How I learned to embrace my inner toff

I do hope it’s a terrible winter this year: a total bastard where everyone’s snowed into their drives and those few who do manage to escape end up being slewed across the road or filmed in tragic tailbacks by drones for BBC news bulletins or stuck in ditches and having to tramp miles across icy fields trying to find a friendly farmer to pull them out.

Nothing personal. It’s just that I’ve finally got hold of the car I always wanted — a Land Rover — and I’d hate people to think I only bought it for class-identity or small-penis or show-off reasons. I want to feel vindicated as a practical, responsible, sensible family man. I want the four-wheel drive to do its proper thing, rather than just be an expensive, fuel-consumption-boosting waste of space.

Our previous car was a Skoda Yeti. People speak very highly of this model — so highly that I kept having drivers of other cars sidle up to me at service stations and asking, almost conspiratorially: ‘So.