Clarkson: The Weekly Times Comment Column by Jeremy Thread

I think it means 'too much effort' or 'too much bother'
The whole sentence means that the people can't be arsed to take down their tent and carry it home. They just abandon it, where it is.
 
Here's another column!

Wandering lonely as a vegan amid a host of humdrum lakes
8 September 2013

United Nations world heritage sites were created so that important cultural and natural landmarks could be preserved for all humanity for all time. Or until the Taliban blow them up.

It was a good idea, but after all the big stuff had been covered ? which didn?t take very long ? the scheme became nothing more than an ego boost for smaller, less important countries that could rush about saying, ?You lot in the developed world may have your nuclear weapons and your literature and your space programmes, but we have these jolly interesting rock formations.?

Plus, as an added bonus, when a landmark is awarded world heritage status, the UN gives the country?s government some money, all of which can be used by the official in charge to buy a shiny new Mercedes.

Naturally, the latest small and unimportant country to leap onto the bandwagon is Britain. There are 28 sites in the UK and its overseas territories; places such as Blenheim Palace and Bath, and the Giant?s Causeway in Co Antrim. But now, people with titles and CBEs are campaigning for more to be added to the list. And it seems the No 1 contender is the Lake District.

They argue that when the former resident William Wordsworth claimed that the Lake District was ?a sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest?, he created the very essence of conservationism and that for this alone, the area deserves recognition. And some money. Please.

They concede that the cost of staking the claim could be as high as ?570,000 but say that if they are successful, the award could increase visitor numbers from the current annual level of about 8m by as much as 1%. This, they say, would bring an extra ?20m a year to the region.

Yeah. Right. But only if the extra 1% is made up of Roman Abramovich, Elton John and the Sultan of Brunei. Because a 1% increase would see 80,000 more visitors a year, and for them to dump ?20m into the local economy, they?d each need to spend ?250 in the sweet shops of Keswick.

It?s not the wonky cost benefits, though, that worry me about making the Lake District a world heritage site. Or the slightly tragic notion that we now think such things matter. No. My main concern is that I really don?t think the award would be justified.

Because while Buttermere is very pretty, it doesn?t cause you to bite the back of your hand in the same way that the Grand Canyon does, or the Pyramids. Or Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. And, I?m sorry, but the centre of Ambleside is in no way a match for the centre of Rome.

Writing last week in The Guardian, the mad old eco-fool George Monbiot went even further, saying that the Lake District is a chemical desert, devoid of wildlife and that the tradition of hill farming ? the very thing the people with titles and CBEs want to preserve ? is responsible. Because the sheep are eating the trees and the mountains and causing floods. Earthquakes, too, I should imagine.

The fact is then that no one who takes a global view could see the Lake District as being a world heritage site. But I wonder: could it be something else?

At present, it is popular among ramblers and tenting enthusiasts; bitter, lonely people with wizened legs who strut about pointing at stuff that doesn?t matter and telling everyone that they enjoy the constant rain. These people add absolutely nothing to the local economy, and with their cagoules and bobble hats are actually an eyesore. Nothing ruins a view quite so comprehensively as a tent full of Keith and Candice Marie.

And to make matters worse, the local authorities actively encourage such people to tarry awhile. They create camp sites, and build footpaths and discourage anything that might be boisterous or fun. Which, if it?s money they?re after, seems to be muddleheaded and stupid.

I recently spent a week on the shores of Lake Como in Italy. This is prettier and more dramatic than any of the British lakes but is not a world heritage site. It?s not being preserved by the UN for all humanity for all time. Nature will do that. And in the meantime, all humanity can play with it.

As you may know, there is now a speed limit of 10 knots on all the lakes in the Lake District. This means that water-skiing and jet skis and powerboats are pretty much banned. So that the aquatic ramblers in their idiotic dinghies can have a bit of peace and quiet.

