I
believe this is the fourth volume in the series The World According to
Clarkson, an annual compilation of Jeremy Clarkson’s columns in the British
Sunday Times. This one is entitled How Hard Can It Be? (ISBN
978-0-141-04876-5, Penguin Books, 2011).
As in his previous three volumes, Clarkson expounds on
all his pet hobby-horses, the government and its inadequacies, the Health
and Safety legislation and men in orange visi-jackets, his color-coded
dustbins, the Archbishop of Canterbury and anything in the slightest
considered politically correct.
Clarkson’s writing style is that of hyperbole, and it is
this that makes one smile, and smile you certainly do. And he does not shy
away from subjects that you would normally gloss over, or tsk-tsk about.
African famine? Clarkson blithely reports that “In Kenya, hunger has driven
half the population to set fire to the other half.” “I’ve argued time and
time again that the old trade unionists and CND lesbians didn’t go away.
They just morphed into environmentalists.”
Sports come in for their fair share of vitriol. Tennis is
described as “15,000 phlebitis-ridden Surrey women in their size 16 summer
frocks furiously banging their bingo wings together every time that poor
Frenchie (Richard Gasquet) made a mistake. And raising what’s left of the
roof every time Murray, who looks like a piece of string with a knot in it,
got a point.”
He waxes eloquent when he comes to looking at
linguistics. He looks at the 460,000 pounds spent by the government on
preparing a language and dialect atlas of Britain. He mentions that in
Britain there is such diversity. “In Britain you can drive for just one day
and each time you stop for petrol, the cashier will sound different. It’s
Punjabi in the morning, Hindi at lunchtime and Tamil in the evening.”
Clarkson has also no time for the ‘scientific’ stories
that appear in the popular press, “I’m only giving you the scientific news
from Tuesday - we heard that women who take HRT will have a stroke; that
smokers get depressed more easily; that Range Rovers cause global warming;
and that if you take pills for high blood pressure you will become
stick-thin and, I don’t know, fall through grates in the street or be taken
away by a stork.” Once again using the absurd to make his point in that
humorous way.
With Clarkson’s scathing contributions to show how the
world should be, it is interesting to pause for a moment to see if he has
actually been successful in turning the societal tide. When you look and see
that this fourth book is actually reprinting his 2008 columns, you then
understand that nothing has been changed in the three years since then.
Clarkson is in many ways a literary King Canute (Knut to be pedantically
correct) trying to turn the tide, and being equally as successful as the
Scandinavian royal.
With 52 weekly contributions, you get plenty to chuckle
over for your B. 430 at Bookazine, but you need to have a personal healthy
dislike of all things PC to get the most out of this book.
