IT'S one of life's perversions that when you are young, gorgeous and looking your best, you're usually at your poorest, struggling to pay the mortgage, forking out for the kids and trying to balance the books at home.
Having a decent car is low on the list of priorities, so, it's with great joy when you hit middle age and the kids have left home and your earnings are at their peak, that you can finally buy the car you've always wanted.
So, why do so many middle-aged men and women get it so horrendously wrong?
Instead of looking dashing, debonair and delightful, they buy a car wholly inappropriate, leaving them looking overweight, overpaid and undersexed.
Last weekend, I saw a bloke, and presumably his missus, driving along a country lane in the Pennines. He was at the wheel of a beautiful, late-nineties Mazda MX5.
I don't think he had the foggiest of just how ridiculous he looked.
He and his partner were in their early sixties. She wore an expression that said she really would rather have been at home watching Dr Zhivago. Instead, she was enduring a freezing, nostalgic drive to hell and back (the Derwent Valley actually.)
It was so cold a drip of water was hanging from her nose. The driver, on the other hand, wore a deluded look of youthful energy. What with the MX5 and the Viagra, I think he was hoping to make a night of it. I'm guessing.
And I think she had had the same dreadful thought. He just looked a little pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I adore the Mazda MX5. It's in my top three cars of all time. And it is especially suited to young women and young men. It is not a car middle-aged men should be seen in. I'm all for old men pretending they are 25 again, but in an MG or a Morgan instead.
There's something more honest about having to grease a car's nippes before a drive. It's a stereotype, but some people suit stereotypes.
Far more distasteful are extra large middle-aged businessmen in their coupés; style-less blokes who look like they've just got off the sunbed and had a three-course lunch while they were there. With their black suits and buckled shoes, you can almost hear the right wing reactionary views coming from inside the car.
They are Radio 5 men who think that because they listened to a phone-in on immigration with Simon Mayo on the way to visit a client in Nantwich, they have a worthwhile opinion on most things.
More than stereotypes; they are clichés. In the main, they drive beautiful cars - Ford Cougars, Mercedes CLKs and 6 series beemers. But when they get out, you see the mullet hairstyle and the moustache that is so incongruous with the style of the car. They look like they tell people how virile they are. He probably thinks that the lap dancer he booked for his mate's stag do (second marriage, obviously) actually fancies him.
The look screams businessman and it screams of a vanity that they should long since have grown out of.
They are self-made men and as such don't owe anyone a jot.
Women who drive these cars are just as bad, with hardened faces that don't smile. They can't. If they do, their face will crack and it will be back to the surgeon for another nip and tuck.
They're trying to tell the world that they're successful and gorgeous. Well, one out of two ain't bad. And they judge their success by the amount of money they are wearing.
My problem is with the cars, too. So often they are sheep in wolves' clothing. I'd rather have a wolf in sheep's clothing. The coupés I'm talking about are too indulgent and self-centred. If I had that kind of money, I'd sooner have any 3 or 5 series beemer. Or the life-affirming Audi RS6.
All right, that last one is pricey. But the performance is akin to an injection of adrenaline straight to the heart and yet would only turn the most discerning of heads.
For me, the secret of good style is subtlety.
And, I am of course, just jealous. And desperate for the day that I don't feel forced to strap a car tidy to the back of the driver's seat.
