When My Week In Cars met Clarkson

What's Diddly Squat Farm really like and is he still as car-mad as ever?

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When we arrived, Jeremy Clarkson was sitting behind his new £3000 aluminium designer desk, the one he'd been writing about buying in his Sunday Times column the previous day.

To tell the truth, that desk was most of the reason why Matt Prior and I were there on that day. Clarkson had been writing about how, because farming was quiet and it had rained nonstop since Christmas, he wasn’t currently needed to run this or his other businesses (farm shop, pub, brewery, game show). He had thus been feeling bored and had turned to buying things and contemplating new hobbies. The desk was part of that.

It was all discussed in Clarkson's uniquely breezy and ironic column writer's style, but what grabbed Prior’s and my interest - we'd both read the column - was this rare confession about JC’s boredom and having time to spare. Twice before we'd approached him about filling a My Week In Cars slot, but the first time he'd expressed a blanket dislike of pods, and the second an entirely understandable protest that he simply didn’t have any spare minutes.

At about lunchtime on Sunday, I sent him a note asking for an hour of his time. By 3pm I'd heard that “I could probably do something tomorrow”. If you're going to get a reply from Clarkson, you get it promptly.