Clarkson: The Weekly Times Comment Column by Jeremy Thread

Thanks for the articles, Revelator.

I agree about the wedding speech. I don't know why people so commonly want to tell embarrassing stories about the groom or bride; they aren't appreciated by either and unless one is very funny at joke delivery they tend to fall flat. The event is supposed to honour and congratulate the newly-weds, so do that; say something nice about each of them [if they are such utter ratbags that you can't think of anything nice about them then make something up; your words aren't taken under oath], and keep it short. Under five minutes. People will much more value your brevity than your wit.

Then, don't say, "Ladies and gentlemen, will you please charge your glasses," because nobody knows what that means and it makes anyone saying it appear like a goose. Say instead, "Ladies and gentlemen, will you please raise your glasses for I will propose a toast. To Roger and Maisey-Bits: we wish you a happy union and every blessing as you begin your new life together." Then everyone can mumble something indistinct, drink, and sit down and get back to talking about the football or Kim Kardashian's bum, or even better, Pippa Middleton's bum.
 
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Thank you in turn Elijah. I've been tasked to give a wedding speech at my brother's marriage and I'm nervous at the idea, since everyone expects it to be funny and I want to avoid embarrassing stories as well. We'll see what happens...In the meantime, here's another Clarkson column:

Step aside, RoboPlayer, sport will simply die without Johnny Hapless (Feb. 8.)

Like half the population of Britain, I spent last Sunday morning watching Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray have a game of upside-down tennis in Australia. And halfway through the third set I realised something: I was watching the beginning of the end for sport.

Both players had plainly spent every waking moment of their lives playing tennis and every sleeping moment dreaming about it. Both had been force-fed with the right sort of lumpy nutritional sludge and tweaked, mentally and physically, until they had become human G-strings. No avenue had been left unexplored. No crease had remained unironed.

And as a result they were evenly matched. Both could play any stroke faultlessly. Both had the best rackets that current technology could provide, both had comfy shoes and both were fit enough to play for a year, should the score line necessitate that.

But then something began to trouble Murray. It could have been a fly buzzing around one of the lights, or a bit of self-doubt. And because of this tiny detail, his game went to pieces, he lost the fourth set 6-0 and that was the end of that.

Well, I'm no particular fan of Murray, but I don't think that a tennis Grand Slam final should be decided by a fly buzzing around a light. Or by some teenage issues about self-worth.

Things are even worse in the athletical world of running about and throwing things for a great distance. Your success in a high-jump competition now can be affected by a light breeze and in a cycle race by a microscopic drop in barometric pressure. And then it gets worse.

In 1954 Roger Bannister covered a mile in less than four minutes and everyone wondered if the human being would ever be able to go more quickly. But just 25 years later Sebastian Coe shaved 10 seconds off the time.

So what does this mean? That man will one day be able to cover a mile in three minutes? Two? A thousandth of a second? Plainly the answer is no, so at some point no more records will ever be broken. High jump. Long jump. All of it is doomed.

Football too. Last year the Premier League was won by Manchester City simply because one of the Liverpool players fell over at a crucial moment. All that training, all those Aston Martins and all that television time, and it all comes down to a dodgy shoelace. This year's Champions League could easily be decided by a header that's knocked off course by a player's idiotic hairstyle.

I went last week to watch Chelsea play Manchester City, and both teams were so good and so well disciplined that nothing interesting was going to happen. As indeed it didn't.

Even Scrabble has been ruined these days because you get two people who have spent their lives learning the dictionary and think it is acceptable to use words such as jo, qi and fiz, and I sit there in a puddle of incandescent rage, shouting: "It's a game of imagination. Not to see which of you is the best at being a parrot."

We've reached the point in all professional sport where the rewards are so bountiful that it's worth pushing your body and your mind to a point where the only way you can shine is by growing an extra lung or two brains. Which means you can't shine at all.

Technology is the only answer. I'm talking about tennis rackets that can read the position of an opponent and then adjust the head to ensure the ball goes to a point on the court where he can't reach it. Or snooker cues that work out the correct angle. And cricket bats that emit a loud and piercing whistle to keep the crowd awake.

But do we want to live in a world where I could become the world golfing champion simply because my bat, or whatever it's called, can direct the ball to the hole thing in one go, in all weathers, and on all courses? Not really. Because that's not sport.

For evidence of this we need to turn our attention to Formula One motor racing, in which the driver simply drives around in a computer algorithm and can win only if his agent has secured him a place in whichever team happens to employ the best aerodynamicist.

Yes, he could throw caution to the wind and try to drive outside the box, but if he does that, the stewards, a Honda dealer from Jersey and a man with an earwig on his face will make him sit on the naughty step until he has no chance of winning at all.

The time is fast approaching when all governing bodies need to start appointing judges who are not especially bothered by how well a person has boxed or how efficiently a team has defended, but are very bothered about who has shown the most grit and determination and spirit.

It would be a sort of Eddie the Eagle-type deal in which the person who flies for the longest time after leaving the ski jump gets a pat on the back, a PS2 postal order and a medal of some kind. But the chap or chapess who comes down in a tangle of limbs yet with a suicidal grimace of determination parked on their face gets PS1m.

If someone wins a motor race having done nothing interesting at all, then his place on the podium is taken by someone who has. Even if he's in a pine box as a result.

