Notes From the Hard Shoulder Read online

(Where S is the new temporary speed limit, E is the existing speed limit, L is the number of lanes normally available and O is the number of lanes still open.)

  I'd be amazed if anyone is still reading this.

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

  It must be 20 years since Jimmy Savile told us that this is the age of the train, but maybe, finally, it is. Just as the last of the InterCity 125s he trumpeted so memorably terminates in the long rusty siding at the side of a scrapyard somewhere, things are looking pretty good on the permanent way.

  I've been on three trains in the last month. Two between London and Manchester operated by Virgin Trains, and one from there to Hull operated by Northern Rail or something like that. I must admit that I preferred the era when one simply turned up at 'the station' and got on 'the train' instead of arriving at a retail and dining complex with some rails attached and then standing for an hour in front of a massive flickering monitor trying to work out which of a countless number of operators will accept the brightly coloured £135 stub in your hand. But still.

  Apart from that, the whole experience was rather good. These were the new Pendolino trains; sleek, stylish and very cool. I know some railway commentators have criticised them for their weight and thirst, but they strike me as a Lexus amongst rolling stock. They are quiet, draught-free, smooth riding and very fast in an unflustered sort of way. The seats are very good, the upholstery subdued, the announcements intelligible. It's some years since I've been on a proper train and I was very pleasantly surprised.

  For example, I'd reserved a seat. In the olden days this would mean there was a bit of cardboard wedged under the antimacassar, or was until some pissed pikey removed it, chucked it on the floor and then filled the table with empty Carlsberg cans so you felt better off in the concertina bit between the coaches.

  Not any more. A little dot-matrix display above my place read 'Reserved, Mr May' so there was no argument about that.

  There was still a chance that a zealous vicar or malodorous railway enthusiast would sit next to me but, again, I was lucky. For two of the journeys I had two seats to myself, and on the third I was joined by a woman who not only smelled rather nice but didn't speak to me at all, which was marvellous.

  Crikey, even the buffet has improved. Once there was a slimy carriage offering the following range of sandwich fillings: cheese. Now there is a trolley piled high with fruit cake and pies and a big samovar thing for making hot drinks, a sort of wheeled five-star-hotel tea-and-coffee-making-facilities facility. Any more wine at all with your meal for yourself, sir? Why, yes.

  What a pleasant and, as widely claimed, efficient way to travel up the sceptered isle. London to Manchester takes just two and a quarter hours, during which one may of course work on a laptop, read important documents or hold an impromptu meeting with colleagues. Obviously I did none of these things. I looked out of the window for a bit and then fell asleep with my head resting on the seat in front, dribbling on my trousers. But if you did work in IT or a customer relations role, you could annoy everyone else on the train by talking in a loud voice about managing expectations or tapping noisily on your strawberry personal organiser. You can't do that in the car.

  However.

  I said London to Manchester takes two and a half hours. Unfortunately, it's a place in London where I don't live to a place in Manchester where I don't want to be. And here we arrive at the crux of the public transport conundrum.

  Obviously, long-distance communal travel makes sense. You wouldn't fly yourself to America in your own Cessna – you'd get on a big aeroplane with lots of other people and complete the bulk of the journey very rapidly. You wouldn't sail your own dinghy across the North Sea to Norway. You'd get on a ferry and stand around a bar with a load of lorry drivers and pimps. Lots of people seem to want to go from London to Manchester at any time, so they can all go together.

  It's the little bits at either end of the journey that cause a problem, yet it's in the towns and cities that public transport is presented as the solution to all our woes. It's rubbish. If I'd had to find my way from Manchester Station to whichever hotel I was staying in using the local buses, I'd have given up and gone home again.

  You can bang on all you like about trams, light rail, bendy buses and maglev, but until such things stop outside my front door in the space where I keep my car, they're not really any good. My local underground station – and the estate agent told me I was buying a property ideally situated for local transport facilities – is still 10 minutes' walk away, and with a big suitcase it's just too much trouble. No matter how comprehensive the public transport network becomes, there's always going to be a little bit of the journey requiring something personal.

