Notes From the Hard Shoulder Read online

  For confirmation of this, look no further than our obsession with in-car cup holders. Over its brief history, the cup holder as found in European and Japanese cars has evolved from a token fixture intended to persuade Americans to buy the car (US sales of the Jaguar XJ once suffered for the car's want of one) to a device of such cunning and complexity that it can embody more engineering and design expertise than once went into a whole vehicle. And yet the only thing that will fit safely into a cup holder is a cardboard cup from a coffee-shop chain.

  Meanwhile, tea – the drink that made Britain great – has been virtually forgotten. Tea is the sustainer of honest toil and remains the second most important commodity of the British building trade after sugar. Some historians believe that the mildly medicinal quality of tea actually encouraged industrialisation, because it allowed our manufacturing centres to proliferate quicker than the bowel disorders that would otherwise have destroyed their populations. Apart from anything else, a Frenchman or Italian, fuelled by espresso that could be used to build roads, would have been far too jittery to sit down patiently and invent the steam engine or the flying shuttle.

  Of course, a nominal cup of tea can be bought from Cafe Nation or Buckstars or whatever these left-wing chattering houses are called, but it is a dismal offering in which bag, tepid water and milk have all been introduced to the vessel simultaneously. Furthermore, tea cannot really be enjoyed out of cardboard. It should be served in a chipped ceramic mug (if engaged in something manly, such as roofing or restoring an old sports car) or a bone china cup and saucer (if there is any risk, however slight, of a visit from your mother). Curiously, neither of these things will fit in a car's cup holder.

  The cup holder, then, can be regarded at best as the perpetrator of a dangerous fad; at worst as the cradle of the enemies of Britishness.

  The problem becomes even more acute if you fancy a proper drink. The instant I joined Salim Khoury at the Telegraph Motor Show, I sensed that he would go home a disappointed man. We had come to test the versatility of cup holders.

  Khoury is manager of the American Bar at The Savoy, where he has worked since 1969. He came to Britain from his native Beirut, where he learned the subtleties of cocktail making in response to the demands of a then enormous American hotel clientele. Yet despite the predominantly American image of drinks such as the Manhattan and the Cosmopolitan, he maintains that 'Britain really comes top of the world in cocktails; in making them and in creating them.' His most recent invention is the Telesuite, a new cocktail to celebrate the inauguration of the Savoy's electronic virtual-conferencing arrangement with New York's Waldorf Astoria. The ingredients include absinthe, which is known to be conducive to brainstorming.

  Khoury comes equipped as a sort of roving international ambassador of correct cocktail etiquette. His briefcase is a beautiful wood-inlaid aluminium job divided into foam-lined compartments for measuring jug, log-handled stirring spoon, fruit knife, ice bucket, a strainer for taking the pith, ice tongs, a champagne stopper and, of course, the silver shaker itself. 'I stir my Martinis. I never shake,' he says, in response to the inevitable comparison with Bond.

  He also brings a selection of glasses, some of them traditional, such as the typical champagne flute, and some of them the trademarks of his bar, such as the Savoy's own more generous champagne goblet, the Martini glass that has been an unassailable feature of the hotel since the '20s, and a huge cut-glass balloon suitable for cognac – a particular favourite of Churchill, apparently.

  Sadly, none of them fit in a cup holder.

  Cup holders can be divided into two basic types. There is the first phase of development, where they took the simple form of a tapered cup-shaped hollow somewhere on the facia, there to satisfy the supposed demand for cup holders at minimum expense. The most pathetic example of Phase One cup holders probably occurred on a Seat Arosa I once owned, in which the inside of the glovebox lid boasted two vague circular indentations. They were little more than a desperate grasp at cup-holder credibility, a sort of visual indication to Place Cups Here, nothing more. But that was in the mid-'90s, a time when it was suddenly believed that not having a cup holder was like admitting to still having drum brakes at the front.

