CAR FEVER
The car bores essential companion
James May
www.hodder.co.uk
Also by James May
James Mays Magnificent Machines
May on Motors
Notes from the Hard Shoulder
The contents of this book first appeared in James Mays Daily Telegraph and Top Gear Magazine columns.
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright James May 2009
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.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN 978 1 848 94226 4
Book ISBN 978 0 340 99453 5
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette Livre UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NWl 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
To SFfD
Contents
Introduction
I feel that a book full of secondhand newspaper columns about motoring should begin with an apology, so here goes.
Id like to apologise for that shirt Im wearing on the cover. I know, from reading comments on the electric interweb, that many people feel quite strongly about that shirt, log its appearances on TV, discuss its sartorial merits, and implore me to get rid of it. But it isnt that simple.
You will see, if you read Old bag dies after 25 years as my friend on page 165, that I had hitherto regarded my deceased Adidas rucksack as my constant fabric companion on this uncharted journey we call life. I now realise that it was the shirt.
That shirt is now me. It is the means by which my friends recognise me, and next to which my face performs only a secondary reserve role. It would be missed if it wasnt there.
Other shirts come and go quite quickly, because they shrink, tear, get left in hotels, sustain a curry injury, and so on. But this shirt refuses to give up its shirty duties. It has at least two holes in it, its pretty threadbare, and the cuffs are badly frayed, but it just carries on. One day I will cough and it will turn into a puff of vapour to be carried away on the breeze, but until then I might as well wear it.
I could never discard a perfectly good shirt, or even a perfectly awful one if it still fits and covers up my unsightly nipples. My cleaner has taken the executive decision to turn other old shirts of mine into dusters and car polishing rags, but I have expressly forbidden her ever to do such a thing to this one.
It is the first shirt I ever bought specifically for TV appearances, and has now lasted so long, and been to so many places around the world, that it has become talismanic, like a raven at a historic building. I now take this shirt on every trip, even if I dont actually intend to wear it. For Top Gears North Pole trip I obviously had to pack a lot of noisy and unflattering cold weather protective clothing, but The Shirt was in my rucksack all the same, to protect me.
A shirt, I suspect, is a little like a cat that is allowed to go outside. Theres always the risk that it will be run over, but if it survives the first six months, then its wise enough to survive into old age. Some shirts live only for a few glorious weeks before they are cruelly snatched away by the unforgiving and indiscriminate hand of shirt fate. This shirt has already lasted for six years of almost uninterrupted use, so I reckon it will be with me until the end.
At a rough guess, because even Im not boring enough to keep a record of this sort of thing, this shirt has been washed and ironed over 500 times and has travelled at least 125,000 miles, or about half way to the moon. Yet by my calculations it is only one third of the way through its projected life, which means it should last for another 12 years. But I can easily eke that out to 15.
What really amazes me though, is that until I saw the cover design for this book, I hadnt really considered the significance of the blue flowery shirt in the formation of my character. I now realise that I dont really have any sort of job at all. Only my shirt does. I am not my body. I am not even my mind. I am merely the vessel that my shirt is wrapped around, and, as Oscar Wilde might have said, if this shirt goes, then so do I.
I hope you enjoy the motoring adventures of the blue flowery shirt as much as my shirt enjoyed writing it.
Mays Britain, a broad sunlit upland
When Im in power, there are going to be some changes around here, I can tell you. Mays Britain is going to be a better place to live.
Its all a matter of passing some very simple and patently quite overdue laws. For a start, there will be strict penalties for any eating establishment that serves normal food in a bowl, and indeed for anyone who writes eating establishment instead of restaurant.
Now: food in a bowl is quite acceptable if its one of those one-utensil, one-implement meals. Some pastas, for example; chilli con carne, cornflakes, stew, Spam and beans. But anyone caught presenting a pork chop and vegetables in something clearly intended for soup will go to prison for one year.
Similarly, the proprietor of any local who arranges sausage and mash in an artful way, instead of forming the mash into a neat Mount Fuji and inserting the sausages into it in the style of the Dandy, will be made to eat pizza and work in a municipal scullery until he or she renounces gastropubbery. No one can deny that this will make the country a better place.
And its not just about food; theres more, from the field of retail. This week, with a mate, I have tried camping for the first time in many years, and, having disposed of my childhood tent long ago in a part-exchange deal against some bicycle spares, decided to buy a new one.
The man in the camping shop described the one I eventually chose (from a picture in a book) as a two-stroke-three-man tent. I believed him. He may have believed it himself. But once it was erected it became quite clear that it was barely big enough for one normal bloke, or at a pinch two who like each other a lot. It tapered towards one end, causing unwanted intimacy, and was very low. Furthermore, the sleeping bag he sold me was also tapered, and quite patently based on a sleep-deprivation torture designed by Chairman Mao to make political prisoners confess.
Apparently, these features enhance the chances of survival in sub-zero temperatures and howling winds on the north face of a mountain. Yet the purveyor of tents must have known, when he saw me, that I was the sort of man who never imagined that a tent could be anything other than triangular in section, and who would assume a sleeping bag to be rectangular.
Fine. In Mays Britain he will be allowed to continue selling such tents. But only after he has lived in one for six months.
See? Some simple rules based on jeopardy will cure our society of many of its creeping blights while ridding it of the hideous spectre of liability-based legislation. Im not going to concern myself with the funding of the health service, immigration or the housing crisis. Ill use the appropriate experts for these. I will just concentrate on those small, nagging irritations that ruin our lives out of all proportion.
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