WHEN it comes to the environment I wouldn't exactly qualify as green champion of the year, but our household dutifully complies with local council recommendations on recycling.
Our three bins - black, blue and brown - surround our shed like three guardians of conscience. Plastic, glass, paper, food waste and garden cuttings are all separated.
Weekly runs to the bottle bank are done early in morning lest the neighbours think we rent a room to the Roman wine god Bacchus.
We even collect rain water and are more parsimonious than Scrooge when using up leftovers.
However, living about two miles from the centre of Newry and four miles from Warrenpoint, the car has become an essential utility for getting about - whether for shopping, leisure or work.
It wasn't always this way. As a family growing up we had no car. We were mainly reliant on our bikes or as they used to say Shanks' pony (for readers under 30 this means walking).
Public transport was pretty dismal. The 'busy bus' hadn't arrived and taxis were a luxury reserved for a big shop at Christmas.
Newry had no train service from 1966 until 1984 and when it did open it was miles from the city centre, had no car-parking provision and its facilities amounted to a portable building and less platform cover than the average bicycle shed.
It stayed that way until a fairly impressive upgrade in 2009. The services provided by Translink, however, never matched the ambition of the new station and of late those services have been reduced even more.
In Newry city centre the Translink terminus is in a location that throws traffic management into total chaos, despite having a perfectly good depot in the city centre that could have easily doubled as a bus terminal too.
It's not hard to see how private contractors have been able to successfully compete with them on their lucrative Belfast and Dublin routes.
Thankfully commerce thrives in Newry due to a sensible policy of cheap car parking which permits three hours parking for a pound.
Rather usefully the pay machines also accept Euro coins. Three hours is long enough to conduct most business, do shopping or take children for medical appointments without encouraging all day parking by workers.
Even if city centre workers do avail of this cheap car-parking, it’s a cost relative to their incomes.
The Newry experience of public transport is a similar one across Northern Ireland and worse for those with no train links at all.
But enough of the travails of provincial life and onto the big smoke - Belfast. The committee of councillors tasked with...wait for it, 'Growth and Regeneration', have voted to end a fairly modest scheme that offered free car-parking after 6pm during the Christmas and New Year period.
The reason being that Translink bosses objected, arguing that it disrupted their services to the tune of some £250,000 and led to increased traffic congestion.
There are some 28,000 paid for car-parking spaces in Belfast and the city council only own 1,500 of these, so it is nearly impossible to see how such a limited evening parking scheme could add to the congestion at an off-peak time after 6pm.
The experience of anyone who has to commute to Belfast is very different to those of the statisticians and pen pushers at Translink.
What is abundantly clear is that too many of them appear to live within Greater Belfast.
Commuting to Belfast when schools are closed is a dream. Problems are few. Rural workers going into Belfast in their thousands are reliant on their cars because the public sector offerings are so poor.
The fanciful notion that shoppers from Armagh, Newry, Newcastle or Dungannon are going to opt to do Christmas shopping, lugging their packages onto buses, only to then have to taxi themselves home is a nonsense.
Belfast is fast becoming ruined by new age zealots and policy wonks who think we can all get by on bikes and buses.
It's the kind of planning that might work for Trumpton, but not for the reality of our towns and cities.
There are buses driving around Belfast between the rush hour periods which are clearly empty, but have exclusive use of equally empty bus lanes.
There are some 24hr bus lanes without 24hr buses and too many of the city centre bus route stops are too close to one another.
Translink seems to think it has a monopoly on traffic solutions when in effect it’s an intrinsic part of the problem.
