop nicking cars, he must be given a car and the opportunity to race it at weekends.
Yeah well, I want a boat in the South of France, a flat in Paris, a house in California and while you’re at it George, a jet.
An Able Ford
You will never have stayed at the Prince de Galles hotel on Avenue George V in Paris because it is too upmarket, but I was there last weekend, and so was Brigitte Nielson, and yes, they really are as big as they are in the photographs in Hello.
Can it really have been a coincidence that the three films available to guests on the pay-as-you-watch video channel were Tango and Cash, Rocksy IV and Cobra? I think not.
Over the course of the weekend we ate in two restaurants that you will not have been to because they are far too expensive and we saw England absolutely stuff the French at a game called Rugby.
But all this is by the by because the best bit is that we drove to and from Paris in the most coveted car sold in Britain.
It was not, however, a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, as you might imagine, and nor did a flying ‘B’ embellish the radiator grille. And no, it was not an Audi S2, which as you all should know, is the best car in Britain.
I am talking about the Ford Sierra Sapphire 2.0i Ghia, complete with air conditioning and compact disc player.
Of course, all of us want a Ferrari 348 in the same way that all of us want a million in the bank, a mansion in the country and a nymphomaniac in one of its bedrooms. But, not to put too fine a point on it, none of us will ever achieve even one of the above. We can only strive for what is achievable. That which is not is a fantasy. Thus, a 348 is a fantasy while a Sierra Ghia is a goal.
If you are a divisional sales manager for one of the major food manufacturers and each day you ply the motorways in your Sierra GL, you can dream all you like about owning a Ferrari, but it will not happen. And nor will you get home that night to find your wife has been transmogrified into a salivating teenage sex machine.
You can, however, strive for the Sierra Ghia because you know that if you could only find a supermarket manager who would return your calls, you’d meet the targets, get the promotion and thus, get the Ghia. It’s a hell of a depressing way to go through life, I know, but that doesn’t stop thousands of people from doing it.
And as there are more people out there driving humdrum Fords than anything else, there are, logically enough, more people out there striving, day in and day out, to make it to Ghia status than there are people striving to get a Volkswagen Corrado or a Mercedes.
Now, those of you with cars from outside the Ford stable will, by now, be howling with derisive laughter at the small-minded nature of our reppy brethren. You will dismiss the notion of a Sierra Ghia with a casual wave of the hand as you seek to explain that your Corrado will out-corner and out-perform any jumped-up sample-transporter.
Indeed it will, but then the ventilation in your Corrado is not that brilliant is it? And when you put a biro on the front seat, it always slips down onto the floor behind, doesn’t it? And there aren’t that many places in the cabin where you can store maps and chocolates and cans of Coke and fags and so on, are there?
You see, with a Corrado as with all other performance cars, only three things matter: How much does it cost? How fast does it go? Can I pull birds in it?
But repping requires a specialised tool. Over the course of my weekend, I drove the Ford for more than 500 miles and it did not irritate me once. I have never, and I mean never, encountered a better heater, and the driving position is even more perfect than lovely Brigitte’s bits.
Now sure, the rev counter should be red-lined at 3000 rpm and if you attempt a corner at anything like breakneck speed, you will probably crash and break your neck. But handling is of no concern to the man whose boot is filled with precious samples.
Go round a corner too fast in
a car that must double-up as your office and your cassettes will fly off the dash, your briefcase will fall over and your can of Coke will tip up, spilling its contents all over your polyester suit. Your wife will then be cross with you, reducing still further the chances of her becoming some kind of Lolita.
Same goes for performance. On the rare occasions when you take your Corrado out of town, sure, give it some wellie, but if you drive for five hours a day, five days a week, and you’re always giving your car some stick, you run the hugest chance of losing your licence or crashing so often that whatever chance you may have had of promotion evaporates, along with the chance of your Ford Sierra Sapphire 2.0i Ghia.
You can, of course, take a colleague out to lunch in your Corrado, but with the Sierra you can take two of his friends as well.
