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. How’s your Yeti?’ My reply to this would be something like: ‘OK. Really OK. About as good as OK could possibly get.’ It trundles along at a perfectly acceptable lick; it doesn’t break down; it has decent enough boot space (with dinky little hooks on which to hang your shopping bags so they don’t fly everywhere and spill your groceries: nice touch, that). But it looks like the sort of car Postman Pat might drive when he’s not using his van. The kids — Girl especially, who’s going through that phase where she wishes Dad ran a hedge fund, like all the other parents — used to loathe being collected from school in it.