Take to the skies to get above the mere motorists

Tired of the road rage, the jams, the costs? Well, take to the skies could be the answer for you . . .

MADE A pile of cash? Peeved at spending more of your life stuck in traffic than rolling around on beds stuffed with €1,000 notes?

Fed up paying road tax and tolls? What do they think you are? A common peasant?

Feeling soiled by being forced to share road space with filthy proles and hemmed-in by the herds of wannabes in their lumbering SUV behemoths?

Miffed that every second drug dealer, hairdresser, two-bit footballer or plumbing contractor has the same Bentley/Aston/Maserati that you do?

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Master of the Universe and generally above it all?

Half a million euro burning a hole in your pocket?

I feel your pain. Lucky for you, I have the solution to your woes.

Buy yourself a helicopter. Between you and me, you might be able to get one cheap. If you'll excuse the unfortunate analogy, the helicopter market is crashing to the ground. The bottom's fallen out of it and prices are plummeting downwards at great speed.

As the economic downturn chews the guts out of the Celtic Tiger, many high-flying builders are offloading their choppers. Perhaps the sight of those acres of houses they erected in a bog beside a pigfarm that then failed to offload as luxury forest villas is just too much to bear from the air. I imagine they'd rather retreat back into their blacked-out limos. It feels safe and warm in there, cocooned from the reality of the financial bleakness surrounding them.

Their loss is your gain. Swoop down and land yourself a bargain.

There's great fun to be had with a helicopter. The first, most obvious, advantage is that you'll no longer need to crane your neck to look down your nose at everyone.

Morever, you can whizz around, dropping stuff on your business rival's head as he makes that crucial putt. And land on the roof of Brown Thomas when you simply must be first in the queue to get those dapper new limited edition Prada cufflinks. And hurl cow pats down onto your wife's lap as she cavorts around in her convertible with the tennis instructor she's having the affair with. Or even use it to dangle said tennis instructor over a silage pit.

And finally, you can buzz traffic jams and laugh triumphantly at the human sheep drowning in the gloop below.

There are, sad to report, certain disadvantages. For a start, you won't be saving any money on fuel. But you don't care. You wouldn't be flying a helicopter if such piffling matters as cost bothered you.

You'll also have to learn to fly the thing. Or pay someone to do it for you. It should be easy enough to hire and retrain a disgruntled former Ryanair pilot.

The beauty of this set-up is that no matter how rude, bullying or obnoxious you are, he will still like you better than his old boss.

More potentially inconvenient is the fact that proles, annoying by your incessant buzzing, can report you to the Environmental Protection Agency for noise pollution.

But they'll have to read the registration number on your chopper first. You have the upper hand here. Simply carry a warmed vat of tar on the underside of your whirly-bird, which you can then gleefully deploy on any pesky busybody you spy brandishing a set of binoculars. If you are feeling particularly vindictive you can unleash the feathers too. That'll learn them.

And the greatest perk of all? When Ireland's economy goes down the plughole, you'll be free to zoom off to pastures new, scoffing at the rest of us foundering in financial porridge as you leave.

You'll try not to hit me with the tar as you go, won't you?