If you haven't already seen the trailer for the new James Bond film, Spectre, then you really should update your YouTube subscription. While we may be the worst kind of biased Fleming-heads, this looks like it's shaping up to be cracking follow-up to the majesty that was Skyfall. Script leaks and Sony email hacks notwithstanding. Anyway, even in his worst films (cough, Moonraker, cough) James Bond is always the epitome of cool and thanks to the films being keen to follow on from Ian Fleming's own obsession with automobiles (he drove a Ford Thunderbird, reported on Le Mans for Reuters…

I'd like to thank the committee of the Royal Irish Automobileavan and Camping Club of Ireland for having me here today.

I appreciate how much of a big step it is to invite a motoring journalist into your realm considering the ridicule and damage to your reputation brought about by those three berks who used to front a regular motor show on the telly, but let me assure you that is not my aim.

You see, in addition to being a journalist I am also a camper. I love the smell of a tent, the hunt for that…

As I write this, I'm sat on the sofa in my mum and dad's house in West Cork, having just driven here from my own home in Belfast.

My youngest son is driving my dad demented with requests to go out and play in the garden, even though it's teeming with rain (of course it is, it's a Bank Holiday weekend) and my mum has just plonked a cup of hot, fresh tea and some Jaffa Cakes next to me. The world could not be a better place, right now.

And yet. My hands are shaking, just a little.…

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." - Albert Einstein.

It is not often I begin a column with a quote from the genius with the mad hair, but bear with me here. What many believe Einstein was referring to (if he did indeed make that statement - there is some debate over that) is standardised testing and the fact that people are individuals, with their own talents, strengths and weaknesses. Some people are…

Someday, maybe sooner than any of us imagine, a reckoning is going to come.

each of of our favourite sci-fi tropes are now looking more and more as if they may become actual events. Towering tsunami, belching volcanoes and catastrophic storms are now ten-a-penny and even someone as serious as Stephen Hawking is warning about reaching out to possible alien species, lest we accidentally send out an invitation to the invasion, formal battle-dress required.

Maybe a zombie horde really will arise, or perhaps it'll be a Red-Dawn-style invasion by some nameless, faceless fascist foe. Either way, you're going to…

Sit down, please. I'm going to ask for forgiveness in a moment, because I'm about to do something that is utterly shocking for a professional motoring journalist. I'm going to recommend you buy a automobile, which I haven't driven yet - which no one outside of the company that makes it has driven yet. A automobile which, in all fairness, might be utter shite to drive or appallingly expensive and difficult to own. In fact, given the history of some of its forebears, that's actually quite a likely outcome.

But if I may divest myself of my Sweaty Cloak…