  Phase One cup holders still survive on plenty of cars and are at least suitable for storing mobile phones. They might even accept the base of a champagne flute or wine glass, but a lot depends on location. In the VW Beetle, for example, the diameter of the cup holes is slightly smaller than that of the base of Khoury's Martini glass, and in any case the Martini would have to be tipped on to its side in order to clear the bottom of the dashboard's central binnacle before final insertion. The only drink that can safely be turned on its side is one with a lid on it, which immediately puts us back in the hands of Cafe Nero.

  The service is rather better on the Rolls-Royce stand, and especially in the rear of the Phantom, which is a good venue for a drink. Here, the cup-holder tray – essentially still a Phase One type – extends from beneath the seat and will at least accept the pint pot Khoury brought along at my personal insistence (pints not actually being available in the American Bar), since it has sufficient headroom. Rolls-Royce will also supply a proper drinks cabinet, complete with glasses, if desired. But at £240,000 one has to wonder why it isn't standard. You can find a mini bar in a £50 hotel room these days.

  Phase Two cup holders are much more fatuous. These are the spring-loaded, extending and retracting type that testify to cup-holder oneupmanship on the part of car manufacturers. Once the novelty of simply having a cup holder wore off – and that happened pretty quickly – it became important for car owners to be able to impress passengers with cup-holder complexity. Top speeds and 0-60mph times have clearly been usurped by the number of stages in your cup holder's deployment. Some of them emerge like time-lapsed film of a daffodil opening, or expand into a sort of plastic balletic first position.

  Especially idiotic examples of Phase Two cup holders – but there are many more – occur in the new BMW 5-Series and the Saab 9-3. In the BMW, the central holder not only sprouts from the dashboard, it actually follows a curved path towards the driving seat, as if reaching an extra inch or two for your cappuccino grande might be too much effort.

  But Saab can beat that. Its offering is so geometrically baffling that it stands as a testimony to the lifetime's work of Euclid. And you thought the electric hood was clever. The whole assembly collapses into a slot no broader than a disposable biro and is, in purely mechanical terms, a brilliant achievement.

  But for what? Khoury's Cosmopolitan, a fine drink in which 'flavour is more important than alcoholic content, absolutely', will either fall out or snap the device clean off. In the BMW, the base of the White Lady glass can be coaxed past the sprung lip intended to hold your king-size Americano in check, but then, because the lip is like a barb, cannot be extracted unless it is turned on its side. It can't be turned on its side until the contents have been drunk. We are now in a cup-holder Catch 22 situation, and the only answer seems to be to turn the car upside down and empty the peerless beverage into a bucket.

  This whole cup-holder thing really hasn't been thought through properly. All credit is due to Citroen, then, for maintaining, with the Pluriel, an immutable that was established with the Mini – namely, that the door pockets should be broad enough to accommodate a wine bottle. But for the glasses? Nothing.

  There are two conclusions to be drawn from this impromptu investigation into cup holders. The first is that the amount of wit and ingenuity being discharged in the design of them is out of all proportion to the import of their function. There isn't a car out there, no matter how good, in which the same effort couldn't be applied to something more important.

  But the second is more encouraging, especially to those who, rightly, are engaged in campaigning against drink driving.

  Relax. It's pretty much impossible anyway.

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

  There are a few simple things I r
equire of government ministers. Taking a broad view, I would be quite interested to know what they are going to do about the funding of the NHS, since it's a very complicated business and I won't pretend for a moment to understand it. A few of them have made it their lives' work, so I'm prepared to defer to them on that one.

  On a more personal level, and since they are ultimately responsible for the people who might possibly be able to help me, I'd like to know what government is proposing to do about the bloke who climbed through my window and nicked my portable telly.

  There are other issues that are no doubt their concern: the pensions crisis, benefit fraud, the war in Iraq, gay vicars (no, not gay vicars) and what the Monty Python team called the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow. These are all worthy of detailed study by suitably qualified people.

