Worthy books won't see a chap through lockdown. Give me explosions, Nazi gold and reviewers' tears (May 3)
New research shows that men usually give up on a book by the time they've got to page 50. Hmmm. I've never not finished a book. Obviously this doesn't include instruction manuals. I've never read one of those to the end. But when it comes to proper books, I've always kept going.
Even when they were worthy and terrible and full of people in ruffs and bonnets, I continued to sail on HMS Optimism through the sea of turgid reality, praying that eventually the dreary Victorian heroine would have mad sex and then get eaten by a shark.
The trouble with this policy is that she never was. So I've wasted a large chunk of my life doing something I wasn't enjoying. And as a result, I've grown to fear books. I'm 60 now. At best I have only 87,000 hours left before I die, and I don't want to spend any of them being avoidably miserable.
In the past five weeks I could have read maybe 30 books. But the number I've actually read is nought. This is because I've been doing hard manual labour, and after a tiring day in the fields, I'd rather shoot a Nazi zombie in the face than read the "searing and poignant" tale of a Romanian woman's 50-year search for her hat. Which is what all books are about these days.
Examples I may have made up include
The Duvet of Blossoms by Pandora Treacle. Set in a remote Cornish village, Pandora's sweeping new novel looks at the lives of two elderly women who occasionally meet when they're posting letters. Or there's
How Dare You! by Milly Lennial. Milly's first novel, published by All Men Are Bastards Books, is a meticulously researched account of how powerful white males such as Prince Philip and "Bomber" Harris are responsible for all the plastic in the oceans.
I've had a canter through all the most talked-about books at the moment and what we have is Dilly Court's
The Summer Maiden, which is about women doing something or other in the 19th century. Then you have
Wilde Like Me, which is about a woman trying to be less dull, and
The Cows, which is about three women who want to be heard. It doesn't explain what they're saying but I bet it's nothing of any consequence.
My daughter is raving about
The Beekeeper of Aleppo, about which I know nothing except that the author's previous work was called
A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible. And that really, really doesn't sound like my cup of tea. It sounds, in fact, like the sort of tea women drink that isn't tea at all, because it's made from nettles.
What I must know, before I begin a book, is that I will definitely enjoy it. If there's any doubt, it goes straight onto the bookcase that I, like Tory MPs, use as a backdrop when doing a Skype interview on television.
But how can you know you will definitely enjoy a book before you have started it? Reviews are no help because all of them are written by weird fedora people in corduroy who would actually enjoy the searing and poignant tale of a Romanian woman's 50-year search for her hat.
I have nothing in common with book reviewers. They want nuance and elegance, whereas I want Apache helicopter gunships. They look for what's not being said. They look for hints and suggestions. Whereas I look for speedboats and submarine evasion manoeuvres.
If you gave a reviewer a book with an explosion on the front cover, and a gold ingot embossed with a swastika, and a girl in a bikini playing baccarat, you can be assured she'd give it one star. Give her a book about a Dutch girl's flower arranging class and she might need to go off for some me-time. We, in the real world, like Jilly Cooper and Jeffrey Archer and EL James. But none of their books are reviewed well. They are sneered at because they are populist, and populism in the arts is always seen as vulgar. To be truly great, a writer must die at the age of 42, alone and penniless. To achieve this, you must write books that only reviewers like.
I devour books when I am on holiday, but this has been getting harder in recent years. Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler and Arthur C. Clarke are dead. Wilbur Smith is pushing 90. Worst of all, Lee Child announced recently that he's hanging up his pen and letting his brother write the Jack Reacher books.
To make matters worse, when you are on a beach you cannot lie there reading something with an explosion on the front cover because everyone will think you're a moron. Biographies work quite well, but I've enjoyed only two. There was
Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon and Keith Richards's memoir
Life, written with James Fox. I seem to have a thing for people called Keith.
That said, I'm lucky because I have a local bookshop — Jaffé & Neale — whose owners, Patrick and Polly, give me a cup of coffee while they scurry off to find a pile of books they know I'll enjoy. They've never been wrong.
