Clarkson on Cars by Jeremy Clarkson

means 40,000 – which, say Pirelli, is way, way down on demand.
    Oh yeah? Apparently, liberated 1960s parents are now writing to Pirelli for copies of the earlier efforts to give as presents to ‘maturing offspring’.
    Of course, all this is pure hype, designed to generate mystique and consequently foster a desire to own something which is actually no more out of the ordinary than salt water.
    Certainly, it isn’t ‘acknowledged as the most potent status symbol in the world’.
    I can hear Richard Branson now: ‘Oh yes, I own several jetliners, an island in the Caribbean, a collection of beautiful hotels, a couple of boats, a number of fine cars, a hot air balloon and more houses than Barratt have ever built –
but most of all, I treasure my Pirelli calendar
.’
    And even if he really
does
get off on past efforts from the eyetie rubber boys, I doubt whether he’ll think too much of
Possessions
– which is what they’ve called the 1989 edition.
    Firstly, it’s shot by a woman. Now, women are forever telling me that I do not understand the bond of motherhood and appeal of babies, so let me tell
them
something for a change: they do not understand what men want from pictures of naked ladies.
    We want heaving chests, white beaches, glistening coconut oil and as much subtlety as you get at a Guns ‘N’ Roses concert.
    We do not want to spend fifteen minutes searching for a nipple that might or might not be in shot. And we don’t get turned on by buttocks, because
we
have them as well. Well I do anyway.
    And great store has been made this year of the photographer’s decision to use Polaroid film.
    I cannot tell the difference. You will not be able to tell the difference either.
    Anyway, what’s so great about using a film that always fades to nothing four seconds after you pull it out of the camera and is about as accurate at reproducing living colour as the male half of Peters and Lee.
    And instead of using months of the year like every other diary and calendar ever made, Pirelli have used astrological signs instead. I do not know when these are. Next year, I will go everywhere either a month early or seven months late.
    On the 3rd of Capricorn next year, for instance, I am going to a party. When should I go?
    Finally, there’s the women. They’re all ugly to varying degrees and one or two don’t even have nice figures. One’s got nipples like dinner plates.
    And another has a bottom so baggy it looks just like two sacks of King Edwards.
    I suppose though that, for the first time, Pirelli cannot be accused of exploiting women. They cannot be accused either of sexism or of favouring those born to stroll the Kings Road.
    But for heaven’s sake chaps, if Beloved can waltz in and order me to pay for two skirts, a packet of stockings and a bedside table, why can’t
I
spend even a few minutes staring wistfully at a decent pair of greased bosoms?

Rat Boy
    There are mutants in the sewers. Each night as darkness falls and a clinging fog descends to envelop the city in an eerie and impenetrable blanket, you can hear, if you listen carefully, the manhole covers sliding back.
    From deep beneath the streets, the hordes, horribly disfigured by exposure to state education, emerge into the silence. Clad in tattered rags, their eyes glint in the oddly transfused glow as they drift into the sodium lighting.
    Stealthily, they move unseen from street to street in a hunt for the currency of that mutant world beneath the catseyes.
    Down there, order has broken down and decency has become anarchy. There is no social structure as we know it; everyone is awful. The mutants only trade in two commodities. Ecstasy and car stereos.
    In order to get the drug, you need the music machines. And in order to get the music machines, you need to emerge into the old world where greed is good, where people wear double-breasted suits they bought in Next and talk into cellphones about how they’ve moved their wedge from copper to sugar.
    They watch