Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars. Boris Johnson
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Jima memorial—apart from their rolling eyes and their trembling trigger fingers.
‘What’s up?’ I asked one, tapping him on the shoulder. He pointed to the field, where the inky crows were flapping over the stooks and the poppies. It seemed someone had heard a shot. About half a mile away. You could tell the Americans had only just arrived.
Vuk even went to the headquarters of the KLA in Pristina, and he stuck it for a full 15 minutes while the youths in red armbands sidled up to him and asked him questions—first in Albanian, then more pointedly in Serbo-Croat. And now this self-styled Serb maniac was a pusillanimous pussy, and his hands were clenched on the clammy wheel in a kind of rigor mortis, and I found myself moaning, ‘Not so fast.’
You soon understand the risks of driving in a war zone. Bombs? Phooey. I’d been bombed in late May, a couple of hours after arriving in Serbia, while driving down the deserted highway through Vojvodin. Wump wump wump wump went the precision munitions 300 yards away on our left, and the clouds wagged to heaven.
As I looked at the windows of his maroon Fiat Uno Testadicazzo 1.4 with bodywork about as bullet-resistant as a can of Diet Fanta, I said a little prayer.
Guns? OK, there had been one Pinter-esque pause when some Serb soldiers found out I represented the Daily Telegraph; and it was certainly my habit, going through the bosky bits, to balance my A4 Niceday pad on my head and cower behind the dashboard.
But the real risk was, of course, a car crash. ‘I very good driver. You see,’ said Vuk that morning we left Belgrade for Kosovo, in our Wacky Races-convoy of hacks. ‘This very good car,’ he said, showing off the Uno’s finer features: its ability to carry five jerrycans of petrol; the way it could accelerate in fifth.
Just to prove the Uno’s durability, he then reversed without looking and wham, our necks whipped as he crunched the bonnet behind us, a Golf belonging to Reuters. Luckily we sustained nothing more serious than a slightly squeaking door, which Vuk cured by anointing it with Coca-Cola, the drink he swore by and which expressed his rejection of Milosevic.
That is why I wasn’t so fussed by the sight of the burning houses, or the sad-eyed Serb soldiers, or the KLA sharpshooters. We smiled and waved at everyone indiscriminately, and, alarmingly, they waved and smiled back—the Serbs assuming that Vuk was a Serb heading home, and the Albanians spotting a western journalist.
‘This very good car,’ he said, showing off the Uno’s finer features: its ability to carry five jerrycans of petrol; the way it could accelerate in fifth.
No, what freaked me out were the signs of previous crashes—one car flattened like a can; that’s what happens when you hit a T-55—and trying to remember my blood group. With each fresh horror Vuk put his foot down harder, and cee-ripes, my fingers bit into the attractive leatherette Uno upholstery.
‘Jesus H Christos,’ I was murmuring when, with a rubber wail, the Uno stopped. ‘Srbija!’ shouted the Serb, and poured himself a joyous libation of Coke. So we went on, bathed with relief, until a couple of miles on he spotted one of those purple-pyjama’d military policemen—the real bastards of the Kosovo purges—lounging unshaven by the road.
He waved us down. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I whispered to Vuk. ‘Don’t stop!’ Too late. The Serb maniac grinned as that unshaven, flat-eyed gunman got in the Uno’s spacious rear seat, and stuck his Kalashnikov near my left ear, and I did my routine of pretending to be Boris Jonsson of Svenska Dagbladet for a couple of miles. ‘It was your turn to be afraid,’ said Vuk, as the militiaman got out.
As for the Uno, it’s just the job for Kosovo; particularly if, like Vuk, you’re smart enough to carry Czech plates.
Vital statistics
Engine 1116cc, 4 cylinders, 58bhp Top Speed 92mph Acceleration 0–60mph in 17.9 secs Price (1999) £150
Lexus have pitched the IS200 against the luxury car big boys. So why have they given it the voice of a girl?
Come on, baby, I say tersely to the girl, speak to me for heaven’s sake. You know how it is when you’re relying on some chick to map-read and they go all silent and sulky? We are coming down New North Road and some key decisions are in prospect. I’m not getting the help I need so I give Carol a poke with my index finger, because that’s the kind of relationship we have.
Come on, darling, we’re dawdling here in the middle of the road and there’s a gravel truck behind us that wants urgently to deliver its gravel. Is it right or left? And I jab her again, harder, because that’s the sort of guy I am, and then Carol speaks: so cool, so low, so scrotum-tighteningly thoughtful.
‘In a quarter of a mile,’ she says, ‘turn right.’
Ah, don’t you love her? She’s somewhere in her early thirties and her voice is perfectly pitched to mesh, to blend, above all not to offend the turbulent emotions of a guy lost in the sweltering Palio of the London traffic.
They’ve done tests on your average, red-blooded, Lexus-buying British male, and they’ve found that he’s a tricky customer. Give him a man’s voice telling him what to do—some jerk with a plummy accent—when he’s trying to do a U-turn in the middle of the Strand, or tax him with some toffee-nosed git correcting his choice of route, and what does he do? Under laboratory conditions your red-blooded, Lexus-buying male feels the veins in his neck become so engorged with incontinent rage that his collar button pops and, pow! He lets it all out with one savage blow of his left fist.
Crunch. Tinkle. Voice silent. Which is a pity, since Carol is the cleverest thing on four wheels. For a paltry £2,100 extra your IS200 Lexus is fitted with a GPS satellite guidance system, a gizmo of such mind-bending sophistication that to see her for the first time is to feel like a South Sea Islander seeing his first aeroplane, or stout Cortez gazing at the Pacific. Imagine a talking A–Z, bashfully unfurling herself on the dashboard every time you turn the ignition. Imagine maps, gorgeous colourful maps of every corner of the British Isles, with the one-way streets helpfully marked out.
The Lexus IS200, fitted with a GPS satellite guidance system, a gizmo of mind-bending sophistication.
Carol’s perfectly pitched to mesh, to
blend, above all not to offend the
turbulent emotions of a guy lost in the
sweltering Palio of the London traffic.
Then imagine your route illuminated by a thick blue line, every revolution of your wheels transmitted—ping—to a satellite transponder, and ping, somewhere in the inky wastes of the heavens a throbbing nose-cone breaks off from transmitting Rupert Murdoch’s ball-by-ball pornography to the people of Zimbabwe and tells your car there are exactly 150 yards to go before a right turn on the New North Road. Yes, that’s you, that blue line inching down that street before your eyes, and you gaze in rapture until—‘Whoa, sorry old fruit, didn’t see you there,’ you say to the weaving, terrified cyclist.
Ahem: that is one disadvantage—the display doesn’t show what else is on your street, and until all vehicles and pedestrians have their own satellite linkups and we can drive about on instruments only, it is as well not to ignore that amazing technological breakthrough—the transparent windscreen. ‘Whoa there’, I say to the cyclist, but thanks to the sensational disc brakes of the Lexus he is unharmed, and shakes his fist in friendly greeting.
‘In 50 yards…’ says Carol, and I think how much I love that use of yards; yes, she’s an imperial measurements sort of girl, Carol—strait-laced but sensuous, firm but tender, like an NHS nurse brusquely fluffing your pillows and then leaning over to take your temperature in fahrenheit, the watch