How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [27]
Unfortunately, the whole forty-two-day thing now seems likely to be a dead duck, but don’t despair, because how’s this for a money-making idea? Simply go on a scuba-diving holiday and get lost. Obviously, you don’t want to be getting, ahem, ‘separated from the dive boat’ in Norway. Or in a gravel pit in Wakefield. It’s best to go to a place where the sea is warm. This will make your ‘ordeal’ quite comfortable. And as an added bonus there will be sharks, which will sound great after you’ve been miraculously rescued and your story is appearing in Hello! magazine.
Don’t worry – in lovely warm water the only sharks you’ll see are so small, they wouldn’t even classify as a hungry man’s starter. When a newspaper talks of ‘shark-infested waters’, though, we all immediately think of cold-water predators biting Robert Shaw in half.
Now, some housekeeping. Don’t, whatever you do, get yourself lost miles from land in some two-bit Third World backwater where all the rescue-boat captains are on heroin. You stand a pretty good chance of being out there for ever. Australia’s good. They are all used to being eaten, and because of this, the authorities will most likely send a destroyer to the rescue. This will look fantastic on the evening news and will up your saleability immensely.
Oh, and do please remember to have something pithy but brave prepared for when they haul you on board. Crying like a girl is no good unless you actually are a girl. Tony Bullimore, the round-the-world sailor, set a pretty good benchmark in this respect. He really had been in trouble, miles from anywhere and freezing cold; he’d even started to eat himself. All absolutely excellent if he’d thought to flog his story. And then, when he’d been rescued by the Aussie navy and, of course, offered counselling, he said: ‘What would I need that for? I’ve just been saved.’ Brilliant.
Next, you must choose who’s coming with you, and here there’s a big rule. No mingers. The girls must be prettier than a Caribbean sunset, partly because Hello! is not going to put someone who looks like Ann Widdecombe on the cover. The men, on the other hand, should be big and strong so that they can deal with any unfortunate attacks by cannibalistic fishermen or Portuguese men-of-war. But, critically, one must be a concave-chested prat whom you don’t like very much. Because someone has to come home with a half-eaten head, after all.
Things to pack? Well, obviously you’ll need some sandwiches so you have something to eat while you wait for the dive boat to go away. You’ll also need some sun cream, a torch, a portable sat nav system, a harpoon gun and some condoms, in case one of the pretty girls falls for the ‘Well, since we’re going to die, we might as well’ line.
Most important of all, though, you must take a camera with a flash. Last week we saw some incredibly dramatic photographs of a beautiful and healthy young woman swimming through ‘shark-infested waters’, at night, after she and some friends had been carried away by ‘fierce rip tides’ off Bali. This is textbook stuff.
The party of three Brits, a Frenchman and a Swede even came up with a fierce-looking dinosaur that had approached them when they did finally make land. It’s called the Komodo dragon and billed as the largest lizard in the world, so we have in our mind a Tyrannosaurus rex, peering through the window of their broken-down Jeep. It all sounds terrifying, and we’ll just gloss over the fact that it prefers carrion to live meat, and that they made it go away by throwing pebbles at it. Honestly, guys, it would have been more lucrative – not that you were going to sell your story, of course – if you’d scarified the Swede. We’d never have known.
Plus, it would have been better if, in the pictures you took as you sat on the island waiting for rescue, you hadn’t all been smiling.
I do hope my simple guide to making a fortune while on a lovely holiday in the Indian Ocean will come in handy this summer. Because the only way you’ll make more money is by sleeping with Wayne Rooney. And I really wouldn’t fancy that.
Sunday 15