And though it is of no concern to our friend in the suit-of-man-made-fibres, the Sierra is easy to service, easy to mend, cheap to operate and, if rumour is right, pretty reliable as well.
Now don’t think the leopard has changed his spots and that all of a sudden I’m about to claim Ford makes the best cars in the world, because of course it doesn’t – Audi does – but I believe that we performance car fans ought to remember that the average car is made up of some 15,000 parts and that the chassis is only a few of them.
On an RS2000, it is probably the most important bit, but on a Sierra Ghia it is less crucial than the upholstery. If you were told you had to drive for 25 hours a week, your major concern, above all else, would be ease of operation.
Stack the Sierra Ghia against any of its rivals in a Performance Car group test and it would lose, hands down. But in the real world, it should be, and is, a winner.
So would I ever think about running one? You have got to be joking. ‘Hey bird, do you want to come for a play with the heater in my Sierra?’ does not sound quite so endearing as ‘Hey bird, ever been up a back street at a hundred and forty?’
Does it.
Train Strain
Each Wednesday, I have to make a 120-mile journey from Nairobi, South London to Bombay, near Birmingham.
If I leave at 7 a.m., I am onto the M40 before the London rush hour begins and then I arrive in Birmingham ten minutes after its rush hour has died down.
En route, I can ring people up on a new device I have just bought called a mobile telephone, I can mount huge excavation projects in one or both of my nostrils and I can listen to the radio, or if Greening and Nicholas are on one of their left-wing crusades, play a compact disc instead. It’s all very civilised.
If I stick to this schedule I never encounter anything which could be described as a jam but even if I don’t there are only three places where things get sticky and, even if they’re at their most glutinous, I only need add twenty minutes to my ETA.
However, like the good citizen I tend not to be, I have taken of late to dispensing with the motor car and using public transport instead. Thus when the token veg-head at a dinner party begins to harangue me for promoting death, I can explain that I do my bit for congestion and pollution. Then we all play party games, seeing who can get the fork, which I have inserted into her eye, out again.
But here’s the rub. In the last fourteen weeks, British Rail has failed to get me from London to Birmingham, or back again, on anything even approaching time. Yesterday, I’ll admit, it was only six minutes late but the week before I was stationary for one hour outside Coventry and consequently arrived at the terminus a staggering 94 minutes behind schedule.
A man kept coming on the public address system, presumably to explain why the train was not moving, but as he had not mastered the art of speaking English, his message was a trifle garbled.
The women who rush up and down the aisles, dispensing salmonella and bashing into your elbows, said they didn’t know what was going on and that we should ask the ticket collector, but he was in a terrible temper and explained rather brusquely that it wasn’t his fault. Also, his uniform didn’t fit.
If this was a one-off, caused by a mad Mick with a bit of Semtex, you might put it down to bad luck and be understanding, but it happens with the regularity of a freshly wound metronome.
The awful thing is that even if it didn’t, even if the train was as punctilious as the Queen’s Christmas message, it would still take 40 minutes more than a car to get from my front door to the door of my choosing in Barmyhom.
Then there is the cost. Getting to and from Birmingham in a car that costs 15p a mile to run sets you back £36, while if you use public transport there are two £5 taxi bills and British Rail has the bare-faced cheek to charge £44 – none of which it spends on cleaners.
I smoke, quite a lot, and that means I am wedged, with the most disgusting bunch of old fleggers, into half a carriage where the ashtrays are all missing, the windows are caked in nicotine and if you stand on the carpet for more than a minute, you stick to it.
If smoking is going to be allowed, why the hell can’t someone pop into the relevant carriage once in a while with some Flash? Same goes for the lavatories, which ought really to have a sign advising passengers that excrement should be ejected in the general direction at least of the small porcelain receptacle without taps.
Even if I could afford first class, I would object to sharing my carriage with people in polyester suits shrieking into mobile telephones. And let’s face it, the staff are still just as rude and the train is still just as late whether you have an extra tad of leg room or not.
