I WAS interested to read Dr Richard House (October 18) and his rant about car ownership.

Where he says all car owners are narcissistic individuals without consideration of the environment for their consumer choice, then he boasts of his green credentials and his saintly decision to give up his car 25 years ago for the benefit of humanity and the planet.

I look forward to him disconnecting his house from the electricity grid and return to using candles, as he will find even if he subscribes to a green energy company he will still get 60 per cent of his electricity derived from fossil fuels, so will still be putting pollution into the atmosphere for future generations.

I assume he is able bodied and lives near the town centre and within walking distance of public transport.

For the rest of us, the disabled with motability cars, the elderly that live in outlying villages with virtually no public transport, people that work from home in rural locations that need to visit their offices and clients, shift workers that have to get to the towns in the middle of the night and people that have to drive to centres of public transport to travel for their work at unsocial hours.

If we all gave up our cars tomorrow the country would grind to a halt.

I have been reading Dr House’s contributions to this newspaper for a while, what is very clear, his extreme left wing views promulgated in this newspaper on a weekly basis indicate to me that he is a frustrated politician and I think before he labels all us car owners as narcissists we all wonder if he will recognise that same definition in himself Oxford English Dictionary definition: narcissism is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes.

Just saying - cast the first stone and all that!

James Riddle

Uplands