GRRRRR. This is what I’ve been reduced to – letting out a frustrated sound at the steering wheel as I battle my way to work along my green lane. I’ve always thought that the prevalence of 4x4s – also known as four-by-four cars – in an island the size of a postage stamp is ridiculous.
But the number of them sailing up and down my road on a morning is just getting silly. It is making for an increasingly onerous journey to the office – and it’s all so unnecessary.
My car is a modestly-proportioned one and every morning it is like I am in a small dinghy bobbing against the unrelenting tide of road-going oil tankers.
The distance between the cottage I live in and the office is virtually nothing, so the journey should take little more than five or six minutes – and that is the time it takes during half-term.
When the school term starts up, however, so too do the engines of these petrol-guzzling monstrosities – these cars truly do look like they have swallowed the automotive equivalent of steroids.
The upshot is that, invariably when I pull out of the driveway on any given workday morning, I will see an ominous line of road-blocking 4×4 barges on the horizon.
It is as if the Dakar Rally has moved to my lane, as the parents behind the wheel inadvertently kick up a carpet of dust with their ludicrously large wheels as they bomb towards me.
The lane is narrower than the margin of victory in Theresa May’s 2017 general election campaign and it is almost impossible to pass when a parent at the wheel of a four-by-four refuses to make even the tiniest concession as they stick to their position of power in the middle of the asphalt. The only option is to become one with nature by flinging your car into the foliage.
It used to be that this process had to be repeated four or five times en-route to work, meaning that the commute for me and countless others took about double the time it should have. But in the words of Boris Yeltsin at the bar, you can triple that.
And there is no way the super-sized wheels of these back-road behemoths are not ripping up the roads as they bound down green lanes like a pack of giant, over-excited, lead-polluting Labradors. Potholes aplenty. GRRRRR.
