Launching my brand-new, pale-green Range Rover, in all its incomparable enormity, down some of London's narrower and most peaceful side streets, I began to realise that this extraordinary car was getting a mixed press from fellow road users.
People seemed to fall into one of two camps. There were those who took violently against the vehicle on sight, their antipathy expressed by looks of pitiless contempt, occasionally underscored by hand gestures of a vigorous nature. And then there were the people who really didn't like it.
This, one sees, would be the price of sitting up so high that the only way to view the world is down your nose. And of driving a car that is six feet tall and the length of Yorkshire. A car, moreover, whose armour-plated front grille is, as it goes along with 2,440kg of precision-tooled metal behind it, aimed almost exactly at the height of most other drivers' heads.
Little wonder, really, that in a busy urban setting, such as, for example, the car park at Sainsbury's in Balham, there appears to be something award-winningly obscene about the presence of a Range Rover. In the country, obviously, the vehicle sits as naturally as wellies or adultery. In the town, it's about as welcome as a gas leak.
Yet Range Rovers have, like foxes, crept into urban areas in recent years, and in its newest incarnation the car seems to play to this development more fully than before. If you dropped the tailgate on a Range Rover in the past, you knew roughly what was likely to fall out: a litter of black labradors, a couple of empty bottles of Veuve Clicquot, the odd polo player, maybe his mistress, possibly his horse. Even now there's no reason to suspect that the vehicle's sales performance in the important Chinless Toffs sector is likely to fall away.
At the same time, in this latest spruce redesign, with its ultra-modern light clusters and chase-me twin side air vents, the Range Rover has never looked less Parker Bowles and more Michael Owen. Its heart seems to be set at least as much on being a big lump of luxury automobile for rich young movers and shakers as it is on being a huntsman's outhouse.
In 1970, when it was first produced, the Range Rover was out there on its own. Now the features that were once its unique selling point (high driving position, animal-friendly boot space) are everyone's idea of a good time and the car has cheaper competitors - lots of fizzy Japanese knock-offs in the main, but also the BMW X5 and the Mercedes-Benz ML500. (The Range Rover is itself an international hybrid these days: British built, with a BMW engine and an overseeing American parent company in Ford.)
But the Range Rover is still the big daddy. It's not just the fact that you can get a full-size bike in the back; it's the fact that you can go for a ride on it once it's in there. One morning, armed with a pair of stout walking boots and a packet of sandwiches, I set off to comb the vehicle thoroughly for a CD changer. Alas, I was forced to call off the search when night closed in.
You mount the car, rather than climb into it, which may partly explain the persistence of its appeal to horsey types. Except that no horse offers an interior as comfortable as the Range Rover's, which, in the sumptuousness of its fixtures and fittings, is up to five-star hotel standards. The clarity of the light and the freshness of the air at that height is quite intoxicating. It helps you understand why people go rock climbing.
On country lanes, you can see a tractor coming before the farmer has even got out of bed. The long-range visibility, coupled with the presence of sensors at each of the car's corners, make it far more intimidating to look at than it is to drive. In fact, one is borne effortlessly aloft, floating on the car's kingly suspension as on a cloud, with the distant swoosh of the four-litre V8 engine ahead of you and, underneath you, the faint sound of your money draining out of the petrol tank at the rate of 17 miles to the gallon.
My only quibble would be with the car's ground clearance. Eighteen centimetres may be enough to keep the bottom of the vehicle from getting scuffed in the country, but it's going to prove conservative in relation to some of the potholes that one is apt to encounter in London.
Out of respect for the decent people at Land Rover who lent us the vehicle, I didn't take my Range Rover across any ploughed fields, attempt to hurdle it over any stiles or see if it would climb a vertical quarry wall. But I am aware that I could probably have done all of these things, and without so much as making the CD player skip. Assuming I could have found the CD player.
The Range Rover will win you no friends in the city. But in the country it will win you any battle you need to fight. Indeed, if you were planning to annex a foreign country and were expecting a bit of local resistance, you couldn't pick a better car.
