Jeremy Clarkson says time may well be running out for the Earth… but not as fast as TikTok says

AS we know, all Hollywood films about global killer natural disasters start in the same way.

Some pigeons run amok in Trafalgar Square causing a bus to fall over. A meteorite slams into a railway station in Bombay.

A big crack appears in the pavement in Los Angeles. Rome explodes and everyone with a pacemaker suddenly dies.

No one is ever connecting all the events, apart from a small man in a jumper, who sits in his shed doing maths until eventually he decides that the world is ending.

Well, for the past month that man in the shed was me.

First of all, I received news that water and sewage was pouring into the lift shaft at my London flat.

But I didn’t have time to worry about that because I was 70 miles away, sweltering in very un-British heat while looking at TikTok footage from Germany of BMWs hurtling down flooded streets before slamming into bridge parapets.

That night on the news there were pictures of Chinese people standing on a tube train, as a raging torrent rose to their necks.

Many were frantically trying to break the windows until they realised the water outside was even higher. It looked terrifying.

And then, after we’d heard about a mud slide that had eaten a whole village in Italy and a new strain of coronavirus, there were reports that California was on fire and a beetle was eating all the trees in Canada.

And that a million people a minute were crossing the Channel to escape war and famine in Africa and the Middle East.

It’s easy to assume when you examine all the evidence that something is going wrong with the small blue marble on which we all live and that soon, if we want to be saved, we shall be forced to call upon the services of John Cusack or Bruce Willis. 

PLAGUES SINCE GOD INVENTED THE LOCUST

However, I’ve done some thinking on the matter and I reckon that most of these problems have been going on for years.

The world has flooded since the days of Noah. We’ve been at war ever since someone made a pointed stick. And there have been plagues since God invented the locust. 

But think about it. When the Black Death was ravaging Mongolia back in the 14th Century, it was terrifying for the people who were dying in a puddle of their own effluent.

But not terrifying at all for the peasantry of England, who’d never even heard of it. 

It’s just that now, thanks to social media, we see and hear everything. 

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be worried. We should.

But maybe we shouldn’t be as worried as the footage on TikTok would suggest.

THIS week’s staggering statistic. Twenty-three per cent of all the people killed in road traffic accidents in 2019 were not wearing seatbelts.

I just can’t understand why you would get in a car these days and not put one on. It’s not like you can say you forgot, because all cars make hysterical bonging noises to remind you.

And anyway, forgetting to do up your seatbelt is like forgetting to put on your trousers.

And when was the last time someone did that?

SEVERAL thousand people, led by the very mad Piers Corbyn, took to the streets of London this week to protest about the lockdown.

Which had already ended.

So what’s next for these people?

A march to demand the end of the death penalty?

Why fans want a briefs encounter

THE Norwegian women’s beach handball team has been fined for wearing shorts instead of bikini bottoms. 

Rightly so. 

Why do they think people watch them? 

For their athletic skill and prowess? 

Yeah, well – if you believe that, turn up at the next event wearing full hazmat suits and watch while the crowd behaves as though there’s a fire drill.

Dusty a fan fave

I ONCE did a TV interview with Dusty Hill, the ZZ Top bassist, who sadly died this week. It didn’t go well.

We were told by the band’s people that Dusty “perspired freely” and that we’d need to stop filming regularly so that he could be wiped down.

This would have been fine, but they then chose, as a location, a Tex-Mex restaurant without air-conditioning. In Houston. In August. 

“Hot” doesn’t even begin to cover what it was like in there.

So we gave Dusty a small Pifco fan to keep himself cool, while I chatted to bandmates Billy and Frank about their cars.

And just as Frank was explaining he had a Ferrari because it meant he could set off to the party late, be on time, stay longer and still be in bed before anyone else, I heard the unmistakable sound of the fan getting stuck in that famous beard.

Three hours. That’s how long it took to get it out again.

Japan bang on time 

IF a Japanese person is late for work, he cannot say to his boss that the train was late. 

Because the train is NEVER late.

I like to think of myself as a punctual man, but compared to the people of Japan I’m as tardy as a homeless drunk. 

Which explains the fiasco at some kind of open-water swimming event in the Tokyo Olympics this week.

The man in charge of it was told the race would begin at 2pm and so at exactly 2pm, he fired his starter pistol. Even though there was a large and powerful boat moored right in front of half the competitors. 

Don’t worry though, mate. I’d have done the exact same thing.

Boat’s a Cruz missile

WHEN Cruz Beckham was stopped by the Italian police as he raced a jet ski off the Amalfi Coast, most people wondered what he’d done wrong.

Me? I was far more interested in the 43-knot boat the Italian police used to stop him.

God, it was a beauty. And it left me wondering why Italy’s border force officers have kit like that to stop Cruz Beckham, when our guys in the UK are only given dinghies to stop half the population of Libya.

CONCORDE was never a commercial success because of the sonic boom created by aircraft flying faster than the speed of sound.

The American authorities felt that the deafening whiplash crack would be so powerful it would knock over cows. 

As a result, they banned the aircraft from flying over US land. 

Well, a new company is developing an 18-seater private jet that can fly at one-and-a-half times the speed of sound, while creating a sonic boom no louder than the slam of a car door.

Called the Spike S-512, it will cost around £90million to buy and £6million a year to run. 

Better get rubbing those scratch cards.

Fuelish notion

Underemployed boffins announced this week that they’ve found a new cause of climate change: Men.

Yup. They reckon that because we eat more meat than women and use more fuel, we are driving global temperatures up.

Yes. But as a general rule, men don’t eat as many avocados as women. 

And because the fruit has to be flown here from South America, they do more climate damage than power-sliding a Lamborghini LM002 all the way from London to John O’Groats.