Global warming almost wiped out the funniest columnist in England – but Jeremy Clarkson is back and I hope he’s back to stay!
One of the most unfortunate side-effects of global warming is that it has turned one of the funniest columnists in England into a petty-minded ideologist who hasn’t been able to talk or write about anything these last years without moaning about it.
I am, I’m afraid, talking about Jeremy Clarkson – and I wish I wasn’t. As I already mentioned, he used to be so good that I was positively afraid for him. I could see his colleagues gathering outside Castle Clarkson, muttering among themselves about the evil master who lived there, their envy as sharp as their pitchforks. Yes, I could see these descendants of extras in an old Dracula movie yearning to drive a stake through their competitor’s heart…
No longer though. Clarkson has joined the ranks of the true believers – those who lose their sense of humour and sense of self by taking on the heavy burden of self-righteousness and the dead weight of their convictions.
Still, there is hope – because I haven’t come here to bury J.C. but to praise him.
Maybe he’s turned a corner, perhaps some of his real friends have taken him aside and told him a few unwelcome but necessary truths. Maybe – but I sincerely hope not! - what happened today is once last spasm, one last rising spark, before this once great columnist sinks back and ever deeper in the mire of evangelical certainty and prophetic zeal.
Still, I sincerely hope that the latter will not prove to be the case. Reading today’s wonderful column I realized for the first time how much I had truly missed the man, before he turned into yet another boring Jeremiah.
So, I hope this latest column will just be the first stop on a proud and triumphant ’soul reunion’ tour, before he settles down again to become, once more, the columnist that makes his colleagues look like B-movie extras.
By the way, if you were planning to go skiing shortly, you might want to look away now, for Clarkson has some very funny and very painful things to say about the subject. All the rest of you: enjoy, as long as you promise to go read the rest of the column in today’s online Times straight afterwards.
Rest me to say but this: Mr Clarkson, glad to have you back on form. Please don’t go away again and leave us with that boring old body snatcher of late…:
For your next holiday, why don’t you take all your money and put it on the fire? Then stand in a fridge for a week, beating your children with a baseball bat until their arms and legs break. And then, after you’ve eaten some melted cheese, dislocate your shoulder. If all of this appeals then you are probably one of the 1.3m British people who go on a skiing holiday at this time of year.
Skiing, for those of you who’ve never tried it, is an extremely expensive way of combining acute discomfort, butt-clenching embarrassment, mind-numbing fear and a light dusting of hypothermia. Plus there’s a better than evens chance that at least one member of your family will come home in a wheelchair.
The first thing you must understand is the ski boot. It is specifically designed to be as heavy as possible and to ensure that if you fall over – and you will, all the time – your leg will break at its most painful point: just above the ankle. The only way to prevent this happening is to cushion the fall with your face.
This year, on my skiing holiday, the air ambulance was lifting five newly formed paraplegics off the mountain every day.
Falling over, however, is not the greatest danger. Far worse is being hit by a teenager with baggy trousers on a snowboard. Snowboarding is like skiing, except you have absolutely no control over your direction of travel, mostly because you will have had a lot of marijuana at lunch time.
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February 27th, 2008 at 17:07
Excellent excerpt – I’ll have to check out more of this fellow’s work.
And my sentiments exactly. I’d tell you about all the injuries and strange things that happened to me when my mother forced me to learn skiing as a child, but then we’d be here all day.
I’ve never broken and bones, but I did slam right into the side of a chalet once … which, in my defense, takes great skill.
Do you have any idea how far those things are from the hills?!
February 27th, 2008 at 20:18
No idea at all, praise the Lord!
J.