  And let's be honest here. Posh InterCity trains are generally full of respectable people, but local public transport isn't. I'm sure London tube commuters are largely upstanding pillars of society, but there are still enough of them that smell of old pants to make the journey unsavoury.

  I have the solution. In my vision I step outside to find something like a Fiat Panda or Smart Car that doesn't belong to me but is open and starts with a simple button. There are no keys. I drive it to the station and leave it. Someone coming from Manchester then uses it to get to the offices around the corner from my house. Then someone else uses it to go to the shops. Occasionally they might pile up in one place or another, but in that case the people who we currently employ as traffic wardens are used to redistribute them a bit. It can't be any harder than running a bus service.

  And you can't nick them, because they are electronically tagged to prevent them straying beyond a radius of a few miles. This is a simple matter, one of utilising the technology so readily used to punish us as a means of liberating us instead.

  I can't really see why it wouldn't work. This is the age of the true city car – a car owned by the city.

  PART 2 – THE FUZZY EDGE OF

  AUTOMOTIVE UNDERSTANDING

  CHARLES DARWIN MAY BE ON TO SOMETHING

  I'm always slightly surprised that my cat, Fusker, can't speak. I spend many hours talking to him, but it's always a totally one-sided conversation and the chances are that the only word he vaguely understands is 'Fusker'. And he can't even say that.

  My other dependant, Woman, reckons he can't talk because he's only a cat, and that the evolution of cat technology is such that he just isn't capable of speech and for complex zoological reasons. But I'm not so sure.

  In terms of the mechanics of speaking, the cat is as well equipped as I am. He has a voice box of sorts: a mouth, a tongue, teeth. These are what we use to form words. And yet still nothing of any consequence comes out of his witless furry face. Why?

  I have been forced to conclude that Fusker remains speechless not because he is incapable of it, but because he has nothing to say. He has nothing to say because he hasn't done anything worth talking about. All he aspires to is another bowl of Munchies or the chance to go outside and look for a lady cat (even though he has no nuts, although he's too thick to realise this). He can communicate either of these desires with a simple bleat.

  I suppose it's possible that some distant ancestor of Fusker, while chomping away at his cat food, came up with the design for a separate-condenser steam engine long before James Watt did. However, he could do nothing about it, so the idea went unrecorded. He could do nothing about it because he didn't have opposed thumbs, the very attribute that allowed humankind to fashion a pointy piece of flint into a farming tool and shake off the shackle of being a hunter/gatherer. It was a relatively small step from there to variable valve timing.

  Since we're on the subject of tools I'd now like to talk about Mr Stanley and his famous knife. Any man who has owned a Stanley knife – and any man who hasn't is unworthy of his sex – will, at some point during the trimming of some linoleum or the assembly of a l/72nd-scale Messerschmitt 109, have stuck the eponymous craft instrument into his body somewhere. This week, I drove mine into the fleshy end of the thumb of m
y left hand.

  To all intents and purposes, I now have only one arm.

  If you'd like to go and stick your own Stanley knife into your own thumb, you will discover how difficult many straightforward life skills can become. Grating cheese, for example, or playing Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag' upon the piano. This is what separates us from the beasts of the field and hearth.

  Consider driving. I hadn't realised, until it was clad in a Beano-style comedy bandage, just how crucial a role my left thumb plays in this everyday activity. Denied the use of this vital receptor, driving becomes notably more difficult. Even in my old Bentley, which, as a slovenly automatic, does more than pretty much any other car to relieve its owner of the tiresome duty of operating it, I find my finer points of car control slightly compromised.

  All of which brings me, eventually, to modern car technology and driver aids, most of which have their basis in micro-electronics. They are amazing things. The injection system of a modern diesel engine can provide five separate squirts of fuel, each minutely timed and of minutely different volume, in the space of one ignition stroke – an event which, at 4,000rpm, occupies just under 0.004 seconds by my calculations. I couldn't do that.