  But what I don't need is politicians setting me an example, unless it's Charles Kennedy, since he likes a drink and so do I. I especially don't want them wasting valuable Commons time worrying about what sort of car I should drive, because I can work that one out for myself.

  Apparently, some of these people are being offered the option of a ministerial Toyota Prius or a bio-fuelled Jaguar, while at the same time supporting a special tax on 4 x 4 cars in the interests of the environment. Nothing could be more irrelevant.

  Let's assume, for the purposes of argument, that global warming is a real threat and that energy consumption is at the root of it. So that would make big, overweight and thirsty 4 x 4s a bad thing, obvious-ly.

  And what difference, exactly, is a tax going to make to that? If you're rich enough to run a big 4 x 4, a bit of extra tax isn't going to bother you. More to the point, how does tax save the planet? If 4 x 4s are such a bad thing, why doesn't the government simply ban them? I conclude that they don't want us to stop driving them at all. They just want some more money.

  And the same goes for smoking. If lung disease is such an issue, and the government feels duty bound to do something about it, why isn't smoking illegal? Taking heroin is illegal, after all. The answer must surely be that smoking is ultimately good for the nation's coffers, and that nobody really wants us to stop. Same goes for binge drinking and driving around in cars.

  I was asked to take part in a radio debate about this 4 x 4 tax business, and I dearly wish I'd been available to do so. On the panel was a man from an organisation called something like the Federation Against All-Wheel Drive; that's not quite right but I'm buggered if I'm going to dignify their mealy-mouthed cause by looking it up and getting it right. What I would say to this man is this: if you want to do something good for the world, can't you think of something better than preaching to us about the exact technical specification of the cars we're driving? Can't you go and make some soup for the poor, or mend some old dear's central heating boiler?

  I'm not here to defend the motor industry, since it's big and ugly enough to do that for itself. But I will say this. In the 10 years or so that I have been writing about cars, it has made an unparalleled effort to clean up its act. My car today is between 20 and 50 times less polluting than the ones I struggled to own as a student. It caused less pollution during its manufacture, it causes less pollution in use, and it will cause less when it's thrown away.

  What other industry or area of commerce has made a similar effort? Fashion? Construction? Other modes of transport? Publishing? Consumer electronics? I can't name one. Every now and then someone comes up with a totally fatuous statistic that shows, for example, how much less CO2 would be produced if we turned our stereos off instead of leaving them on standby. Is that it?

  Well, you might be thinking, the car was always a big culprit. But I'm not so sure. Figures I've heard state that road transport (and remember – that includes stinky Latvian tour buses as well as your Vectra) accounts for anything between 11 and 20 per cent of all so-called greenhouse gases. Even if it's 20 per cent, I'm left wondering about where the other four-fifths are coming from, and yet I hear nothing – nothing – about this in any populist debate about the environment. All I hear is some sanctimonious cant about how if I buy a slightly smaller car everything will be all right.

  If I were in power, and I thought taxation was the sovereign salve for all environmental ills, here are a few of the things that would suddenly start costing you a lot more: vegetables grown in Israel and flown to your supermarket, when the same ones are growing just as well in England; replacement kitchens, since the one you have undoubtedly works perfectly well; bottled water from France, since there's perfectly good stuff in the tap; plastic carrier bags, which aren't even made here but are produced in places like China, and even if we recycle them they're sent back to China to be made into more carrier bags and then transported here in ships that burn thousands of litres of heavy fuel oil every day; and so on. These are real-world concerns at least the equal of the Volvo XC-90's fuel consumption. Yet the only person I know who talks intelligently on these matters is, remarkably, a car enthusiast.

  I'm not going to be lectured about my driving habits by people who probably haven't bothered to check their loft insulation in the last decade. I have, as it happens, and I've improved it. Leave us alone, and leave our cars alone as well.

