That lets you have a short bonnet which means more space for passengers and luggage. It’s also quiet, well-equipped and fast, despite the absence of a V8 motor. I’m almost embarrassed to say it but here we have a car which, by global standards, is right up there with the best.
It, along with the new Fords and GM cars, means that in the short term, at least, the big three American car manufacturers are safe. But what about their birth town? What about Detroit?
Well there are some chinks of light. Today, right in the city centre, there is one 300-yard stretch called Greektown where trendy restaurants abound and where you can walk on the pavement at night in relative safety. There are lots of beggars but they only let murderers in in packs of ten.
There is also the appropriately named Renaissance Center, which houses office blocks, a shopping mall and the world’s tallest hotel. You’re fairly safe in there too because armed guards outnumber visitors by 200 to 1.
And there’s the people mover — a monorail which tours the city. Now sure, it’s pretty pointless offering a public transport alternative in a city where the public don’t go and where, even if they did, they’d take a car, but never mind; someone had the confidence to build such a thing.
The trouble is, these are details. Building a shiny new monorail in Detroit is like cutting someone’s toenails when they have lung cancer. And Detroit, to pinch a line from
It’s called crime.
The Mayor says Detroit will be the next great international city, and a great place to do business. Yes, and I’m a little teapot.
I’m so mad, in fact, that I always list Detroit as one of my five favourite cities in the world. It is as soulful as the music it once made and, as Gertrude Stein once said, ‘There is a
Iceland
Iceland is not of this earth. It is a little piece of Mars stuck away on a barren rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. There are no reference points for the visitor, no little reminders of the civilisation that you’ve left behind, no clues that you’re in a fully paid-up NATO member state. Small wonder they sent Neil Armstrong here to train for his lunar walk.
The countryside is weird. The people are mad. The weather defies belief and the laws and customs leave you gasping. But all of this is overshadowed by one important feature that, quite literally, turns your world upside down. In the summer, it doesn’t go dark.
They can take you for a ride in a nitro-powered Jeep up a sheer cliff face. You can drive a snowmobile across the sea. You can pay ?80 for a bottle of house white and you can have dinner with a girl who has completely see- through skin, but you won’t be paying attention because here, night does not necessarily follow day.
Life for the rest of Planet Earth is a mishmash of unpredictability but there’s always one inescapable fact — every single night, without fail, the sun
But up there, from the end of April to the middle of September, night is like easing the dimmer switch down a couple of notches. And in the middle of June, it doesn’t happen at all.
At three or four o’clock in the morning, it’s as light as it was at three or four o’clock in the afternoon, and that is spooky. You can go up to Sneffels Yokul, where Arne Saknussem set off in
Not surprisingly, this peculiar aspect of life in the far north has had an effect on the people who live there. They don’t behave like human beings. If Darwin had come here instead of the Galapagos Islands, he’d have deduced that, on the evolutionary scale, man followed on from the hedgehog.
In the summer months, the Icelander doesn’t really do much sleeping. And at weekends, he doesn’t do any at all.
When they finish work in Reykjavik on a Friday night, they go home, have some drinks, get changed, have some more drinks and then at 11.00 p.m. they go out: all 125,000 of them.
This can be a bit of a shock if you’ve arrived from Earth. The first time I went there, ten years ago, I wandered around at eightish looking for a restaurant, not really surprised that the streets were deserted. This, after all, was the northernmost capital city in the world and it was a bit chilly.
But as I sat with a plate of fish and coleslaw, I couldn’t help noticing that as the night wore on, the tables were filling up, and then some. By midnight, there were queues of expectant diners going right out of the door.
So I took out a mortgage, paid up and left, whereupon I was thrust into the world’s biggest party. If you could combine Live Aid with a papal visit to Rio, you’d get something that, compared to this, was a village fete.
Everyone was hog-whimperingly drunk. As Bjork put it recently, ‘What’s the point of having a glass of wine every day? It’s a waste of money, a waste of time and waste of wine. Why not wait till the weekend and drink a litre of vodka all in one go?’
So they do. The teenagers, those too young to get into the endless array of nightclubs, fill massive Coke bottles with nine parts vodka and one part Coke and get so pissed most of them walk round backwards.
And then, if they’re girls, they get pregnant. Iceland has the highest rate of illegitimacy in the world because most teenage girls have a child at sixteen which is then brought up by their parents. They are then free to have a life without worrying about the biological clock. They say Bangkok is the sex capital of the world: it isn’t — not by a long way.
And nor is Monaco the epicentre of partydom. Reykjavik has that one all sewn up, too.
The gathering, which starts on a Friday at midnight, goes on until Monday morning when people go directly from their disco to work. It’s bizarre but they really do seem to have developed sleep patterns based on the tortoise. You’re awake for six months, and then you’re not.
Anyone planning to invade Iceland would be advised to hit the beaches some time between November and February because no one’s awake. Mind you, you could go in June too because everyone is rat-faced.
Everyone, that is, except the huge gangs of bikers that roam the streets at night with massive Mad Maxian hogs and biblical hairdos. ‘What,’ I asked nervously, ‘do you do?’
I expected them to say they barbecued virgins and danced naked in front of ceremonial fires but this was not quite the case. ‘Oh,’ said one. ‘We campaign for safer roads and lower insurance rates. That sort of thing.’
How come you’re all sober? ‘Let me make one thing absolutely plain here,’ said another, who was wearing a US tank-driver’s helmet. ‘No one in Iceland drinks and drives. You see, this is a small community and if you get pissed and knock someone down, there’s a strong chance you will know them. And if you don’t know them, it is absolutely certain that you will know someone who does.’
And feeling duty-bound to go to the funeral of someone who you killed is, well, a little embarrassing.
For the same reason, you can leave your car and your house unlocked. When I asked a policeman how much car crime there is in Iceland, he genuinely didn’t know what I was on about.
So you have more time to worry about murder then? And that got him too. In Iceland, in the last ten years, there have only been a dozen cases of homicide and most of those were crimes of passion — the type where Plod arrives to find the wife dead and the husband sobbing away in a corner, smoking gun in hand and explaining to anyone who will listen that he didn’t mean to kill her.
It’s not all sweetness and light, though. For the most part, people are pleased to welcome foreigners who’ve come to do something other than fish, but there’s a significant number who reckon you’re gate-crashing their party.
They’re living up there, on their funny rock, having a ball in a crime-free, stable and fantastically rich country and they don’t want yobbos from the real world sticking their noses in. More than once I was told to ‘fuck off back to America’.
I stayed though, because Iceland is my kinda town.
It is four-fifths the size of England but they have the biggest glacier in the northern hemisphere, 100 active
