The World According to Clarkson - Softcover

Clarkson, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141017899 ISBN 13: 9780141017891

Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Synopsis

Jeremy Clarkson shares his opinions on just about everything in The World According to Clarkson. Jeremy Clarkson has seen rather more of the world than most. He has, as they say, been around a bit. And as a result, he's got one or two things to tell us about how it all works; and being Jeremy Clarkson he's not about to voice them quietly, humbly, and without great dollops of humor. In The World According to Clarkson, he reveals why it is that too much science is bad for our health, 1970s rock music is nothing to be ashamed of, hunting foxes while drunk and wearing night-sights is neither big nor clever, we must work harder to get rid of cricket, and that he likes the Germans (well, sometimes). With a strong dose of common sense that is rarely, if ever, found inside the M25, Clarkson hilariously attacks the pompous, the ridiculous, the absurd, and the downright idiotic, while also celebrating the eccentric, the clever, and the sheer bloody brilliant. Less a manifesto for living and more a road map to modern life, The World According to Clarkson is the funniest book you'll read this year. Don't leave home without it. The World According to Clarkson is a hilarious collection of Jeremy's Sunday Times columns and the first in his The World According to Clarkson series which also includes And Another Thing; For Crying Out Loud! and How Hard Can It Be?

About this title

About the Author

Jeremy Clarkson made his name presenting a poky motoring program on BBC2 called Top Gear. He left to forge a career in other directions before ending up back on Top Gear again.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Another Day’s Holiday? Please, Give Me a Break
According to a poll, the vast majority of people questionedas they struggled back to work last week thoughtthat England should have followed Scotland’s lead andmade Tuesday a bank holiday.Two things strike me as odd here. First, that anyonecould be bothered to undertake such research and,second, that anyone in their right mind could think thatthe Christmas break was in some way too short.I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morningI had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all thenewspapers and theGuardian and then . . . and then what?By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang afew pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man cameto replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then Itried to fix the electric gates, which work only whenthere’s an omega in the month. So I went down thedrive with a spanner, and later another man came to putthem back together again.I was just about to start on the Aga, which had brokendown on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife tookme on one side by my earlobe and explained that buildersdo not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, sowriters should not build on their days off. It’s expensiveand it can be dangerous, she said. She’s right. We have these lights in the dining roomwhich are supposed to project stars onto the table below.It has never really bothered me that the light seeps outof the sides so the stars are invisible; but when you arebored, this is exactly the sort of thing that gets on yournerves.So I bought some gaffer tape and suddenly my life hada purpose. There was something to do.Mercifully, Christmas intervened before I could doany more damage, but then it went away again and oncemore I found myself staring at the day through the wrongend of a pair of binoculars. Each morning, bed and theblessed relief of unconsciousness seemed so far away.I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless tripsto the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehowmissed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided tobuy a footstool.I took the entire family to the sort of gifty-wifty shopwhere the smell of pot-pourri is so pungent that it makesyou go cross-eyed. Even though the children were lyingon the floor gagging, I still spent hours deliberatelychoosing a footstool that was too small and the wrongcolour so that I could waste some more time taking itback.The next day, still gently redolent of Delia Smith’sknicker drawer, I decided to buy the wrong sort ofantique filing cabinet. But after the footstool debacle mywife said no. So it seemed appropriate that I shoulddevelop some kind of illness. This is a good idea whenyou are at a loose end because everything, up to andincluding herpes, is better than being bored.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0141017899
• ISBN 13: 9780141017891
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352