For Crying Out Loud!: The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson

Author:Jeremy Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Great Britain, Humor, General
ISBN: 9780141038124
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2009-07-15T16:53:48.251000+00:00

For Crying Out Loud!

I once saw a group of people who’d taken some magic mushrooms, lying on the floor laughing hysterically at a tube of toothpaste. And toothpaste, so far as I can tell, has exactly the same comedic properties as Russell Brand.

Magic mushrooms, then, do not make you clever, or horny, or buzzy, all of which would be fine. They make you mental, and that’s not fine at all.

I don’t even like to take alcohol in such large quantities that no matter how carefully I marshal my thoughts into a coherent sentence they come out as a stream of incoherent gibberish.

Once, in Houston, Texas, I arrived back at my very large hotel and couldn’t remember either what room I was in or my name. So I had to spend the whole night trying my key in each of the doors, a job made doubly hard because they each appeared to have 16 or 17 locks. Fun? No, not really, unless the alternative is being eaten by a shark.

The worst drug, though, by a mile, is the common or garden sleeping pill. I tried one once, on a flight from Beijing to Paris, and was so removed from anything you might call reality that to this day I have no recollection of the emergency landing we made in Sharjah. Being so out of it that you can sleep through a plane crash: that’s bloody frightening.

So last weekend, when I was offered a couple of pills for the flight back to London from South Africa, I smiled and said no. But the paramedic was very pretty and very persuasive and said they were only antihistamines rather than proper sleeping pills, so I relented and as the plane took off popped them into my mouth.

The first indication that something was wrong came 20 minutes into the Martin Scorsese film I was watching. It didn’t make any sense. Mark Wahlberg had become Leonardo DiCaprio who, in turn, looked just like Matt Damon. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t care. And then I fell into such a deep sleep that, legally, doctors would have been able to remove my spleen for transplant.

The next thing I knew we had landed at Heathrow and Richard Hammond – or it could have been Matt Damon – was shaking my shoulder, pointing out that I had to get off. ‘This isn’t the Circle line,’ he said. ‘You can’t just sleep till your stop comes around again.’

I vaguely remember collecting a bag from the carousel – I think it was mine – and driving into central London to the accompaniment of many blown horns and harsh words. And I dimly recall climbing into bed thinking, ‘I’ll just have an hour’s kip before I go to work.’

And then it was five hours later, and I still wasn’t entirely sure how the world worked. I stared at my coffee machine for what must have been 20 minutes until the sheer complexity of the thing made me feel all weepy.

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