They gave me a book about Mexican drug cartels called
The Power of the Dog, and it was breathtaking. And then there was
Matterhorn. That's a book where you're very tempted to give up on page 50. The Vietnam War dialogue is impenetrable. But as usual I persevered and, ooh, I'm glad, because it's the second-best book ever written. After
The House at Pooh Corner, obviously.
Don't argue. It is.
Anna Karenina.
The Great Gatsby.
War and Peace. These are the books Mark Twain was on about when he observed that a classic book is "something that everyone wants to have read, and no one wants to read".
That, I guess, is why so few men are capable of getting past page 50.
Everyone is trying to write classic books rather than great books full of global annihilation and Cylons coming at Mach 5 out of the sun.
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Sorry Clarkson, but I
will argue. I doubt Mark Twain had any of those three books in mind. Having read
Gatsby and
War and Peace, I can say they're classics for the most obvious reason: they're profoundly good. And they're pleasurable and not difficult to read. Don't let inverse snobbery deprive you of good books.
Anyway, here's the automotive column:
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Sparky, but it won't set anyone alight
The Clarkson Review: Mini Electric (May 3)
Because of delays relating to current circumstances, I'm talking to you from the past. It's late March, and a week ago we were all ordered to stay at home. Especially in Derbyshire, where the police have broken out the Stasi manuals and are running amok using drones to buzz hikers in the Peak District and megaphones to harangue elderly ladies popping to the chemist for more support tights.
Even worse are the Neighbourhood Watch types, who've become the behaviour police. They sit behind their permanently twitching curtains, making detailed notes about anybody who drives past. They are loving the lockdown because suddenly everybody else is made to live as they do, in a friendless haze of relentless daytime television and tinned soup.
At the moment most people are playing ball. There are no contrails in the sky, and you could walk down Regent Street at 6pm on a Friday knowing you aren't going to be knocked down. Well, not by a car, at any rate. For some reason the powers-that-be are still keeping the double-decker Petri dishes moving.
Luckily, I am not affected. I can go where I please, partly because I have a press card. And partly because I'm a farmer, so I'm a key worker. I can therefore whizz about as much as I like in my Range Rover and, though I wouldn't dream of putting this to the test, I'm fairly sure I could get away with running it on red diesel.
"Sorry, officer, but I was scared of the 'ronavirus being on the pump."
I wish to God that I had a truly great car to test, because to bomb about now, on deserted roads, knowing that all of the police force is busy telling youths to stop their kickabout in the park and go home, would be bliss. I haven't, though. As I've explained, I'm stuck with the last cars to be delivered before the lockdown, which I'm working my way through. I recently reported on a Vauxhall Corsa, which has been appropriated by my girlfriend's daughter. I also have an electric version of the Mini Cooper S. First things first: it's bloody cheap. Factoring in the government's £3,000 cashback incentive, prices start at a whisker under £25,000, which is obviously a lot for a Mini, but for an electric car it caused me to sit up a bit and pay attention. Sure, I was lent a Level 3 version, but even that was only £30,900, and it's a lot of car for that kind of money.
You certainly get a lot of tech. It has the same "hybrid synchronous" motor as BMW fits to the i3. This means — pay attention — that within the rotor design you get the effect of permanent magnets combined with something called "reluctance". This cuts down the need for rare-earth neodymium, which means the rotor can spin faster. I can see why James May likes electric cars so much. To him this kind of talk is way beyond erotica. It's filth.
What normal people care about, though, is the oomph, and that's not bad. You get 181 horsepower and nearly 200 torques. And so, even though the Mini is both big and very, very heavy, it'll get from zero to 62mph in 7.3 seconds. It actually feels faster than that. It feels faster than its petrol-powered brother. But it isn't. Not quite.
And I must now put the needle back on the same old record and explain, once again, why I shall never buy a car propelled by electricity. This is a personal thing. I know Richard Hammond wants a Tesla and I know James May already has one, along with an i3 and some kind of hydrogen car. Not sure what sort it is, but it looks very boring in the pictures.