  A drive-by-wire throttle, when you depress it in anger at the exit of a corner, will garner information from sensors monitoring, among other things, air density and temperature, limits of traction and perhaps even the steering angle. At the same time, a disposable plug-in module will be deciphering the ignition requirements in three dimensions. I couldn't begin to sort this lot out even given three hours in a silent examination room with a calculator and my lucky pencil sharpener.

  In fact, whatever computerised systems are responsible for these things are much, much better than me at punctuality, long division, data management and spatial logic. But I bet they couldn't catch a tennis ball.

  I can. I can also ride a bicycle, swim, shoot clay pigeons and pat my head while rubbing my stomach. Bosch Motronic can't do any of these things. I could even, theoretically at least, compete in the triple-jump, and I bet I'd beat that robot Honda keeps banging on about.

  So when people tell me that electronic controls are coming between the driver and the modern car, I say cobblers. Yes, the right-hand pedal in the new Golf GTi may seem a bit vicious at times, and perhaps the traction control in this or that supercar is too intrusive. I've no doubt that some electric power-steering systems are placing a barrier between the steering wheel and what the driving wheels are ultimately doing, and brake assist sometimes seems to make a mockery of the relationship between what we do with the middle pedal and what actually happens to the car. But to suggest that these things are usurping the driver is absolute nonsense.

  Electronics are merely cussed and logical, as your desktop computer will ultimately prove to be. Meanwhile, the human computer is supreme, the most remarkable electro-mechanical device ever conceived and one as yet barely understood. I now realise that when I drive my old 911 down a winding country road, pretty much every last bit of my body save perhaps my hair is toiling away at the man/machine interface, deciphering the incomprehensible mass of information coming at it and translating it through the brain into a multitude of decisions and inputs. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself without one thumb, a big toe, an eye or a buttock. We are no closer to finding a substitute for the driver than we are to finding an alternative to sperm in the reproductive process.

  The greatest driving aid in the history of motoring was fitted to the Benz Motorwagen when it was rolled out of its shed for the very first time, and it has been included in the design of every single car built since. It was you.

  And it's still you.

  NAKED MOTORCYCLE PORN SHOWING NOW

  The late and still sadly missed LJK Setright had a rather pessimistic view of bike shows. He once described them as being 'full of people on crutches looking to buy their next accident'.

  Personally, I rather like a good bike show. For a start, experience in my own garage proves that you can fit three or four bikes into the space occupied by one car, which means you don't have to walk as far as you do at the motor show. The fact that the biggest physical workout the average motoring journalist ever takes is three laps of the NEC while looking at cars strikes me as strangely ironic.

  Secondly, the atmosphere is better at a bike show. Motorcycling is still largely a hobby, and has yet to be infected with much of the glitz and fatuous marketing cant that accompany the latest launch of a sporty lifestyle vehicle for the active-minded urban sophisticate. There's rather less carpet on the stands, rather more tepid lager in cracked plastic glasses.

  And then there are the bikes. I admit that often, when I'm at home alone, I think I should give up motorcycling. I'm getting too old, too cautious, and I'm just not very good at it. I believe that 'waterproof motorcycle clothing' remains an oxymoron, and often, in the middle of a tight, greasy bend, I worry that Newton may have made a mistake, and there's some dark corner of physics where there is no equal and opposite reaction, and I'll fall off. But then I go to a bike show.

  Nothing, and I mean nothing, tugs at the strings of my Neanderthal man-being quite like an array of new bikes, and especially the type of big-bore naked motorcycles that I like. It's something to do with the way engineering, styling and the dynamic considerations are required to collaborate in the design; their utter interdependence. A motorcycle really is an extension of your being on the road, and your own mass and dimensions are a critical aspect of the way the whole thing works. There is little room for conceit on the part of its maker, and it shows.

