The World According to Clarkson (8 page)

So I feel desperately sorry for the Heathrow air traffic controller who was found last week to be guilty of negligence when he tried to land a British Airways 747 on top of a British Midland Airbus. He has been demoted and sent in eternal shame to wave table tennis bats at light aircraft in the Orkneys.

The problem here is that we all make mistakes, but the result of these mistakes varies drastically depending on the environment in which we make them.

When a supermarket checkout girl incorrectly identifies a piece of broccoli as cabbage and you are overcharged by 15p, nobody really cares.

But what about the man who incorrectly identified a live bullet as blank, put it into the magazine of an SA-80 army rifle and heard later that a seventeen-year-old Royal Marine had been killed as a result?

The inquest last week recorded a verdict of accidental death and now the dead soldier’s father is said to be considering a private prosecution and a civil action against the people responsible for his son’s death. I don’t blame him, of course. I would do the same. But the fact remains that as mistakes go, loading the wrong bullets into a magazine is exactly the same as loading the wrong information about broccoli into a checkout weighing machine.

Think about the chap who was employed by P&O ferries to shut the front doors on the car ferry
Herald of Free Enterprise
. I have no doubt that he performed his
badly paid, noisy, repetitive and unpleasant job with the utmost diligence until one day, for reasons that are not clear, he forgot.

Now if he had been a warehouseman who forgot to shut the factory gates when he left for the night, there may well have been a burglary. And that may well have put a dent in the insurance company’s profit and loss account. But he wasn’t a warehouseman and, as a result of his momentary lapse, water rushed into the car deck and 90 seconds later the ship was on its side. And 193 people were dead.

He was not drunk at the time. He did not leave the doors open to see what would happen. He just fell asleep.

So what’s to be done? Well, you can employ the Health and Safety Executive to dream up the most foolproof system in the world, the sort of money-no-object set-up that I’m sure is employed at Heathrow. But the fact remains that all systems rely on human integrity to some extent and, if someone takes their eye off the ball for a moment, two jets with 500 people on board can get within 100 feet of one another.

Or you could argue that people who hold the lives of others in their hands should be paid accordingly. But I don’t think the size of a person’s bank balance affects their ability to concentrate. I mean, His Tonyness is on £163,000 a year and he makes mistakes all the time.

No. I’m afraid that fairly soon we are going to have to accept that a blame culture does not work. We are going to have to accept that doctors, no matter how much training you give them, will continue to stick
needles into people’s eyes, rather than their bottoms. We are going to have to accept that, once in a while, Land Rovers will crash onto railway lines causing trains to crash into one another. We are going to have to stop penalising people for making that most human of gestures – a mistake.

And the best way of doing this is to ban those ‘Injured at work?’ advertisements for solicitors on the backs of buses.

So long as there’s an opportunity to profit from the simple, unintentional mistakes of others, then there will always be a desire to do so. To lash out. To blame. To turn some poor unfortunate soul who just happened to be in the wrong job on the wrong day into a human punchbag.

Sunday 17 June 2001

Europe offers the discerning traveller a rich and varied tapestry of alternatives. You may go salmon fishing in lceland or sailing off Greece. You may get down and dirty on the French Riviera or high as a kite in Amsterdam. You can bop till you drop in Ibiza or cop a shop in London. And we haven’t even got to Italy yet.

So why then do a significant number of Americans, having decided to take that vacation of a lifetime over here, always start the tour in Germany? Because Germany is to holidays what Delia Smith is to spot welding. Perhaps it’s because they’ve heard of it. Maybe they have a brother stationed at Wiesbaden or perhaps their father did some night flying over Hamburg back in 1941. Yes, I know that’s before America joined the war, but judging by the movie
Pearl Harbor
, they don’t.

Or maybe in the brochures Germany somehow looks appealing to an American. I mean, both peoples tend to eat a little more than they should and both have a fondness for driving very large automobiles, extremely badly. Both countries also have absolutely hopeless television programmes where the hosts dress up in vivid jackets and shout meaningless instructions at the contestants. An American flicking through the 215 one-size-fits-all alternatives in his Stuttgart hotel room would feel right
at home. Until he got to Channel 216, after midnight, and found a whole new use for a dog.

