Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [7]
I was asked to take part in a radio debate about this 4 x 4 tax business, and I dearly wish I'd been available to do so. On the panel was a man from an organisation called something like the Federation Against All-Wheel Drive; that's not quite right but I'm buggered if I'm going to dignify their mealy-mouthed cause by looking it up and getting it right. What I would say to this man is this: if you want to do something good for the world, can't you think of something better than preaching to us about the exact technical specification of the cars we're driving? Can't you go and make some soup for the poor, or mend some old dear's central heating boiler?
I'm not here to defend the motor industry, since it's big and ugly enough to do that for itself. But I will say this. In the 10 years or so that I have been writing about cars, it has made an unparalleled effort to clean up its act. My car today is between 20 and 50 times less polluting than the ones I struggled to own as a student. It caused less pollution during its manufacture, it causes less pollution in use, and it will cause less when it's thrown away.
What other industry or area of commerce has made a similar effort? Fashion? Construction? Other modes of transport? Publishing? Consumer electronics? I can't name one. Every now and then someone comes up with a totally fatuous statistic that shows, for example, how much less CO2 would be produced if we turned our stereos off instead of leaving them on standby. Is that it?
Well, you might be thinking, the car was always a big culprit. But I'm not so sure. Figures I've heard state that road transport (and remember – that includes stinky Latvian tour buses as well as your Vectra) accounts for anything between 11 and 20 per cent of all so-called greenhouse gases. Even if it's 20 per cent, I'm left wondering about where the other four-fifths are coming from, and yet I hear nothing – nothing – about this in any populist debate about the environment. All I hear is some sanctimonious cant about how if I buy a slightly smaller car everything will be all right.
If I were in power, and I thought taxation was the sovereign salve for all environmental ills, here are a few of the things that would suddenly start costing you a lot more: vegetables grown in Israel and flown to your supermarket, when the same ones are growing just as well in England; replacement kitchens, since the one you have undoubtedly works perfectly well; bottled water from France, since there's perfectly good stuff in the tap; plastic carrier bags, which aren't even made here but are produced in places like China, and even if we recycle them they're sent back to China to be made into more carrier bags and then transported here in ships that burn thousands of litres of heavy fuel oil every day; and so on. These are real-world concerns at least the equal of the Volvo XC-90's fuel consumption. Yet the only person I know who talks intelligently on these matters is, remarkably, a car enthusiast.
I'm not going to be lectured about my driving habits by people who probably haven't bothered to check their loft insulation in the last decade. I have, as it happens, and I've improved it. Leave us alone, and leave our cars alone as well.
Still no news on the stolen telly, by the way.
ANY COLOUR YOU LIKE AS LONG AS IT'S AVAILABLE FROM DULUX
I've got the builders in this week. It's quite a big job – two new bathrooms, decorating throughout, plus a few structural alterations. The whole lot will probably take a couple of months to complete and after one week I'm already over budget, because I hadn't factored in the cost of sugar.
I favour a sort of post-modernist school lavatory chic look for the bachelor household, so on the whole have gone for white stuff. White walls, for example, and white porcelain. Wall tiles look suitably municipal in white and I only ever buy pure white bog roll.
But then we come to the question of the stairs, which have gone uncarpeted for years, the money allotted for the job going to Moto Guzzi. But this time