You know them – you see them everywhere, they’re on every street corner, on every highway, even in the parking lots of the malls you frequent and – most of all – lurking outside the schools of your city. They’re a scourge, a danger and the most insidious threat to both general and personal safety that anyone in town or country presently faces.
Yes folks, it’s the 4x4. Sorry, Sparky – what was that? ‘What am I to do with all of my kids?’ Have you not heard of a station wagon? Have you not thought of a hybrid soccer-momobile? Or are you too cool to invest wisely in your children’s future by doing your bit for the environment?

Of course, there’s an easy route to blaming the Yanks for this – someone’s likely gonna come along and point out that the US was way ahead of the rest of the gang when it came to having an 4x4/SUV fetish, and they’d be right in assuming that this has had some influence on the polony -brained muppets of all other nations that have taken to driving the automobile equivalent of The Hulk with all the ardour of a dog long denied a walk. The problem is – perfect timing as always, folks - there couldn’t have been a worse time for the world to suddenly develop a taste for vehicles that can comfortably fit a family of twenty.

‘What brings about this deluge of bile for the perfectly innocent 4x4 / RV / SUV driver?’ you may well ask. Let me put you in the picture. Let me show you what I mean.

Walking – yes, dear reader, I walk to work, every morning. OK, so sometimes I can’t walk when it’s pissing with rain, but my walking is doing a damned sight more for the state of your world than you’re doing for mine. What’s that? ‘I work too far away from home to walk!’ Get a job closer to home, Sparky. Or get a bike. Whatever – do your bit or stand against the wall and wait for the firing squad. But I digress.
On my way to work this morning – a small aside; I live across the road from a Well Known High School, my alma mater – I did as I usually do, and took about three minutes to make sure the coast was clear before scurrying the ten metres to safety on the other side of the road. The problem? Behemoth Mom- and Dadmobiles, hurtling around the corners of my neighbourhood as they raced against time to drop little Johnny off at school. Because - god forbid - Johnny can't walk to school, that's just outta the question. I mean, what would Johnny's friends say? Once safely across, I saunter off down the side road to work. Only this morning this just isn’t a safe place anymore because Small Dick Man #1 has decided to drive like a marauding Hun. And even though there’s only about 400m to maraud along, he’s determined to break all land speed records – and not just in a straight line, oh, no – that’d be too easy – no, no, no – he wants to do it whilst overtaking another hulking 4x4 - on the left! Now usually this is only mildly offensive behaviour, but when Small Dick Man with his Prosthetic Dick Car is swerving towards me as I walk along the pavement, I get a little pissed off.
Someone should give muppets like this an award, like maybe a Darwin Award – lord knows they're gonna pick one up posthumously, might as well let them bask in the glory before he drives himself into a roadside mahogany, right?
If I were driving it would make me want to pull up and step out, pull the Small Dick Man outta that twincab and clip him around his unused earhole while reading the little cuckold the riot act and denigrating his manhood, the parlous state of his moral pantry and last but not least his thoughtless frippery with oil at a time when it is blindingly clear that Things Are Not What They Used To Be. Is it possible that perhaps he just happened to be going so fast that he missed the past twenty years? And why in the name of all that is good and pure in the world should decent people have to put up with imbeciles like this making life not only more dangerous to live but indeed of a lower quality than it was only some two decades ago?

I await enlightenment and the Answers to these and other Important Questions.

As Always.