May 17th 2005

It takes 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat but only one to wear it." It was a good poster, that: memorable, got to the heart of the matter, did what it said on the tin. You don't see many people wearing fur any more; some hip-hop pimp gangster types, obviously, but when you listen to them, you realise that the death of the odd ferret is quite low on their list of priorities. But generally speaking, fur is no longer the acceptable or coveted garment it once was (I would like to see the poncho, the Ugg boot and the velour tracksuit added to that list, but you can't have it all). Paint was chucked, blood daubed, abuse shouted, and hey presto, dead, drooping animals gave way to dead, drooping faces, and Botox took off.

With this in mind, I'd like to salute Greenpeace, who yesterday infiltrated the Range Rover factory and chained themselves to the assembly line in protest against carbon emissions. Then I'd like to launch my own poster campaign. "It takes a couple of hundred people to make a 4x4, but only one idiotic tosser to drive one." It's not got the same succinct ring to it as the anti-fur slogan, and of course the vehicle isn't made of people, but by them - not that the corpse of an engineer in the wheel arch would deter most of the bull-bar brigade. And if there was a chance that it was the body of one of the Greenpeace activists, so much the better.

"But they are so much safer for my children," chime the cretins as they veer across two lanes with mobile phone in hand. No, they are not. Sorry, I mean yes they are - much safer, provided that you never get out of your stupid bloody vehicle. It's like a big steel bunker with wheels: safe, cosy impenetrable. That is, until you have to slide off the faux leather seats and waddle off to your houses, then some equally moronic version of yourself comes round the corner with two and a half tons of steel and a Chris DeBurgh medley on the stereo and you are suddenly 30 times more likely to die than if these massive self-esteem replacements were banned from the road.

Perhaps that is the answer - force every urbanite 4x4 user to joust to the death until only Jeremy Clarkson is left laughing like a git and driving off into the sunset, or better still, the actual sun.