BOOK REVIEW: Grumpy Old Drivers - The Official Handbook
By: Stuart Prebble
Publishers: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London; Orion Books
Price: £10stg (around €12.70)
GRUMPY. DON'T get me started. It's bad enough that Tesco car park in Ballybrack is chock-a-block with SUVs (Stillorgan Utility Vehicles) with late-onset blondes (both sexes and points in-between) at the wheel, needing at least two parking spaces, trading down from Marks Spencer. Lidl is that way, ladies and gentlemen. And no, please don't park on the pavement, that's not what the big wheels are for.
Now for the book. You want grumpy. I'll give you grumpy . . . bloody traffic wardens. They are latter-day Nazis in naff uniforms, jobsworths with personality disorders, who go home happy to a cup of lukewarm Horlicks and a copy of Beekeepers News, if they have ruined 20 motorists' days.
Using your mobile phone to pay for parking is next to the Great Fire of London on the atrocity scale. And maps. Bloody maps. The place you are looking for is never on them, or it is tucked into the crease between the pages in tiny writing that an ant could not see, let alone read.
Roadside cafes? Purveyors of encrusted horse dung labelled "cheeseburger".
Nothing if not intemperate is our Stuart. Consistently funny? Witty? Original? No, none of these either.
In truth, I could get seriously grumpy about a once-respected publisher, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, who brought us Nabokov's Lolita and Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage, and much more besides, being used by its multinational owner Orion to lorry out this dross.
It reads like it was dictated too late at night after an interminable journey up the M1.
It's a shame for a man with a distinguished record in journalism, including a stint in charge of Granada's World In Action documentaries.
Stuart Prebble was the executive producer and writer of the 2003-2004 Grumpy Old Men series for BBC2, and I fear what we have here between hard covers is the dying kick of a tired franchise.
And I can do incandescent over the assumption that people who like cars are idiots, followers of the Great White Clarkson with alloys for brains.
There's a place of honour on my shelf for Peter Thorold's The Motoring Age, and interesting readable books like it.
Bloody Prebble drives me round the bend.