SHE was youngish, prettyish and made me jolly angryish as she barreled round the blind bend in the twisty country lane, threatening to take out me, my precious Toyota MR2 Mk1 and a hawthorn hedge.

The following may not surprise you: She was driving a four-by-four, she was holding a mobile phone to her ear and, after bouncing off a convenient grass bank, continued on her way, still chattering.

Doubtless something along the lines of: "Whoops! I nearly hit something. Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah, I'll be with you in a couple of minutes."

Drivers using mobile phones do to me what closed public loos do to my co-columnist Plain Jane.

Not in the sense of crossing my legs and grimacing, but as in being driven to degrees of rage likely to feature when Channel 4 gets round to showing "The 40 Greatest Temper Tantrums Ever".

Using a mobile phone is worse than speeding, drink-driving or careless driving and here is why:

Take your eyes off the speedo as you glance up at a road sign and you could stray over the 30mph limit.

Not realise that the pint of beer you enjoyed in the village pub was stronger than the brew in your local and you could find you are a couple of milligrams over the drink limit.

Misjudge the speed of the car pulling out a side road and you could be judged to have driven carelessly.

All wrong, all punishable – and all accidental.

It is impossible to reach for a phone and make a call by accident. It is an "I'll do what I want" v-sign. I have seen motorists at the Cecil Square traffic lights, rabbiting away and snarling a "What's your problem, Grandad?" glare at any hint of disapproval.

You see it at high speed on Thanet Way, at low speed at Westwood, in the twirly bits of Broadstairs shopping streets.

Yet it could be eliminated overnight. Instead of a piffling £60 fine and three penalty points, police should be empowered to seize the vehicle on the spot. No matter where, no matter what time. And don't return it for a week.

As the drivers stand by the road, they can phone for a friend to pick them up. And for once their call won't be putting the rest of us in peril.

DELIGHTED to see August living up to its reputation as the silly season for news.

We have learned, for instance, that a scheme involving Reading Education Assistance Dogs is being backed by Kent County Council (the same story was doing the rounds last August, although then it was happening in Bournemouth).

It involves children reading aloud to dogs, to spare the little darlings the ordeal of having to do anything as taxing as reading aloud to other children.

From the monosyllabic conversations one hears grunted outside several of our local schools, it might make more sense to get the dogs to read to the children.

AND we learned this month that even in these straitened times, our council can put its hands down the back of the sofa and find tens of thousands of pounds to make Margate look prettier for visitors processing from Margate station to the Temple of Turner.

Confessing that certain key sites still need tackling, our cabinet spokesman for regeneration declared that: "The last thing we want is for those to have an impact on people's views of the town when they come to visit Turner Contemporary."

Ratepayers might suggest that the first thing we might have wanted would have been for the council to have the same fawning concerns for its own residents' sensibilities.

Once silly August is out of the way and sombre September sets in, we may have more serious concerns if the Turner's golden geese get carted off to the poulterer.