Clarkson on Cars by Jeremy Clarkson Read Free Book Online Page B

heading off towards whatever horizon was currently nearest.
    I stuck with the Suzuki, and, after a while, became quite accustomed to ricocheting my way from baby to grannie to car door to helicopter landing gear in a sort of large-scale demonstration of Brownian motion.
    Only once did I hurt myself on it. Because of its huge, underinflated tyres and plethora of gear ratio and drive selection levers, I figured it would be as adept at traversing rough ground as those hamster lookalike thingummys which live in the Andes.
    So, bearing this in mind, I tried to scale a 45-degree slope which felt, as I reached halfway house, like I’d overdone things. Doubtless the bike was sailing through the test without even gently perspiring, but from where I sat, it felt like there was no way we’d reach the crest.
    The foot I put down to act as a sort of stabiliser was promptly run over by the back wheel which, thankfully, wasn’t as painful as you might imagine. This though is because my left foot is used to being squashed. In the past year, it’s been run over four times, once by myself in an XJS and three times by other people. And I’m not joking either.
    Happily, on rough ground, the front tyres do enjoy a modicum of grip so I was able to turn round and head back to
terra firma
where they became as sticky as sheet ice again.
    All the while, I kept being overtaken by this maniac on the out-of-control Honda who kept squeaking about how he’d just overtaken Gordon Murray and run Nigel Mansell off his moped. Poor chap spent the entire evening muttering about power to weight ratios and how slow Thrust Two is.
    As I loaded my Suzuki on the back of a Mitsubishi pickup truck for the homeward voyage on Sunday evening, I was quite sad. There’s a challenge in mastering a four-wheeled bike that one simply does not encounter in the everyday world of electric-windowed cars.
    I should like to be able to buy such a beast for everyday use but unfortunately, because they have no indicators or tax discs, they cannot be taken on public highways and byways, which is a shame. It should be much easier to drive on a road than in a field, there’s so much more to hit.
    I don’t understand how F. Giles Esq can be allowed to pedal his pre-Boer War tractor up the A1 at 2 mph when the lord of the manor isn’t even able to dart across the Nether Middlecombe to Lower Peasepottage back road on a Suzi Q to see how his sheep are doing.
    Unless this silly law is repealed immediately, I shall become an anarchist.

Invaders from Cars
    Now let me make one thing perfectly clear. If I say I will be in the pub at 8 o’clock, I will be in the pub at 8 o’clock.
    I will not arrive, breathless, at a quarter past blaming the traffic or an unlikely encounter with a crazed Bengal tiger.
    Punctuality is a fine art and I have mastered it to such a degree that as the second hand of my unusually accurate Tissot rock watch – the one that’s as individual as my own signature – sweeps round to herald the appointed hour, I will be just about to enter the pre-arranged venue. My expected companion, however, is rarely, if ever, in evidence. This makes me mad.
    What I can’t understand is how on earth other people aren’t able to manage the business of being on time quite as well as I do. Some do the breathless bit, some try to claim that they’ve been in a meeting which went on a bit but these people are usually estate agents and thus not worth talking to anyway. Then there are those who saunter in an hour late with nary an apology.
    No matter. The thing is that if you arrive before the people you’re supposed to be meeting, you must find something to do.
    Something that lets other people in the bar know that you haven’t been stood up. You can always hear them muttering about how ‘she isn’t coming’ and sometimes how they’re ‘not in the least bit surprised with a face like that’.
    You try desperately not to look at your watch every four seconds until eventually