Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars. Boris Johnson

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Big Boris and the small Smart car made a great double act…well, his

      builders and the Camden clampers thought they were a funny pair

       LITTLE AND LARGE

      Big Boris and the small Smart car made a great ouble act…well, his builders and the Camden clampers

       thought they were a funny pair

      You know, that Smart car could not have turned up at a better time, tactically speaking. The kitchen had no floor and wiring dangled pathetically from the walls where the stove and other vital appliances awaited installation. In our supposedly wonderful new sitting-room the fireplaces were gashes in the wall, from where there leaked increasing quantities of black dust which made the children cough. Every morning, about a dozen builders would turn up, spread their tins of dhal, chapati and okra across the lunar surface of the floor, and then begin an interminable, ruminative feast.

      ‘Smart?’ I spat. ‘What’s so smart about a machine you can’t turn on?’

      ‘How much longer?’ we begged Bishi, the foreman with fascinating holes in the gristly parts of his ears. ‘How long?’ we wheezed with plaster-coated lungs, two weeks after the deadline had elapsed.

      And Bishi the builder would grin, scratch his perforated ears and announce that, ‘Brickie has not turned up!’ And as for the skein of tangled pipes that presently served as the bathroom, it all depended on the plumber. Where was the plumber? ‘Plumber is thinking,’ said the foreman, and invited us to imagine his colleague cross-legged at home, meditating on the precise angle of the overflow.

      One dark hour before dawn, shivering under the duvet, I suddenly grasped the game of Bishi and Co. What was it about this sadistic go-slow? They doubted me, that’s what it was.

      They looked at me and saw a mere hack, a drudge who churns out articles by hand—a manual labourer! With their keen sense of caste, of hierarchy, they doubted—entirely reasonably, I may say—that I would be good for the final £30,000. And that was why they passed the brinjal pickle and delayed the completion of our brushed-concrete kitchen floor; and that was why they had put off finishing the patio. They wanted to see the colour of my money!

      The cheek! Of course we had the money. It was just a flow thing. The dosh was backed up in some blocked U-bend in Barclays, Reading, waiting for a touch of the spanner from my Premier Service personal banker who, like the plumber, was presumably ‘thinking’.

      All I needed, it hit me, was a sign; a concrete and eloquent testimony to my wealth and station in life.

      And that very morning, just as Bishi and Co arrived, a liveried huissier from the offices of Smart Car UK was to be seen in our street. ‘Acha!’ they exclaimed, as they drank in the glossy cuboid with all the rapt attention of the crowd on the Bombay maidan when Pakistan have six to win and an over in hand.

      ‘It is a Mercedes!’ moaned Bishi. ‘Mercedes!’ hissed the number two man. And as the word was passed down the line to the Painter, Tile Man, Concrete Mixer, Plumber (for it was he) and Brickie (he, too), I could feel my stock rising by the second, like some air conditioning company on the Delhi Bourse.

      Quite forgetting their hectic timetable, the builders stayed to watch; if only to satisfy themselves that the machine was really mine.

      Expertly locating the door handle among the eezigrip Swatch-designed panels—which can be mixed and matched from a range of upbeat pastel tones—I got in. Soon the admiring faces of the builders were lost to view. Not that the car had moved anywhere. The windows, though, were slightly steaming up as I tried and tried to find the ignition. Through the mist of the glorified goldfish bowl I could now sense that they knew this was not my car.

      ‘Smart?’ I spat, jabbing the key at every orifice in the fascia.‘What’s so smart about a machine you can’t even turn on?’ The central concept of Smart, according to the bumf, is ‘simplicity’. At Mercedes HQ in Dortmund, logicians with high, papery foreheads and lozenge-shaped spectacles have, in a fit of Freudian ecstasy, taken Car back to its infancy. The result is that everything is chunky and rounded in easy-wipe, vomit-resistant Fisher-Price plastic.

       Vital statistics

      The Smart Car was launched in 1998 as the ultimate city runabout.

      Engine 600cc, 6-speed manual gearbox, 3 cylinders Top speed 87mph Acceleration 0–40mph in 6.5 secs Price (1999) from £8,499

      At the very best, this is either a Kiddikar or a girlie car. It would be absolutely fine, I was thinking, if you were an It girl with a brace of topiary-tailed poodles in the back seat—or if you were proposing to drive it accidentally-on-purpose into Prince William’s South of France swimming pool.

      In fact, I seem to remember Peter Purves driving just such a car in my 1974 Blue Peter Annual. He drove it to Paris and I have it in my head that he parked it sideways on the Champs-Elysées—exactly the sort of stunt the Smart can pull. And here I was, a quarter of a century later, the Peter Purves of GQ magazine, and I couldn’t turn the bloody thing on.

      Until at once, with a savage downwards jab at the key like a bad-tempered two-year-old, I accidentally found the right hole; by the handbrake for some reason (‘Natürlich, Gottlob! What is starting but the opposite of stopping?’) and vroom!

      A colleague from GQ believes the car is like a motorbike with four wheels. ‘There is nothing that can beat it away from the lights,’ he says. That must depend, I think, on who is at the controls. I do not think that I would have been beaten by an old woman in a bath chair as we kangarooed away from the lights on Liverpool Road. But you should not rule it out.

      Once I’d sussed out the Play Station-style, automatic six-speed gearbox, a vague sense of fun started to take over. I cannot pretend that I tested my colleague’s assertion that it can reach 90mph, certainly not on the route between Islington and the Spectator’s offices in Holborn. But if, like me, you rather like left-hand drive, and believe that the so-called motoring authorities encourage an aversion in the hope of deterring the ripped-off British public from buying cheaper cars from the continent; and if you think you might rather enjoy weaving around in a souped-up 600cc beer crate, then you might be a Smart kind of guy or gal.

      Everything in the Mercedes is chunky

       and rounded, in easy-wipe, vomit-

       resistant Fisher-Price plastic.

      You might enjoy squeezing its rump into a space no larger than a bath mat; though I should warn you that its charm has not yet penetrated the traffic wardens of Camden. First they clamped it. Then they just removed it—gone; tossed, perhaps, like a Dinky toy into some municipal cupboard.

      There’s no car smart enough to get itself out of that one. When I got home, on foot, Bishi and Co were tactful enough not to bring the matter up.