Styled for the city, made for the mud
The Clarkson Review: Suzuki Jimny (April 28)
Vegetable enthusiasts are forever telling us that it's possible to make delicious food from nothing but bark, seeds and roots. They say that, with patience, a pestle and a mortar, you'll be able to produce something just as appetising as a shepherd's pie.
And, what's more, they say there are now plenty of vegan restaurants, warmed by stoves burning Tories rather than logs and staffed by bright young things who have excellent colons and wonderful digestive systems.
All of this, however, defeats the point of being a vegan. Because if you're making moreish food, people will want second helpings. This means they'll eat more than they need, and the next thing you know, all of East Anglia will have to be smothered in plastic sheeting to satisfy their appetite.
This has always been the problem with meat. If you put a bit of sausage or a forkful of ragu in your mouth, you are consumed by an immediate need to have some more.Which means that pretty soon the world can't keep up with demand.
So if you want to go vegan to save the planet, the food you eat and make and serve to friends has to be disgusting. People should take as much as they can manage without vomiting — just enough to stay alive. That way the planet stands a chance.
It's much the same story with everything. If you want to save the world for future generations, you can't dress up your new life choices in butter and tinsel and hundreds and thousands. If you want the world to work for your grandchildren's grandchildren, then you have to be cold, hungry, smelly and uncomfortable until the day you die.
No, you can't use shampoo, and, no, you can't use soap either. You must give up everything that's made of plastic, which means you must also give up cleaning your teeth and shaving and wearing clothes. Remember Cambodia after Pol Pot came along? Yes, well, it has to be like that, I'm afraid.
In one respect, however, things needn't be so bad. At present I have a Range Rover. Actually, I have two, one for Sunday best and one for bringing sheep carcasses out of the pond. This is wildly unnecessary. No one needs two Range Rovers. No one needs one, in fact, or a Lamborghini Urus or a Porsche Cayenne or any of the other large SUVs that fill all the car parking spaces these days. They are the unacceptable face of where we've ended up (I don't really believe this. I'm just getting ready for life under Corbyn).
And I'm delighted to say that for £15,499, there's a solution. It's called the Suzuki Jimny, and even at that price you get air conditioning, cruise control, DAB radio, switchable four-wheel drive, a low-range gearbox and electronically managed diffs. That's got your attention, hasn't it? Even the higher-spec SZ5 that I drove costs only £17,999.
And there's more, because you get virtually identical styling to the Mercedes G-wagen. Yes, the Suzuki is a lot smaller, but there's a solution to that: simply stand nearer to it and you'll be completely fooled.
Everyone was. I drive a lot of fancy cars in the course of my job but none got quite so many admiring glances as the Jimny did. People were stepping into the road and taking pictures. Tourists wanted to know what it was called. Small wonder that, even as deliveries began, more than 4,000 people had expressed an interest in buying one.
Let's get the drawbacks out of the way first. It's not a Tardis. It's small on the outside and small on the inside too. The back seats are nigh on useless, so you may as well fold them flat and treat it as a two-seater. At least that way you get a boot.
Then there's the performance. Or rather, there isn't. The time it takes to get from 0-60mph depends on how much of a hash you make of the tricky clutch and the sloppy gearbox. And the top speed depends on how much pain your ears can take. Using headphones, I got it up to an indicated 88mph, but it felt like a spaceship on re-entry.
Comfort? Nope. This is definitely not a strong suit, I'm afraid. At slow speeds around town it's not as bad as its forerunner, the Suzuki SJ, but only because nothing is as firm as that. Not even a mountain. It's still pretty crashy, though, and at speed, by which I mean about 42mph, it's better but still fidgety. And it's prone to crosswinds. Plus, the brakes aren't up to much.
And apart from poor brakes, a bad ride, woeful performance, cramped back seats, a baggy gearbox and an odd clutch, it's also not that economical. Mainly because it is geared, in top, at 20mph per 1,000 revs. I have no idea why.
But it starts to snow, and you've got to get across your farm to repair a broken fence post, and then the Suzuki is brilliant. It skips along like a fallow deer, refusing to get stuck in even the deepest mud. If you fitted it with off-road tyres, it would get to places that would defeat a Land Rover. And not just because it's little and light. It also has good angles of approach; better in fact than the new Jeep Wrangler's. It didn't even seem to mind wet grass, or green ice as we call it round these parts. Nothing's unstoppable, but this gets close.
The Jimny, then, may look chic and urban and cool but underneath, it's a farmer-tool. And a serious one at that.
It is also a hoot. As you bounce along with your ears bleeding, you will have a smile on your face. And you'll be making other road users smile too. I put it in rear-wheel drive at one point and turned of f the traction control, and in one of my fields I was reminded what it was like to be five. I'd like to thank it for that.
Yes, it's riddled with problems you don't get in bigger cars. But it's bloody cheap. And with a ladder chassis, it'll be tough. And with that 1.5-litre, two-horsepower petrol engine, it's not exactly chomping its way through the world's resources. It's not even available as a diesel.
