My car is a lot like myself; an old banger with bashes, dents, scrapes and the occasional loud exhaust. Sometimes I feel so old that I'm sure my first motor was a covered wagon.

As a relatively latecomer to driving in my mid-20s (my family never had a car, boo hoo) I think I needed about five tests before an examiner finally took pity on my three point turns and gave me a pass.

On my second test I got eight out of 10, the other two managed to get out of my way.  Being technically and mechanically dyslexic I couldn't even get my seat belt on...and then it clicked.  (Keep up with the jokes, madam).

This column has been jump-started by the news that seven years from now, 2030, the only new car that can be bought, by government decree, will be electric at a price that most of us will not be able to afford. At the moment you need to find between £25,000 to over £50,000 to buy an E type...and I don't mean a Jaguar.

Even I can calculate that I won't still be driving my 13-year-old Peugeot nine years from now (mind you, it's only clocked 60,000 miles and hardly travels 1,000 miles a year) but, at the risk of being burned at the altar of Saint Greta Thunberg, I don't think my old jalopy is destroying the ozone layer.

I also don't believe that the UK, which contributes about one per cent of the world's carbon emissions, is destroying the planet either, but then again I'm not part of Stinking Rebellion. 

My car has turned into a driveway...literally. It rarely moves from the house.

In truth, nowadays, I enjoy cruising to far-flung places like Glasgow in a £200,000 vehicle. It's called a bus and doesn't cost me a penny. 

Incidentally, I almost had to give up driving when I suffered from apnoea. Apparently, I snored so loudly that it scared everyone in the car I was driving. (Yes, madam, I'm still joking).

To be honest, I want to die peacefully in my sleep (editor's note: it could be arranged) just like my grandfather and not be screaming like the passengers on his bus.

A more knowledgable columnist than me (there are a few around, so my wife tells me) has revealed that only 240,000 motorists in the UK have so far bought an all-electric car. That leaves 30 million of us behind the wheel of a petrol or diesel vehicle.

Now, if the electric drivers find it a struggle to get charging points, what are the rest of us going to do? How many charging points do you know of in your town?

If I'm still driving before the deadline of 2030, I reckon that I will make sure I have a second-hand petrol or diesel model that will do me until my heavenly chariot arrives.

Someone asked me recently if I would ever get a car for Her Indoors, and I replied no, but it sounded like a decent trade-in.

A motoring journalist has pointed out that there are only 40,000 charging points in the whole of Britain but, infuriatingly, there are four different plug sockets. He said that 5,500 were "awful", 13,000 were "really slow", 3,400 were "slow" and only 900 were "okay."  Don't ask me how he knows; he just does, OK!

Electric cars might be the future, but it's not my future. It wasn't that long ago that the government's official advice was to buy diesel to produce lower carbon dioxide emissions.

By 2017 half of new cars were diesel so those of us who thought we were doing our bit to save the planet are now lambasted as being polluters. Actually, if you take the blessed Greta and the XR mob at their word we won't exist by 2030.

As is my wont, let me leave you laughing (I hope). I'm thinking of the Two Ronnies newsreading sketch as follows: "A cement mixer and a prison bus crashed on the motorway. Police advise people to be on the lookout for hardened criminals." Boom, boom.

 

Thought for the Week: I cried because I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet.

 

Largs and Millport Weekly News:

My old Fairlie mucker David Telford wrote to the editor calling me the Svengali of Stevenston and saying - in today's rather woke cancel culture - that I should have been sacked years ago.

Now, hold on, I know satire is not everyone's cup of comedy, but yon Svengali was a man "with evil intent" who dominates, manipulates and controls someone else. He should have a word with Her Indoors.

For jesting that illegal refugees could be berthed at Hunterston and accommodated at, say, Kelburn Castle, he suggests that I have a Svengalian criminal mind. Panto villain aye, master criminal, naw.

Svengali (as you know, madam) was a fictional character, like myself, who seduced a young girl and made her a famous singer. See me, see Largs Operatic Society.

It's a long time since I seduced anyone, but ladies beware. Maybe not Svengali, more the Phantom of the Opera.