If there is an uglier car on the road than the Citroen Berlingo Multispace, then I would be very keen to see it. A tribute to the elasticity of the welder's art, the Berlingo combines the charm of an electrician's van in a former communist country with the road-tearing elan of a show-dog transporter.
Toying daringly with the conventional wisdom on vehicle dignity, the car slowly rises from front to back, without coming down again. It has a sheer, almost vertical rear end, as milkfloats do. An impressed three-year-old remarked that the Berlingo was "like Andy's car" - which turned out to be an allusion to the animated movie Toy Story 2, in which Andy is indeed driven away to summer camp in a vehicle not a million miles away from a Berlingo. And it's quite right that, in reality, the car looks somehow pixellated, a piece of computer guesswork, not quite true.
All this and it seems to have been named after some kind of cassette-based, teach-yourself language course. ("Do you speaka Berlingo? Learn French in 10 days, or your money back.")
At the same time, though, check out that price. Go for the smallest engine (1.4) and do without the air conditioning, the sunroof, a few of the air bags and a couple of the other fripperies, and a Berlingo can be yours for under £9,000. This is a large car we're talking about - one that could happily seat a family of five and its pony. Or even its giraffe, with the sunroof back. (The Berlingo, like the Citroen Picasso, has one of those gigantic, full-length sunroofs that has the effect of peeling the top right off the car.) It's doubtful that your money could buy you a more capacious vehicle.
Citroen knows it is up to something challengingly unusual with the Berlingo. As it puts it itself: "Why choose an ordinary car when you could have a Berlingo?" Well, for one thing, because an ordinary car doesn't look like a Berlingo and doesn't have humorously square windows of the kind made famous by Wendy houses. And because some people like to get about without being laughed at or having others assume they have come to unblock the drains.
But Citroen seems to prefer to interpret the Berlingo's difference as a fetching quirkiness. Publicity photographs for the car dare to show it on a beach, pored over by five young people of inordinately sunny dispositions - like you might gather some friends, gas up the Berlingo and take off to St Tropez, just for the buzz.
I'm not so sure about this. I find it hard to imagine a journey in a Berlingo that doesn't involve children, livestock and/or some of the larger items of produce from a garden centre. And, even though Citroen has taken the trouble to realise this scenario for me photographically, I find it very hard to imagine someone in a bikini driving one.
Personally, I was very well-covered the day I went in my Berlingo to pick up a Christmas tree. (It was on the scale of a gift from the Norwegian people, but it went in the back easily enough.) A man offered to help carry the tree to the car and I found myself saying: "It's that funny blue thing up there." Life with a Berlingo would, I suspect, be like this a lot: you would keep finding yourself having to laugh it off or apologise for it in advance, a bit like with your mother.
Better really, if one is going to get involved, to accept the car straightforwardly for what it is - which is not a misplaced fun wagon or thickly disguised dream machine but, rather, a highly effective and deeply affordable means of driving a big lump of space around.
Inside, the driver is confronted by the usual prairie of uninteresting plastic and a set of dull but perfectly coherent and usable buttons and clocks. The quietly functional engine was ... well, quiet and functional and at no point tempted me into anything madcap, such as a handbrake turn. But then, one would hardly have stepped into what is, in effect, a high-sided vehicle expecting thrills.
The rear passenger compartment appears to have been modelled on an aeroplane's interior (there are seat-back pockets on the seat in front of you and overhead luggage space in the form of nets above the doors). Except, of course, that there's more leg-room in a Berlingo. And you are never far from an emergency exit: the rear doors slide open, which does nothing to decrease the sense that you are in an adapted Post Office vehicle, but which does, clearly, assist one's passage and makes sitting on one side and getting out on the other an easy manoeuvre, rather than an exhausting feat of contortionism.
And in the end, I guess, these things matter, far more than the overall comeliness of the car. The fact is, right now, I have a Christmas tree to dump and no Berlingo to dump it with. I miss it.
The lowdown
Citroen Berlingo Multispace 1.4i
Price: £8,995
Top speed: 93 mph
Acceleration: 0-62 in 14.6 seconds
Consumption: 36.7 mpg
At the wheel: Alan Titchmarsh
On the stereo: Melody FM
En route for: Water Features R Us
