Kilian Doyle's dark little heart goes out to you unfortunate harassed car commuters out there.
For months now, you have enjoyed morning traffic jams of merely monumental proportions. I say enjoying, because this week they get a whole lot worse.
In Dublin alone, over 40,000 vehicles of parents and teachers that were safely parked during morning rush hour for the past three months re-enter your territory as the schools re-open. It'll make your Hell more Hellish, won't it?
You know what's coming, don't you? Another rant about SUVs. I don't want to do it, but I can't help it. I'm consumed with hatred for them.
For me, "School Run" conjures up the odious vista of thousands of parents driving around in ridiculous yokes with names like Pathfinder, Trooper and Wrath of HRT. (All right, made the last one up. But you get the message.) Sets my blood on edge, my teeth a'boiling, so it does.
Many say they drive SUVs because they offer more protection for their kids. An honourable aspiration. But come on, be real, people. It's not like you're driving your whimpering offspring clutching their lunchboxes full of freshly-killed seal meat across the ice floes of the Canadian tundra, is it? You're plodding through traffic at 10km/h in Cabinteely or Gurranabraher or Garryowen or some other suburb. Do you really need to be 11 feet off the ground in case ravenous polar bears encircle you?
And what about the irony that you're directly contributing to destroying whatever chance your lovely offspring will have of being able to breathe without gasmasks when they are 32 by the very act of "protecting" them?
Ach. I can whine away all I want, but I know I'm fighting a losing battle. They're everywhere. Better get used to it, I suppose. Let's call it progress.
Dismiss me as a curmudgeonly old sod at your peril. I'm actually a great man for the progress. I hate people who go on about things being better in the old days, people kinder, less selfish, blad-di-blah-di-blah. Nonsense. If things were so dandy, what's the point of progress? We might as well all go back to living in moss shacks and wearing half-dead goats as blazers.
Things were pants in the 1970s and 1980s when I was growing up. We had to listen to Gay Byrne on the way to school, for a start. Most historians and economists blame unemployment for the mass emigration of those two decades. They're wrong - the truth is the tens of thousands of sons and daughters of Erin who left did so because they were so traumatised by that patronising twaddle that they had to flee before they found themselves before the courts for mass murder in Montrose.
But one thing was better. We made our own way to school, most of the time. I remember it well - five pence on the bus on rainy days, on my bicycle on sunny days and on foot when the bike was punctured and I'd spent the five pence on penny chews. And still have enough left over for the pictures.
On rare days when it suited the mother, the sister and I and our Basset hound piled into the back of her beige Renault 5 and tootled on our merry way. By the time we got there, we leapt out as fast as our little legs could carry us. Not because we were happy to be in school, mind - have you ever been drooled on by a Basset with breath like a rotting whale while listening to Gaybo? It's a small miracle I'm not off digging ditches in Western Australia.
Nowadays, kids are nearly all driven to school or given bus fares that they pocket and spend on crack cocaine and ringtones and internet pornography while bunking off and terrorising decent citizens like myself in shopping centres.
And another thing - pop music these days. Rubbish. Can't hear the words, except sex this and drugs that. And those new euro coins. Too fiddly. How am I supposed to find them in my satchel? I tell ye, things were better in the old days . . .