Free The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson Page A

donot believe this. If 65 per cent have gone, then 35 per cent must still be there. Which begs the question: where the bloody hell are they?
    West Germans are paying a special 7 per cent tax at the moment for a new infrastructure in the east. Chancellor Kohl promised this would last for three years but twelve years have elapsed and still the spending goes on.
    A recently leaked report from Wolfgang Thierse, the German parliamentary speaker, painted an apocalyptic picture of the east as a region on the verge of total collapse. We think we have problems with migration from the north of England to the south-east but ours are small fry and we are not hampered by having the lowest birth rate in the world.
    In the year before unification 220,000 babies were born in East Germany. Last year just 79,000 births were recorded.
    They are pumping billions into the former GDR so that everything over there is either freshly restored or new. The lavatories flush with a Niagara vigour. Your mobile phone works everywhere. The roads are as smooth as a computer screen. But it’s like buying a new suit for someone who is dead.
    And that brings me back to Sonderhausen on that boiling Sunday, when I had twenty minutes to find the bar before the German Grand Prix began.
    With nothing but the sun for guidance, I just made it and in my rush failed to notice that the bar was located in the worst place in the world. It was a quadrangle of jerry-built communism; a faceless ten-storey, four-sidedslab of misery and desolation. And there, in the middle of it all, was the Osterthal Gastshalle.
    I have drunk at roughneck bars in Flint, Michigan, and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. I am no stranger to the sort of places where the optics are rusty and the chairs are weapons. But the Osterthal was something else. The only light came from a brewery sign above the bar and a fruit machine in the corner. But this was enough to note that there were eight people in there, none of whom had any teeth.
    But, I said to myself, this is okay. This is a mining town. I’m from a mining town. I know that in mining towns you don’t ask for a glass of chilled Chablis. So I ordered a beer and settled back to watch the race.
    It did not last long. Pretty soon one of the toothless wonders sauntered over and offered the international hand of friendship. A cigarette. Except it wasn’t a cigarette. It was called a Cabinet and it was like smoking liquid fire. ‘Is good yah?’ said the man, helping himself to fistfuls of my Marlboros.
    Then things grew a little serious. Could I, he asked, explain what was written on the television screen? It’s just that despite the much-vaunted school system in the old GDR, he couldn’t read. But he could speak English, providing we stuck to old Doors lyrics.
    Have you ever tried this: commentating on a motor race using nothing but the words of Jim Morrison? It’s difficult. ‘Heinz-Harald Frentzen. This is the end. You’ll never look into his eyes again.’ By lap 50 I was struggling badly and, to make matters worse, they hadeach consumed 150 litres of beer and were ready for a good fight.
    Ordinarily, I guess, they would ram each other’s heads into the fruit machine but today they had a much better target: me, the western git. A living, breathing example of the faceless capitalistic machine that had moved into their town, bought the mine, asset-stripped it and shut it down.
    They had lost their jobs, the free kindergarten places for their children and most of their friends. In exchange they had got a new sewage system. Now I was facing a simple choice: watch the end of the race or get my head kicked in.
    What these people want, more than anything, is to have the Berlin Wall back. What I want, more than anything, is to know who won the Grand Prix.
    Sunday 1 July 2001

Wising Up to the EU After My Tussles in Brussels
    Ordinarily I don’t talk about the European Union. But when you are in Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the capital of