Free And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson

Orange is strong, I want to talk via Orange; and when I’m in London, where Vodafone provides the best coverage, I want to use Vodafone. Is that impossible?
    Technically, the answer is no. But financially it’s ‘difficult’, so we’re stuck with phones that shtwang lang. krzzzzz. Hello. Hello, hello…
    Sunday 30 May 2004

We really have to draw a line under tattoos
    As the rugby World Cup drew near, Jonny Wilkinson upped his training regime a notch. He was at the ground 12 hours a day for six days a week so that when the big day came he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, miss.
    David Beckham seems to have taken a rather different approach as he prepares for the forthcoming Euro 2004 football tournament. Instead of wasting his time at the training camp, he has got himself another tattoo. His tenth, apparently.
    Worryingly, it didn’t seem to do him much good last week when England were held to a one-all draw by a Subbuteo team of Japanese little people.
    But then it’s hard to see how a tattoo might improve anyone’s footballing skills.
    In fact, it’s hard to see the point of a tattoo at all.
    I remember, when I was a local newspaper reporter in the late 1970s, writing a piece about unemployment in the wake of some strike or other. One interviewee told me he had all the right qualifications but was always rejected after an interview. He couldn’t see why, but I could. It was the enormous spider’s web that had been tattooed on his face.
    There was a time when a tattoo would demonstrate that you had been in the nick or the navy, but now pretty well everyone I ever see has what looks like a huge Harley-Davidson motif peeping out of their trousers.
    Has Camilla Parker Bowles got a giant eagle with a man’s skull eating a snake on her backside? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
    No, wait. Actually I would be surprised because despite the notable exception of Lord Lichfield, who has a seahorse on his arm, and Sir Winston Churchill’s mother, who had a snake round her wrist, tattooing is still very Club Yob. It’s still the preserve of pole dancers and people with England flags fluttering from their car aerials. Abs, formerly from the band Five, has a tattoo on his nipple and I think that says it all.
    Of course, when I was 16 I fancied the notion of having a small red Che Guevara-style red star permanently etched into my left buttock.
    I didn’t, for two reasons. First, the law states that you can’t get a tattoo unless you are drunk. That’s why 18 is the minimum age.
    Second, a tattoo artist once ran his needle over my forearm to show me just what a painless experience it was. He was lying. It felt like I was being stabbed in slow motion.
    What would I have ended up with? Aids, probably, and a smudge on my bottom. What’s the point of that? Why endure all the pain and expense when you’ll have something that you’ll never see. That’s like manhandling a giant Bukhara rug all the way back from Uzbekistan and then using it to carpet your loft.
    You see these people, in
Heat
magazine usually, with half a yard of gothic symbolism plastered all over their back and you think: Do you hang your curtains pattern-side out for the neighbours to admire?
    There are other problems, too. Tattooing has been around since the dawn of time, but if we examine the work of all the great artists – Leonardo da Vinci, van Gogh, Monet – we find they would apply their skill and dexterity to just about any surface: walls, ceilings, canvas, paper. But not the human body.
    At no point did Constable ever think, ‘I know, I’ll paint
The Haywain
on Turner’s arse.’
    Tattoo art is invariably awful. David Beckham today is beginning to look like an Iron Maiden album cover. But then, look at the average tattoo artist.
    Maybe, if my children were being held hostage, I would let Tracey Emin loose with the needles, but not a bald, 18-stone Hell’s Angel with most of Travis Perkins’s stockroom stuck through his nose.
    I wouldn’t mind, but