It is, then, the marrow of cars. There's a lot wrong with marrow. It's not meat. It's too hot to eat even 15 minutes after you've taken it out of the pan and it's not as fancy as arugula. But I like it. I could live on it, in fact … If you want a Range Rover, go ahead and buy one. But I can tell you this: apart from legroom in the back, all you "need" from a Range Rover you can get from this little Suzuki.
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Forget Chris Packham's ban — we farmers speak the only language pigeons understand (April 28)
Fishing. It's not one of my specialist subjects. I do not want to stand up to my gentleman's area in an icy Scottish river and I'd rather spend my spare time in the pub, with friends, than sitting, by myself, on a damp canal bank with a bag full of maggots. Fishing, really, is for people who hate their children.
But, this morning, I feel duty-bound to come to the defence of the nation's anglists, who are being blamed for an alarming drop in salmon numbers in Scottish rivers. There used to be a time when 25% of all the fish that left their birthplace came back. Today, it's just 5%.
Those who enjoy animal rights say fishermen and fishermen women are to blame, along with farmers and bankers and possibly Mrs Thatcher, and conveniently fail to mention a couple of important points. Almost all the salmon caught by anglers are allowed to resume their journey after they've been landed. And, more importantly, the mouth of every Scottish salmon river is patrolled these days by an armada of hungry seals.
You want to get the salmon numbers up, you must do something about the number of seals. But what? Seals have big doe eyes and puppy-dog faces, and no one wants to see them being beaten to death with bats.
This, then, is the problem with conservation. Protect one species — and seals are very protected — and it's going to have an impact on another. It's all a question of balance and being sensible. Which, I'm afraid, is hard when our government is being advised by a Swedish teenager and Chis Packham.
Packham is a wildlife presenter on the BBC, and I like him. He's a good communicator, fun to be with, hugely knowledgable about punk rock and able to tell a corn bunting from a reed bunting at 400 paces. He's also a fine lobbyist. So fine, in fact, that, having teamed up with a former conservation director of the airborne wing of the Labour Party, the RSPB, he was able to convince the government's conservation watchdog, Natural England, to announce that it is now illegal to shoot pigeons.
Now I'm not going to be silly about this. Last weekend, as the sun blazed down, I very much enjoyed sitting in the garden listening to the wood pigeons cooing away. It's a sound that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. And I don't hold with the argument that town pigeons should be hounded to extinction because they crap on your car. They do, but it's not a big issue to get a hosepipe and wash it off.
However, I'm a farmer these days, and one of the things I grow is oilseed rape. I grew enough last year to make 100,000 bottles of vegetable oil.
This year, though, things are tricky, because a weed called black grass, which is immune to herbicides, is ravaging the crop.
And what's left is being half-inched by pigeons. I'm told that I can try scaring them away with loud bangs and kites and statues of Jon Pertwee, but I'm also told by the Viyella army of local countrymen that none of these things actually works. You have to shoot them. And now we can't.
Score one for Packham and Corbyn's RAF. But hang on, because if there's less oilseed rape, that means there's less vegetable oil, which will drive demand for alternatives such as palm oil. And palm oil production is what's destroying the jungles of Indonesia, and with them the orangutan.
So what the do-gooders have done by helping the pigeon, which is as prolific as nitrogen, is kill more of Borneo's endangered orange monkeys. And that's obviously idiotic. Happily, there seems to be a solution.
For nearly 40 years farmers have been using a so-called general licence to shoot pigeons, because they're protected under wild bird legislation, drawn up to save important stuff like the osprey and the golden eagle and so on.
In short, you could get permission to shoot certain kinds of common and unimportant wild birds, such as pigeons and crows and magpies, if it was bleeding obvious they were stealing eggs, pecking out the eyes of lambs or devastating crops. Well, thanks to Chris Packham's lot, that permission has now gone.
There is one idea for keeping the pigeon under control. Simply remove it, along with the crow and the magpie, from the legislation covering wild birds. Then no special permission to kill it is necessary. It's not as if this minor shift in the law would cause millions to take to the countryside each weekend in weirdo NRA combat strides, because to shoot a pigeon you need a gun, and you still need a licence for that.
But will the government allow a pigeon free-for-all? It should. It makes sense. We live in weird times, though, when governments in general and ours in particular are entirely detached from the real world. They seem to live in a universe full of unicorns and magic fairy dust. So there's no way Michael Gove, who's running the countryside this week, is going to say, "Lock and load, Farmer Giles. Let's waste the motherf
**!" So what about this for a plan? We pat Chris Packham on the back and say, with a magnanimous smile, that he has won. A bit like remainers are being urged to do by Brexiteers. But then we carry on as before. A bit like Brexiteers are being urged to do by remainers.
Seriously, can you see the police being that bothered? Really? About the death of a pigeon? And how would they ever know? A shotgun is noisy, but it's not so noisy that it can be heard in the nearest police station, which these days is usually 20 miles away. And only open from nine to five. On a Tuesday.
Plod isn't interested when I have a gate or a quad bike nicked, so I can hardly see a Swat team coming through the door with an enforcer ram because they suspect the pie I'm taking out of the Aga has four and twenty pigeons in it.
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And here's the
Sun column: "
First rule of Bank Holiday DIY — don’t injure yourself and enjoy a beer instead"