And football? Yes, the number of goals will still count, but the number of tackles and shots on target will be considered as well, to stop managers parking the bus, or settling for a draw.

It is often said these days that sport is business, and that's true. But the business in question is entertainment. And in a world where all the competitors are trained, fed, massaged and psyched to perfection, it's like watching robots. And that's not entertaining at all.

A question for the board: does anyone have Clarkson's Charlie Hebdo column from The Sun? It was published on Jan. 19. There's a short preview (at http://www.sunmotors.co.uk/news/clarkson-are-we-allowed-to-offend-or-arent-we/) but I presume there's more.
 
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I want to see his Comment column from yesterday because he has finally got around to pissing off the Scousers. :dance:
 
I want to see his Comment column from yesterday because he has finally got around to pissing off the Scousers. :dance:

Ask and ye shall receive:

Phrasebook, tick. Local currency, tick. Tracksuit, tick. I'm off to the north (Feb. 22)

Over the years my trips to Liverpool have always been extremely memorable. On one occasion I found that the door to my hotel room was blocked by a girl who was lying in the corridor, having apparently died. On another the constant burglar alarms meant that I checked out of my hotel at 2am and drove back to London for a bit of peace and quiet. Oh, and I nearly forgot: there was the time a bloodsoaked chap sprinted into the restaurant in which I was dining and ran amok with a knife.

However, I went to Liverpool last weekend and it was all very agreeable. There was a lot of postmodern urban-chic architecture and many museums, hotels and waterfront cafes. It looked really good. I liked it.

Yet behind the veneer of modern loft living were one or two incidents that warrant a mention. I stayed, for example, in an extremely stylish hotel with mood lighting and a lot of exposed brickwork, and for breakfast I asked the waitress if I could have a kipper.

"What's a kipper?" she asked. "It's a sort of smoked fish," I said. "Fish?" she responded. "For breakfast? No. We don't do that."

It turned out, however, that they did do that, and a kipper was duly brought to my table. Sadly, though, it had to go away again shortly afterwards because it hadn't been what you'd call cooked.

For lunch I had a caesar salad that the menu said was done "our way". Their way was interesting. There were some prawns, lettuce and a handful of croutons that were bits of bread that appeared to have been dipped into a bowl full of lukewarm washing-up water. It was like eating a docker's wet vest.

That night we did one of our Top Gear Live arena shows and went out afterwards to a private room with catering from the restaurant below. There were oysters. Yummy.

"Could I have some Tabasco?" I asked the waitress.

"Some what?" she said. "It's a hot sauce," I explained, and off she scurried.

She was gone a very long time, and as she returned I worked out why. She'd obviously decided that serving anything in a bottle wouldn't be "posh", so she'd emptied it, one drip at a time, into a saucer.

And if I'm honest, I wish she hadn't bothered, because Tabasco doesn't really work as a dipping sauce. You end up with too much on your oyster, so every mouthful feels as though you're snorting Harpic. It sounds risible, yes? And it was, thanks entirely to me. Seriously. When I visited Israel a few years ago I didn't barge into the restaurants at night demanding the chef cook me a pork chop with added grasshopper. And neither, when I was in a Burmese temple last summer, did I say to the monk: "Oi, fatso, fancy a kickabout? Altars for goalposts." I know I have a dreadful reputation for putting my foot in it, but when I'm abroad I do my best to fit in. These days I even check my registration number to make sure it's not offensive in any way.

So what the bloody hell was I thinking of in Liverpool, splashing nasal C-4 all over what the waitress plainly thought were lumps of raw snot? And then washing it down with a bottle of la-di-bloody-da rose wine? Ordering Whispering Angel in Liverpool is like a Liverpudlian strolling into the Savoy at teatime, in a shell suit, and demanding seven pints of vodka. He's going to be shown the door. And I should have been shown the door too.

This is the root cause of all the problems surrounding the north-south divide. And not just in Britain either. In Europe we have states in the north imposing their rules on states in the south: "Look here, Stavros. Just go to work and pay your taxes and everything will be fine." But Stavros doesn't want to pay his taxes. It's not the Greek way.

Closer to home we have soft-living, champagnesoaked southerners imagining that they know what's best for northern cities such as Liverpool. "My dear fellow, why don't you simply give up heroin and start a book club? Because if you don't, we'll cut your benefits."

We go up there and say, "Look what we've given you, Gary: a Tracey Emin hotel and slavery museum, all full of Ed Miliband bumper-sticker slogans. Aren't you grateful?" But Gary isn't grateful because he doesn't like Primrose Hill sensibilities and bloody mood lighting.

Or does he? I don't know because I'm not a Liverpudlian. But I am a northerner, and what I therefore know is this: the north of England has never been more different from the south of England.

People up there earn less, die more quickly, have fewer jobs and live in houses that are worth the square root of sod all.

I know of no country in the world in which the biggest city is so dramatically different from the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth-biggest cities.

For those who live in the south the north has become "abroad". Going up there and sitting about sipping pinkie-up earl grey tea while inquiring of the good man on reception where one might avail oneself of some EM Forster reading material is therefore as offensive as driving though Alabama with "Manlove rules OK" on the side of your pick-up. Oh, hang on a minute. I've just remembered. I did that. We go to Rome to eat pasta under some wisteria. We go to France to sit in a cafe, people-watching. We go to Morocco to haggle with market traders. We expect and hope that these places will be different from home. So why should we expect the north to be the same as Esher? This weekend I'm in Newcastle, and I shall therefore make sure I have toast and dripping for breakfast, some kind of buttie for lunch and several pints of brown ale for tea. Then I'll go clubbing in a vest.
 