I'm afraid, however, that I do not share their enthusiasm. Yes, when you put your foot down at low speed there is instant and dramatic thrust. But before your passenger has time to say "wow", it's over. In this respect the power delivery from an electric motor is like the power delivery you get from a diesel. There's one big lump, and then it's gone.
I much prefer the seamlessness of petrol. Sure, the electric car whizzes off the line more quickly, but as the seconds tick by the petrol car will catch up. What's more, if you run the race five times the electric car will start to lose its immediacy, and if you run it 10 times it'll stop working altogether because the batteries will be flat.
Then there's the issue of slowing down. In a proper car you can coast. And if you coast in gear you will be using no fuel at all. Not a lot of people know that. In an electric car you cannot coast because the act of slowing down is used to top up the batteries. It's called regenerative braking and it makes my nose swell up with rage.
In the Mini you take your foot off the throttle and it's as if you've jammed the bloody brakes on. This means gentle driving is tricky. It also means that, much to the surprise of the driver behind, you shudder to a halt 300 yards before every set of traffic lights, every roundabout and every T-junction.
But it's not this, or the quality of the power delivery, that causes me to shy away; it's the noise. All you can hear in an electric car is the tyres. And, frankly, I'd rather listen to the bubbling stomach juices of the lion that's just eaten me.
My Alfa GTV6 is a musical instrument. The noises it makes cause the hair on the back of my neck to rise. No electric car will ever do that. Because an electric car is nothing more than a dishwasher. That stops about four minutes before you want it to.
I appreciate, however, that I'm speaking to only a very few people. (Hi, Eric.) Most will be ignoring the hairs on the back of my neck and saying, "Yes. But the Mini costs only 4p a mile to run."
This is undoubtedly true. If you choose your electricity provider and your timing correctly, and you operate the throttle using nothing but the down of a newly born owl, you will achieve this figure. And you will also get a range of 140 miles before you need to charge the batteries.
Two things on that. One, in normal running you will not get anything like 140 miles before you need to find a plug socket and sit about for 12 hours while the damn thing comes back to life. And, two, rival electric cars from Peugeot and Renault can go further than 140 miles. Quite a lot further.
There are other issues too. The proper Mini has fairly cramped accommodation for passengers in the back, but, because the batteries are under the back seat, there's even less room in the electric version, and the boot is suitable only for people who have a pet ladybird. It wouldn't work at all if you had two.
Further forward, things are much better because it's familiar Mini territory. Like the last version I drove, the electric car has a dash that changes colour to tell you things. I don't know what those things are, but it looks cool. I like the head-up display too, even though it gives you exactly the same information as you get on the dinky new instrument binnacle, which is located about an inch away from it.
I quite like the way the car handles too. It may weigh more than a policeman's lockdown bellow, but it still has the Mini nimbleness. The ride's not brilliant, though. And that's another reason I'd buy the petrol-powered version instead.
Of course, you may be sold on the idea of an electric car — and don't be ashamed by that, because you're not alone. Plenty of others like sitting about waiting for the batteries to charge and driving along in a state of permanent panic that they're going flat again. But even if you are green'n' clean, I still think the Mini is no good. The price is fine, but the French alternatives are better cars.
If, that is, you can think of a battery-powered personal mobility unit as a "car". Which I don't, and never will.
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The
Sun column: "
Instagram generation don’t know what’s going on because all they see is pampered celebs boasting about lockdown"
And a bonus--a column by Clarkson's girlfriend:
FARMER CLARKSON IS WORKING ME LIKE A DOG. CAN I BE FURLOUGHED, PLEASE?
Building dams and putting up fences is not how Lisa Hogan imagined spending lockdown with her partner, Jeremy Clarkson
By Lisa Hogan (May 3)
I have played it all wrong from the start, this lockdown with Clarkson on the farm. In the early days, hearing Jeremy shout, "I have just had a genius idea!", my ears would prick up. I would listen, in full meerkat alert pose, as he explained, for example, how we could reroute a dribble of a stream into a pond. Then, day after day, we would trundle to the dam, and Jeremy would bellow instructions while I lugged wheelbarrows full of clay over a series of old doors that served as a makeshift bridge.
