A couple of weeks ago Michael Palin was to be found in a Tibetan yak herder’s
hairy tent, making cheese. After much plunging with a sort of broom handle,
he said wistfully: “There is a much slower pace of life here.”
Well yes, Michael, that’s true, because when I want some cheese I don’t have
to milk a yak. I simply climb into my supercharged Mercedes and pop to the
supermarket. This gives me more time to play shoot-’em-up Star Wars games on
my son’s PlayStation.
Later, Palin, on a trek around the Himalayas for your Sunday-evening viewing
pleasure, adopted a rueful tone and asked the yak herder’s English-speaking
friend if he felt Tibet’s culture and history were being lost now that China
was in the driving seat. The man didn’t really seem to give a toss. He
wasn’t worried about whether his son felt Tibetan or Chinese just so long as
he got a good education, learnt Engrish, and was able to go to university in
Peking. Or maybe Oxford.
And there you have the central thrust of my point. Contrary to what we learn
in this country from books, and television, there is no nobility in poverty.
There is nothing charming about a worn-out loincloth. Making cheese is
boring. And given the chance I’m pretty sure that most yak herders would
rather spend their time shooting Ewoks in the face on a PlayStation.
Ray Mears is the worst offender. He’s the BBC’s bushcraft specialist and keeps
winding up his programmes by explaining that we have much to learn from
whatever ancient tribe he’s been with that week. No we haven’t. We don’t
need to cure a headache by rubbing bark into the palms of our hands, because
we have Nurofen.
The simple fact of the matter is that remote tribes from the middle of Africa,
or Alaska or whichever godforsaken hellhole he’s in, have a great deal more
to learn from us than we do from them. They start fires by rubbing gull
beaks together because they don't have Swan Vesta. They eat boiled soil
because they don’t have takeaway pizzas. And they while away their evenings
singing tuneless old songs because they don’t have Robbie Williams or the
Gibson Les Paul electric guitar.
We see the same sort of thing closer to home. When was the last time someone
went on Parkinson and said they were born in a large house with a
silver spoon in their mouth. All of them claim to have been brought up with
outdoor plumbing, as though this will create a halo of empathy. Why? There’s
no dignity is traipsing down the garden for a crap. That’s why no one does
it any more.
Cilla Black, for instance, never talks about the large house where she lives
now; it’s always the crummy one in which she was brought up. Well if she
thinks being poor is so much fun why doesn’t she give all her money to a
Tibetan yak herder and hitch-hike back to Liverpool.
I love not being poor. I love that I was born in England in the later part of
the 20th century. I love that I don’t have to make cheese from the juice of
a yak, or headache pills from bark, or butter from the hooves of a caribou.
I love that I can eat out whenever I want, and wash away the residue using a
flushing commode.
Yes, people who sit around cross-legged all day eating twigs and leaves have
better, whiter teeth than me, but I can go to the fridge whenever I want and
drink a refreshing bottle of Coke which, if you stop and think for a moment,
has to be one of life’s greatest pleasures. Cold Coke, from the traditional
bottle, when you’re thirsty beats the spectacle of a gleaming white urinal
when you’ve been driving for 40 miles with crossed legs. Cold Coke when
you’re thirsty is up there with Uma Thurman saying: “Oh, okay then. Just
this once.”
What I love even more is that we don’t even consider Coke to be a luxury good.
In parts of Africa people have to walk for 40 miles for a drink of filtered
mud, and when they get there and have shooed away the leopards and
wildebeest, out of the savannah pops a whitey-boy TV documentary crew to say
how noble they are.
Rubbish. They would chop off one of their yaks’ legs for a glass of cold
Coca-Cola. To them it’s a 42-year-old single malt, a Gulfstream V and a
Pershing 85 all rolled into a single, slim-hipped bottle. And it’s much the
same story with the subject of this week’s column. The Ford Mondeo.
This car holds a special place in my heart because when it was being designed
Ford inadvertently created the best camera tracking car in the business.
You probably think, when you watch Top Gear, that all the moving
pictures are taken from some elaborate pick-up truck with scaffolding and
jib arms. But in fact we always use a Mondeo because it has a good, smooth
ride and because its sloping tailgate, when raised, gives the cameraman a
180-degree field of fire.
Of course you’re probably not that bothered about this particular feature. In
fact you’re not bothered about the Mondeo at all, because so far as you’re
concerned the days when you bought a Ford passed on the same day Terry
and June was axed and the council moved your bog from the vegetable
patch into a cupboard under the stairs.
You think of it like Coke. Fine when you’re on holiday and you need a set of
wheels from Hertz, but back at home you’d rather have an Alcopop BMW or an
organic fruit-whip Audi.
This is a shame because the Mondeo is better-looking than most of its rivals,
and better equipped, too. It’s also cheaper, more spacious, better to drive
and surprisingly well screwed together.
If an alien, or even an African, were to come to Britain, he simply wouldn’t
understand why so many people pay so much more to get so much less.
Unless, of course, you happened to be running around in the new £22,000 ST
TDCi version, which isn’t very good at all.
Sold only in Britain, it’s styled to look like the flagship V6 with huge
wheels and lowered suspension, but under the bonnet you get a diesel engine
that makes the sounds of the canal when you start it up. And the sounds of
the bus when you get going.
This is the most powerful diesel engine ever slotted into a Mondeo. It’s a 2.2
litre that gets the car from 0 to 62 in 8.7sec and onwards to 138mph. And
you’ll still be able to average 37 or maybe even 40mpg. Not bad, you might
be thinking, as you scan the ads for used BMWs.
Well keep on scanning, because to make the Mondeo achieve this kind of
performance you really have to work the six-speed gearbox. If you lose
concentration for a moment you’re out of the power band, spluttering, or
right at the top of it, sounding like a narrowboat that’s about to go
critical.
This is the problem with overly powerful diesel engines. On paper the torque
figures look good, but in reality the grunt comes in a short, sharp lumps.
And the Mondeo is a particularly bad offender. Also, on full beam, the
headlamps are rubbish.
Don’t you love that. That we can dismiss a car because it has poor full-beam
headlamps; even though the latest research shows we used dipped beam these
days for 98% of the time.
Ray Mears would tell us that we’re spoilt, but I’ll tell you what. I’d far
rather that Africa and South America joined our way of life, than that we
joined theirs.
