Don't Stop Me Now

Subaru Legacy Outback

Ask anyone who is truly, properly famous and they’ll tell you that the single greatest gift God gave to man was anonymity. The ability to walk into a restaurant without being pointed at. The comfort blanket of being able to make a phone call safe in the knowledge that nobody else is listening – because nobody else cares about what you have to say.

Anonymity? Ask Harrison Ford, or Madonna, or John Ketley, and they’ll tell you that it’s more precious than two functioning lungs.

Oh, you see all those silly, half-naked soap stars desperately trying to attract the attention of the paparazzi outside two-bit PR puff parties. But if they were to really make it, if they really were to become a household name with a household face and a household love life, if we really were to find out what they have for their elevenses and where they are every minute of every single day, and what text messages are stored on their mobile phone, they’d go absolutely mental.

I’m not famous, but I do appear on the television from time to time, and that’s enough to make my life difficult on occasion. Chiefly because sometimes I forget myself and I think I am famous.

Last year I was shown to my hotel room in Dubai by a porter who, when he’d shown me how the door worked and explained what the bath was for, asked: ‘Do you think I could have your signature?’

‘Sure,’ I replied, with a huge grin. So, snatching up a piece of hotel notepaper, I wrote: ‘To Ahmed, with lots of love, from Jeremy Clarkson.’

‘No,’ he said, with a puzzled face. ‘I mean, do you think I could please have your signature onthe registration form.’

This year, the same sort of thing happened again. I was lying on a sun lounger, generally taking in some Caribbean rays, when I noticed the telltale glint of a paparazzi lens in the bushes. Angrily, I threw down my book and stomped over to express my displeasure.

Sadly, it was a wasted journey, because when I’d finished shouting the poor guy explained he hadn’t a clue who I was and had been photographing someone called Alex Best, whose bikini top had slipped down a little.

And there you have it. This girl was apparently married to a footballer and then lived in a jungle. And that’s enough to make the positioning of her swimsuit interesting. Can she possibly have been ready for that?

Can any one of these Madonna wannabes imagine what it would be like to be photographed every single time they walk out of the house, and how they would cope when the assistant in the local knicker shop telephones the newspapers to tell them what colour bra they’ve just bought?

Only last week I was having a serious heart-to-heart with a friend when, quite out of the blue, a brassy woman with metal hair marched up to me and asked what I thought of the Honda CRV. And, like I said, I’m not famous.

If you want a sense of how it feels to be well known, try walking into your local bistro naked. Or go to work tomorrow dressed as a trout. Or, better still, buy yourself a Porsche 911 GT3RS.

It’s finished in Human League white and has red wheels. It says GT3RS in foot-high letters down the door. And it has a spoiler the size of a hospital stretcher.

As a result, everyone tries to come alongside so they can point and stare. And, worse, complete strangers stroll over in petrol stations, and won’t go away even when you put the nozzle down their trousers and produce a match.

There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want this car. A steering wheel that has nothing to do with your direction of travel. A roll cage where the back seats should be. And a ride quality that… well, put it this way – I doubt it would make a suitable platform for disarming a nuclear weapon. Or getting a tattoo. But the worst thing about it is the never-ending attention it draws.

Which brings me on to the world’s best antidote to fame – the £26,500 Subaru Legacy Outback Estate. Russell Crowe could drive through the middle of Pontefract in this car and nobody would notice, even if he were naked at the wheel. You could impale Uma Thurman’s head on the radio aerial, and that wouldn’t do the trick either.

It’s so invisible that you could almost certainly drive it into the vault at the Bank of England and steal all the gold. And speed cameras? Help yourself, because the Outback makes the F-117 stealth fighter look like a pterodactyl.

Then there’s the quality. In the past couple of years I’ve noticed a distinct downturn in the robustness of virtually all cars. Mercedes used to be a byword for durability but now it’s a byword for being on the hard shoulder at four in the morning with steam coming out of the bonnet. And Volkswagen has suffered, too, coming near the bottom in the Top Gear customer satisfaction survey. Toyota used to employ a man to ensure the switches all made the right sort of click when you pushed them, but, judging by my recent experiences, I think he may have left. And then there’s the new Volvo V50, which feels like it’s running on suspension made from tinfoil.

The Outback, though, is different. When you shut the door, it makes exactly the same noise as a dead pheasant hitting the ground at 40 mph, a sort of muffled, autumnal ‘bumph’ sound. And the quality of the material used on the dashboard is up there with Sabatier.

Of course, in recent years Subarus have become famous for going through woods at high speed, spewing stones into the faces of men in bobble hats.

The Legacy, however, is far removed from all of this. The top-of-the-range 3-litre version does 0–60 in a whisper-quiet but rather pedestrian 8.1 seconds and is all out of ideas at a near-silent 139 mph.

This, then, is more a Subaru of the old school. Let’s not forget that when these funny cars with their flat-four engines and four-wheel drive started arriving in Britain, they weren’t sold through plate-glass and rubber-plant dealerships. No, they were sold to country folk by agricultural supply centres.

That’s why on the Legacy’s door panel there is a sticker explaining its four-wheel-drive layout. To remind you that under the invisible, Teflon-tough skin, it’s still a tractor.

There’s been a rash of new estate cars in the past few months. Jaguar has whacked a greenhouse on to the back of its X-type, Volvo has the aforementioned V50, and we mustn’t forget the old hands from Mercedes-Benz, Audi and BMW.

Think of this lot as holiday destinations. You’ve got all the obvious ones, such as Minorca and Florida, plus a couple of new choices, like Costa Rica and Rwanda. Well, the Subaru is like Croatia, you see: you wouldn’t normally even consider it, but those who do so keep returning there, year after year.

I must say I was deeply impressed. It was smooth, quiet, dignified, and it had quite the largest sunshine roof I’ve ever seen. Certainly, if you ever tire of it as a car, you could use it as a hangar for your helicopter.

More than this, however, I enjoyed the way it dealt so easily with any kind of road surface. The slightly raised suspension meant that the car’s underside was high enough to miss the boulders on rutted lanes, but not so high that on twisting A-roads it felt like I was in a boat.

I really was enjoying this car, right up to the moment when I completely lost it in the long-term car park at Birmingham airport.

This was one of those times when anonymity doesn’t work for you. Another, of course, is when you want a table at the Ivy.

Sunday 9 May 2004

Don’t Stop Me Now