interested in saving money.
I spent a few days hanging around with one 28-year-old guy who vehemently denied that he was a playboy, but there was some evidence to suggest he was not being absolutely honest.
First, there was his boat which, at the time, was away in America being equipped with new, more powerful engines. Then there were his cars. He said he didn’t have so many these days, only ten, but my, what a collection. There was the Bugatti, of course, the Ferrari, of course, the Porsche 911, of course, the army Jeep and the Lamborghini LM002, which he used as a day-to-day runabout. And why not? I mean, it’s ideal in the crowded streets and so easy to park.
He also had a 40-tonne truck which he bought to take his Bugatti to Finland where he set a world record for driving on ice — at 180 mph.
Quite a life, I’m sure you’ll agree. But we haven’t got to the subject of girls yet. He had bedded every single one of the best-looking women in southern France, and maybe the whole of Europe, now I come to think of it, but said that the best was a Texan, who did amazing things with dogs and video cameras apparently.
However, when I was there he was about to take up motor racing again so he was giving women a rest. ‘Just for today’, you understand. Then he wandered off with someone who had a blonde head and some legs, but that was about it.
He was one of the lucky ones though. Because everyone there is so rich, and so handsome, and so chiselled, it is quite normal to have 50 million in the bank, no spots and a Mercedes but to end up on your own every night.
Sit in the Cafe de Paris and just watch. You will see the same cars going round and round and round for hours, their desperate Latino drivers eyeing up everything with a pulse. It’s sad, and horrid.
And it gets worse when the Grand Prix rolls into town. The parties get phonier, the rich get richer and the police plumb new depths on the bolsh-o-meter. And on top of all that, the locals pack up and leave.
Half of me says they do the right thing but as I sat in the Sporting Club, watching Belinda Carlisle strut her ample stuff at the Marlboro party, I began to wonder. I had Chris Rea to my left and Jean Alesi to my right as the roof slid back to reveal a monster fireworks display.
The champagne was Bollinger, the caviar was Russian and the waiters made George Hamilton look ugly. This was weapons-grade conspicuous consumption.
But there was more to come. I ended up on a massive boat in the harbour, cummerbund akimbo, talking to a girl who appeared to be wearing nothing at all. It was warm, the stars were out, the vodka was tinged with a hint of lemongrass and all around, truly beautiful people were having a truly beautiful time.
Monaco has been described as the world’s first wildlife reserve for humans but if that’s the case, let me tell you that being an exhibit there is industrial-strength fun.
India
This chapter is dedicated to Uday Rao Kavi. A fine man.
Calcutta is a remarkable city, known throughout the subcontinent as a city of thinkers, a place where they prefer to discuss cricket than play it. If you can ignore the soot-blackened brickwork and the completely opaque air, you will marvel at the buildings, built with the vast money brought to Calcutta by the British East India Company.
You will seek out the Fairlawn Hotel where you will tuck into winter-warming soup, roast beef and spotted dick. Outside, you will see people cooking their supper on open fires.
Me, I was more taken with a bright-yellow Lotus Esprit Turbo which had just cruised by.
Calcutta is where they make the Hindustan Ambassador — better known as the 1950s Morris Oxford — and the luxurious Hindustan Contessa, an old Vauxhall. Every single car on the streets is a Hindustan of indeterminate age and condition. Some have brakes. Some have steering. Some have suspension. Some have none of these things and are therefore a bit worrying.
But there, in the middle of it all, was the yellow Lotus. What kind of moron would drive a car like that in a country where driving is not a chore or an art form? In India, driving is something you learn to do badly.
And that leads me neatly on to the Indian driving test.
The examiner finds a quiet piece of road and asks you to demonstrate that you can make the car move and stop. Then he gives you permission to take part in what is by far the most dangerous game on earth: driving on the subcontinent.
Visitors may laugh but what passes as mayhem is, in fact, carnage. Even though there are only 29 million vehicles in India — just four million more than we have in Britain — they manage to kill 164 people every day. By way of comparison, we kill just thirteen.
This means that, every twelve months, 60,000 people die on the Indian roads and if you ask about serious injuries, officialdom just shrugs, a despairing look on its face.
Informed sources reckon that upwards of a quarter of a million people are hospitalised and broken by car crashes every year in India. That’s the population of a big British town.
And the statistics keep on coming. In Bombay, a city which has more dollar-millionaires than Los Angeles or New York, every single family has been affected in some way by a car crash. Nationwide, one car in five will, at some stage in its life, be involved in a fatal accident.
We may scoff at the Indian’s inability to get from A to B without killing someone but, really, it isn’t funny.
And despite what you might think, the driving test is not really to blame because most people don’t bother taking it.
What you do if you want a permit is send a few rupees to a driving agency in another state, simply asking for one. And by return of post, you’ll get it.
One girl that we spoke to decided to actually take the test and then found herself sharing her exam with six other hopefuls. Everyone else, including the examiner, piled into one car and she was asked to drive her little hatchback on her own. After a couple of hundred yards, the two-car convoy stopped and everyone passed, even though five of them had only been passengers and she’d been on her own.
With this sort of background, you can be assured that almost no one on the street has any form of training. But more worrying still, they don’t follow any rules.
The trouble is that if you are stopped by a policeman, which almost never happens, you only need furnish his outstretched paw with the equivalent of ?2 and nothing more will be said. The motoring courts in India’s cities are as packed as the Yukon.
Take insurance, for example. To drive without it in Europe is a serious offence which will result in a possible jail term. Throughout the Continent, high streets are full of insurance brokers and every newspaper carries advertisements for bargains galore.
But none is quite so cheap as the system in India. You just don’t buy it.
But even a complete lack of discipline or training doesn’t account for what is a massacre. I mean, there are other countries in the world with a similar background of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, and they don’t get through 164 people every day.
What sets India apart is religion. Being mindful of Salman Rushdie’s fate, and not wanting to criticise Hinduism, I feel duty-bound to report that it doesn’t fit very well with motoring. These are pieces from two different jigsaws.
It seems that Hindus have a fatalistic approach to life, believing that everything has been organised in advance and that there is absolutely nothing they can do to shape their own destiny. Que sera sera and fair