  Still no news on the stolen telly, by the way.

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

  I've got the builders in this week. It's quite a big job – two new bathrooms, decorating throughout, plus a few structural alterations. The whole lot will probably take a couple of months to complete and after one week I'm already over budget, because I hadn't factored in the cost of sugar.

  I favour a sort of post-modernist school lavatory chic look for the bachelor household, so on the whole have gone for white stuff. White walls, for example, and white porcelain. Wall tiles look suitably municipal in white and I only ever buy pure white bog roll.

  But then we come to the question of the stairs, which have gone uncarpeted for years, the money allotted for the job going to Moto Guzzi. But this time I have studiously binned the Guzzi brochure and immersed myself in the John Lewis website instead. I was going to cover the entire floor in seagrass or some other form of monastic rush matting, but then I had a thought.

  How would it look, I wondered, if the stair treads were alternately orange and lemon? That way I could start from a lemon hallway and arrive, purged by the acetic, at an orange landing. John Lewis sell both orange and lemon carpet, so it must be possible.

  And then I thought a bit harder about the bathroom floors. White is all very well, and suitably redolent of those hotels situated on roundabouts in which I seem to spend so much of my life these days, but would a riot of terrazzo look better? Curiously, there is a shop just up the road specialising in the stuff, and they do a particularly nice lime-green version. Perhaps we have arrived at that apocalyptic moment in time when the avocado bathroom suite has once again become acceptable, too.

  But that's the great thing about renovating the home. As Walt Disney said of animation, you can portray anything that the mind can conceive. There is a massive industry devoted to humouring your bad judgement and several TV programmes inspired by the idea of amateur designers ruining perfectly good houses through the medium of power tools.

  No such indulgence from the motor trade. Most new cars come with perhaps half-a-dozen choices of standard interior trim, all of them very, very boring.

  Even Porsche are guilty of this. My Boxster was available with just five standard interior colours. The options list featured another five. I went for a special dark-brown leather at huge expense and then paid more to have some panels in the black they would have been in had I not said anything. Yet when I look at it – monument to good taste though it is – I can't help thinking that it still has a leather interior like every other Porsche. I've only meddled in the colour scheme.

  Meanwhile Jeremy, who has roundly denounced the Porsche and has spent two years proclaiming that the Honda S2000 is the best roadster money can buy, has bought a Mercedes SLK. Seven
standard interior colours were available and in order to break free from the tyranny of German taste he had to resort to the bespoke and very costly 'Designo' range of hues. He now has black seats with red inserts. It looks quite good (though not as good as my Porsche, obviously) but why is it such a big deal? Red and black are hardly the new magnolia. Cars in the '50s had red and black interiors.

  I wouldn't mind, but down at my local DIY superstore literally thousands of shades of emulsion are available, and all of them can be produced for you in a few minutes by a youth who wasn't charismatic enough to become an estate agent. The tile shop offers so much choice that I could tile the whole of my road without using any one design twice. Modern manufacturing methods should mean that the same freedom is available to people specifying the seats, floor mats and facia of a new car. But what do we get? Biscuit beige, black and elephant-arse grey. Why? You wouldn't have that at home.

  I do get the impression that the motor industry thinks we all need its guidance on matters of interior design. But this is ludicrous. Next time you're in a showroom, have a look at the salesman's tie. Would you let this man choose your new kitchen?

  I've ordered the orange and lemon carpet, by the way. And the terrazzo. And I know what some of you are thinking: you're thinking that all this would look revolting. And you may be right, but since it's my house it's my business.

  And if you don't like it you don't have to come and stay here.

  PORSCHE OUTPERFORMS DESKTOP PRINTER – SHOCK

  I spent this morning swearing at my computer printer. I'm no technophobe, but we have here one of those consumer devices assembled with superglue, inside which there are apparently 'no user-serviceable parts', so the only tool left in the engineer manque's box is his 99-piece precision profanity set.