My road trip notebook: castles, Charles Darwin and Churchill’s cuddly toys

Before pandemic I thought I might drive across America, or even France. Now — what about Kent, the garden of England? Why treat English Heritage and the National Trust like guardians of the graveyard: you must be old or possessing a dog to enter? I need a car and so I borrow a Ferrari. The car and I are both nervous. It has a peculiar consciousness; no car feels as responsive, or as human. It feels like driving an Italian man. It is infinitely stylish, it beeps when it is anxious or cross, and it is credulous and ambitious about London traffic, which is touching: how can it take an hour to go eight miles? Me, I just don’t want to break it. It has a V8 engine, which presumably calls to other Ferraris — mastodons bellowing across the valleys, ideally in Modena — and it throws off the monstrous rain like a metal animal shaking its head.