Her's an interesting test for our Psychology Department.

Does the colour of one’s car affect the way you drive?

I’ve just moved into a white car. By no means the colour I was looking for, but it was all they were offering.

It’s not just that cleaning the car is somewhere below stone-breaking or oakum picking on my list of priorities.

It’s also that, in my experience, white car owners take more risks and drive faster than other drivers.

Am I now obliged to join this hair-raising club, and to match white knuckles to the colour of the paint-work ?

I need to qualify the colour here. What they have given me is “ice white”. This distinguishes it from “platinum white” and “Oxford white” on their colour spectrum.

These are, I suppose, a little less threatening than “performance blue” or “tornado red”, but not by much.

A great deal of pretentiousness, I think you can see, has crept into automobile paintwork.

What’s the point of having a car in “Aegean blue”, if you only plan to drive around Hall Green?

For example, when I last visited my dealership to discuss models, they were trying to lure me into a car in “panther black”. Panther?

Does this mean that I shoot down the road and end up in a tree?

Alternatively, they told me I could choose “tuxedo black”. Having never worn one, I’m not about to get into one either.

Isn’t it interesting that vehicle colours are almost always designed to appeal to the male market?

I think that, in attempting to make their colours sound cool and sexy, the manufacturers are missing a trick.

If I was running a dealership in Swansea, I would be cashing in on the Dylan Thomas connection, and selling models in “bible black”. With the added instruction, of course, that misjudged use of the accelerator lands one in the fishing-boat bobbing sea.

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve ended up with a car in sterilised milk white, and I’ll be driving it at the speed of a milk-float.

* Dr Chris Upton has been pulled over by the police for clogging up the traffic on the ring road