Notes From the Hard Shoulder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART 1 – I'VE A GOOD MIND TO WRITE A LETTER PLEASE KEEP OFF THE MUD

  THIS JAGUAR LOOKS A BIT HALF-BAKED TO ME

  BRITAIN'S SURFACE INDUSTRY FAILS TO DELIVER

  MY CUP RUNNETH OVER AND INTO THE CENTRE CONSOLE

  BROWN'S GREEN TAX – A BIT OF A GREY AREA

  ANY COLOUR YOU LIKE AS LONG AS IT'S AVAILABLE FROM DULUX

  PORSCHE OUTPERFORMS DESKTOP PRINTER – SHOCK

  MEN, RISE UP AND EMBRACE THE WHEELBRACE

  HOW THE PEACE AND QUIET OF ENGLAND WAS RUINED BY THE NOISE OF PEOPLE COMPLAINING

  IN CASE YOU'RE READING THIS ON THE BOG, HERE ARE SOME EQUATIONS OF MOTION

  IT'S A CAR, JIMMY, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

  PART 2 – THE FUZZY EDGE OF AUTOMOTIVE UNDERSTANDING CHARLES DARWIN MAY BE ON TO SOMETHING

  NAKED MOTORCYCLE PORN SHOWING NOW

  SOME OBSERVATIONS ON REAR-END HANDLING

  THE FUTURE OF IN-CAR ENTERTAINMENT

  THE TECHNICAL REVOLUTION IN THE TOYSHOP

  THE BEST DRIVING SONG IN THE WORLD EVER

  HOW TO DEAL WITH VAN DRIVERS

  BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID. BUT ONLY OF THE SIZE OF THE BILL.

  I'M GAY, BUT NOT THAT GAY

  THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE CAR OF THE FUTURE

  THIS IS PERSONAL

  IS IT A CAR? IS IT A BIKE? NO. AND NO.

  IF HE KNOWS, HE'S NOT SAYING ANYTHING

  PART 3 – THESE ONES ARE ACTUALLY ABOUT CARS, SORT OF HOW GREAT CARS COME TO BE ABANDONED IN OLD BARNS

  BREAKING DOWN IS NOT SO HARD TO DO

  LAMBORGHINIS ARE GREAT. YOU SHOULD HAVE ONE.

  PIOUS PORSCHE PEDDLES PATHETIC PEDAL-POWERED PRODUCT

  THE FOLLY OF TRYING TO SAVE FUEL

  JEREMY CLARKSON RUINED MY DREAM CAR

  THE RANGE ROVER OF OUTSTANDING NATURAL BEAUTY

  POETRY ON MOTION

  ONLY THE FRENCH WOULD BUILD A CAR DESIGNED TO BREAK DOWN

  THESE MODERN SUPERCARS ARE ALL BLOODY RUBBISH YOU KNOW

  TRACK DAYS, OR THE FUTILITY OF GOING NOWHERE

  CLASSIC CARS – YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

  ACHTUNG! BENTLEY!

  THE VAUXHALL VECTRA, A REPRESENTATIVE VIEW

  I'VE NEVER FELT SUCH A SPANNER

  PART 4 – THE THRILL OF THE OPEN ROAD (AT LEAST UNTIL THE PHOTOGRAPHER WANTS TO STOP AND TAKE A PICTURE) A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN SOMEONE ELSE'S CAMPER-VAN MISERY

  THE MOTOWN STORY

  A CLOT ON THE LANDSCAPE

  DON'T FORGET YOUR TOOLKIT

  HARLEY-DAVIDSON, A HANGING OFFENCE

  I'M JUST GOING TO ICELAND, I MAY BE SOME TIME

  POLICE CAR, LIGHTS, ACTION

  THE SMART CAR. NOT AFTER WE'D FINISHED WITH IT.

