Most times in this job, a car review is based on a period of time living with the car in daily work and then writing about it on that basis. Somehow, that didn’t seem the right thing to do with Alfa’s latest 156, the 2-litre JTS.

Temptation, it was. And the weather colluded, with no sign of rain on the Irish horizon. Even a partly blue sky teased.

A blue car, wild blue yonder, and we were without much difficulty convinced that it was a day to beat the blues. Even imaginary blues.

Even in these overcrowded days, there are a few roads left on which the tempting charms of an Alfa 156 can be experienced. Made easier by the fact that we didn’t have to start the day from Dublin.

It has always been a comfortable fit, the 156. I’m convinced that the seats are the best in the business, and they don’t even have electric gadgets. And it is the car that the company finally built to hold real people properly.

So the first part of the spin down the 14 miles of the Athy Road, which only has three bends, was an easy, lazy run. You don’t yield to any temptation to speed there, because they’ve put in a number of 40mph stretches and you never know behind which gate opening lurks a radar howitzer.

I’ve always known it as a road which a tramp must hate, because he has a long trudge to hope for a new view around the next corner. Its only historical interest is the Gordon Bennett Race of 1903, commemorated at the Moate of Ardscull, a hill of bones. So it is good to reach Athy and find a town which is gradually pulling itself out of a long period of decline.

The town never became an IDA darling - though it had an empty advance factory for many years - when the regional agricultural centre it once was lost its importance with the fall in the fortunes of that particular industry. Now, though, rocketing house prices in the greater Dublin area have turned it into something of a commuter bed town.

We passed by that once-extraordinary pub owned by the late undertaker Bapty Maher (a colleague of mine in that dying craft), probably no longer a place where the customers pulled their own drinks and left the money in the till. And for a few moments I was tempted to call and see if Tom Norton was still alive in the Nag’s Head. I think I’d have been told if he was dead. I must call soon.

But on through the town we rolled, in a smooth series of gearshifts, and on out towards Ballylinan where my grandmother lived before going to work in the Monster House in Kilkenny, and, many years later, where she left for the last time to come and marry my grandfather. They’ve dickied up the village, but it hasn’t yet got big, which is nice, I think. There’s a corner green with some nice planting where we almost stopped to photograph the car. But it was too soon to stop. The road was getting interesting.

There’s a turn to the right not far beyond Ballylinan which is the main road from Carlow to Portlaoise, and from that point until Stradbally it is one of the most pleasant rolling and twisting routes in this part of the world, wide enough, well-surfaced, and with good clear views around the curves through which one can very pleasantly exercise the engine and suspension of a car like the 156.

The new engine is direct injection, and this is not the kind of article in which to deal too much with the technicalities of its advanced technology. Suffice to say that there's a bit more power, some significant extra torque at lower revs, and a strong boost in acceleration if you hold the revs up. But - and I’m open to correction - I have the impression that the JTS has rather lost a certain audial edge over the older twin-spark. It could be, to purists, now almost TOO refined? Not for me, though, as its drivability is magic.

There’s a place where you come through a gap in the hills that you’ve been steadily climbing, enjoying what the 156 has to offer, and where you are heading is suddenly spread across below you, the village of Stradbally nestling in the midsummer rich greens of fields and trees and the heavy bulk of Cosby Hall standing behind it like some brooding cultic temple.

They’ve done pretty things to Stradbally too, and there are flowers all over the place. But the row of artisans’ dwellings as you run into the town are still decorated with ersatz painted doors and windows and they’ve not yet managed to find a way to refurbish them to use. The old market square is still disappointing too, with most of it a parking space for the lorries of a local haulier. A shame when there’s an historical potential.

I drove up to Cosby Hall for old times’ sake, though we were a week beyond the annual Stradbally Steam Festival which was originated there by the late Colonel Charlie Kidd. Charlie was one of the old time larger than life characters, a friend of my father’s, and I went with him to the colonel’s funeral many years ago. He had, we were told, donated his body to medical research, so the coffin left the church in a rush for Dublin rather than to the graveyard.

I never thought there was a need for the rush, as the good Charlie had imbibed enough alcohol over the years - often with Dad - to have been adequately preserved from the inside out for some considerable time.

There were those afterwards, too, who wondered if he was really dead, or just making a strategic retreat from a sometimes difficult life situation?

Ah well, he would be well dead now anyway. And my recollections of him are all pleasant, a jovial man who had many dreams and made some of them come true.

We really had to get some pictures soon, though, and the Rock of Dunamase is the local version of the famous Cashel sight, but without any religious connotations. We took the 156 to the base, and marvelled at a juxtaposition of two wonders separated by more than a millennium.

The rock was occupied for over a thousand years, and its history goes back to the time of Strongbow, into whose possession it came when he married Aoife, the daughter of the man who brought the Normans to Ireland, Diarmuid McMurrough.