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I want to see his Comment column from yesterday because he has finally got around to pissing off the Scousers. :dance:

Bit stupid to venture in the quagmire that is the The Sun v Liverpool, on loser from the get go.

Nothing really wrong with his silly column, but add in a nasty bit of previous from The Sun, not worth the hassle. Hillsborough inquiry is still ongoing...
 
As expected, local fuckwits taking things out of context to gain their 15 minutes.

Bit stupid to venture in the quagmire that is the The Sun v Liverpool, on loser from the get go.

Nothing really wrong with his silly column, but add in a nasty bit of previous from The Sun, not worth the hassle. Hillsborough inquiry is still ongoing...

I don't know where you are located but as a native Ukanian there is a particular victim mentality that exists in Liverpool particularly when it comes to Hillsborough and the idea that by some divine right their suffering in any capacity is completely different to anything anyone else may have suffered. I'm not saying in any way that it wasn't an appalling tragedy but when you consider it was Liverpool fans who were directly responsible for the Heysel Stadium disaster you can see why those looking from outside might have a limited amount of sympathy.
 
As expected, local fuckwits taking things out of context to gain their 15 minutes.



I don't know where you are located but as a native Ukanian there is a particular victim mentality that exists in Liverpool particularly when it comes to Hillsborough and the idea that by some divine right their suffering in any capacity is completely different to anything anyone else may have suffered. I'm not saying in any way that it wasn't an appalling tragedy but when you consider it was Liverpool fans who were directly responsible for the Heysel Stadium disaster you can see why those looking from outside might have a limited amount of sympathy.

The cause of both tragedies is different.

Heysel
Approximately 1 hour before the Juventus-Liverpool final was due to kick off, a large group of Liverpool fans breached a fence separating them from a "neutral area" which contained mostly Juventus fans. They ran back on the terraces and away from the threat into a concrete retaining wall. Fans already seated near the wall were crushed; eventually the wall collapsed. Many people climbed over to safety, but many others died or were badly injured.

Hillsborough
On 12 September 2012, the Hillsborough Independent Panel[85] concluded that no Liverpool fans were responsible in any way for the disaster,[86] and that its main cause was a "lack of police control". Crowd safety was "compromised at every level" and overcrowding issues had been recorded two years earlier. The panel concluded that "up to 41" of the 96 who perished might have survived had the emergency services' reactions and co-ordination been improved.[87] The number is based on post-mortem examinations which found some victims may have had heart, lung or blood circulation function for some time after being removed from the crush. The report stated that placing fans who were "merely unconscious" on their backs would have resulted in their deaths.[88]

The findings concluded that 164 witness statements had been altered. Of those statements, 116 were amended to remove or change negative comments about South Yorkshire Police. South Yorkshire Police had performed blood alcohol tests on the victims, some of them children, and ran computer checks on the national police database in an attempt to "impugn their reputation".[89] The report concluded that the then Conservative MP for Sheffield Hallam, Irvine Patnick, passed inaccurate and untrue information from the police to the press.[90][91]

170px-The_Sun_Liverpool.jpg


The Hillsborough Inquests are still ongoing
http://hillsboroughinquests.independent.gov.uk/

The sales of The Sun remain poor in Merseyside and a boycott is still practised
http://www.contrast.org/hillsborough/boycott-the-sun.shtm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#The_Sun

Not really what Jezza said, its what happens when someone from the Sun mentions Liverpool. The Sun needs to stay away from Liverpool and shut up about it. Nothing the Sun says or does will take back their sick headline. How stupid must Jezza be if he thinks the Liverpool Echo give a toss about giving him a fair go.
 
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First, a reminder that Jeremy's automotive columns can be read at: http://www.driving.co.uk/contributors/jeremy-clarkson/

Second, here's his latest non-automotive column!

Listen, Kirk, you need a Starfleet wheelchair to reach Planet Oscar (March 1)

Let's be clear from the outset. The Theory of Everything is a lovely film and Eddie Redmayne's portrayal of Professor Stephen Hawking is extremely warm and wonderful. No one would think, apart from the other nominees, that the best actor Oscar he won last weekend wasn't entirely justified.

And I'm sure the same can be said of Julianne Moore, who won best actress for her role in Still Alice. I haven't yet seen it but I'm sure it will be thought-provoking and very interesting.

What I find annoying, though, is that I predicted long before the ceremony that both would win, in the same way that I predicted with confidence last year that Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn't.

He had been majestic in The Wolf of Wall Street, a film I thought was an absolute epic. But there was no way in hell it was going to be an Oscar phenomenon because it was a homage to the imaginary love child of Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Gekko. It was full of inverted snobbery, greed, lust and screw-the-little-man excess. So it was always going to lose out to 12 Years a Slave, which was about how slavery was bad and wrong, and Dallas Buyers Club, which was about the early days of prejudice against HIV sufferers.

In Tinseltown, slavery and Aids are going to trump Thatcher and Gekko every day of the week, and twice on a Sunday night in February.