On Lake Como things are rather different. Every day I was woken to the glorious sound of someone parting the morning mist with their wondrous Riva Aquarama speedboat. Then the ferry would go by, its jets turning the tranquil green water into a foaming, vibrant white spume. There are no speed limits on Lake Como and, providing your speedboat has less than 40 brake horsepower, you don?t even need a licence.

This attitude attracts people with spending power, and to help them along, the nearby towns are rammed with shops selling expensive trinketry and restaurants full of beautiful people eating the beautiful wildlife. Let me put it this way: when George Clooney was looking for a house in Europe, he chose Como, not Derwent Water.

This then is what the people with titles and CBEs should be doing; getting rid of the coach tour mentality, and replacing the vegans and the ramblers with Hollywood high-rollers and billionaire speed freaks. They should accept that there are plenty of places in Britain where the lonely can go to be by themselves and that the Lake District should be a playground for the young and the interesting.

It?s time to forget about what Wordsworth did for the Lake District and concentrate more on the contribution made by Donald Campbell. Because blasting across Coniston Water at 297mph is more appealing to more people than wandering through a field of daffodils. Which you can?t do any more, anyway, because the sheep have eaten them.
 
More Clarkson!
Day 893: Tim from accounts is attacked by bats on Mars
Published 15 September

In recent years we have become accustomed to TV reality shows in which people with bright orange skin and many tattoos spend some time in a confined space, talking gibberish and being rude about one another.

Well, now a Dutch-led foundation has decided to take the idea one step further. So, instead of contestants being sent to a jungle or a strange house in north London, they will go to Mars, where they will remain until they die.

This is all deadly serious. Mars One, the foundation behind the idea, has a website and everything. And it says that the venture will be up and running by 2023. In other words, it is planning to construct a Mars base, get some spaceships there and populate it three years before the British government can get a railway line from London to Birmingham up and running.

Which is all very well but who, pray, would want to spend the rest of their lives on another planet, eating earwigs for the edification of various gormless youths? Well, such is the desperation to be on television these days that more than 200,000 have volunteered. And I?m one of them. Although I did make a bit of a mistake on the application form and said my name was Piers Morgan.

The next question that raises its ugly head is: who exactly will foot the bill? Well, the foundation is already selling bumper stickers and T-shirts but I?m not sure this will cover the costs completely. So, to make up the difference, it has been rather clever.

Premier League football and Formula One motor racing are rich because of the television deals. And that?s exactly what the Mars One team is trying to emulate. It will film the candidate selection process, which will be shown on global television, and then we, the viewing public, will have a say in who goes.

That?s brilliant. Because you are not voting for some halfwit to win a singing competition or deciding who?s been best at eating stick insects; you?re voting to send someone to another planet for the rest of their lives. Which means they are going to end up with a spaceship full of Tony Blackburn and George Galloway. People whom we really don?t want cluttering up the Earth any more.

What television company wouldn?t buy into that as a ratings smash? And then, of course, once the motley crew of misfits and ne?er-do-wells have set off, we?ll all be praying they crash-land and explode. So the cost of being allowed to transmit this event will make Mark Byford?s BBC pay-off look like the bill for a stamp.

It gets better. Because even if the boffins have done their sums right and Messrs Galloway and Blackburn do arrive safely, we?ll all continue to tune in every night to see if a hull breach has caused their faces to turn inside out. Or whether they?ve been attacked by Martian bats.

Naturally they will be expected to build their own power station and water filtration plant, which sounds a bit dreary. But imagine their little faces when they fire up the atmosphere generator only to find it doesn?t work. That would be a piece of comedy gold to rival Basil Fawlty?s broken-down Austin estate.

Oh, and one of them is bound to become ill at some point, which means we will be able to see, oh, I don?t know, Esther Rantzen taking out Nicholas Witchell?s appendix. With hilarious consequences. God only knows what the bill for an advert in that commercial break would be. And what about the day they all die? Tonight, live: George Galloway breathes his last on Mars.

Of course, it all sounds preposterous; like the brains behind this madness have spent rather too long in one of Amsterdam?s coffee shops. And yet . . .

