M1, and pull into a service station for petrol. ‘Well where else would I get gas?’ said one.
You sometimes get the impression that the Icelandic parliament is rather like a parish council presiding over a piece of geological lunacy, but it’s not. Iceland is in NATO and is a European state, even if they’ve had the good sense to keep the EC at bay.
They really have worked out a different way of life up there and it works a damn sight better than every other country I’ve ever been to. Iceland, as far as I’m concerned, is simply the best.
I wasn’t even slightly surprised to find that Reykjavik is chock-full of ex-pat Britishers who went there for a holiday once and decided not to come home. Ask them why and you always get the same answer. ‘What? Are you kidding!’
They may moan about the agonising price of everything and the desperation of living through an Icelandic winter, but they know they’re at the best party in town, and they’re not coming home.
Indeed, when you’re in Iceland, you tend to look out on the rest of the world through shit-coloured spectacles.
Iceland is God’s finest hour.
Japan
When you wake up in a Japanese hotel bedroom after a fourteen-hour flight across the international date line, you get an idea of how Dave Bowman felt at the end of
Yes, it is a hotel room with a bed, a dressing table, a television and a wardrobe. The bathroom looks normal too, right down to the fan that will not shut down unless you hit it with a hammer.
But there are little clues which suggest that this is a facsimile of a real hotel room. The carpet, for instance, is the same shade of purple as a pair of loons I had back in 1971. The easy chair is button-back and finished in ice-white plastic. None of the food listed in the room service menu is recognisable as such. I wanted bacon and eggs. I got a Thai green curry.
Then there’s the telephone. Not once during my two-week stay did I ever work it out. I think I once managed to get through to someone in England, but it sure as hell wasn’t my wife. Mostly, I ended up talking to hotel laundry boys, who’d scuttle into my room moments later, sweeping up all the clothes I’d planned to wear that day.
And I’d run after them, saying ‘no’ a lot and looking ridiculous because the hotel-issue dressing gown did about as much to protect my modesty as one of Colin Moynahan’s cardigans.
Generally speaking, international hotels have a remarkable knack of erasing any clues about what country you’re in. They’ve tried in Japan too, but they’ve failed. Miserably.
In one hotel there, in Kyoto, there was a different pair of slippers laid out in each of the suite’s many rooms. However, as they were of a size that would have given a baby blisters, I just clomped around in my cowboy boots. It’s also worth mentioning that in this hotel bedroom, there was one huge ingredient missing — a bed. Also, none of the tables or chairs had legs, and the bath was made of wood.
Even the television wasn’t normal. It doesn’t matter where you go on the planet, you always get CNN which rattles through world events in eight seconds and then does a two-hour, in-depth report on the plight of potato farmers in Idaho. The presenters look like they’re from outer space too, with their wild, staring eyes and their hurricane-proof hairdos.
But in Japan, I couldn’t get CNN, or BBC World or MTV or anything in English, which may sound arrogant but is, in fact, unusual. So I had to resort to local breakfast TV which is like nothing on earth. Men in suits lean forwards when reading the news and shout.
And if it isn’t the news, it’s a kung-fu movie where people hit each other a lot. I speak no foreign languages but can usually work out what’s going on when watching alien TV. But the programme I found that morning seemed to be a cross between
It was hopeless and anyway, it was time to go to work, which, that day, involved going to Mazda’s research and development centre fifteen miles away in Yokohama.
The lobby was huge, really gigantic and there was more purple carpeting. But stranger still, all the white plastic button-backed chairs were arranged in rows, like in an airport departure lounge. It felt about as welcoming as the cold storage room at an abattoir, so I met up with the equally bewildered crew and left.
Or tried to. The doors slid back electrically but were flanked by two porters who, as they opened, bowed. It was very charming, flattering even, but their heads were touching and there was no way past.
So I said ‘excuse me’ and they bowed a bit lower. Another ‘excuse me’ and they began to look like pre- pubescent Russian gymnasts, only smaller. One more ‘excuse me’ did it. The bows became so pronounced that their heads touched their knees and we were able to slip through.
And into real trouble. There are 121 million people in Japan and nearly all of them were porters at our hotel. As a guest, you aren’t allowed to do anything, even tip, which is embarrassing as these guys, some of whom were only three inches tall, struggled to manhandle 200 kg of camera and lighting equipment into our Mitsubishi Super Exceed people carrier. Crazy name. Crazy car.
This was to be the crew’s transport while the production team was to be chauffeur-driven by our man on the ground in a Mitsubishi Debonair, a car that was anything but.
It was very large when you looked at it from the outside but absolutely microscopic when you climbed on to one of its button-backed plastic chairs. This is because of all the equipment they’d shovelled inside. Who needs leg room when you can have a dash-mounted television screen that doubles up as a map of Tokyo?
It’s clever, this. The on-board satellite navigation processor works out exactly where you are and a small arrow points to a particular point on the map. You can then tell it where you want to go, and it works out a route — vital in a city like Tokyo which is 50 miles across.
And unlike any other large conurbation, there are no architectural changes as you move from area to area. In London, there’s no way you could confuse Cricklewood with Soho or Kensington with Docklands, but in Tokyo it all looks exactly the same — grey, cramped and, usually, wet. It’s a symphony of concrete and neon,
Still, today I was going to look upon it from the air-conditioned splendour of my Mitsubishi Debonair which, at eight o’clock in the morning, was trying to get out of the hotel car park.
At nine o’clock, it was still trying to get out of the hotel car park and there was no blood in my legs.
At ten past ten, the traffic jam moved a bit and we were off… by which I mean we were off hotel property and onto the road network. Four hours later, the fifteen-mile journey was over and we found ourselves on an industrial estate in the industrial town of Yokohama, outside the Mazda research and development centre.
Maybe here we would discover how the Japanese make their cars so well. I’d already been to one of their car factories and could find no differences at all between their processes and ours.
We have robots. They have robots. We have line workers. They have line workers. They have big digital boards showing targets. We have big digital boards showing targets. And yet, when their cars roll into the sunshine, they don’t break down. And ours do.
I’ve even asked Japanese people why this should be so and I genuinely believe they don’t know. They simply can’t work out why a car should ever go wrong.
I mean, a Japanese car made in Britain is more reliable than a European car made in Britain. Why?
And all I can assume is that errors are eliminated in the design stage; that the engineers spot potential problems before the car comes off the drawing board. Mazda’s R&D centre might provide an answer.
The man sent from the reception area to welcome the ‘respectful journalists of UK’ had brought an umbrella but it was of limited use because he was nine inches tall and I’m 6 ft 5 in. Plus, I was standing up straight and he was bent double in the best bow I would see all week.
Now on my last visit to a Japanese car factory, the workers were lined up, standing to attention, as the intercom system played Johnny Mathis’s ‘When a Child is Born’ — a good English song, said our guide.
