A Mazda MX5's gearbox is miles more positive; finding the right gear in a Boxster can be a lucky dip in which you can catch first when you wanted third. It can be specified with Porsche's Active Suspension Management (PASM) which, unusually for such a system, you can actually feel coming into play on fast corners, resisting roll, keeping your course true It's not perfect though, the Boxster. Though this new Boxster looks precisely the same as the original, launched almost 10 years ago, there have been numerous improvements which make it an even more irresistible drive. There's more aluminium and magnesium to save weight, larger wheels, a sharper gearbox and reworked suspension. Go beyond comfort speeds on corners and the Boxster will reward you with an assuredness and composure that hardly seems credible in a car that rides so smoothly at low speeds. Own a car like this and you will want to see what it can do, and the only place to do that will be on a track. The new Boxster is in its element being pushed to the limit on a tight circuit.

It is one of those cars in which every component, from the suspension, to the seat bolsters, to the thickness of the steering wheel, has been designed - at a molecular level - to urge you to push harder every time you drive it. It's true, you will always be able to find a brief stretch of B-road on which to let rip, but the drudgery of day to day motoring is going to make spending £32,000 on a car as scintillating and addictive as the Boxster deeply frustrating Which is where track days come in. Over the next few years driving on the public roads is only destined to become less and less pleasurable. Speed cameras, a decline in driving standards, congestion and the swingeing cost of motoring in the post-Darling era are, for the vast majority of us, due to render the private car no more than a very expensive means of getting from A to B without having to sit next to someone with ferocious halitosis on a bus. At the same time, cars are being designed to handle better and go faster which will mean that owning cars like the new Porsche Boxster, for instance, will be like having an itch it is illegal to scratch. Specifications Would suit Well, if Alastair Darling owned one, the world would almost certainly be a better place.Price: from £32,320 Maximum speed: 159mph, 0-60 in 6.2 secs Combined fuel consumption: 29.4mpg Further information: 0845 791 1911 I realise you wouldn't ordinarily turn to this page for financial advice, but forget Google or Tesco, I urge you to invest your surplus cash in motor-racing circuits I can feel it in my water.

It's important for us to be prudent with bio-security," she said.Although the chances of the virus spreading from birds to humans within Britain is thought to be very low, the Cabinet's civil disasters committee, Cobra, is to stage its own emergency exercise next month.Ministers and the World Health Organisation believe a global flu pandemic in the next few years is inevitable and fear it could potentially cause millions of deaths worldwide and hundreds of thousands in Britain.Additional reporting by Gemma Collins. Bans on imports of all Russian poultry into the EU have already been imposed.The risks of the virus being spread by wild birds will be high on the agenda of the Government's expert animal diseases advisory committee meeting this November. The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is also planning a major national emergency exercise early next summer, to plan for a nationwide outbreak.Andy Evans, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said conservationists were updating their plans as they tracked the outbreak in Russia. British ornithologists and the National Farmers Union (NFU) are now closely tracking the new outbreaks, and have drafted new measures to control an outbreak in bird sanctuaries and chicken farms.The NFU admits it is also preparing plans to bring poultry indoors if the virus arrives in Britain, which could be quickly stepped up to include mass culls on infected farms. Health experts are increasingly alarmed about the dangers of its spread because nearly nine million water-birds and waders migrate from Siberia to Europe every autumn, with nearly 850,000 thought to make winter homes in Britain.Some species, including the pochard duck, identified as one of the birds that brought the disease from elsewhere in Asia to Russia, breed in the affected areas. The Dutch authorities have already ordered all poultry farmers to bring their chickens indoors from tomorrow, and the German government announced on Friday it would order all its poultry farmers to follow suit next month if the virus spread.British bird experts have told The Independent on Sunday they believe there is a risk - although currently a small one - that migratory ducks and waders arriving in the UK this autumn will be carrying the disease.