A sticky moment this week for Grand Tour maestro Jeremy Clarkson, who recently revealed he has been hospitalised with pneumonia, and would now be spending two months recuperating. There is absolutely nothing wrong with recuperating – it is completely normal and natural – but for whatever reason, a few uptight Twitter users saw fit to point out that Jeremy’s recent “likes” had included a series of porn clips.
Did he style it out? Let’s just say Clarkson carried it off like a favourite pair of jeans, emerging the next day to tweet: “Valuable lesson learned this morning about not leaving your phone unattended when there are drunk people about.”
Well now. I’m no linguist, but I love how the only possessive adjective in that tweet is “your”. In fact, re-reading this defence a few times, I am in total awe of the way Clarkson has constructed it, in a manner that almost succeeds in exorcising the possible masturbatory presence of a convalescing motoring-show host. By whom is the valuable lesson learned? Was it Clarkson’s phone left unattended, or yours? “Drunk people” are clearly “about” – but aren’t things so woolly by now that, while we can all feel pretty sure about whom the pertinent drunk person was, a grammar of plausible deniability has been quite spellbindingly spun?
I know Clarkson doesn’t get an awful lot of credit for being particularly bright, but if he spends his time in the Land of Counterpane staging more dazzling rhetorical displays like this, then more power to his elbow.