This year, Rosamund Pike went all the way to Los Angeles having been nominated as best actress for her role in Gone Girl. But this was a waste of an air fare, because, good though she was, a whodunit thriller has no chance against a film about the awfulness of Alzheimer's.

And it's exactly the same story with Bradley Cooper. Did he really think, after playing an American sniper, that he was going to beat someone who had made a film about motor neurone disease? Don't make me laugh.

Redmayne's only real competition came from Benedict Cumberbatch, who had played the part of a man whose homosexuality drove him to suicide.

To win an Oscar these days, you have to be good at your craft, let's be in no doubt about that, but, more importantly, your film has to be lifted directly from a point midway between a sixth-form debating society and a Guardian leader column.

This means no one is going to win an Oscar for playing Captain Kirk in a Star Trek film. If you utter the words "Eject the warp core", or "Secure the perimeter", you know that at no point in your near future will you be saying, "I'd like to thank the academy".

Star Trek films contain many important messages about race and women's rights--actually they do--but as long as they feature men rushing about on a spaceship, stunning Romulans with photon torpedoes, then Chris Pine and Simon Pegg can book holidays in the Bahamas around Oscars time, safe in the knowledge they won't have to cancel them.

In the past 35 years, Star Trek movies have won only one Oscar and that was for best make-up. This is because the academy doesn't care for science fiction. Gravity won best director last year deservedly but Alien, Star Wars, ET and 2001: A Space Odyssey missed out on the big awards. Not even John Carpenter's Dark Star was recognised and that was a gem.

There's a similar problem with horror movies. If your film features a girl hiding in a cupboard, all wide-eyed and breathless with fear, and then falling over while running from an unseen monster, she is not going to need a new frock next February.

And that's before we get to the comic-book superhero movies filling the multiplexes every Saturday night. Robert Downey Jr in Avengers Assemble was brilliant. He gave as fine a comedy performance as Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, which I reckon is the best comedy performance of all time, but was Downey nominated for a best actor gong? Was he hell.

Whizzing about in a metal suit, kicking people in the face and saving your own life every few seconds with bits of mysterious tech: these things are of no use in an industry where the politics is as red as the carpets at their backslapping awards ceremonies. Next time the Avengers assemble, one should be in a wheelchair, one should have a muscle-wasting disorder and they should use that flying aircraft-carrier thing to rescue noble locals from ebola-based tyranny in west Africa.

That's what tickles the voting bones of the great and the good in Los Angeles: films that deliver a message, clearly and simply, in a way that can be understood by everyone in the English-speaking world.

Which brings me on to the film Untouchable. It should have cleaned up in 2012 because it was brilliant; a thought-provoking lesson in how to stir the soul and make the heart sing. It told the true story of a fantastically wealthy quadriplegic who became close friends with a dope-smoking down-and-out ex-con from the ghetto.

It should have won best picture, best actor, best supporting actor, best screenplay, best everything. But in fact it won none of those things because it was French. And films not delivered in English can be considered by the judging panel only as a "foreign language film".

The message is clear: if it's in a foreign language, it can't be as good as if it had been in English. So no matter how good a director or an actor you may be, you cannot win one of our awards because you are smelly, your wife may have hairy armpits and you are possibly a terrorist.
 
This week Jezza enjoys Europe:

Put the flat-pack down and I'll show you how paradise is put together (March 8)

Can you imagine what it would be like to live in the middle of ... of ... I don't know, South Dakota? Because you'd be cut off from the world by mile after mile of familiarity. You could travel in any direction for days and days and days, and when you finally got out of the car you'd look about and wonder why you'd bothered. Because it would all be exactly the same as where you'd come from.

Then there's Perth, in Australia. If you fancy seeing someone who doesn't rent earth-moving equipment to miners for a living, then you'd better pack well, because the nearest city of any meaningful size is more than 1,300 miles away. And there's nothing between you and it but sand.

Or what about Siberia? There are towns and villages there separated from one another by an ocean of wolves, methane and nothing else that's interesting at all. And it's an ocean so vast we Britishers can't really comprehend the scale at all.

Here in western Europe nowhere is more than an hour or two from somewhere that's completely different. From where I'm sitting now in London I could be in Paris or Pontefract in a couple of hours. Bruges is next door, Rome is round the corner and I could be on Lake Annecy for dinner.

Which raises the question: why the hell do you spend your hard-earned cash on DIY furniture and your weekends on your hands and knees on the living-room floor saying, "Mavis. Mavis. These bloody instructions make no sense at all"? For a lot less than a self-assembly wardrobe you could go away for the weekend and come home cleverer, healthier and deeply, passionately grateful that you are a European. And even more deeply, passionately grateful that you live just off its coast.

Over the years, I've been to all the continent's capitals and most of its big cities, but somehow I've never really got to know Barcelona. I went once 20 years ago and can't remember a damn thing about it. So last weekend I went back. It was a city-mini-break-type deal; cheap as chips, bish, bash, bosh, toiletries in a polythene bag, man rubs your nuts for security reasons, lunch in London and afternoon tea in the sunshine, 700 miles away.

The first thing you notice in Barcelona is how slowly people walk. In London I'm always being overtaken when I'm on foot, but over there I was Usain Bolt by comparison. So on my first full day, to blend in, I slowed way on down because, hey, I wasn't really going anywhere in particular.

