And not a Yorkie in sight

Another couple of short, non-me based stories today.

When ah were but a slip o' a lad I went t'college for t'learn all abaht compewtuhs an' th' like.

(Sorry, can't keep that up, it's hurting my brain)

I had this lecturer, can't remember his name for the life of me, he was great... Funny, knowledgeable, mad as a hat full of colossal squids at an all you can eat Japanese restaurant and a martyr to borderline dissociative identity disorder.  He'd come to be a Computer Science teacher after a long time as an HGV driver in the late 70's and he told a couple of stories once that came to me this morning after seeing a 42 tonne truck driver trying to back a container truck down a farm track.

-oOo-

He'd been working for this particular company for a few months, when they sent him on a trip to the sea-side on a nice summers day to deliver some... ah... some... Well, I suppose it doesn't really matter what it was, but he did his drop and thought that he'd park up and have a bit of a snooze in his cab.  So, he found one of those carparks that you sometimes see that have extended parking spaces for coaches and suchlike, got a nice spot where he could open his windows to hear the sea and dropped off. (I mean go to sleep, it wasn't right on the cliff edge or anything)

He woke up some hours later, looked at the clock, realised that he was late, yelled some expletives, started the truck up and started out of the Carpark.  The first thing that he had to was do a sharp left turn to get out of the parking space... And that's where the noise started, it continued when he straightened up, it was an odd kind of a grinding / dragging noise.  He stopped and looked in his mirrors thinking that he'd hit a litter bin or something, but couldn't see anything. So he pulled forwards about ten yards and the noise not only started again, but the trailer started to bounce up and down.

Then he thought that maybe the trailer brakes had jammed on and the wheels weren't turning, so he got out of the cab, and that's when he saw it - there was a car, underneath the lorry, in between the cab and the trailer wheels.  It was a convertible MGB with the top down, it must have been parked next to him as he was asleep, then as the cab swung around it'd gone between the wheels and he'd dragged it along.

Only thing was, the old chap it belonged to had seen him do it, well, he couldn't really miss him doing it, as he, and his wife, were sat in it eating their sandwiches at the time.

He moved companies shortly afterwards.

-oOo-

Another day, another company, this time he was up in the Dales (Think proper Last of the Summer Wine country) and he was completely lost.  Remember that this was before GPS Systems and mobile phones and all he had was the 1965 AA Book of the Road and a hand-written list of instructions taped to the dashboard.

He did a heroic job of trying to find the place he was supposed to be delivering to, but ended up in this little village where there was every likelihood that he was going to get roughly sodomised and then eaten.  It was hilly, very hilly and the signage was confusing, the roads hadn't been built with 8' wide, 60' long trucks in mind and he'd started to panic a bit.

Eventually he pulled over and asked this pregnant woman for directions.  Unfortunately, the combination of driving a right hand drive truck on the left, where the height of the cab means that you're 10' up in the air meant that she couldn't really hear what he was saying.  Saying turned to shouting, shouting and growing panic turned to yelling, and the yelling brought on the crying from the young lady.  He immediately regretted what he'd done, climbed down out of the cab, stuck two fingers up to the queue of traffic behind him and apologised deeply to the person whose only crime was to try to be a good Samaritan.

Let's look at that list of actions again shall we?  Just to see if anything obvious is missing:

Hilly village, Pull over, ask directions, shout, yell, regret, get out of truck, abuse other drivers, console pregnant women.

No, that all seems... Ah, wait a minute... Did you spot it?

Not a single mention of a handbrake.

The truck started to roll and gathered speed quite quickly really, by all accounts, and went off straight down the hill in the middle of the road. people were screaming, children were pointing, our hero was sprinting after it, dogs lay with cats and a mighty voice from above declared 'AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO'S NOTICED THAT THERE'S A T-JUNCTION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BLOODY HILL?' And God was right, there was a T-Junction, and on the other side of the T-Junction were more houses and shops.

Luckily, the truck had started to weave about a little by this point and clipped a Talbot Sunbeam, which wasn't big enough to stop it, but was just right to divert it enough to get it around the corner so that it could grind along the row of shops and houses, ripping off signs and smashing windows until it ground to a halt outside the local Police station.

It was shortly after that that he left driving for ever, got himself a degree, and became a teacher.

Safer for everyone I think.

*Allegedly

Did you know, Top Gear is the world's most widely watched factual TV program?

No, really, more people watch it in more countries than any other non-fiction program ever, in the history of the known universe?

