You know me. A more serene, stoical fellow you are unlikely to meet this side of a Shanghai opium den. I'm so chilled I have been known to moonlight as an ice sculpture at fancy parties, writes Kilian Doyle
Arra, who am I kidding? I'm grumpier than a shaved gorilla stranded on an Arctic ice floe.
I have so many pet hates I could open a petting zoo. The only thing stopping me is the insurance - some of these pet hates are so vicious they'd keep snapping the children's hands off.
None is more liable to savage an innocent than Pet Hate No. 54: The use of mobile phones whilst driving.
It boils my blood. A terrible affliction to have, not least because the vinyl on my car seats keeps melting.
Most humans are such imbeciles that the feat of simultaneously breathing, sitting and watching Fair City has their brain firing at the limits of its capabilities.
Now driving is a complex procedure, requiring utter concentration to do so safely. But bizarrely, any subhuman with the price of a provisional licence is allowed to do it. And often as not, the self-same cretins think they can do it whilst yakking away on a phone that's attached to the side of their head like a plastic limpet with a penchant for human flesh.
They drive me nuts. I hate the woman swinging her SUV around bends as she blabbers into her hand, utterly oblivious to or completely uncaring about the dangers she's putting her children in. "Should have her kids taken off her," I mutter, self-righteously, when I see such Egowagon-driving Harpies.
I despise her nearly as much as the bumfluffed little toerag in a clapped-out hatchback tearing around the city - one hand on the wheel, the other hand on the phone whenever he can bring himself to remove it from down the front of his trousers. (The hand, that is.)
Perhaps a little too earnestly. I worry even myself sometimes. I am of late finding my opinions veering off somewhere to the right of Darth McDowell's. Which is in itself something of an achievement, you'll agree.
An oft-quoted survey by the UK Transport Research Laboratory found motorists using mobiles were four times more likely to crash than those who were just a smidgeon over the legal alcohol limit.
Appears you are as dangerous swanning around with a Motorola in your hand as a Margarita.
The researchers said reaction times were a third slower when yakking than when tipsy or stoned, and half as quick as when driving with neither narcotics nor Nokias. Hands-free kits are no solution. Conversation itself is the distraction.
According to the experts - though why it would take an expert to work this out is unexplained - phonecalls can easily suck one in and start to take precedence over driving.
Flirting with the speaking clock; ordering a surgical military strike on your boss's cat; hearing your wife's reaction when you tell her you want to be a woman or, worse still, a TD; all of these can distract you just enough to miss a stop sign and broadside a bus full of blind one-legged dyslexic orphans on their way to Fat Camp.
To make matters worse, the person yelling at you down the phone doesn't know that you are careening through said bus and isn't terrified into silence like a passenger would be.
To be honest, much as I bleat about safety concerns, the main reason I despise these phone freaks goes much deeper, right into the darkest depths of the black hole of loathing that masquerades as my subconscious mind.
The truth is, I'm jealous. I have nothing to talk to anyone about that is so desperately important that it's worth risking life and limb for.
Poor me. I feel so inferior.