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  NOTES FROM THE HARD

  SHOULDER

  NOTES FROM THE HARD

  SHOULDER

  James May

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9780753520789

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in

  2007 by

  Virgin Books Ltd

  Thames Wharf Studios

  Rainville Road

  London

  W6 9HA

  Copyright © James May 2007

  The right of James May to be identified as the Author of this

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A catalogue record for this book is available from

  the British Library.

  ISBN: 9780753520789

  Version 1.0

  To Pullin and Green, for the

  opportunity

  PART 1 – I'VE A GOOD MIND TO WRITE A LETTER

  PLEASE KEEP OFF THE MUD

  It is time, now that someone has raised the truly preposterous notion of congestion charging in our national parks, to acknowledge a few painful realities about the countryside. There is a feeling at large that cars somehow do not belong in the countryside; I now put it to you that in fact the countryside belongs to the car.

  Before anyone writes in with a volume of Rupert Brooke, I should make it clear that I understand perfectly the position occupied by the rural idyll in the English national consciousness; how its gently swaying fields of corn are instantly evoked by thoughts of home when abroad; how the memory of England endures not as a shopping centre or theme park but as an endless Arcadian vista who gave her flowers to love etc. But how are we to enjoy all this, if not from the car?

  You could go for a walk, say some, but have you seen the size of the place? It would take me two days to reach the edge of it from where I live, and even then there would be a few golf courses to negotiate before I arrived in the other Eden. Cycling? Civilised bicycles only work on the road, and the road is only there because of cars. If you try off-roading on one of these so-called 'mountain' bikes, farmers will shoot at you. And I have to say that if I were a farmer, and you rode across my field with an inverted polystyrene fruit bowl on your head astride £2,000-worth of unobtanium, I'd shoot at you as well.

  No – the problem is not that people keep driving through the countryside, it's that people keep living there.

  If you're a farmer, tilling manfully on the land to produce the things I love to eat, then that's fine. Likewise a gamekeeper or some old toff, since they're not safe in the city. Also fine is running a country pub, as that's where I like to stop for a pie. But the rest of you – and especially those of you who think a two-inch-high ribbon of tarmac is somehow 'ruining the countryside' – can bugger off, because your houses are spoiling the view from my Porsche.

  If, for example, you're a merchant banker working in the City, you should live in the City near the bank. If you're the manager of a country bank, you should live in the flat above it or in a windowless bothy alongside. Similarly, working for a software consultancy and living in the sticks is as absurd as turning up for work at a software consultancy in a straw hat singing ee-aye-ee-aye-oh. I don't want to escape to the countryside in my car to be rewarded with an endless rolling panorama of Barratt Homes. It's the ruin of England.

  Everyone I know who lives in the cuds is, in terms of their demands, aspirations and general lifestyle, exactly the same as my neighbours in London. They are separated from me by nothing more than a very, very big garden. They drive into the town every day and complain about congestion, without stopping to think for long enough to realise that the road isn't there so that they can come in, it's there so I can get out in something with a flat six and enjoy a world as Adam would have known it.

  The harsh truth is that cod country living is a privilege bequeathed entirely by the roads and motor transport. So if you live in Chodford and despise all things automotive, you sh
ould live as I imagine country folk did before the car was invented. That is, like a chicken; in your own poo, driven mad by blight and at the mercy of wild animals. You should ride a donkey, and the road to your damp dwelling should be a rough track beset by bandits and deranged inbreds with huge hands and one eye in the middle of their faces.

  Actually, I'd go further than that. You should not be allowed anything in life that is in any way dependent on road transport. So no fresh shiitake mushrooms from the charming deli in the village, because they arrived in a van. You'll have to bake your own bread in the little cubby holes at the side of your Aga – the ones with the red-hot handles. And no reading the Daily Telegraph, because it isn't really a telegraph at all. It comes in a van as well.

  Anti-car sentiment is nowhere as incongruous as it is in the countryside. In fact, the beauty of the countryside in modern times is that you can drive through it, look at it and then leave it alone. Its principal function is for the growing of carrots, but after that, it's what sports cars were invented for.

