Clarkson on Cars Read Online Free PDF Page A

enquired of them why it is that small people in peaked caps are always so damned intransigent and they, of me, why BMW drivers are always so ??$*!ing pushy.
    Eventually a bossy woman with a loud and hectoring demean-our came but I couldn’t understand what she was saying to me because she was holding one of those walkie-talkie affairs that seem to emit nothing but white noise punctuated with people saying ‘Roger’ a lot.
    I finally managed to squeeze past the music teacher lookalike and her SS sidekicks when a charming man stepped from his Volvo Estate to ask them why it is that the working class always vote Labour. I didn’t actually see what bearing his line of questioning had on the issue but his suicide antics diverted the heat for just long enough for me to win my battle.
    Sadly though, my war with the day was far from over. My Fiat test car ignited warning light after warning light until its interior began to resemble a Jean Michel Jarre concert, my doctor warned once again that if I didn’t have a week off, my eczema would envelop the last vestiges of skin and Barry Reynolds rang up from Ford to say the Cosworth I was due to get next week would, in fact, be an XR2.
    Now, I have many weak spots – my face is perhaps the most apparent – but I do pride myself on an ability to maintain an even strain when the adversity is piling up.
    Some people, I know, reach for the paraquat if the sponge cake doesn’t rise correctly. Others weep for weeks upon finding out their son’s motorcycle isn’t taxed. But I do none of these things, not least because I don’t know how to make a sponge cake and don’t have a son.
    What I do in times of crisis is try to put my predicament in perspective. As I sat on the phone listening to Mr Reynolds explaining why the Cosworth would not be winging its way to Fulham, I merely thought about that time when my sister ripped the last page from the Famous Five book I was reading and I was smacked for beating her up. And those dreadful tea-time visits to Aunt May’s – a sizeable woman who always sat with her bandaged legs wide apart and began all her toothless monologues with ‘Do you remember when…’
    I even summoned up from the memory bank’s deepest recess that incident when a load of town boys stole my school cap and put something a dog had done in my satchel.
    Still though, the pain of not getting a Cosworth hurt – it hurt in the same way a Sherman tank would hurt if it ran over your legs. What I needed was to recall something so terrible, a moment that produced so much anguish, that not having a Cosworth would become joyous in comparison. I thought about the red mullet I’d eaten on the BMW 7-Series launch and how sad it was that I’d never again enjoy this, the best piece of food created by any chef anywhere, ever before.
    But the pain didn’t go away until I remembered that moment on 10 October 1969 when I crashed my brand-new Buick Riviera into the coffee table and one of its four gleaming headlights dropped from the grille.
    This was the pride of my Dinky/Corgi fleet because it sported mirrors in the front and rear windows which, when covered up, dimmed the head and tail lamps.
    It cost 5/6d and was the envy of everyone at school. Once, Gary Needham offered to swap his Mercedes Pullman with the dirty front windscreen for it, but I refused. He even offered to throw in his Batmobile but I already had one of those even though Robin’s window was broken after my sister trod on it. I beat her up for that too.
    She also lost the little yellow pellets you could fire from the boot-mounted mortars and I was the school laughing stock because I had to resort to matchsticks instead.
    I’ve still got my entire collection and am told the earlier variety with detachable rubber wheels will one day be worth a few bob.
    But I somehow doubt the ones I Humbrolised with all the finesse of a charging rhino will ever be worth more than the 5/6d I paid for them. The paint seemed to go