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Get me a rope before Mandelson wipes us all out | Jeremy Clarkson – Times Online
Get me a rope before Mandelson wipes us all out | Jeremy Clarkson – Times Online.
I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.
He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt onto in the meantime.
I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.
There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.
Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist. And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”
It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson- skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?
You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.
You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany … because you just can’t.
The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.
Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.
I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.
So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit.
Hemingway 1923
We can’t ever go back to the old things or try and get the “old kick” out of something or find things the way we remembered them.
We have them as we remembered them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds.
Sheep Racing
Charity sheep racing last weekend. It’s going to be the new big thing I tell you!
Winning Tickets
“To an English Friend in Africa” by Ben Okri
To An English friend In Africa
Be grateful for freedom
To see other dreams.
Bless your loneliness as much as you drank
Of your former companionships.
All that you are experiencing now
Will become moods of future joys
So bless it all.
Do not think your ways superior
To another’s
Do not venture to judge
But see things with fresh and open eyes
Do not condemn
But praise what you can
And when you can’t be silent.
Time is now a gift for you
A gift of freedom
To think and remember and understand
The ever perplexing past
And to re-create yourself anew
In order to transform time.
Live while you are alive.
Learn the ways of silence and wisdom
Learn to act, learn a new speech
Learn to be what you are in the seed of your spirit
Learn to free yourself from all things that have moulded you
And which limit your secret and undiscovered road.
Remember that all things which happen
To you are raw materials
Endlessly fertile
Endlessly yielding of thoughts that could change
Your life and go on doing for ever.
Never forget to pray and be thankful
For all the things good or bad on the rich road;
For everything is changeable
So long as you live while you are alive.
Fear not, but be full of light and love;
Fear not but be alert and receptive;
Fear not but act decisively when you should;
Fear not, but know when to stop;
Fear not for you are loved by me;
Ben Okri
Johnny Oonyack Rides The River
Johnny on his big daft KTM, he really needs to get a boat.
Homemade Motorized Bike
Homemade Motorized Bike Pays Tribute to Motorcycles of Yesteryear
James Hough is a lawyer by profession but a gearhead at heart. He’s always tinkering with engines and building things from scratch. About a year ago, he combined the two passions to create the Houghmade Cycle Works 71, a motorized bicycle that pays homage to the racing motorcycles of the early 20th century.
“I had been looking for a project and saw online that someone had put an engine on an old Schwinn,” Hough says. “I was inspired by that and thought it would be a fun project, an outlet for my desire to build. I thought it would be fun to ride around the neighborhood and to run errands. The 100-plus mpg didn’t hurt.”
Kesh My Arse Weekend
Off to Ireland next weekend on the moto bike. Got a nice route on back roads to get from Dublin to the village of Kesh in County Fermanagh.
Full write up now readable here.
Dub to Kesh
Lost In France
Just planned a route down to the South of France for my trip in August. Didn’t want to ride on any Motorways so this route is all “N” and “D” roads.
740 miles in total. Not sure which way to come back yet?
Route to the sun
Grantham Road, Whatton by BerryGood
A nice photo of where I live taken by a freind…
Grantham Road, Whatton by BerryGood uploaded on 6 Feb 2009 – 00:16.
Calum’s Road to The Gambia 2010
My friend Johnny is of on a ride from The Isle of Skye to Gambia. Him and some other riders are doing the ride to raise money for a worthwhile cause.
For 20 years, Calum MacLeod toiled alone to build a road to his croft on the island of Raasay, near Skye in Western Scotland.
He began the arduous job in the 1960s after failing to win public funds for an upgrade, his exploits featured in the press, on radio and television, and in the best-selling 2006 book Calum’s Road by the Raasay-based author Roger Hutchison.
Now that story has inspired the people of the villages near Kuntaur in The Gambia to build their own road supported by a local charity.
The village women use this road daily to get to the rice fields, and it is the route to the nearest secondary school, health clinic and market from which they can both buy goods and sell their produce. Most of the road has been washed away and during the rains and for some months after the rains, this road is under water.
It is dangerous for children going to school and must be very disheartening if you are sick and need to get to the clinic. People have been known to put off the visit until it is too late and this has caused unnecessary deaths.
The road is estimated to cost £130,000 – £150,000 to build.
To raise both funds and the profile of this worthy cause, a group of motorcycle enthusiasts are preparing to ride in January 2010 from the site of the original Calum’s Road on Raasay to the new Calum’s Road in the Gambia, traveling through the UK, France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania and Senegal.
Each team member will be covering the costs of the trip themselves and any donations made will go directly to the charity.
Just Giving page
My Old Mans Scooters
Old school scoots , my old man 45 years ago…….
Solo set up
Who needs expensive luggage when you’ve got a suitcase and two ex-army rucksacks…..
Combination
Touring with my Mum and their dog…….
Mum and the dog
What I'm Seeing 
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