THANKS to Britain's drink-driving laws and hopeless rural bus services, most people now live in ghastly suburbs, centimetres from their next-door neighbours and never more than 200 metres from a speed bump and a traffic jam.
Their cars are expensive to buy and to run, environmentally unfriendly and, even if they can hurl themselves along at 240kph, the coned-off roads will not allow it. Nor will the speed bumps. Nor will the sheer volume of traffic.
Today, in suburban Britain, the car is something in which to listen to the radio while crawling along at 6kph. The days when it could even half-heartedly be thought of as something romantic are dead.
That may be how it feels to you, but, call me old Mr Fortunate Trousers, I beg to differ. Motoring today is every bit as romantic as it ever was. Have you, for instance, driven from Loch Lomond to Fort William via Glen Coe in late September in a big, powerful Jaguar? No? Well, then.
You don't need a 12-cylinder engine, either. The single best drive I can recall is through the eucalyptus forests of central Portugal in a 1.0-litre Toyota Starlet.
P. J. O'Rourke once said the fastest car in the world was a hire car, and after that huge thrash up the most intestinal road I had ever found, I would have to agree. Although my speed never once rose above 64kph - the straights just weren't long enough - it never dipped much below 48 either, even on the astonishing hairpin bends.
