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they naturally fall into a position where they jam the door when you close it and whose aerodynamics are bettered by most motor homes and several bungalows? What can be the attraction?
    Well, for one thing, the Land Rover has been chipped; something called a Stage Two Conversion has upped its horse power by 50 per cent, replacing – or at least reprogramming – the original engine management chip and fitting a beefier turbo (the ‘T’ in Td5 stands for ‘Turbo’, and it’s a five-cylinder diesel engine).
    This does not exactly transform the Land Rover into a Ferrari, but it does mean you can keep up with normal traffic and can tackle long motorway inclines without the ignominy of having to slow and change down from top gear (it has five forward gears, but could use a sixth). Keeping the original gears means that you do tend to have to whisk through them pretty quickly on the way up – there aren’t many cars where you can comfortably change up to top gear at 40, even while going uphill – and the thing does feel a bit overrevved at motorway speeds. Still, there are useful peaks of acceleration to be found. You can sweep past startled slower drivers and caravans in the Land Rover, too, in other words; you just have to remember to slow down for the bends.
    And you can
do
things to them; customise them, fit what is, in effect, chunky Landy jewellery to them, like ladders up the back, wading snorkels up the front, vehicle-long roof-racks, foot-plates on the wings so you can stand on them without scratching them, dinner-plate-sized driving lights, rear spotlights, front towing hitches (they pretty much all have rear towing hitches). There’s even stuff you can do yourself if you’re not utterly mechanically incompetent; I took off its four wee spring-loaded side-steps all by myself and replaced them with beefy-looking running boards over a year ago and they
still
haven’t fallen off yet. On the inside, the long-wheelbase ones in particular let you stow vast quantities of junk in them. This is a vehicle with almost no conventional cubby holes or storage bins to speak of; what it has instead is a ludicrous number of nooks and crannies, once you start looking for them, mostly behind and under its many, many seats.
    And you can fit a winch, the better to extricate yourself from awkward ditch-involving situations where even your low-ratio, differential-locked four-wheel drive and mud-plugging tyres won’t get you out of your sticky predicament. Or so I’m told. Personally, I’ve never used the winch for that, but it has come in handy for boat-pulling-out duties and once got our old Drascombe Lugger (that’s a boat, honest, not rhyming slang) onto the trailer and then the trailer out of the sea in circumstances probably no other vehicle but a tractor would have prevailed in.
    The only trouble with all the ironmongery up front is that you’re making an already deeply pedestrian-unfriendly vehicle even more lethal. Of all the things on the road you don’t want to walk out in front of, a tooled-up Defender must figure pretty near the top of the list. The first thing you’ll hit – no, let me correct that; the first thing that will hit
you
– is an industrial-looking winch capable of hauling five tonnes or so attached with extreme rigidity to a beefed-up bumper you could hang a lifeboat off which is in turn bolted to an exceptionally sturdy steel ladder chassis which is attached to everything else. There is no give there, anywhere.
    (‘Does this thing have crumple zones?’
    ‘Yes. They’re called other cars.’)
    In the Defender’s defence, all I can say is that, realising all this, you do tend to drive even more carefully, especially in towns, given the sort of mess you could make of other people or lesser vehicles if you hit one.
    The impressive view is useful here. Being so high up gives you a much better idea of what’s going on between and beyond parked cars and, on the open road, helps with planning