It's a good format, much better than the old one. Essentially it's three 'Great Mates' (tm) Who know about cars (to a greater or lesser extent) sat on a sofa, having a bit of a chat and a cuppa.  Occasionally they scoot about a bit, test-driving (And I use the term loosely) the sort of cars we'd all like to be able to afford... It's, like, inspirational, innit?

They also cater to the celebrity lovers by letting us see famous people drive a car around a Mildly Moist track, proving that they're not brilliant at everything (apart from the tremendously annoying ones that are at least) - It's great, real family entertainment of the old school.

The three main characters play off each other perfectly,

Richard Hammond plays the diminutive, eyelid creasingly stylish one, who specialises in letting his inner child out.  He revels in the wonderment of the very act of driving and whips up tumultuous enthusiasm for every, single, solitary thing that he does.

James May is at totally the opposite end of the scale, he embodies everyone's inner 'normal bloke in the street'.  He eats pies, drives sensibly, owns a trainset, and has a healthy contempt for the flashy and corporate.

Both of these fine gentlemen do a great job of representing the audience at home of the show, and they both ride motorcycles, which obviously defines them as members of the next level of evolution.

The third member of the team, whose idea (along with producer Andy Wilman) the whole shebang was, is Jeremy Clarkson. Who does he play?  I've thought long and hard about this, on the toilet, this morning, and the best description I can come up with is The lottery-winning juvenile uncle, who after years being stuck in a dead end marriage has started his midlife crisis with pockets full of crumpled tenners, and wants to take us along for the ride and show off a bit.

So, Great show, great presenters, great cars, great premise... What's it famous for?

Well, controversy for one...

I know that most of the planet nowadays seems to be populated by swively-eyed jobsworths who claim racism, sexism, heightism, weightism, spoonerism and speciesism, homophobia, zoophobia, triskadecaphobia, coulrophobia, xanthophobia or ipovlopsychophobia about every sentence that has ever been spoken by anyone ever - But they do seem to target Top Gear more often than anything else.

OK, so occasionally they've said things about those lovely, hardworking, people, who through no fault of their own, have the misfortune to have been born in places that aren't England.  They've re-enforced the odd cultural stereotype, citing Mexicans as being lazy for instance or Romanians as all being gypsies (Which, of course, we'll all find out isn't true in 2014 when Romanian nationals are allowed to apply for permanent jobs in the UK with impunity). They also may have claimed that Albanians lean towards organised crime and added an extra part into their Albanian roadtest by trying to fit a recently deceased Albanian gentleman (Killed especially for the show) into the boots of various cars to see which the best one for a local person to own would be.

They've been accused of destroying areas of outstanding natural beauty, running into the odd tree, setting fire to campsites and promoting drinking and driving whilst becoming the first people to drive to the (magnetic) North Pole.

They're also constantly berated for not droning on and on about electric cars - Which are, most definitely, the future... So 'they' say, whoever 'they' are.

But I think that the common denominator in all of the things that Top Gear has gotten itself into trouble about is that they're all things that we'd say to each other in the pub after a few pints, then there'd be a minuscule pause followed by raucous laughter.  Even one of Mr Clarkson's more complained about diatribes, the one where he noticed that that there was a propensity for long-distance lorry drivers to murder prostitutes.  I myself may have made this connection to a couple of my lorry driving friends, who took it as the good natured ribbing it was intended to be - I would forever greet them after they had been driving a lorry, for long distances, by saying 'Alright [Insert name], where've you been? Murdered any prostitutes?' and we'd all laugh and he'd disappear into the toilet to wash his carving knife and change his clothes, which he would then burn and bury.

And a lot of the other notoriety comes from people's irrational hatred of Jeremy Clarkson.  He's just a Yorkshire lad, who came from a family that made cuddly toys and jam-jars who went to the same school as one of my mates (not at the same time though).

His character thinks the Government interferes too much in our day-to-day affairs, thinks people who vote for the Green Party are a little bit odd, Champions the cause of political incorrectness, Dislikes Rover and GM (That's the car firm, not those wonderful mutated crops that people keep committing suicide over), thinks that too many trains get delayed because loonies keep throwing themselves in front of them and has a healthy disregard for farcical speed limits.

In short, the same things that most of us think.

The only difference that I can see between us and him is that he, arguably, has the best job in the world, and we don't - So I'm just going to go with jealousy.

And bearing in mind that he's also punched Piers Morgan repeatedly in the face, you should all be jealous too.