Over the years, Nasa has convinced us all that space travel is very tricky and that colonising another planet is nigh-on impossible. It needed to maintain this illusion so it could go to Congress and say, ?We need more money or everything will blow up.?

But if you watch the film Apollo 13 you realise that, actually, it is perfectly possible to drive three men round the moon and land them at a precise point in the ocean even when their spacecraft is leaking and has only enough battery power to run a toaster.

This demonstrated that anyone with a welding torch and some oxygen can go into space. A point that was made again recently when a test version of Sir Branson?s forthcoming tourist spaceship reached Mach 1.43 and an altitude of 69,000ft.

Now if he can do this using nothing but the proceeds from Mike Oldfield?s Tubular Bells, I?m fairly certain that a television audience of 4bn would enable our Dutch friends to put George Galloway on Mars. I hope they succeed ? for another reason as well.

Nasa has managed to make the whole space thing incredibly boring. We were expecting warp drive and rocket suits but all we ever get are men in slacks on the space station, growing watercress. Why can?t they do something more interesting? Have a fight, for example. I?d love to watch a zero-gravity scrap. It would be hysterical.

And what?s the Mars rover all about? It plods about, sticking its prongs into the dust every now and again, and I can?t be alone in thinking, ?Why don?t you make it do a doughnut??

Then you had the space shuttle. It was a fabulous piece of machinery but why did it have to look like it had come from the design studios of Playmobil? To keep our interest, it should have been more pointy and fitted with guns.

Certainly the Mars One team will need to think about this when the time comes to start designing its spaceship on the back of a Rizla. Job one: make it look like the Starship Enterprise.

I wish the team well, I really do. It?s tragic, of course, that there are 200,000 or more people on the planet who are so friendless and lonely that they?d rather live out their days in the freezing cold Martian desert. But if the spending power of the world?s television networks can put them there, it?d be the most interesting and watchable extraterrestrial event since the cow jumped over the moon.
 
Can someone post his car column of today? It was about the P1...

It's now online. Since it's a rather special column, I'm going to reproduce it here:

Goodbye, dino. It?s the age of the mosquito
20 October 2013

LET US be in no doubt about this. The Toyota Prius is a stupid car for sanctimonious people. It has two power sources and is made from rare materials that have to be shipped all over the globe before the finished product is finally delivered with the morning muesli and a copy of The Guardian to some malfunctioning eco-house in some trendy part of town where the coffee shops sell stuff that no one understands.

Remember how people used to sew CND badges to their parkas in the 1960s? This simple act didn?t actually stop the SS-9 missiles rolling off the Soviet production lines but it did tell everyone that you were interested in nuclear disarmament. Well, that?s what the Prius is: a badge. A full metal jacket that tells other people you are interested in sandals as well. It?s a knowing wink, a friendly nod. And I hate it.

However, it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important cars to have seen the light of day. A genuine game-changer. Because versions of its hybrid drive system will eventually be fitted to every single car on the market. McLaren is already there. Its new 903bhp P1 uses a 727bhp 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 that works in tandem with a 176bhp electric motor. This has not been done to save the polar bear, but to produce more speed. A lot more. Yes, you can turn the V8 off and use the electric motor to drive you silently around town, but mostly it?s used to fill in the performance hole while the turbos spool up, and to fire rev-generating backwards torque at the petrol engine during gearchanges.

I asked a McLaren engineer if the P1 would have been even faster if it weren?t fitted with 324 very heavy laptop-style batteries and the extra complexity of the electric motor, and he was most emphatic. ?No,? he said. ?Really, no.?

So, in other words, McLaren has taken Toyota?s concept and turned it into something else entirely. You can think of this car as Viagra. Designed originally as a drug to mend a patient?s broken heart, it is now sold to keep you going harder and faster for longer and longer.

And McLaren is not alone. Ferrari is working on a car called, weirdly, the Ferrari the Ferrari, which uses much the same technology. Porsche is nearly there with a hybrid called the 918 Spyder. Already it has lapped Germany?s N?rburgring in 6 minutes and 57 seconds. That?s faster than any road car has gone before. Mercedes is working on a hybrid S-class.