  THIS JAGUAR LOOKS A BIT HALF-BAKED TO ME

  I've now been sitting here for some hours looking at a picture of the Jaguar X-Type estate fitted with the maker's optional 'Sports Collection' body styling package. And I have to say, I'm just not sure about it.

  To explain why, we have to go back a few weeks to an idle evening when I decided that I would make a Chinese meal. And I don't mean one contrived from a packet sauce and a tin of water chestnuts. I mean the real thing, like that bloke Ken Whatsit would do.

  Now, I don't really rate myself as a chef. Anything outside the orbit of the old school favourites – shepherd's pie, cheesy pasta – is frankly a bit of a mystery. But that doesn't matter, because you can buy sets of instructions for clever cooking and the picture on the front is usually so good it's tempting just to eat the book.

  I did everything properly. I went to a Chinese supermarket for the ingredients and I borrowed a wok from a neighbour. The preparation time amounted to many hours of careful chopping and straining.

  But then it started to go wrong. I've heard a theory that oriental cooking is the way it is because of a historical shortage of fuel, so everything is cut up small and it's all cooked together in one very thin utensil that becomes blindingly hot in seconds. It all happened far too quickly.

  I think the word that best sums up my Szechuan double-cooked pork with chow mein is 'grey'.

  Undeterred, I decided to try an Indian instead, since the cooking process would then be much more leisurely. I visited a proper Indian food shop and started from scratch with raw spices, ghee, basmati rice and what have you. I ground, roasted, made pastes, marinated things overnight – in fact, my chicken tikka bhuna with peas pilau took almost two days to complete. It could best be described as 'brown'.

  As a result of all this I have decided to abandon any ridiculous pretence of being multi-culti and acknowledge that if I fancy a Chinese or an Indian, I'll find some Chinese or Indian people to make it for me. There are several within a few hundred paces of my house, as it happens, and they are much, much better at this sort of thing than I am because they are steeped in the appropriate culture and traditions; rather in the way that I know, almost instinctively, what to do with Spam.

  Similarly, I may have spent many hours as a boy sketching supercars in the back of my geometry exercise book with my Oxford Mathematical Instruments set, but I will still recognise that real car designers are better. So if I buy a car that I think looks good, I'll leave it alone. I don't order a butter chicken from the Light of Nepal and then start adding some extra ingredients I brought along from home.

  In fairness to Jaguar, the 'Sports Collection' body package is the work of the factory, so presumably all the bits will fit properly. But I can't help wondering why, if it looks so good, they don't just make it like that in the first place. And in what other arena of sporting endeavour is weight added for no performance gain? This is like an Olympic sprinter thinking he'd be better off if he was a bit fatter.

  Car manufacturers are developing an unhealthy appetite for mucking about with things that were already right. I've just driven a new and extra-sporty version of the Audi TT, which has a harder suspension, ridiculous bucket seats that feel like, well, buckets, daft alloy wheels that stick out further than the tyres and which you will kerb on the way home from the showroom and, worst of all, a black roof. They've completely ruined it. It was a seminal and much-trumpeted bit of automotive design, but somebody imagined it could be improved with a tin of Humbrol enamel. Even the Subaru Impreza Turbo, which comes sort of pre-kitted, looks better left alone.

  I know the modifled-car scene is a huge and vibrant one. I've examined the work of the lads who are into it and a lot of it is really exquisitely done and bought at the expense of still living at home with mum. Good for them. But I still don't believe I've ever seen a modified Citroen Saxo or Vauxhall Corsa that looked better than the ones Citroen and Vauxhall came up with.

  So here's a tip. If you open the fridge tonight and find that it contains, like mine, a pork chop, some potatoes and a sprig of broccoli, have pork chop with potatoes and broccoli for dinner.

  BRITAIN'S SURFACE INDUSTRY FAILS TO DELIVER

  Last year, the main road that runs perpendicular to the little road I live on was resurfaced. And I know what you're expecting me to say next.