Soon I wanted a drink, so I found a table in a small square and after a little while an extremely beautiful woman in a black velvet evening dress arrived with a man who looked like he'd resulted from the sexual congress of an ape and a sad dog. They set up a tape machine and started to tango. It was exquisite, sitting there in the sunshine, watching the woman and the ape-dog man whizz about to the strains of Por una Cabeza.

Nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry to leave, so I drank more wine until it was time for a spot of lunch and is there a better, more beautiful way of spending the day than wandering about in a European city, in the spring, choosing a restaurant? I thought of all the men on their hands and knees at home, getting blood blisters from their flat-pack furniture, and that made me happier still.

After an afternoon's promenading at what the Spanish would call a breakneck 0.000001mph, it was time for dinner. And getting a table is easy because you will want to eat about six hours before the locals do.

They really do have a very different approach to the day: sleeping when we are at work and having dinner when we're frying up the bacon and eggs. A weekend in Spain gives you jet lag. But is there anything on God's green earth that would make you happier than sitting on a sunny Sunday morning, on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, with an endless supply of proper coffee? Not the value-and-volume nonsense we've imported from America but the kind of thick, brown tar that crosses your eyes and clears out your sinuses.

I did that last weekend and then I set off to the city's shopping district, which was shut, presumably because the staff were still out clubbing, so I peered into a cathedral, which seemed to be filled with geese, for some reason, and then I went to look at Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece. It's unfinished, of course, because, well, hey, this is Spain ...

By lunchtime I was yearning to parcel up this way of life and take it back to London. I could feel the knots in my shoulders easing and the ulcers in my mouth disappearing. After my walks and my good food and all that sitting about in the sea air, my head was as clear as it's ever been.

And it made me wonder: why can't we behave like that? Why don't we have a bottle of wine with our lunch, and then another? On a Wednesday? And why don't we stay out till 6am on a Monday night? And why are our shops open on a Sunday? So we feel duty-bound to go out and buy another piece of flat-pack furniture so we don't waste the weekend sitting in a chair, drinking wine and eating cheese.

Well, I'm back now and the answer to all those questions is obvious. We like being busy. We like earning a few bob and spending it on home improvements. We had our cathedrals up and running by the 13th century, and when one burnt down, we had a new one up in a week.

All this is fine. It's who we are and it's why Britain's an economic powerhouse and Spain sort of isn't. But I do recommend that you take a leaf out of my book and spend a weekend very soon not being busy with a bradawl. Because what's the point of living in Europe if you don't use it?

I doubt anyone would dispute the value of a weekend in Spain, but there's no way in hell it would cost "a lot less than a self-assembly wardrobe." Europe is frigging expensive!
 
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[...]
I doubt anyone would dispute the value of a weekend in Spain, but there's no way in hell it would cost "a lot less than a self-assembly wardrobe." Europe is frigging expensive!

The Dollar is at 1.06 for 1 Euro at the moment. The lowest it has been since 2002. From a Us-perspective - Europe right now is relatively cheap.
 
The Dollar is at 1.06 for 1 Euro at the moment. The lowest it has been since 2002. From a Us-perspective - Europe right now is relatively cheap.

You're right! I see the Euro has slid to a 12 year low. Now I'm glad that I might be visiting Europe this year.
However, I might stop in the UK, and the pound's still going strong...
 
This week's column:

When a fat man gets suspended there?s only one thing to do ? get cooking (March 14, 2015)

We read often about active and busy people who die the day after they retire because they simply can?t cope with the concept of relaxation. So as I seem to have a bit of time on my hands at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to take up some kind of hobby.

I began by watching daytime television, and soon I felt myself starting to slip away. So I turned over to the news and it was all about a not very interesting fat man who had been suspended from his not very important job. But watching the fat man made me hungry and that?s when the penny dropped: I?d take up cooking.

I?ve never really bothered with cooking in the past because it would have meant using a recipe book. And as a man I can?t do that, for the same reason I can?t use instruction manuals or listen when someone is giving me directions; because it means admitting that someone out there knows something I don?t.

And besides, recipe books are full of beautifully shot photographs showing you what your food should look like when it?s finished. No, it won?t, because you haven?t painted everything with varnish and employed a stylist to make sure the sultanas are all in the right place. Recipe books are just cruel.

There?s another problem as well. Anyone who can cook is able to control ingredients using their minds. This means it?s witchcraft. Don?t argue with this because it is. You put butter and flour into an oven and somehow it comes out after a while as a delicious fluffy cake. How? Why didn?t it come out as a yorkshire pudding? Or a profiterole?

And what is the origin of cooking? I think it?s almost certainly sinister because, let?s face it, nobody accidentally stumbled on the recipe for bread. You take the bullet-hard and completely tasteless seed from a sheaf of wheat and grind it into a powder. Right. I see. And how many other seeds did they try before they arrived at that? ?Morning darling, I?m trying laburnum today and . . .?

But anyway, they ended up with a powder that is still tasteless and inedible but they kept right on going, adding water until they had a paste. Which is still a long way from yummy. Undaunted, however, our early-days Marco Pierre White then thought, ?Hmm. I?m on to something here. I think if I just add the stuff that gathers in my navel if I haven?t washed for a while, this will be delicious.?

