Motoring: Snow patrol

The American poet Robert Frost wrote memorably of pausing on his pony in the snow and looking longingly into woods that were ‘lovely, dark, and deep’, regretting that he had promises to keep and ‘miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep’. In another poem he described a woodland path as the road not taken; instead, he took ‘the one less travelled by/And that has made all the difference’. I felt he was with us in spirit in Finland last week as I gazed into the mysterious depths of snow-clad, brooding conifers and wondered at the fragile, frost-feathered glory of a birch wood. He would have left in disgust, however, when he saw how close we — I — came once or twice to rudely penetrating those mysterious depths and shattering the frosted glory.

Rather than pausing on a silent pony, I was struggling to restrain well over a thousand horses of assorted Jaguar XKR-S, Range Rover Vogue, Sport and Evoque engines, not to mention the awesome plodding power of the almost unstoppable Bigfoot.