We live in an age where we aspire to be as everyone else around us. It's true.
We crave celebrity and adulation because, basically, we want to be admired. It is this, that makes us the same.
We want what everyone else wants and that's why we create unions, guidelines, policies, legislation. We come together and we thrash out rules, otherwise we'd never get along.
This guiding principle of competition and envy is what, in this day and age, helps drive progress.
And progress is exactly what I want to drive.
When I sat behind the stearing wheel of a Ferrari 360 for the first time, it was a triumph of spirit over mediocrity.
I was in control of a car that was the idol of my childhood. The prancing horse, always at the ready to gallop off.
I took it round for a few laps and hit 160mph on the straight. I'd never felt such torque in my life. The car, hugging the asphalt, with a low centre of gravity and 6 speed transmission, growled and roared at my every touch.
It was incredible. Breathtaking.
Like being in one of those volatile relationships that leaves you thirsting for more.
Kicking it's hind up in the air, 400bhp @ 8500rpm this mid-engined, rear-wheel beast, let me have all 275lb/ft of it's power and told me that any stupid move and I'd be struggling to control it round the chicane.
Wow. I was breathless. 0-60 in 4.5 seconds. I felt like a cowboy trying to stay in the saddle at a rodeo.
Man and machine as one....
It's after an intense ride like this, which warps space and time and makes you finally understand Einstein's Theory of Relativity, that you understand just how slow our lives really travel.
Everything afterwards is played out at 1/8th of a pace.
It's made me thirst for more and I'll be behind the wheel of another soon. A car that refused to be saddled and broken into, that riding required energy of my own and in doing so, exposed to me the truth of our species: that no matter how we travel, we can always go that bit further, that bit faster.
I love my Lucy; She's a Toyota Avensis. Red and pretty and she's big. She's capable of around 130mph (if any officers are reading this rest assured I have not tested this on a UK road), and I know she's been designed with safety and comfort in mind.
But I wonder, with safety a prerogative and the Euro NCAP breathing down manufacturers necks, with Health and Safety a priority when designing anything (and to a great degree, rightly so) have we sacrificed a little too much daring-do? Has this compromise of safety and excitement dulled our roads, our passageways in between destinations and, as a consequence, dulled our wits and senses and our very ability to move?
I don't know.
In any case, I will say that a man should drive a very fast car, very fast (in a controlled environment like a race track), at least once in his lifetime.
It's a right of passage greater than the first time you ever had sex, acquired a mortgage or stepped up a peg higher on the career ladder.
A man only develops an appetite after he's eaten and I'm hungry for more -
Plymouth-Dakar race next. Watch this space....
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