"Get your act together, Elastigirl," Jeremy boomed as the door with the wheelbarrow on began sliding away from the door with my feet on. The last thing I saw was the exasperation on his face as I fell into the freezing water.
Jeremy's energy has always been extraordinary. He whizzes between his seven jobs (or is it 11 now?), flicking a two-fingered salute at the fact he had his 60th birthday a few weeks ago. I am a decade younger, athletic and have always been a willing partner in his creative ideas on the farm. But now I'd like to check into Slothdom, please. I can't keep up. Can't I be furloughed?
Take the saga with our old Aga. Not long after confinement began, beastly easterly winds blew down its vent and from then on its cooking temperature would barely rise above tepid. After eating dinner post-midnight a few nights in a row, Jeremy had a brilliant idea. "Why don't you fix the Aga? All you have to do is disassemble the cupboard under the sink, unscrew the engine and see whether any soot's stuck."
I did not want to do this.
We have a farmhand who normally deals with this kind of thing, but he's not allowed in the house now. The cupboard under the sink is scary, and if it turns out it's not soot that's the problem, Jeremy will come up with many other excellent suggestions that could well singe what's left of my grizzled hands, or blow me up. So I refused to fix the Aga.
On Sunday, I put lunch in the oven at 9.30am. It wasn't ready until 4pm. Ha, that will teach him, I told myself as he sat on the terrace, reading in the sun with a glass of rosé.
With us on the farm is Ali, my 18-year-old daughter, who has been my little helper: my sous-chef in the kitchen, on constant dishwasher duty and in charge of the chickens. I've only found one dead and only occasionally discovered them still sweltering in their coops at 9am when Ali's slept through her sunrise alarm. Out of pity, we decided she could have a friend to stay and work on the farm and help with the ever-growing list of "brilliant ideas" Jeremy sets as tasks. But we would have to apply some strict self-isolation rules: Ali and her friend would stay away from me and Jeremy for two full weeks.
Initially, I suggested they stick to the older, separate part of our cottage, but Jeremy thought this was just a cunning plan for me to get out of being his laundry bitch, since the washing machine is in that part of the house. I was annoyed that this ploy hadn't crossed my mind.
There may have been alcohol involved when, instead, we decided to buy an isolation mobile home for Ali. When it arrived, I thought, "Holy Moly! How drunk could we have been?" The horror is two-tone green, with green carpet and green sofas. It's an eyesore with conjunctivitis.
The girls could in theory come back into the cottage now, but they've found the barn where the booze is stored and refuse to do so. I'm allowed to visit if I need to use their oven.
Jeremy had been filming a new farming series for Amazon. But the crew that used to pile into the house are gone, along with the delicious film-set catering. So now it's me filming wobbly scenes on a little video camera. Jeremy gets in position, says his bit, shouts "Cut!", then pff, he's gone. Half the time I haven't got round to turning the camera on.
Around week four, I hit a slump. The
Groundhog Day routine has got to me. So the next evening, at dusk, Jeremy leads me deep into a wood. We climb up onto a wobbly plank high in a tree opposite a badger hide. Our badger watching plan doesn't get far because we chat too much. Jeremy loves nothing more than to tell an interesting story he's read or heard, then I tell him something that he doesn't find interesting at all, but we natter on our perch until it's dark.
Back at the house, he lights the fire in the party barn, puts on the disco lights and plays me his favourite vinyls from the 1970s. I dance my heart out. Even though he thought it would be funny to put my daggy dancing on Instagram, I'm back in high spirits the next day.
I've been sleeping well, but Jeremy less so. Waking after the deepest sleep, I found him awake, bleary-eyed and shattered. To make up for it, I cut his hair, which grows outwards. At one point I heard it brushing the door frames as he walked through the cottage. Using clippers, I've done quite a good job.
Now he wants to return the favour. I'm about to fire up my home waxing kit (let me point out, this is for me), when he offers to assist me with the parts I can't reach. I look warily at his enormous hands. "Can't you fix the Aga instead?" I ask, but he's adamant.
Who would have thought it? As it turns out, we've both acquired new skills during the lockdown.