Considering we have so little in common, it's a wonder Richard Hammond and I get on so famously.

Richard Hammond is happy to drink lager, while I prefer brown beer made with soil and think anything bottom-fermented usually has a detrimental effect on precisely that area. Especially his.

Hammond, absolutely and unequivocally, cannot cook a single thing, whereas I quite enjoy knocking off the odd pie or fry-up. He is strangely inept at any sort of bar game, while I'm reasonably good at darts and pool, and he knows even less about football than I do, which must make his the least encyclopedic knowledge of the game ever recorded.

Hammond lives in the countryside and likes rolling around in mud. I think the countryside is something you have to drive through in order to get to another city.

But here's a better example. Richard Hammond likes fighting. He really does. He was once bitterly disappointed that he wouldn't be able to take part in a proposed boxing programme called something like 'I'm a celebrity, get me in the ring and see if I can last three rounds'. I believe he also once had a 'friendly fight' with someone inside a pick-up truck.

In Hammond's ideal world, all the pub furniture in Britain would be made from balsa wood and all the windows from boiled sugar, so we could all have a big brawl in the evening without doing any serious damage. In truth, he should have been in the army. The gurkhas, perhaps.

Meanwhile - and I think Clarkson's with me on this one - I hate fighting, largely because I'm very bad at it. Even in a world where quite a few people seem to want to punch me in the face, I will still do everything within my considerable diplomatic power to talk my way out of a scrap.

This is why it's quite good hanging around with Hammond, because if I fail to disarm my enemies with tact, I can always set the world's hardest hamster on them. In return, I once negotiated his escape from a pub in which he'd almost started a fight with six off-duty American marines. Pillock.

Up to a point, Richard Hammond even seems to quite like taking a knock. I remember one of numerous bicycle expeditions we've undertaken on the riverside paths near my house. On one of these, inevitably, he fell off very dramatically at a point where I'd just managed to stay on. He cut his knee and skinned his knuckles quite badly. And I've rarely seen a man more pleased with himself.

Here's another. Last year, I learned to fly a light aeroplane. This involves a lot of dry classroom learning, numerous written exams, a lot of mental arithmetic, quite a bit of form-filling and, of course, the notorious pre-flight checks.

Hammond admits that he quite likes the idea of flying, but couldn't be bothered with all that. The checks, in particular, sent him into a steaming rage and he never had the good grace, at the end of our Bugatti-vs-aeroplane race, to thank me that the wings hadn't fallen off.

On the other hand, he'd quite like to jump out of the aeroplane and parachute to earth, whereas I can't imagine anything more pointless. To my way of thinking, the Wright brothers did not toil thanklessly in their bicycle shop and miserable hut at Kitty Hawk so that I could one day step out of the door at 3,000 feet. Hammond probably thinks that the gift of flight was granted for exactly that purpose.