Both countries enjoy the same British exports, too: Benny Hill, Mr Bean, Burberry mackintoshes. Then there’s the question of taste. Only two countries in the world would dream of teaming a tangerine bathroom suite with purple and brown carpets. And only two countries go around pretending to be democracies while burdening the people who live there with enough regulations and red tape to strangle everyone in China. Twice. In Germany, you must not brake for small dogs and you must have a licence before you can play golf. An American would nod sagely at that.

So, it would appear that Germany and America are identical twins and now you may be nodding sagely, remembering that some 25 per cent of Americans are derived from German stock. Indeed, shortly after Independence, there was a vote in the Senate on whether the official language of the fledgling USA should be English or German.

Whatever, a great many Americans spend vacation time in the Fatherland, including, just last week, a retired couple from Michigan called Wilbur and Myrtle. They packed their warm-weather gear into a selection of those suitcases that appear to be made from old office carpets, got their daughter Donna to drive them from the gated community they call home to Detroit airport, where they flew for their holiday to Cologne.

Myrtle had packed some powdered milk because she’d caught a report about foot-and-mouth disease in
Europe and figured she’d better stay safe. Wilbur was worried about catching KGB from beef that had been infected with BSM and vowed on the plane he’d stick to chicken. Both wondered if you could get chicken in Europe.

I know this because I know the man who lent them a car. They liked him very much, not simply because he spoke such good English but also because, contrary to what they’d heard, he could stand on his hind legs. Myrtle asked whether they should go to Munich because an antiques fair was in town or if it was better to visit Frankfurt which, she’d heard, was the Venice of Germany. ‘Well,’ explained my friend, ‘there is a river in Frankfurt but it’s probably stretching things a little to think of it in the same terms as Venice.’

Still undecided, they set off, and that should have been that. But just two hours later they were on the phone. It seems that they’d become a little confused and strayed into Holland, where they’d found a charming little cafe´ that did chicken.

Unfortunately, however, while they were inside someone had broken the back window of their car and helped themselves to all their belongings: not only the Huguenot felt-tile suitcases but also their passports, driving licences and Wilbur’s wallet.

Maybe the thief was a drug addict after his next fix. Or maybe he’d mistaken them for Germans and had taken everything in exchange for the theft of his father’s bicycle. Or perhaps he’d taken umbrage at their registration plate. All Cologne-registered cars this year begin
with KUT, which is Dutch for the worst word in the world.

Either way, poor old Wilbur and Myrtle were not having much luck with the police, either in Holland or Germany, to which they’d returned. They decided after just six hours in Europe that they’d had enough and were going to fly home. So they did.

The problem is, of course, that while Germany may superficially have some things in common with America, it is not even remotely similar once you go beneath the surface. There’s no ‘have a nice day’ culture in Germany. The German does not care if you have a nice day because he is a European.

I’m writing this now in a town called Zittau on the Polish border. I feel at home here.

Sunday 24 June 2001

So there I was, cruising into town with the top down when, with the crackle of freshly lit kindling, my map hoisted itself out of the passenger side footwell and, having spent a moment wrapped round my face, blew away.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem. I had the name of a bar where I could watch the Grand Prix and I even had its address. So I would simply pull over and ask someone for directions.

Unfortunately, I was in Germany where, if someone doesn’t know exactly what you are looking for, they won’t tell you at all. To make matters worse, I was in the eastern part of the country where there are no people to ask anyway.

I first noticed the problem in the achingly beautiful Saxony town of Zittau which, at 8.30 on a Friday night, was deserted. It was like a scene from
On the Beach
. Further up the autobahn in the city of Zwickow,
Aida
was playing at the opera house but there were no queues. The shops were full of expensive cutlery sets but there were no shoppers. There were car parks but no cars.