Much of the ruins remain, including a portion of the barbican, and the massive hall keep on the top. The view, for the price of a fairly easy climb from the small church at the base of the Rock, is stupendous. The model trucks and cars of Ireland’s today slip silently along the Portlaoise Bypass some kilometres to the west. Strongbow and Aoife never had to concern themselves with these fume-spewing machines.

And so it was time for a little lunch, and a negotiation of the relatively new intricacies of Portlaoise and pay-parking. I don’t remember the name of the pub, but the food was decent, and finding a parking space was nothing as difficult as when the main road went through the town centre, and the stop of choice was Egan's restaurant.

The, thankfully, poorly-known Sliabh Blooms was our post-lunch planned route, and I preferred to take the way there from south of Portlaoise in Montrath than from the county capital itself. I have memories there too. After a little motoring invigoration and letting the Alfa leap out a little, we made a sharp right in the small town which I once made momentarily famous in the local paper with a photo-essay of the small details. There are no large details in Mountrath.

But there is a very big personal memory of a woman who used to slip me half Milk Flakes when as a small boy I entered her domain in the cash cubicle of my grandfather’s drapery/hardware shop in Kilcullen.

Miss ‘Ray’ Young was a Protestant lady with that brand of christianity’s ethic that made her the reliable custodian of the bookkeeping for my grandfather, my father, and for some years myself in the family’s various businesses. She too is many years dead, but her memory is embedded in my being, as somebody who not just worked for us, but loved us, and kept us as far as she could on the straight and narrow.

She drove Morris Minors as long as they were available, and the one I will always remember was in a puce colour which Paddy McDonnell of Chapmans in Kildare, God be good to him, managed to sell her in one of the last incarnations of that particular beast. It was parked for many years outside the window which opened into her office in my Dad’s house. Anybody with business for Miss Young tapped on that window, and conducted whatever they had to do there. She guarded our family home’s privacy from common commerce and commercials.

As we made that right turn in Mountrath, we drove past what had been her first and final home, and I blipped the Alfa’s throttle in her honour. It hid my quiet sniffle and the threat of a tear.

On a quiet weekday - and most are so in the Sliabh Blooms - there is fun to be had climbing upwards in a good car through bits of high bog and scraggy forest acres to a rather bare top of the hills. A car like the JTS Alfa is just right.

There are a couple of ways you can go, through ‘The Cut’ to Clonsaslee or down by the Clear Lake toward Kinnity. I chose the latter, and the view from where you top the ‘Blooms’ on the Laois/Offaly border is stupendous. It was time for another photo session, to get the rear of the car in the right place.

And then down through the Letter Cross, with some good twists and a few walking trails that looked worth a day’s trek at another time. And the eventual end of the hills is Kinnity.

The village is one of a necklace of small towns that ring the western and north-west of the ‘Blooms’. It is sweet and simple, and the ancestral home of the Bernards (I wonder if Raymond is related?) who once owned nearby Kinnity Castle and also built a pyramid in the local graveyard which reputedly contains six dead members of the Bernard family. The idea came from a family scion who saw soldier service in Egypt in the mid-1800s.

More cheerfully, there was a wedding in progress in the local church, which provided a pleasant backdrop for the Alfa’s front. We had considerably more horsepower than the carriage which was waiting for the bride.

We didn’t wait for her, but passed a nice few minutes with the woman in charge of the local tourist office. We were very impressed with her knowledge and her helpfulness, she was equally impressed with the JTS. Fair exchange.

Anyway, Kinnity Castle, where the bride and groom were eventually destined, we heard, seemed to be a good stop for late-afternoon coffee. And it WAS interesting, a gothic heap revived from one destroyed in the 13th century and rebuilt around 400 years later. It is now a 34-bed hotel, and has a bar established in the old library which feels almost as old as the original edifice. Dust, and soot from the turf fire, are real.

The afternoon tea was very good, and not nearly as expensive as in Dromoland and Adare Manor, which had the same architect as employed to extend Kinnity Castle in the early 19th century.

We watched with interest (I used to be in this kind of service business) as the manager skilfully dealt with a situation in which a young couple were clearly being bored with the conversation of an elderly and talkative gentleman, but were too well mannered to take themselves out of it. The manager sat in the middle, attracted the conversation to himself, and then left when the couple were safely disconnected.

I can appreciate that kind of thing. I've done it myself in an earlier living.

And then, the bride and her one-horsepower conveyance not having caught up, it was time to leave and wend our way home through that necklace of villages - Cadamstown, Clonaslee, Rosenallis and on to Emo and the main road home.

It was a good day. It is the kind of thing everybody should do sometimes. Simply because there’s a blue car, a teasing sometimes blue sky, and the excuse of an imaginary blues to deal with.

The blue car was just right for the day. If it hadn’t been an Alfa 156 JTS, it would not have happened.

Which is why we all should have temptation waiting outside our doors from time to time.

I indulged myself that day. I’ve indulged myself now, and if you’ve got this far, thank you for sharing my memories. And if you want to know more about the JTS, well, take one for a test drive. And they’ll give you a brochure too.