The whole idea is as preposterous as the idea when someone one day decided that tobacco wasn?t very suitable as a sandwich filler but that it was lovely when rolled up in a piece of paper and smoked.

Anyway, I decided not to cook bread. Oh no. I decided to get ambitious and cook the most delicious thing I?ve eaten in my whole life: a pho.

A pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup that contains about 128 different ingredients, and unlike bread or smoking, it?s very easy to see how it was invented. Someone who was very poor heated some water and thought, ?I wonder if this would taste nicer if I put some weeds in it? And maybe a bit of that cow that has died.?

Today of course the weeds have pretty names such as star anise and coriander and cost more than cocaine. Mostly they are also harder to find than cocaine. But luckily I?m holed up in a part of London where you stand in line behind Alan Rickman, who?s buying half a pound of myrrh, and Jimmy Page, who wants a bag of lemon-infused pistachio nuts.

My greengrocer was full of Damon Albarn, who was buying all the things he needed for an exotic chicken korma, and naturally the place had everything I needed for my even more exotic pho. It was the same story at the butcher, which stocked beef knuckle and bone marrow. And so within minutes my son and I had all we needed to start my hobby.

Except a pan. I do of course have pans, all of which are easily big enough to handle some beans or a bit of Heinz tomato soup. But to make a pho you need a dustbin, really. We had to resort to a wastepaper basket.

We also didn?t have a rolling pin, which we needed, apparently, to ?lightly bruise? the ginger. But I did have a hammer, so we used that instead. It didn?t go particularly well because ginger, it turns out, can?t really be bruised. You tap it and it just sits there undamaged. So you use a bit more force and it falls to pieces.

The instruction manual said that during the four-hour cooking process we should also spoon off the scum that formed as the broth boiled. But there wasn?t any that I could see. This might have been down to the fact that I couldn?t see much of anything at all, or talk properly.

The problem is, when you are cooking, you are near a fridge and fridges have wine in them. Well, mine does, because I haven?t been drinking much for the past few weeks. And with time to kill until the broth was ready, I came over a bit Keith Floydish.

This may explain why I didn?t roast the bone marrow or the knuckle before boiling them to bits and it certainly explains what happened later. I hadn?t really been listening properly when the man in the greengrocer asked what sort of chillies I?d like. And I must have selected some that sat on the Scoville scale just above lava.

I only used one or maybe two but it was enough to ruin four hours of work. The only good news was that my spoilt broth was already in the wastebin.

I went to bed that night hungry, drunk and with an ulcerated, gangrenous mouth from a tasting sip that I?d taken to make sure I hadn?t used too many chillies.

I think, therefore, some people are not born to be cooks. They lack the special powers needed to influence the outcome of what is basically sorcery.

So my new hobby is called ?going out to restaurants and letting people who know what they?re doing cook my food?.
 
Okay, that sorta explains Jeremy's daughter's Twitter post about his cooking.
About that "going out to restaurants bit," though, after the events of this week that probably wouldn't be a good idea. Especially if he asks for steak.
 
It's also a "well, this all started over food so might as well teach myself on how to make my own", if only subconsciously.
 
I always thought that he only wrote one column and that The Sunday Times was the same as The Sun (Sun short/slang for Sunday - I'm not from GB, you see). Regardless, there's another column titled: "So we lose the tiger... but gain acid-spit snail" which seems to deal more with the fracas.

In any case, thanks to all those who post these columns here.
 
I always thought that he only wrote one column and that The Sunday Times was the same as The Sun (Sun short/slang for Sunday - I'm not from GB, you see). Regardless, there's another column titled: "So we lose the tiger... but gain acid-spit snail" which seems to deal more with the fracas.

In any case, thanks to all those who post these columns here.

No he writes two. The Times is probably the UK's highest "intellect" newspaper, read by the people who do bizzniss. The Sun is essentially an entertainment daily magazine that carries mostly celebrity gossip and comedy - and is the staple of the "White van men" and working classes. Clarkson's two columns reflect that, the times one is more in depth. Most of the Times columns are translated into Clarkson's books.

The readers of the Times would not really care about a "reported fracas on a poky motoring show". The readers of the Sun lap it up with a spoon covered in drool from the scantily clad girlies on Page 3.
 
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No he writes two. The Times is probably the UK's highest "intellect" newspaper, read by the people who do bizzniss. The Sun is essentially an entertainment daily magazine that carries mostly celebrity gossip and comedy - and is the staple of the "White van men" and working classes. Clarkson's two columns reflect that, the times one is more in depth. Most of the Times columns are translated into Clarkson's books.

The readers of the Times would not really care about a "reported fracas on a poky motoring show". The readers of the Sun lap it up with a spoon covered in drool from the scantily clad girlies on Page 3.

Thanks for the clear, concise, and colourful explanation!
 
And thank you for giving me the opportunity to post this guide to UK newspapers, as determined by that show of shows....Yes, Minister.


Sir Humphrey: The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices.

Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they *ought* to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually *do* run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who *own* the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by *another* country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care *who* runs the country - as long as she's got big tits.
 
R.I.P Top Gear.

On a related note, both of Clarkson's columns for this week discuss his suspension.

No time for the stodgy bits any more, so start reading by my left elbow (Mar. 22, 2015)

There's an especially marvellous moment in the wonderful film Planes, Trains and Automobiles when Steve Martin turns to John Candy and says, "When you're telling these little stories, here's a good idea: have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener."