The latest figures suggest that since the Berlin Wall came down, some towns have seen 65 per cent of the population migrate to the west in search of work. I do
not believe this. If 65 per cent have gone, then 35 per cent must still be there. Which begs the question: where the bloody hell are they?

West Germans are paying a special 7 per cent tax at the moment for a new infrastructure in the east. Chancellor Kohl promised this would last for three years but twelve years have elapsed and still the spending goes on.

A recently leaked report from Wolfgang Thierse, the German parliamentary speaker, painted an apocalyptic picture of the east as a region on the verge of total collapse. We think we have problems with migration from the north of England to the south-east but ours are small fry and we are not hampered by having the lowest birth rate in the world.

In the year before unification 220,000 babies were born in East Germany. Last year just 79,000 births were recorded.

They are pumping billions into the former GDR so that everything over there is either freshly restored or new. The lavatories flush with a Niagara vigour. Your mobile phone works everywhere. The roads are as smooth as a computer screen. But it’s like buying a new suit for someone who is dead.

And that brings me back to Sonderhausen on that boiling Sunday, when I had twenty minutes to find the bar before the German Grand Prix began.

With nothing but the sun for guidance, I just made it and in my rush failed to notice that the bar was located in the worst place in the world. It was a quadrangle of jerry-built communism; a faceless ten-storey, four-sided
slab of misery and desolation. And there, in the middle of it all, was the Osterthal Gastshalle.

I have drunk at roughneck bars in Flint, Michigan, and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. I am no stranger to the sort of places where the optics are rusty and the chairs are weapons. But the Osterthal was something else. The only light came from a brewery sign above the bar and a fruit machine in the corner. But this was enough to note that there were eight people in there, none of whom had any teeth.

But, I said to myself, this is okay. This is a mining town. I’m from a mining town. I know that in mining towns you don’t ask for a glass of chilled Chablis. So I ordered a beer and settled back to watch the race.

It did not last long. Pretty soon one of the toothless wonders sauntered over and offered the international hand of friendship. A cigarette. Except it wasn’t a cigarette. It was called a Cabinet and it was like smoking liquid fire. ‘Is good yah?’ said the man, helping himself to fistfuls of my Marlboros.

Then things grew a little serious. Could I, he asked, explain what was written on the television screen? It’s just that despite the much-vaunted school system in the old GDR, he couldn’t read. But he could speak English, providing we stuck to old Doors lyrics.

Have you ever tried this: commentating on a motor race using nothing but the words of Jim Morrison? It’s difficult. ‘Heinz-Harald Frentzen. This is the end. You’ll never look into his eyes again.’ By lap 50 I was struggling badly and, to make matters worse, they had
each consumed 150 litres of beer and were ready for a good fight.

Ordinarily, I guess, they would ram each other’s heads into the fruit machine but today they had a much better target: me, the western git. A living, breathing example of the faceless capitalistic machine that had moved into their town, bought the mine, asset-stripped it and shut it down.

They had lost their jobs, the free kindergarten places for their children and most of their friends. In exchange they had got a new sewage system. Now I was facing a simple choice: watch the end of the race or get my head kicked in.

What these people want, more than anything, is to have the Berlin Wall back. What I want, more than anything, is to know who won the Grand Prix.

Sunday 1 July 2001

Ordinarily I don’t talk about the European Union. But when you are in Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the capital of Europe, it’s hard to stay off the subject for long.

Yesterday I settled down in an agreeable square with a charming and erudite Irish girl who has lived here for four years. We spent four seconds on the prettiness of Bruges, eleven seconds talking about Jean-Claude Van Damme and then I could contain myself no longer.

‘What exactly,’ I demanded brusquely, ‘has the EU done for me?’

I’m sorry, but the night before I had arrived at the Presidents Hotel behind two coachloads of tourists who could neither read nor understand the fantastically enquiring registration cards. It’s interesting, isn’t it: you don’t need a passport to enter Belgium, but you do need a passport number before they will let you stay the night.