  Because, on a naked bike especially, you can see it all. You can see the way the stylist and the mechanic have been forced to collude, to give and take, to work constructively together. Engineering considerations temper the excesses of artistry, artistry dignifies the metalworking. And it all chimes instantly with some need to climb aboard and imagine how the thing might feel, which is why bike shows are full of people sitting astride new machines and gazing blankly into the distance.

  Take Yamaha's MT01 muscle bike. One side of the engine looks like the work of dour technologists with Rotring propelling pencils wedged into spring clips in their breast pockets; the other like the fantasies of some blokes in polo-necks who would be as happy doing fashionable kitchen appliances. It appears to have a fish poacher on that side; actually, I believe it's the cover for a filter. Marvellous.

  This is why motorbikes make a better static statement than cars. Aston Martin boasts of 'power, beauty, soul', and the new V8 has it all. The power is in the superb engine, the beauty is in the sculpture of its bodywork, and the soul comes from the physical properties – the suspension set-up, the distribution of weight, all that impenetrable stuff – that make it drive the way it does. But on a motorshow stand we sense only the beauty, and feel only a distant longing inspired by some faint carnal promise. Meanwhile, the Ducati Monster is flashing its knickers at you like some metal harlot.

  It was Dr Johnson, I believe, who said something to the effect that all men feel slightly inadequate who have not at some time been a soldier. Today, he might say that all men feel cheated who have not at some time owned a motorcycle. They have somehow resisted the silent siren cry it emits even when stationary; they have not succumbed to that visceral urge to crack open the throttle and feel the beast tremble, to quest alone and armoured like some latter-day knight of Arthur's circle.

  It's there in all of us, which probably explains why bike-show exhibitors never really bother with the tiresome live-band and rollerblading displays that dog the car show. They know that there's still only one tune that really works for motorcycling, and that it will, whether we like it or not, be playing on a loop in the back of our minds, from the moment we arrive to the moment we leave with a bulging bag of brochures.

  Stop fighting it. And get your motor running.

  SOME OBSERVATIONS ON REAR-END HANDLING

  We've had the Kyoto Summit, we've had the Good Friday Agreement, and
we've had a United Nations resolution. And now I'd like all car manufacturers to sign an international gentlemen's agreement promising to leave my bottom alone.

  I'm as liberal as the next man etc. etc. but this has now gone too far. What consenting individuals get up to in the privacy of their own homes is one thing; the dead hand of a multinational directed at my buttocks is something else altogether and, to my mind, wholly unacceptable. Is nothing sacred any more?

  Now I think about it, I realise that the world's car makers have been showing an unhealthy interest in my plum duff for quite a long time. It started well over a decade ago with the widespread introduction of the heated seat, which for years has been hailed as a great thing on a cold morning. Even my 13-year-old Range Rover has seat heaters.

  But here's a thing. It's been very cold for the few days prior to my writing this, and I've been doing quite a bit of driving. Yet at no point have I walked out of my front door into the frosts and hoars and thought, 'God in heaven, my arse is cold.' It never is. My buttocks are the second biggest muscles on my body and therefore retain a huge amount of warmth. I have cold toes, cold fingers, a cold nose, cold ears and cold hair, but none of these things are catered for in the cabin of the car. I suppose Mercedes has made some effort with that Scarftronic neck-warmer fitted to the new SLK, but otherwise it's hot cross buns as usual.

  It didn't stop with the seat heater, of course. Some time in the mid-'90s I drove the first BMW 7-series fitted with the 'active seat'. The base of this 'stimulating innovation' could be set to gently rock your pelvis from side to side, supposedly in the interests of reducing backache and encouraging circulation. I tried it on a very long journey and it seemed to work, but I was very uncomfortable with the idea of a German technologist called something like Jurgen fondling my chuff at a distance.

  Mercedes responded with that massage seat thing, which incorporates some fans to extract the wurst effects of the corporate lunch. But again, I have the feeling that Herr Doktor is taking an unhealthy interest in my tradesman's.