Free The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson Page B

Europe, it’s hard to stay off the subject for long.
    Yesterday I settled down in an agreeable square with a charming and erudite Irish girl who has lived here for four years. We spent four seconds on the prettiness of Bruges, eleven seconds talking about Jean-Claude Van Damme and then I could contain myself no longer.
    ‘What exactly,’ I demanded brusquely, ‘has the EU done for me?’
    I’m sorry, but the night before I had arrived at the Presidents Hotel behind two coachloads of tourists who could neither read nor understand the fantastically enquiring registration cards. It’s interesting, isn’t it: you don’t need a passport to enter Belgium, but you do need a passport number before they will let you stay the night.
    Still, it was only a small wait of two hours before I was issued with a key to what was basically a double-bedded blast furnace. Immediately, I knew this hotel was designed and run entirely for the benefit of visiting Americans, a people who seem unable to cope unless a room is either hot enough to boil a fox or cold enough to freeze nitrogen.
    By 1 a.m. I had dragged my pillow into the minibar and was trying desperately to get some sleep when the man next door decided what he’d like to do most of all was to play squash. So he did. For about an hour.
    Having worked up a sweat, he then decided that what he needed was a nice long shower. So he did that for an hour, too. Then he figured it would be a good time to call the folks back home in lowa. Although why he used the phone I am not entirely sure.
    ‘Hey Todd,’ he yelled, ‘it’s Chuck. Listen how loud I can make my TV go.’ I haven’t had the chance to check yet but I feel fairly sure that if you look in
The Guinness Book of Records
to see who has the loudest voice in the world, you will find it’s good old Chuck. And boy, does he have a lot of friends. So many that by the time he had finished calling them all, it was time for another game of squash. Eventually, I had to call reception to ask if they would ring the man and ask him to go to sleep. I heard him pick up the phone.
    ‘Hello,’ he bellowed. ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then he put the phone down, knocked on my door and whispered at the sort of level that can splinter wood: ‘Sorry, buddy.’ Then the sun rose and in the same way that it always seems to find the crack between the sun visors in your car, it found the crack in my curtains and bored a line of pure, superheated radiation straight into my left retina, so I had to get out of the minibar and back into the Aga that was my bed.
    Understandably then, the next day I was not in the mood for small talk about Jean-Claude Van bloodyDamme. ‘Come on, ’I persisted. ‘What has theEU ever done for me?’
    My companion, a fervent Europhile, explained that she would not have been able to go to an Irish university because she had been educated in England and, as a result, could not speak Irish. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s very wonderful but how does it help me?’
    She had to agree it didn’t but, unfazed, went on to explain that because of the EU leather shoes must now sport an EU-approved symbol showing they are made of leather.
    Hmmm. I’m not sure that this, on its own, is quite enough to justify the two-centre, three-tier government with its staff of 35,000 people, especially as most of us are clever enough to recognise the difference between something that came from the bottom of a cow and something that came from the bottom of a Saudi oil well. ‘No,’ I said. ‘This leather thing is going nowhere. You must do better.’
    She told me that because of the EU designer clothes were now cheaper in the UK, but since I’m not big on Prada I don’t care. Then she said that were it not for the council of ministers there would be more air pollution. Wrong subject, I’m afraid. Twenty minutes later, after I had finished explaining precisely how little damage is being done to the world by man and his machines, she moved