They?re not statements. They?re not cars for eco-lunatics. They are cars for people who want the speed they have now. And in some cases even more. But not the petrol bills. What we?ve done, then, is taken a technology intended for the greens .?.?. and hijacked it. We?ve weaponised the muesli.

There?s more too, because we are about to see a shift in the way cars are made. For years they?ve all been built along pretty much the same lines. The body is a sort of frame onto which the engine, the suspension, the outer panels and the interior fixtures and fittings are bolted.

This is fine, but as the demand for more luxury and more safety grows stronger, the penalty is weight. Twenty years ago a Vauxhall Nova weighed about 800kg. Its modern-day equivalent is more than 1,000kg. Many larger cars tip the scales at more than two tons. And weight blunts performance, ruins handling and costs you at the pumps. Try playing tennis with a dead dog on your back and you?ll soon see the problem.

Happily, there is a solution. It?s called the carbon-fibre tub and it?s been the basis of all Formula One cars for years. It really is just a tub, which is used instead of the frame. And because it?s made from carbon fibre it weighs less than Richard Hammond. Seriously. But it is much stronger. Ferrari uses a similar thing in its road cars. So does McLaren. And now it?s starting to filter down the food chain. The Alfa Romeo 4C has a tub. Maybe one day the Ford Fiesta will too.

Preposterous? Not really. I remember when the video recorder first went on sale. The Panasonic model was ?800 and was viewed by the bitter and mealy-mouthed as being another example of life being all right for some. And here we are today with DVD players being available on benefits.

For about 40 years cars have inched along, getting a little more refined and a little easier to use with each generation. They have been evolving at about the same rate as the trees in your garden. But, in part because of the lawmakers in Brussels and the need to meet tough rules on what comes out of the tailpipe, we are about to witness a seismic shift. The meteorite has landed, and if the species is to survive, it needs to change.

I look at all the cars out there now and all the cars in this supplement and I get the impression they are all dinosaurs, roaming about in the fields, chewing grass and bumping into one another, blissfully unaware that the dust cloud is coming.

Some of them have V12 engines. And they?re not going to survive the storm. Nor will V8s. And that?ll be sad. We?ll all miss the rumble. In the same way, I?m sure, as when the last apatosaurus keeled over, the species that were left may have shed a bit of a tear.

But look at it this way. It?s argued by some that dinosaurs actually evolved into birds. The velociraptor became the white tern. The Tyrannosaurus rex became the peregrine falcon. And cars will have to do the same thing. It?s already happening, in fact. And it?s not necessarily a bad thing. Ford has squeezed 124bhp out of the 1-litre three-cylinder engine it fits into the Fiesta. And I challenge anyone to get out after a drive in that thing without wearing a grin the size of Jupiter?s third moon. It?s a riot and yet it can do more than 60mpg.

That Alfa Romeo 4C is a pointer as well. It?s light, so it needs only a little petrol-sipping 1742cc engine to reach 160mph. But imagine if it were a hybrid, if it had a small electric motor firing gobs of instant torque at the rear wheels while the petrol engine was waking up, and adding horsepower to the mix when the road ahead opened up. It?d be like driving a mosquito that had somehow mated with a water boatman.

I have enjoyed my time with the dinosaurs. I shall look back at the Mercedes SLS AMG and the Ferrari 458 Italia and the Aston Martin Vanquish with a teary eye. And I shall always keep a picture of the wondrous Lexus LFA in my wallet. But that chapter is closing now. We?re about to start a new one, and from the snippets I?ve seen so far, it looks rather good.
 
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Wow...he's exhibiting a level of thoughtfulness and perspective that previously only came from James May.
 
Thanks, I enjoyed those.
 
Jesus, how about a thank you instead?

Thanks Buktu.

Bretton, I used to quote the columns in full, especially when I was getting them from sources that other people might not be able to access. But since everyone can access reddit, there's not much point in that.
 
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