Before & Laughter: A Life Changing Book

by Jimmy Carr

‘Practising honesty’ sounds like a philosophy preached by crunchy-granola-eating, sandal-wearing, electric-car-driving hippies. That said, I like the idea of owning your mistakes, correcting them and moving on to fulfil your purpose – and I now own an electric car. I’ll tell you how it happened. I’m in Westfield London. There is nothing I want to buy, I’m not hungry, I’ve just had a coffee and am mooching around waiting for my girl. And then I see it, the Tesla store – you can buy a car in the shopping mall now, great. I ask the salesman in the shop, ‘What’s the deal with the cars?’ And the guy goes, ‘Do you want to take one on a test drive?’ ‘Yes!’ Twenty minutes later, my girl is sitting in the passenger seat, the guy from Tesla is in the back and I am driving. The car’s got these incredible doors in the back, like a Mercedes Gullwing or the Back to the Future DeLorean. When the doors lift up vertically to open, there’s a bit of me that will forever be fourteen – it’s just cool. We drive around and it’s fun, like driving a massive go-kart. After doing a lap of Shepherd’s Bush we head back. Westfield London is a huge shopping centre and the garage there is a confusing maze. We get a little lost, take a wrong turn and the Tesla guy suddenly pipes up from the back, ‘Wait, stop. I’ll move those cones, we can take a left here.’ ‘Great.’ He opens the back door, ‘wuhoosh’, and it goes up like something from Star Trek. I feel like Captain Kirk. He runs over and moves the cones. ...