Premium dreams

Here we are. Home again after a hard day sitting in a parking lot. There goes your man, the hunter-gatherer, off to pontificate at his unfortunate wife about his struggles as a Captain of Industry.

And me? Left sitting in the driveway. He spent nearly €100,000 on me, professes his love for me every day, boasts about me to his sweatered chums every chance he gets. But how does he show it? Abandons me here every night.

Dum di dum. Boring, this sitting around. Not that it's much more interesting when he actually drives me, mind. See my fine chest? Under there is a 4.4-litre engine with eight cylinders, delivering more horsepower than north Kildare. Not to mention the most advanced all-wheel drive engineering known to man and enough technology to run a small battleship. And what use is all that put to?

Three miles in traffic each morning, three miles back again, sometimes four if he diverts to the pub - "Sorry love, important meeting with the Americans, can't possibly get out of it" - and a trip to the golf club on Sundays, if I'm lucky. It's like owning a surface-to-air missile launcher and using it to take potshots at crows.

I'm mortified at that obnoxious club. I swear I heard some of the caddies' hatchbacks sneering and calling me Driving Range Rover.

Last time I had any bit of excitement was the time your man ran over a neighbouring kid's bicycle.

"You stupid child, look at my car!" he ranted. (He'd had a very long meeting with the Americans.) "If there's even a hint of a scratch on my paintwork, I'll leather you. What're you doing leaving it lying there in my driveway?"

"Err, it's my driveway. You live next door," the kid responded, smugly. A little too smugly, it must be said. But we'll let him off. His father is a lawyer, so he didn't lick it off the ground.

What to do? Maybe I could scramble his Sat Nav system. The next time he programmes me to go to that vile pit of back-biting and snobbery, we'll end up in a forest instead. Imagine his horror as my elegant flanks are soiled by mud, my glistening tyres stained with bog water. He'll have a fit. Lovely.

Probably shouldn't say this, but sometimes I wish someone would steal me.

I have a cousin, a Golf GTI. Lucky sod has been pinched three times. He loves it. Says they slip into his owner's house and lift his keys, very careful about it. None of your smashed windows and hotwiring, which is very painful, no matter what they tell you in the brochures.

They're professionals. No goading gardai for chases or setting fire to him in a field in Blanchardstown. No sense in them hurting him. Their job is to steal him, get him to an agreed place in one piece and collect their cash.

But that's not to say they don't have fun getting from A to B. They let rip, use every ounce of his muscle. The only problem is, he says, that it's always over too quickly. They pull into an apartment block and leave him to see if he'll be found.

And, whaddya know, the gardai arrive in a few hours and haul him off. And the crooks skulk away, defeated.

The cousin can't work it out. But then, GTI doesn't stand for Gigantic Tranche of Intelligence. But I've got it sussed. It's the pesky tracking device that's ruining his fun. So I'm switching mine off.

My dimwit "master" won't notice - he can't even put on his seatbelt without giving himself a hernia.

Hold on, who's this chap? And what's he doing with that fishing rod through the letterbox? Is he? He is, you know. You little beauty, that's some fine hooking, sir.

Hop in, you're more than welcome. And where would sir like to go? Please say the top of the Sugarloaf, huh, willya, please? What's that? You're haven't the time? Fair enough. How about we just tearing up a few greens and fairways? I know the perfect spot .