My friends, I am a doomed man. If I read this latest letter correctly, I am on the point of losing the right to drive.
The state will shortly take away from me the privilege I first earned at the age of 18, when, after massive investment in the British School of Motoring, I passed my driving test first time.
Since then, I have driven many hundreds of thousands of miles, in dozens of countries, and never yet had a prang. Not a single person has been thrown from my bumper; not a deer, not a cat, not a dog, not even, dare I say it, a mouse.
If you discount the minor flesh wound sustained by a Cornish meat pie van that brushed my Alfa very late at night some years ago, I have barely come into physical contact with another vehicle, so scrupulous is my driving.
Wherever I go, I see louts who pull out without looking, who overtake on blind corners, who fling open their doors just as I am coming by on my bicycle.
I see idiots and crash-artists and prangmeisters and fools who change nappies on the hard shoulder; and in all this carnival of incompetence and carelessness it is I – I, who have never so much as crunched a headlight! I, who have never even stoved in a bonnet, boot or door! – I am being taken off the road.
According to my secretary, Batley-born Ann Sindall, I have now been photographed so often by the same speed camera, exceeding the speed limit by the same pathetic amount, that, come September, the game will be up.
She has been counting the letters from the police, and totting up the points. The emanations of the state will be warned that I am no longer allowed on the Queen’s highway, and any breach of the ban will be an imprisonable offence.