The way that traffic treats you is an important question, writes Kevin Myers. It is emblematic of your relationship with the universe. How you inter-relate to traffic, what its intentions are to you: these speak of the inner forces of the world about which we know so little.
I have a friend, for example, whose middle name, I suspect, is Ceaucescu. All he has to do is get on the road to Cork, and cars vanish from it. Traffic parts before him like the Red Sea before Moses. Driving with him is like travelling in a post-apocalypse America, empty highways in all directions.
Not me - as I learned in the spring of 1982 when heading west. Some miles east of Shannon I did not meet so much a traffic jam as the Falklands Task Force trying a shortcut overland. Have you ever tried overtaking HMS Ark Royal? Probably not. Let me tell you this. If the skipper has a rear-view mirror, he probably uses it for grooming his beard or eyeing up tasty midshipmen. He hasn't even got wing mirrors or brake-lights, and there was no sign of indicators. Perhaps that's because aircraft carriers don't turn sharp left or right very often.
Migrating glacier
The very devil to overtake, mind, your average aircraft carrier, not least because you can't see round them. And they never, ever give way, even though they're going at the speed of a glacier migrating. Sound your horn? As much impact as a gooseberry breaking wind.
And when finally you get past one, just ahead you find there's a race between another two carriers, and they're side by side on the road outside Kilbeggan, fat as wheelbarrows, and as difficult to get past as Mo Mowlam and Mary O'Rourke at the desserts trolley.
The Task Force finally abandoned the highways at Athlone, where it slipped into a medium it found more accommodating, turning left for Limerick and the Shannon estuary. Yet the roads ahead for me were barely an improvement, and what should have been a simple journey over a couple of hours stretched out to fill the day.
So it has been ever since - most recently going northwards last weekend. My first obstacle occurred near Collon, caused by a man herding dromedaries. You do not expect to get dromedaries on an Irish road, no more than you expect to get South Atlantic Task Forces. I, however, am an exception, and managed an instant diagnosis. Such sumptuous beasts, with such full lips, like I don't quite know what, could be for only one thing: barter for not merely a bride, but a maiden bride.
"The last virgin in Louth?" I called to the camel herd, as he propelled a reluctant flank with a blackthorn, and the Bactrian snarled. The simpleton grinned a toothy grin in assent. In no more than a half a morning he had cleared a path through the swaying sea of humps, and I was on my way again.
Pedestrian crossing
It is one of the ancient rules of traffic that if you see a JCB pulling out of the village road in front of you, just as you put your foot on the accelerator to get ahead of it, a small child will push the button on the pedestrian crossing between you and the custard-coloured iron. You come to a screaming stop, for children are very difficult to disentangle from windscreen wipers - like trapped badgers they are inclined to bite - but the infant stays at the button, not crossing but smirking. This is his adventure playground, where he plays God with grown-ups.
By the time you have slain the child with your bare hands and returned to your car, the JCB holds the crown of the road. Worse, it is being driven by a nun, who is on her way to her hundredth birthday party, her wheelchair in the scoop in front of her. Her progress does not merit the description headlong. Another birthday party might well occur before you are clear of her.
You cut sharply into a side road, and are suddenly behind a small turquoise car. It is probably a Matsima Microbia or a Velcro Virus or an Opel Quark. Those who buy blue-green cars named after a sub-atomic particle or a vector for a deadly disease have long since excluded themselves from the human race.
Animated conversation
How do I describe their drivers' sex? Mmmm. Let me see, how can I put this? Well, it's the sex that doesn't go in for steeple-jacking, or coal-mining, or Sumo wrestling, or bull-fighting, but on the other hand, it is terribly, terribly in tune with its feelings. You can tell that by the animated conversation within the Bellini Bacillus or the Gerona Germ, while the driver appears to be conducting Beethoven's Ninth.
In despair, you abandon the turquoise trail, and are up a country lane, where a product of 15 generations of careful incest is holding a red flag, with which he waves you to a halt. You are about to reverse, when the LE Eimear eases up behind you, on its way to Border duty. And then, with awful majesty, from round the bend in front of you, inches the Sellafield nuclear processing plant, en route for its new home in Dalkey.
And just as you think the day could not be worse, you are overtaken by a small turquoise coloured car on the outside, full of animated chatter and flying hands, and on the inside lane by a JCB, with a wizened crow-like figure whooping behind the steering wheel. . .
KEVIN MYERS