Bemused, Misunderstood, Weeping. I had no idea BMW drivers were such a sensitive lot - after all, who takes anything said in these columns seriously? BMW drivers, apparently. I'd have thought the vapourings which occur here are beyond notice, beneath contempt, and hardly worth pistols for two and coffee for one at the Phoenix Park gallops.
A lot of bruised BMW drivers do not agree, and have said so - which merely proves BMW drivers, conclusively, are not what I was suggesting they were. Forgive me for causing offence - it was meant in the most knockabout kind of way. No doubt in my heart of hearts I am secretly a BMW driver, and my BMWlessness has made me cantankerous and crabbed.
Of course, all car-drivers - not just of BMWs - are susceptible to unfair parody. Maybe it is one of those wisdoms which Jane Austen meant to utter, but which she never got round to; that it is a truth universally acknowledged that each kind of car seems to draw from its drivers an extension of their personalities which might not otherwise be evidenced.
Take the top-of-the-range Volvo. It is normally driven as if it is as unassailable as the continental drift. Why? Because top-of-the-range Volvos are invariably company cars. Behind the wheel is the boss. This means he doesn't mind the odd scratch on the side which would normally have the rest of us chewing our tongues in grief.
Volvine and Alpine
And Volvos are constructed on the lines of the Alps. The driver doesn't expect to be crying after a crash - that is, if he even notices it. Volvo drivers tend to feel collisions with other cars in much the same way jumbo jets are retarded by collisions with gnats. That is why Volvos enter howling maelstroms of traffic as if they are nuclear-powered aircraft carriers entering the Sargasso Sea. Being in a car which is immune to every impact this side of a comet-strike gives the men behind the wheel a blissful sense of immunity.
I say men. I mean men. Has anyone ever seen a woman behind the wheel of a top-of-the-range Volvo? No, never. Volvos and their drivers command the road; they are proof of the theory that the safer the driver feels, the more risks he takes, for he is immortal. He is surrounded by air-bags, seat-belts, side-impact systems which can absorb the charge of a mother steamroller which has seen the driver interfere with her brood of baby steamrollers.
The men behind the wheels of Toyotas have a different sense of immortality, perhaps because very large numbers of them are taxi-drivers. This means that upon approaching green traffic lights with a fare aboard, they slow until a satisfactory red appears. This gives them the opportunity to excavate the interior of their ears with a specially constructed Yale key, and to contemplate the result with a steady glow of satisfaction while the lights go green, then amber, then red again.
There is a special plant at Dublin docks which removes the indicators on all cars, of whatever marque, destined to be taxis, thereby excusing all such drivers of the tiresome responsibility of informing other drivers they will be turning left or right. The taxi-drivers of Dublin do not indicate; they simply turn. It is as if they have been implanted with part of the brain of a Volvo-driver, and assume immortality is assured whenever they approach a junction.
Heigh ho, just turn.
There are lean, low sporting numbers from Japan - Mazdas, Toyotas, no doubt others - which are painted red, with spoilers on the back like a surfboard rack. They burble at traffic lights, and lane-weave down motorways. Their drivers steer them with their palms while listening to rock music, their heads keeping time with the idiot-rhythm. When they emerge from their homes, it's a day for staying in bed.
Elegance of bedpans
As it almost is when the Metros come out. Metros have the style, elegance and elan of bedpans, which they resemble in every respect, except in matters of speed. Bedpans move faster. Metro drivers know only one gear, second, one place on the road, the middle, and one speed, 20 m.p.h. They are apparently excused the need to use their rear mirrors for any purpose other than adjusting the tea-cosy on their head which they bought on the mistaken impression it was a hat.
The name Fiesta is as appropriate to the Ford of that marque as it would be to call Nobber the Venice of Meath. It recruits its drivers from the ranks of the petrified who have not mastered the synchrony required to change gear and depress the clutch simultaneously. And therefore the progress of a Fiesta is marked by shed cogwheels and sheared-off clutchplate linings, while the driver, rigid with terror and nose against the windscreen, cruises into a Volvo, like a moth on a windscreen.
On your Mercs
Red-faced, cigar-puffing Mercedes drivers tend to share that Volvine sense of inviolability. Nobody ever said of a Mercedes-driver: He has an inferiority complex. He is full of uncertainty. He lacks self-belief. Mercedes-drivers move through traffic like a bishop passing through the Confirmation class, airy, confident, assured, with maybe an episcopal pat on the head for a mere Hyundai, and an odd question or two of a scarlet-faced, mumbling VW Polo, trailing a whiff or two of incense.
And as for Rover, the pride of the British motor industry, it was until recently a Honda and will soon be a BMW. Sorry, remind me again: just who exactly won that war? Which brings us, of course, full circle, back to Beatific, Majestic, Wise. OK? Friends now?