Sometimes it's difficult to stay positive, it really is. With world financial markets collapsing and the USA turning into a socialist state it seems nothing is the same anymore.

Of course the great failing of the human condition is the false assumption that everything will stay the same but it never has and it never will. We all plod through life thinking that as it is, it always will be. There is good reason for that of course, if we digested the reality of the world on a regular basis it would be hard to cope.

The free-market world we have lived in for the past few decades is only a recent phenomenon, post Second World War really. Our grandparents and great-grandparents were used to a world that was utterly different to our own, one of war and destruction. Their grandparents lived in a place of starvation, abject poverty, low life expectancy and the constant threat of violence. All changes often.

Our cosy presumption that things will always stay the same is a defence mechanism against uncertainty. Climate change is just the latest hurdle; at least in Western Europe we live in a peaceful place. Citizens of the great civilisation of Rome must have felt secure and certain of their future. That lasted more than a thousand years, we are but the blink of an eye in comparison but eventually it turned to dust. The truth is that so will our civilisation, maybe not today, maybe not for a thousand years but eventually we too will amount to nothing, it is inevitable.

This is something that the provisional licence holders of Ireland are now also having to come to terms with. Figures just released show that 1,400 of them have been caught driving unaccompanied since the government decided on the novel approach of actually enforcing the law.

No more will Granny McCarthy be able to pootle to the shops without passing a test, no more will Dezza be able to drive home in his Subaru after failing his driving test (again). No more will Fionnula (five crashes) Fitzgerald be able to stay on the road. Another lethal piece of old Ireland has finally been consigned to the dustbin of history along with the Romans.

We have become like Sweden and Saskatchewan, safe, sanitised, smoke free, long lived, obedient consumers. Another lesson we can learn from Rome is that pride goes before a fall. That most long-lived of western civilisations eventually became the agent of its own demise. It wasn't the Barbarians that finished Rome, it was the Romans. They became complacent, decadent and corrupt. They lost their edge and Rome ate itself.

It seems to Motormouth we may be going the same way. I don't wish to be alarmist but talking down the economy should be the least of our worries, this is the beginning of the end of the world as we know it as Michael Stipe once said.

Ireland has become boring, anodyne and pointless. It may be safer and richer but it is poorer for it. The provisional driver is a metaphor for our old selves. He is dangerous and irresponsible but he's a bit of craic too. He represents what once was our healthy disrespect for authority. Now he's driving off into the sunset and truth be told, I'm going to miss him in a funny sort of way.

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