  That it's now worse than it ever was, is covered in nasty grit that destroys underseal, and has already been dug up by the GPO to lay some new telephone cables. But no. This was by far the most professional, efficient and well-managed civil engineering project I've ever witnessed at close quarters.

  The work began at around 10 o'clock one night, when all the traffic had died down. The whole road was closed, and an army of stout men turned up with a gigantic fire-belching engine, a sort of mechanical version of that Norwegian cheese slicer, the one that you use to put parmesan shavings on the top of your salad if people are coming round for dinner.

  This thing, moving at a speed so imperceptible that in the time it took me to drink three pints and have a game of darts it had travelled only about 30 yards, removed exactly three inches from the top of the road surface while somehow avoiding the drains and manhole covers. Once the pub had shut, and because I had no one left to talk to, I went to watch the miracle unfold and have a ride on the iron horse.

  The next morning, just before the rush-hour started, the bollards, the security tape, the cheese slicer and the workers' tea tent thing were all removed and the road was opened again. It wasn't very good, because each manhole cover now assumed the proportions of Ayers Rock and the grooves left by the skimming machine tended to steer one's motorcycle into the path of oncoming traffic. But it was open.

  The next night, it was closed again. Now another roaring inferno worthy of Hieronymus Bosch himself turned up to lay the new surface, inching along the street and dispensing the gleaming, sweet-smelling blacktop of hope in its wake. By morning it was finished, and this little corner of UK PLC was back in business, thanks largely to some blokes from Poland.

  And the results were – and there really is no other word for this – perfect. People were on their hands and knees at the kerb examining the road and searching vainly for flaws. Small children were riding up and down on bicycles, marvelling at its smoothness. People in shops could be heard saying, 'Have you driven on the new road yet?' There had not been such a collective sense of wonderment since the invention of radio.

  Even now, a year on, I can find only two small patches that have been disturbed, and these have been mended almost invisibly. It really is a pleasure to arrive home by car.

  So can someone explain the appalling Horlicks that's been made of the side road running parallel to mine? It was closed and excavated for the purposes of installing a new water main, although for the most part it was simply closed. The job is now complete, and in fairness the contractor has made good the road, in the sense that I don't actually fall down a hole when I'm making my way home from th
e pub at night. But, God in heaven, it's unsightly. The new tarmac is the wrong colour, the wrong texture, and it isn't flush with the old stuff.

  How can I portray the sheer horror of these road repairs? Let me put it this way. If one of the perfectly laid green tiles from my bathroom floor was broken, this lot would come around, affix a slightly smaller brown tile of half the thickness, fill in the gaps with the wrong colour grout and then stand back and say, 'Yep, that looks pretty good.'

  It's not even an isolated case. Since noting this, I have been walking around with my head bowed, ignoring the cheery greetings of my neighbours, totally absorbed in studying the road surface. Everywhere I look it's a patchwork of cack-handed repairs completed so shoddily that it's a mystery the place isn't littered with spilled bicyclists. Why is this? It can't be any harder or more expensive to repair a road properly than it is to do it badly.

  Tadek, Jarek and Marik have shown that first-class road repairs are possible in Britain. Yet, for some reason, we don't seem to think it matters beyond the main thoroughfares. The people around here studiously mend their window frames, grow brightly coloured shrubs and flowers in their front gardens and paint their front doors in amusing colours. Yet this model of English urban splendour faces a road that appears to have been imported from 1990s Bosnia.

  The side roads of England are a disgrace. Can somebody please explain why?

  MY CUP RUNNETH OVER AND INTO THE CENTRE CONSOLE

  Some time ago, the national press published the findings of a report in which continental Europeans denounced the British as 'a nation of coffee philistines'.

  An important point was missed in all this. We are not coffee philistines at all; we have become philistines because of coffee. There is now barely a corner of a British high street that hasn't been commandeered by a bean-bashing multinational of some kind, and within them can be found people talking in a strange and subversive code. You'd be forgiven for wondering how the nation had survived until now without a regular double skinny latte mocha choca top before work.