Did you see that television series about the Galapagos Islands? God, I want to
go. It looked like the most perfect place on Earth. Iceland with the
thermostat turned up, and lots of animals to laugh at.
But of course there’s a problem. If you want to see a flock of those
blue-footed boobies, or a seal playing a hearty game of bug-the-sea-lizard,
you have to spend four years in various different airports, followed by a
dose of jet lag so horrid that each eyelash will weigh more than a caber.
I’m afraid this is always the way. Every dream has a drawback. You may fancy
the idea of owning a Ferrari Enzo, but after three fast starts it will need
a new clutch and at every roundabout you’ll have the problem that you won’t
be able to see what’s coming. So you’ll have to use the Force, which is fine
if you are a Jedi Knight, which of course you aren’t.
So okay then. You while away the hours dreaming of owning a small cottage by
the sea. Great. But the reality of a second home is that you’re always 75
miles away from a clean pair of underpants.
Then you have those people who turn up on X Factor every week saying that what
they most want, what they really want more than anything else, is to be
famous.
Now of course fame does have certain advantages . . . but there are obvious
disadvantages too, such as for instance the
fact that every time you go to a public convenience people will whip out their
camera-phones and try to take photographs of your gentlemen’s area. This
becomes wearisome.
And consider this: if you are even mildly famous, people will feel they have
the right to come up to you in the street and tell you you’re fat or ugly,
or that you’re no good at your job.
Try to imagine what that feels like.
Now hold that thought and imagine how it feels if you spend the rest of your
time surrounded by agents and managers who do nothing but shower you with
the rose petals of flattery. This sends you bonkers.
In extreme cases, fame can even mean you end up with a small African baby
called Dave.
It also means you can’t lie when you’re in a taxi. One of the great gifts of
anonymity is being able to tell the driver that you’re the world’s
first homosexual astronaut, or that you’re employed by Stevie Nicks to adjust
her gusset when she’s on stage. But when you’re Nicholas Parsons you just
can’t do this.
What’s more, you can’t ever shake off fame — it’s not like dandruff. So if you
decide one day that you’ve had enough, that you don’t want people to take
pictures of your privates any more and that you don’t want an African baby
called Dave, well that’s tough. You will always be “the bloke who used to be
Peter Purves”.
And that gets me back onto the scent of this morning’s theory: the surefire
certainty that all of life’s pleasures are tainted with a dollop of
unpleasantness. Chocolate tastes delicious but it makes you fat. A moustache
masks your inadequacies as a man, but it makes you look like a nitwit. And a
powerful car will be fun to drive, but it will smash up your skeleton every
time you drive over a bump.
I mean it. Someone, somewhere, has decided that any low-slung, sleek-looking
car with a big, thrusting engine must be “sporty”, so it has to have
suspension that’s made from pig iron and rocks.
This is idiotic. If you take a careful look at the sort of people who buy
low-slung, sleek-looking cars with big thrusting engines, some — for sure—
are footballists who won’t mind the discomfort of a rock-hard ride. But
most, I reckon, are slightly paunchy middle-aged men and women who are way
past the days when it was either acceptable, or indeed possible, to sleep on
the floor after a party.
People with enough money to buy and insure fast cars are usually of an age
when their own chassis are starting to fall prey to osteoarthritis, or even
osteoporosis. Which means that if they run over a pothole they need to be
isolated from the bump or their hips will come apart and their ribcage will
turn to dust; you cannot bring a car safely to a halt if this sort of thing
happens.
It’s one of the reasons I’m so intrigued by the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder,
because here is a car with a shouty V10 engine and bright orange seats,
which you can buy equipped with what’s called a “comfort pack”.
In other words, you can have the speed and the looks and the noise, but you
don’t have to come home every night with your legs held onto what’s left of
your torso by nothing more than skin.
It’s also why I have fallen so very badly in love with the new Jaguar XKR. It
sits on fat, low-profile tyres and has aluminium gills so you expect it to
be as hard as a sideboard and as unforgiving as an enraged barbary ape.
But you’d be wrong, because it is wonderfully soft and compliant. Getting out
of, say, an Aston Martin V8 Vantage and into an XKR is like climbing off a
kitchen chair and getting into bed.
Yes of course the Aston is a sharper drive; it turns into corners more
aggressively and hangs on more tenaciously, but when do you ever drive on
the limit anyway? And even if the answer is “sometimes”, the Jaguar is still
remarkably good. Despite the softness, it is very, very competent in the
bends.
After a few laps of the Top Gear test track I actually felt that it had been
deliberately set up to look good in our power-sliding shots. I know of no
other car that’s so easy to kick out of shape and hold there until the tyres
burst. I absolutely loved it.
I also loved the creamy-smooth automatic transmission, the remarkably spacious
boot and the fact that I really could get two of my children into what look
like ridiculously small back seats.
The new XKR then, is a car you can dream about that doesn’t really have a
spike in the middle. It won’t make you fat. It doesn’t make you go blind.
And you don’t have to have an African baby called Dave.
Sure, the supercharged engine doesn’t provide as much power as you’ll get from
a Mercedes or a BMW. And yes, the interior does look a bit weedy for what is
actually a £70,000 package. So yes, you might be tempted to buy German
instead, and that’s just fine. But don’t come crying to me when you run over
a Catseye and find that your left leg falls off.
And oh how I’d love to end it there, on a note of jingoistic pride. But sadly
I cannot.
Because the first car I tested suffered from a flat battery. No big deal, you
might think, except that with its keyless entry system, there was no way of
opening the door to get in, and with an electric handbrake no way of moving
the car either. And then the rear parcel shelf fell off . . . and the
Bluetooth wouldn’t work.
Fortunately the second car I tested was much better — to begin with. But then
its sat nav went on the blink, and the passenger airbag warning light came
on. And then the rear parcel shelf disintegrated in that one, too.
A spokesman for Jaguar insisted that both cars were pre-production models and
that all the faults will be fixed before the cars go on sale.
The parcel shelf, apparently, was a last-minute addition after it was found
that if you drove over a sharp bump with luggage in the boot it could bounce
straight through the rear window. I’m assured that tougher clips have been
specified.
And the sat nav? It overheats, and so it’s been decided that the system used
on cars specified for Middle Eastern countries will be fitted here in the UK
too. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re on top of things!” Of course he’s bound
to say that, but I hope he’s right. It would be a shame to think I had found
a dream with no dark centre, only to discover that it’s actually as volcanic
and as unpredictable as the very thing that kicked us off this morning — the
Galapagos Islands.
