Free Clarkson on Cars by Jeremy Clarkson Page B

moment now because, last week, I came out from the pub and found two padlocks securing my steed to the railings. Since I’d put just the one on, it means that someone out there has a finely honed sense of humour.
    It took two hours and some seriously sophisticated cutting gear to free the beast, but the effort was to no avail. Last night it was stolen, so now I’m going back to walking.
    Unless someone steals my shoes in the meantime.

Girls and Rubber
    The Kings Road, as usual, was at a standstill. There was a gardening programme, as usual, on Radio Four, and Capital, as usual, was playing the latest splurge from Kylie Astley.
    But things could have been a whole lot worse. It was a sunnyish sort of day, and the Kings Road shopperettes were out and about, competing with one another to see who could get away with wearing the least amount of cloth around their person.
    I just sort of fiddled with the door mirror to get a better view of the one in the suede mini skirt who’d gone into Fiorucci, and then slumped down in the seat so that I could see the one in the convertible Golf without her noticing the leer that was parked on my countenance.
    I even beckoned one over and reminded her that five years earlier we’d had a few dances together at a hunt ball. She wasn’t all that bothered.
    Neither was another one impressed when I told her that we’d once shared a table in Puccis.
    Now, this is one day in the life of the Kings Road. Go down there right now and you will see attractive women, hundreds of them, deliberately being pretty.
    So, what I want to know is why on earth those who choose models for calendars don’t use the location as a hunting ground.
    Let’s face it; a lot of real models are simply not pretty. Worse, a lot of real models look as though they may have spent the last eighteen years head butting bulldozers; yet if you turn to any page in some of the glossier mags you will see them, half dressed in some bizarre fashion undergarment, half not dressed at all.
    Some of the fat slobs who man the ironmongery stalls in provincial market towns would make better subject matter. For heaven’s sake, I could do a superior job with those things you see on the Readers’ Wives pages in Paul Raymond’s
Menshouse Clubnational Only Boy
.
    Only last week, I was in Honfleur in Northern France where they were shooting the sort of picture you’ll find in a subsequent issue of
Harpers and She
.
    The photographic equipment, all three lorry-loads of it, was set up in a smashing little bar and on a table by the window they’d carefully placed a crushed Disque Bleu packet, a half-eaten croissant, a half-cup of French coffee and a model.
    Wearing the sort of coat you would more normally associate with a cartoon char lady, she had the figure of a garden hoe and the face of a long-dead turbot.
    And the problem was compounded because she was wearing bright scarlet lipstick and a layer of mascara so heavy her eyelids kept closing under the strain. Finally, she had a facial complexion and colour that reminded me of unbaked pastry.
    Thumb through any women’s magazine and occasionally you come across the sort of person you’d eat dung for, but mostly they’re the sort that would have you leaving with sonic booms.
    Never has this phenomenon been more keenly obvious than in the 1989 Pirelli calendar.
    While Unipart and a host of other component manufacturers do their level best to make their calendars sell in the face of fierce competition from the
Sun
and
Penthouse
, Pirelli claim to be in a class of their own.
    Now 25 years old, this titillatory publication was a British invention and, even now, is orchestrated from London. Top models have appeared in it, big-name photographers have been selected to shoot it.
    And each year since the whole caboodle began, the makers have kept the contents of the calendar a closely guarded secret until publication – though from whom, God only knows, so few copies are ever produced.
    Few, in 1988,