I was reminded of it last week as I read a story in The Times about a chap called Dan Jarvis. Today Dan is a Labour MP and the shadow justice minister but back in the day he was a special forces major. He parachuted over enemy lines in Afghanistan and Iraq and saw service in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. So we are talking about a man who knows how to handle himself in a tight spot.

Anyway, late one night our all-action hero was at London's King's Cross station, travelling down a long escalator, when he noticed a drunk at the bottom waving a bottle.

"I gave him a wide berth," Dan said, "but he lunged towards me. I kept going but he squared up to me and then said, 'Give me your f****** wallet or you'll get this f****** bottle.'" "That's not going to happen," said Dan, with a steely-eyed determination.

This is excellent. A drunken would-be mugger has picked on the wrong man this time. Dan looks like a weedy businessman but underneath the suit this father of three is a trained killer. His back is like a sack of writhing pythons. His buttocks are like ostrich eggs. He's 12 stone of sinew and muscle and righteous indignation.

We can barely contain ourselves. We are desperate to know what happens next. Ready? Right, here goes. Dan turned and walked away.

He did. He walked away. So we have the best build-up in anecdote history and it completely fizzles out at the end. Dan said the incident made him think about the nature of society and the treatment of crime. Whereas it made me think: why can't some people tell a story properly? I have one friend who is completely hopeless. He starts out by saying, "I was on my way to work this morning," but then interrupts himself to add a raft of detail that is simply not necessary. "You know I'm working on the high street now because, well, I couldn't get on with my old boss. My dad was the same. He used to argue all the time with his boss when he worked at the colliery. But you could back then ..."

So he had identified the starting point for his story as his trip to work but then instead of going forwards he had reversed down memory lane to a South Yorkshire mining town in the 1920s. The only solution at this point is to take an imaginary phone call. Or to gouge your own eyes out.

The trick when regaling friends with a story is to remember that everything is better if it's shorter. Well, not everything, obviously, but you know what I mean.

I used to work on a television show called Top Gear and every week the films were edited to a length that felt right. They felt balanced. They felt good. But every week there simply wasn't the time to fit them into the programme so they'd have to be shortened. And without exception they were better as a result.

In journalism college the lecturers would often call us students back at the end of the day to give us a story that had to be turned round immediately for the "late news" section that local papers had in those days.

One time they told us that a train carrying nuclear waste had crashed in a residential area and that we had to get the story across in no more than seven words. I loved doing that.

It's why I love Twitter today because it forces people to be concise, to think how they can say a lot without saying much of anything at all. Twitter is making the world a funnier, more interesting place.

It's why I adore tabloid newspapers. Anyone can say, "Mr Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Liberal Democratic party, today admitted to an extramarital affair." But it takes a special type of wit and brilliance to come up with "It's Paddy Pantsdown" and cover the whole damn thing in three words.

This ability to get your message across quickly is going to become a lot more important in the future because a whole generation is growing up with an intolerance for wasted time. They see no point in sitting through the whole of the Battle of Britain when they can go on YouTube and just see that good bit where the German's goggles fill up with ketchup.

Many see the sudden and dramatic increase in the amount of entertainment that's available online as a bad thing. They reckon that without record company bosses to filter out the wheat from the chaff and editors to decide what's worth printing and what isn't, the world will become a sea of beige.

I disagree. Because when everyone has the same platform on which to launch a musical career, people will have to work doubly hard and be doubly brilliant to get noticed. Waffle will be an early casualty.

And as a result I shall get straight to the point with an anecdote of my own from this rather turbulent week. Most of us have woken up after a night at a charity ball to find an empty wallet and a signed rugby ball on the kitchen table. So we're all familiar with the sense of, "Oh no. What have I done?" Well, it was worse for me on Friday morning because I woke up after a night at a charity do to be told by my lawyer that someone had uploaded a video of me using choice language to describe bosses at the BBC. He was very stern and I had to look at my shoes like a naughty boy.

But it was all meant in jest and anyway it worked. By being brief and controversial and a bit sweary I woke the room up and the auction prize I was offering one last lap of the Top Gear test track raised ?100,000.

The car column has an eye-grabbing headline:
I?ve found Top Gear?s new presenter ? and she?s a woman (March 22)

WHEN THE BBC announced that I was to be suspended from my job on Top Gear, I thought it would be a good idea to maintain a low profile for a few days. Which in one big respect was a bit tricky because the car I had on test that week was the M?gane Renaultsport 275 Trophy-R. And it?s about as under-the-radar as a Day-Glo B-52 bomber.

To make matters worse, my own Mercedes chose the very day of the announcement to explode. And I do mean ?explode?. After start-up it sounded as if four of the cylinders were full of plastic explosive and the other four were so full of nitroglycerine they weren?t working at all.

I therefore decided to use my bicycle. But the chain came off. And before I could get it back on, about two and a half million photographers and news crews had descended on my London flat.

I thought about asking AA Gill, my colleague and friend from this newspaper?s larder, to come and pick me up, but he is the worst driver in the world. And I didn?t think he?d be able to manage the job of driving through a photographic scrum without making everything worse. So. It was the Renault, complete with its white body, black roof, red wheels and copious writing down the side.

