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overtaking manoeuvres. The Defender’s windscreen starts about where most cars’ roofs top out and from a Defender – especially one like ours, fitted with tall 750 series tyres which would hardly look out of place on a tractor – you even get to look down on Range Rover drivers. And walls. You and your passengers get to look over walls and hedges and fences; even a totally familiar route opens up the first time you drive it in one of these beasts.
    Other Defender advantages: they’re hard to lose. Take your average car into a crowded supermarket car park, forget exactly where you left it and you can spend ages searching for the thing. A Defender is different; as you push your trolley out of the supermarket’s front doors you can easily spot a Defender because it’s the object blocking out the sun in the near, middle or far distance, depending. And, talking about supermarket trolleys, Defenders laugh in the face of those savage despoilers of metallic-finish car bodywork. Honestly; you can still feel deeply proud of and even attached to the thing, but you just stop caring about dings, dents and scratches.
    In fact, a Defender doesn’t really look quite right until it’s got a few dents in its aluminium panels (Defenders look somehow distinctly embarrassed when they’re all clean and gleaming, too, and as for the alloy wheels you sometimes see them fitted with … dearie me). Plus the high floor – at hip-height on me, and I’m just over six feet – is perfect for loading heavy stuff, much more spine- and disc-friendly than a low car boot, however commodious.
    And, with a little experience, you can throw Defenders about to a surprising degree; they lean a lot and you’re kept very aware indeed that you’re driving something over two metres tall and only five feet wide, but, to some degree, they can be hustled. You can even get the tyres to squeal, though such larks do tend to alarm one’s passengers and as a result are very much not recommended. They are also very much not recommended because that squealing noise from the rubber bits generally means you are a frighteningly small speed increment away from executing a series of spectator-spectacular but incumbent-injurious rolls-cum-somersaults immediately prior to becoming an embedded part, or parts, of the nearby scenery.
    Last advantage. This really only affects people in London for now, but if I read the rules correctly, you can drive a Land Rover like mine into the central charging zone of London without having to pay the congestion charge. I’m not saying you
should
, of course, but I think in theory you could.
    This is because a 110 County Station Wagon of this vintage has at least ten passenger seats. In theory it has eleven, believe it or not, but that includes the central seat in the front right beside the driver, where your passenger basically gets sexually assaulted every time an even-numbered gear is selected. Most people replace this effectively useless so-called seat with a cubby box for storing handy Landy stuff. As a result of this bizarre proliferation of seats and seat belts, the vehicle is effectively classed as a bus, and while it does mean that you face the added expense of an MOT from year one of ownership, not year three, this would easily be outweighed for Londoners by the benefits of even just a couple of weeks’ free driving into the city centre.
    Still a fine, bright, sunny day. Not warm, but mild, even on the water. The ferry shoulders its way through the knee-high waves; Gourock’s drawn-out southern limits draw away and I walk to the other side of the boat to watch Dunoon and Argyll come closer.
    What the hell am I doing here?
    It all started a few months ago, with my agent. The way things are supposed to when you’re a professional, after all. I was sitting at home in North Queensferry reading the paper and minding my own business on a cool October day when the phone rang.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Banksie. It’s Mic. I may have