Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson Read Free Book Online Page A

cancer.
    It’s called crime.
    The Mayor says Detroit will be the next great international city, and a great place to do business. Yes, and I’m a little teapot.
    I’m so mad, in fact, that I always list Detroit as one of my five favourite cities in the world. It is as soulful as the music it once made and, as Gertrude Stein once said, ‘There is a
there
there’.

Iceland
    Iceland is not of this earth. It is a little piece of Mars stuck away on a barren rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. There are no reference points for the visitor, no little reminders of the civilisation that you’ve left behind, no clues that you’re in a fully paid-up NATO member state. Small wonder they sent Neil Armstrong here to train for his lunar walk.
    The countryside is weird. The people are mad. The weather defies belief and the laws and customs leave you gasping. But all of this is overshadowed by one important feature that, quite literally, turns your world upside down. In the summer, it doesn’t go dark.
    They can take you for a ride in a nitro-powered Jeep up a sheer cliff face. You can drive a snowmobile across the sea. You can pay £80 for a bottle of house white and you can have dinner with a girl who has completely see-through skin, but you won’t be paying attention because here, night does not necessarily follow day.
    Life for the rest of Planet Earth is a mishmash of unpredictability but there’s always one inescapable fact – every single night, without fail, the sun
will
set.
    But up there, from the end of April to the middle of September, night is like easing the dimmer switch downa couple of notches. And in the middle of June, it doesn’t happen at all.
    At three or four o’clock in the morning, it’s as light as it was at three or four o’clock in the afternoon, and that is spooky. You can go up to Sneffels Yokul, where Arne Saknussem set off in
Journey to the Center of the Earth
, to watch the sun kiss the horizon, and then start rising again.
    Not surprisingly, this peculiar aspect of life in the far north has had an effect on the people who live there. They don’t behave like human beings. If Darwin had come here instead of the Galápagos Islands, he’d have deduced that, on the evolutionary scale, man followed on from the hedgehog.
    In the summer months, the Icelander doesn’t really do much sleeping. And at weekends, he doesn’t do any at all.
    When they finish work in Reykjavik on a Friday night, they go home, have some drinks, get changed, have some more drinks and then at 11.00 p.m. they go out: all 125,000 of them.
    This can be a bit of a shock if you’ve arrived from Earth. The first time I went there, ten years ago, I wandered around at eightish looking for a restaurant, not really surprised that the streets were deserted. This, after all, was the northernmost capital city in the world and it was a bit chilly.
    But as I sat with a plate of fish and coleslaw, I couldn’t help noticing that as the night wore on, the tables were filling up, and then some. By midnight, there were queues of expectant diners going right out of the door.
    So I took out a mortgage, paid up and left, whereupon I was thrust into the world’s biggest party. If you could combine Live Aid with a papal visit to Rio, you’d get something that, compared to this, was a village fête.
    Everyone was hog-whimperingly drunk. As Björk put it recently, ‘What’s the point of having a glass of wine every day? It’s a waste of money, a waste of time and waste of wine. Why not wait till the weekend and drink a litre of vodka all in one go?’
    So they do. The teenagers, those too young to get into the endless array of nightclubs, fill massive Coke bottles with nine parts vodka and one part Coke and get so pissed most of them walk round backwards.
    And then, if they’re girls, they get pregnant. Iceland has the highest rate of illegitimacy in the world because most teenage girls have a child at sixteen which is then brought up by