Let me walk you through the headlines of this vehicle. It starts out in life as a Renault M?gane, a car much favoured by the sort of person that is not interested in cars ? I?m surprised Adrian doesn?t have one. But then it is altered, completely.

It comes with a turbocharged 2-litre engine, but you choose how much power you would like it to develop. Set the on-board computer to Normal mode and you get 247bhp, which in a three-door hatchback such as this is what engineers call ?a lot?. However, if you put the computer in Sport or Race mode, you get 271bhp, which causes engineers to say, ?Don?t be silly.?

In Mad mode this car will get from 0 to 62mph in 5.8 seconds, and then it will keep on accelerating until you?re doing the speed of sound. An earlier hot M?gane ? the R26.R ? was so fast that in 2008 it set a new lap record for front-wheel-drive cars at the N?rburgring. And to give a sense of just how much more impressive the new model is, it smashed that lap record by a whopping 23 seconds.

Some of that is down to the almost completely bald tyres, which come with a warning notice in big, bold type telling you not to expect any grip at all if it even looks like rain and that if it is wet, you should keep the traction control on or you will skid off the road and die. Die, d?you hear?

Then you have the adjustable dampers from Ohlins, PerfoHub double-axis front suspension, Akrapovic titanium exhaust and, inside, almost nothing at all. The rear seats have been replaced with air, the sat nav is gone, the air-conditioning is gone, even the rear wiper is gone. Anything that weighs anything at all has been ditched. So it?s rather bizarre to find a choice of seatbelts. You can get the optional full race harness but you?ll still have the normal inertia-reel system too.

It should be said you can get all the stuff that?s been taken out put back. But since this adds a lot to the already steep ?36,000-plus asking price and defeats the object, I wouldn?t bother.

You get the drift anyway. It?s not what you want for a low-profile week when you are trying to stay out of the spotlight. And yet . . . as it turned out, it was exactly what I wanted because, ooh, some of those paparazzi are persistent. They work in teams, using scooters and cars so that you can run ? but you can?t hide. Especially if you?re in a white car with red wheels and lots of writing on the sides.

As they seem to have no qualms about telling you all what I do and where I go, I hope they won?t mind if I explain what they do. Jump red lights. Carve up buses. Do more than 100mph on the Westway. (Yes, you did.) And treat cyclists like insects. The paparazzi are like Terminators. They absolutely will not stop.

I don?t want to use the D-word but I can quite understand how that drunken idiot at the wheel of the Mercedes in Paris ended up slamming into the tunnel support. Because when you are being hounded, it?s easy to lose concentration.

I thought about abandoning the car and using the Tube instead, and I thought about asking for a bit of help from the police. But, hey, in my old job I got a lot of practice at driving while doing other things, so it wasn?t much of a challenge to shake them off. This is because the bike guys are a bit thick. They hang back, hoping you haven?t spotted them. So a left and then another quick left usually results in them whizzing past the end of the road in which you?ve just parked.

But there was a woman in a Volkswagen Golf who was very impressive: smooth and tenacious. If a job vacancy does crop up on Top Gear, she?d be ideal.

She was in a Golf diesel and I was in a 271bhp M?gane Renaultsport 275 Trophy-R and for about half an hour it was simply impossible to get free.

And at this point some of you will be starting to wonder: what is the point of buying a fast car? Because, yes, at the N?rburgring I could have left her far behind, but I was in Marylebone and, unlike her, I had to obey the rules of the road. And if you do that, a Golf diesel has exactly the same performance as a stripped-out, hunkered-down road racer.

This is undoubtedly true. But it?s missing the point, because, ooh, that Renault is fun. It?s firm, yes, but unlike all the other firm cars I?ve driven, it?s not stupid. There?s a compliance to the shock absorbers that means you don?t have to grit your teeth and squint every time you go over a pothole.

And it?s noisy too, and not in a throaty, grrrrr sort of way either. It?s noisy because there?s no soundproofing. Which means you get a real sense that you are inside a machine. And if you love cars, as I do, because they are machines, that is very satisfying. I like to hear the gravel pitter-pattering on the floor and the wheels bouncing around.

The only thing I?m not sure about was the little green light that came on telling me when to change up. I?m in a racing car, for heaven?s sake, being chased by Divina Galica. I?m not on a bloody economy run. Oh, and it beeps a lot. For no reason.

Mostly, though, I loved this car more than Divina loved her Golf, because she was driving for a reason. It was her job. And her job, she thinks, matters (it doesn?t). Whereas I was driving for the sheer sport of shaking her off. I was only going out to buy my son?s birthday present. Why would I care if she snapped me doing that?

And, yes, reader, I won. I went down a back alley that was blocked by a lorry. Many builders were standing around, and when I apprised them of the situation, they agreed to move it. Then, before Golf lady could follow, they put it back in the middle of the road. Cheers, lads.

Clarkson's verdict ?????
M?gane Renaultsport 275 Trophy-R specifications

Price: ?36,430
Engine: 1998cc, 4 cylinders
Power: 271bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque: 265lb ft @ 3000rpm
Transmission: 6-speed manual
Performance: 0-62mph in 5.8sec
Top speed: 158mph
Fuel: 37.7mpg (combined)
CO2: 174g/km
Road tax band: H (?290 for first year; ?205 thereafter)
Release date: On sale now
 
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