Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [12]
Really? We're there, on average, about once a week. The airfield is very large, and we occupy the bit right in the middle with our test track. The nearest house is a long way away. I can accept that the steady drone of Clarkson shouting 'poweeeer!' would be quite irksome if you were relaxing in the garden of an afternoon, but the occasional and distant squeal of tyres around the Hammerhead is surely no more intrusive than the chirp of a randy blackbird.
But we live in an era when a single complaint has the weight of a 20,000,000-signature petition delivered to Downing Street. Consider the programme itself. If one person rings or writes to complain that Jeremy has been rude about the Liberal Democrats or that I've said 'cock', the producer is obliged to investigate it and do something about it. Why? Important work is being done at Top Gear. It's thanks to Top Gear that the new Koenigsegg has a rear wing, and that the motor industry knows not to waste its time and money trying to develop a convertible people carrier. If people had complained about Barnes Wallis's bomb bouncing through their back yards, or the Flying Scotsman making an irritating whistling noise, nothing would ever have been achieved and Britain would be renowned the world over only for being very quiet.
It's the same story with the flying club. The people who complain about the aeroplane noise forget that the person flying the airliner that takes them on holiday to Spain will most likely have started flying at a local airfield, often at great personal expense. If people like me weren't there supporting it by flying a wonky circuit over the village, everyone would have to go to Whitby on the train instead.
What else do these people complain about? Talking in restaurants? Babies crying at feeding time? Long grass rustling in the wind? Velcro? They could make a bigger contribution to the fight against noise pollution if they all simultaneously piped down.
Everybody shut up. You're beginning to get on my nerves.
IN CASE YOU'RE READING THIS ON THE BOG, HERE ARE SOME EQUATIONS OF MOTION
Professor Stephen Hawking once averred that for every mathematical equation he included in his book A Brief History of Time, the readership would be halved. This gives us:
(Where Ra is the actual readership, Rp is the potential readership, and N is the number of mathematical quotations. And if you think I'm making this up, it's all been checked by Yan-Chee Yu of the Oxford University Mathematical Institute. So there.)
This leads every other one of us rather neatly to the work of the Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli (1700-82), whose work on fluid flow showed us, in simplified form at least, that:
(Where P is the static pressure, p is the density, and V is the velocity.)
What Bernoulli was saying, in essence, is that when the pressure in a fluid system is reduced (by a constriction, for example), the velocity must increase, and vice versa. The rate at which the fluid flows will remain the same. It's hugely useful stuff if you design the air intakes for racing cars.
If, however, you are simply annoyed at being stuck in traffic jams at roadworks, you may prefer Bernoulli in its layman's form, which is known as May's Motorway and Dual Carriageway Jam Avoidance Velocity Modulation Principle. This states that when one or more lanes of a busy multi-lane road are closed, the speed limit in the remaining lanes must be increased if the traffic is to keep flowing smoothly.
But here we arrive at a socio-political problem. For years it has been accepted that the most dangerous job in Britain is that of trawlerman. Recent research shows that a trawlerman is some 50 times more likely to be killed or injured at work than, say, me. If he is not despatched by the cold, the cruel sea or a rusty chain, he will be starved to death by the iniquities of EU fishing regulations.
A few years back he was briefly usurped by elephant handlers, since they are few in number but two had