Clarkson on the Bugatti Veyron In a rare moment of reflection,
Jeremy admits he can be wrong. Even over the Bugatti Veyron…
Sometimes, I wish I was James May. Obviously, I don’t want his jumpers, his hair or his collection of Bach records. Nor do I want his house, his cars, his accent, his ability to mend motorcycles or the leather ballet boots he bought recently. But sometimes I do wish I had his regimented, organised mind because that would make my life as a columnist so much easier. Take Richard Littlejohn, for example. Present him with a news story and you know exactly what he’s going to make of it.
And it was the same story with the late Auberon Waugh. When you read in his autobiography that he was three when he learned to hate the working classes, you know what his take’s going to be on everything from the French riots to Big Brother.
James is the same. James likes his beer to be brown and his house to be beige. I therefore know what James will think of a new car long before he actually drives it. Poncy, usually. And I know he’ll continue to call it poncy until the day he dies.
I’m rubbish at this. I change my mind six or seven times before I get out of bed.
‘I try on opinions like I try on clothes, standing in front of a mirror and wondering if they suit me’
One minute, I think the only way to deal with disaffected Muslim youths is to drop a bomb on them. The next I think the solution is to drop a bomb on America.
I try on opinions like I try on clothes, standing in front of a mirror and wondering if they suit me. Sometimes, I take them home and realise I made a bad choice, so I throw them away and get new ones.
This gets me into all sorts of trouble because I can have a definite, firmly held view on, say, a new Peugeot and then, when I drive it again, I can’t remember what on earth that view might have been.
People sometimes stop me in the street and are alarmed to find I sing the praises of something I destroyed in print just two weeks earlier.
Take the McLaren F1. When it came out, I said it was a stupid car because it had a stupid price tag. You’d have needed to win the premium bond jackpot twice to have bought such a thing, and then there’d have been nothing left over for shoes, or supper.
“Why dream”, I asked, “about something there’s no point dreaming about?”