I have also noticed that, in first class, I always feel sick whenever the train’s speed exceeds 100 mph, which thankfully isn’t very often. Mind you, this is better than the ‘thrifty’ carriages, which shake so much the print in your book blurs and your coffee goes everywhere except down your mouth part.
What is required is a class in between first and second (second, apart from being uncomfortable, is also full of mutants). Yesterday, on the way up, a fat girl plonked herself next to me and talked incessantly about retirement homes, thus preventing the massive nose diggery scheme I had planned. On the way back, the man opposite was shamelessly reading the Guardian.
A couple of weeks ago, a girl said she was educated at a public school called Abbots Bromley and that she was 29. Yet she claimed not to know any of the thirty 29-year-old ex-Abbots Bromley girls I fired at her. Either she was, in fact, 46 or she did not go to AB at all and she was educated in the state system; like most liars.
The class I’m proposing would not be based on ability to pay but on breeding. Smoking would be compulsory because, in my experience, the only people worth talking to get through at least twenty a day, all the sandwiches would have meat in them, polyester would be banned and so would the Guardian. Basically, before being allowed in the carriage concerned, M15 would have to check your background, you’d be tested on certain U and non-U expressions and you’d have to be proposed by me.
However, in Major’s classless society this is unlikely to get off the ground, which means that those of us wishing to be green will get black as we talk to reds.
So why don’t I just give up and use the car? Well, the thing is that, for about five miles, the train runs alongside the M1 and even if it’s being as asthmatic as ever, it always manages at that moment to be going faster than the traffic.
This gives a false impression of speed and efficiency and for a glorious moment you tend to forget that British Rail couldn’t get its leg over in a brothel.
So here is an appeal. If, on a Wednesday, you are heading North on the M1 just near turn-off 17 and you see a train coming up alongside, please, please, please put your foot down.
And make me a very happy man indeed.
Cruising Soundtrack
Last night I returned from America with a cricked neck and sunburned feet to find that someone had thoughtfully left a Jaguar XJS for me outside the office.
Ordinarily, one has to reverse cars to the main road some 200 yards away but, because of the broken neck, I had to make a 67-point turn in a street that is just two inches w
ider than the Jaguar is long.
This was a nuisance. It was also much, much colder than it had been in Florida. There wasn’t enough headroom. The leather seats were like blocks of ice. I knocked my cigarette end out while twirling the wheel. I had jet lag. All in all, the Jaguar XJS, pretty new rear windows or no, was lining up alongside VD in the suitable companion stakes.
And as the very raison d’être of the XJS is comfort, I began to consider the notion of abandoning it and using a taxi.
But then, as I finally accomplished the turn, the CD player began, seemingly of its own accord, to fill the cabin with the strains of ‘Nimrod’, Elgar’s most moving excursion to the very furthest-flung corners of jingoism.
And, as a result, I stopped likening the XJS to an enema and began instead to think of it in the same breath as lobster thermidor and, er, second helpings.
I do not consider myself to be especially musical. You’re reading the words of a man who fainted while attempting to learn the flute and who reached grade four in piano, but only after failing grades one, two and three.
Yet music is capable of inducing strange mood swings. It can soothe away the aches and strains of a busy day or it can drive me nuts. I even have a compilation tape which I play when I want to get somewhere quickly because all the songs on it, from Bad Company’s ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’ to Bob Seger’s ‘Long Twin Silver Line’, are designed specifically to make me drive much faster than is usual.
I have another tape, well I have a lot of other tapes actually, but there’s one in particular I play when the day has been especially awful and the traffic is being especially bad and the pavements are full of horrid working-class people queuing up to spit on me as I drive by. They do this a lot these days.
This one features such songs as Albinoni’s ‘Adagio in G’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’. There are those who recommend John Martyn and Leonard Cohen, but these guys take things a bit too far. I mean, they go beyond calming you down; they lower you so low you start to hallucinate about gas ovens and vats of Valium.
Clarkson on Cars Page 16