Clarkson on Cars by Jeremy Clarkson Page B

notepaper, consider two things. Firstly, who are the people that break into cars? Do you know one?
    No, of course you don’t. No one does, so they must come from
somewhere else
.
    Secondly, who the hell is buying all the stereos they steal? Where are all the shops that sell them? And if what they’re selling is obviously stolen and on offer in such mind-boggling numbers, why on earth can’t someone with a firearms licence pay the vendor a call?
    You can’t pay them a call because it isn’t a them. It’s a he, a sort of Thatcherday Fagin who lives underground, distributing ecstasy tabs with gay abandon.
    I promise that if I actually catch someone in my car, I will not stop hitting them over the head with something blunt until they are in as many pieces as the glass they broke to get in.

In a Flap
    Imagine, for a moment, the face of an opera aficionado if, halfway through a performance of
Don Giovanni
at Covent Garden, Bruce Springsteen bounded on stage and began a 120 decibel rendition of ‘Born To Run’.
    Or picture, if you will, the depths to which a prison warder’s jaw would drop if Ronnie Biggs appeared at the door of Wands-worth jail asking if his bedroom was still free.
    Presumably neither Ronnie nor Bruce could be persuaded to stage these feats but if you, like me, enjoy watching innocent strangers in a flap, all is not lost – just try letting someone out of a side road in London.
    It’s a relatively simple procedure. Let’s say you’re in a slow-moving queue of traffic on Baker Street and you see a BMW driver who has quite obviously been waiting for some time to pull out (easy: he’ll look like a non-opera buff at a performance of
Don Giovanni
). Simply stop and with a huge smile on your face, flash your lights, indicating that he may emerge into the traffic stream.
    After he’s looked gormlessly around to make sure you’re not waving at a friend, and then peered into your eyes to ascertain there isn’t a hint of lunacy hidden within their depths, the flap begins.
    Once he has assured himself your intentions are genuine, his left hand will dart for the gear lever – put in neutral ten minutes earlier because the clutch leg was getting tired. Not only will the hapless hand in consequence drop the cigarette entrusted to it moments before but it will miss first gear anyway, and more often than not hit reverse. Happily, the tired clutch leg will have been slower on the uptake so passers-by will only be treated to an earful of crunching cogs rather than the sight of a BMW lurching unceremoniously backwards into the window of Mr Patel’s sandwich bar.
    Wait a little longer and the kangaroo petrol-powered BMW will be in front of you, complete with a driver equipped for the next month with the best ‘guess what happened to me’ story any Londoner could wish to relate.
    Strangers to the city (yes, they exist) will be baffled by this scenario, but it isn’t as crazy as it sounds. In London you do not let people in, make no allowances for the elderly or infirm, treat red traffic lights as no more than advisory stop signals and, if you plan to survive with your wings intact, you become bloody arrogant.
    London is, of course, an exception: to some, horribly frightening; to others, a challenge that needs mastering. There are those who will drive miles to avoid any contact with its streets and yet also those who regard the new traffic lights at Hyde Park Corner as the brainchild of a spoilsport.
    It is not, of course, only London that offers the motorist an insight into its inhabitants. It works on a worldwide scale. If one encounters a crashed or broken down vehicle in Pakistan, one simply makes a new road round it. In America, one wonders how on earth drivers can direct their huge automobiles through the haze of cigar smoke and the glare from oncoming sports jackets. In France, they haven’t yet learned that you no longer yield to the right, and in Italy no one yields to anyone.
    Nor is the phenomenon