Yup, you read me right: one of the “names” the Kellogg’s website actually suggested that punters might like to personalise their free cutlery with was . . . Butt Munch.

There was, for a while, a certain amount of tension; then it faded, as tension does. We’re all experimental animals, really, subject to vivisection by means of a scientific method we ourselves promulgate. The electric plate is charged, we yelp and try to struggle over the wall – but once we realise our struggles are futile we collapse, and lie whimpering as we’re subjected to shock after shock.

We collected the tokens assiduously, even though it entailed visiting several corner shops, often late at night, and rummaging through dusty shelves under the sleepy lenses of duff CCTV cameras. Why? Because such is the parsimony of the mighty Kellogg Corporation that it can afford to be capricious: an offer will be proffered – then, without warning, the free-gift-bearing hand will be retracted, as if it, too, has been subjected to an electric shock.

Anyway, at last we had the three tokens required and we sat down in front of the computer and logged on to the mandated site. I wrote in this column in May that my 13-year-old son and I had leapt at the Kellogg’s “personalised spoon” offer, our only desire to have a spoon engraved with the legend “WHICH ORIFICE? YOUR CHOICE”. But when we saw the options on offer we were dismayed; “personalising” turned out to mean branding your name on the eating iron, not using its steely surface as a sort of miniature toilet wall on to which you could graffito such off-colour remarks. We scrolled through the names on offer, hoping against hope we would find something that approached the sentiment we wished to convey – and then, miracle of miracles, there it was: Butt Munch.

Yup, you read me right: one of the “names” the Kellogg’s website actually suggested that punters might like to personalise their free cutlery with was . . . Butt Munch. My boy and I goggled at the screen until the pixels began to pop, crackle and snap before our eyes. Who in the mighty Kellogg Corporation had authorised this bizarrely subversive insertion, in between all the Keishas, Kellies and Kevins? We goggled at the screen some more, half expecting the letters to waver and dissolve into a sweet and milky sludge. Not a bit of it: Butt Munch remained on the table. So we selected it, entered our postal address, clicked the button, sat back, and waited.

And waited . . . and attended some more. My son was of the opinion that the Butt Munch was the work of computer hackers. After all, it was simply beyond belief that Kellogg’s, with its ethical roots sunk deep in the socially conservative soil of Seventh-Day Adventism, could sanction the idea of people munching on butts – let alone actively promote it. You’ll recall that even the tolerant and sexually adventurous Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, when awakened by her husband indulging in a little late-night butt-munching, is rather . . . shocked. It’s one thing for fictional characters to practise butt-munching in the privacy of their own home – quite another for breakfast cereal consumers to have such perversions urged on them from the handles of their spoons. Besides, Kellogg’s has its dietetic reputation to uphold. Seventh-Day Adventists are much preoccupied by the health of the “whole person”, and the company was established in part to disseminate notions of healthy eating. Now, even though butt-munching isn’t necessarily unhealthy, nor is it holistic: for that, you have to munch the “whole person”.

As we continued to wait for our subversive spoon – May ladled into June – still it didn’t come. I never thought it would, because whether the “Butt Munch” option was deliberately offered by a maverick employee, or maliciously by an infantile nerd wearing a V for Vendetta mask, there was no way several Kellogg’s staff were going to collude in making and despatching it. I set to one side the vision that had originally animated our quest: my descendants, many years in the future, staring bemusedly at the faint inscription on their inherited cutlery. I got on with my life – it was a disappointment, true, but no more of one than realising Ronald McDonald isn’t a really funny clown but a cynical advertising tool. I went to Australia and travelled deep into the Outback, visiting remote regions where few proper spoons, let alone personalised ones, are ever seen, and the sparse local population has to eat its Rice Bubbles with cumbersome, makeshift tools beaten out of bits of corrugated iron.

Then, upon my return, there it was! A visitation! A miracle! A beautiful red cardboard box with a transparent cellophane panel in it, through which could be seen the slim, shiny handle of a spoon – and on this handle the delightfully suggestive appellation “Butt Munch”. The packaging alone was a provocation to lust, resembling as it did silky, translucent lingerie. Soon enough I’d torn it off and was feverishly caressing my new spoon.

I grew still more fervid when I turned the insurrectionary implement over and saw “Kellogg’s®” engraved on the back of the handle. So there they are: a puerile invocation to sexual activity and a multinational snack-maker, united for ever in a spoon. What a joy it is to be alive in Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain.

The atmosphere in the Red Ochre Grill is distinctly chilly – not exactly what you would expect in the middle of a desert. There was an early-bird discount of 20 per cent for guests of the attached hotel, if you booked before 6pm for a table before 7pm; but we screwed up by 15 minutes and the maître d’ was emphatic: we’d have to pay full whack. Now I’ve been sitting over the remains of my kangaroo and macadamia salad for a full half-hour, waiting to pay the inflated bill, and my temperature has been plummeting the while. There’s nothing more real than this sort of tourist gouging – and Alice Springs is a tourist town, among other things. A tourist town serviced by tourists: mostly backpackers, most of whom in turn are from Britain.

Last night in Casa Nostra, a Calabrian restaurant sited on the parched banks of the Todd river (it flows about once in an average lifetime), we were served by a nice young man from Aberdeen, and the many miles between the Grey City and the Red Centre were eliminated by his opening remark: “I read something you wrote recently about Scots independence. I myself am not in favour.” Then this morning, at a café in the mall, he popped up again – working a second job, this time with his Edinburghian girlfriend, so they can gather a sufficient sum to keep on truckin’.

All down the Stuart Highway (known colloquially as “The Track”) from Darwin, we’ve been waited on by young folk from East Grinstead and Letterkenny, Dewsbury and Great Malvern. They come on working visas, not available to the nationals of countries that aren’t either historic (Britain) or contemporary (United States) overlords of Australia, and work these jobs out in the back of Bourke, where young Australians are loath to go. To the backpackers the Outback is a mythic realm suffused with wonder, presided over by an ancient people steeped in sorcery who are also wizard at graphic arts – but to most young Australians it’s too much of nothing, while their largely deracinated and welfare-dependent Aboriginal fellow citizens are a source of perplexity, shame and ignorance.

All this is running through my mind as I ask the waitress where she’s from. “Israel,” she replies.

“Ah,” I say, “I didn’t know you could get a working visa for Australia on an Israeli passport.”

“You can’t,” she says, “but my parents are American and I also have a US passport.” Of course it’s not this young woman’s fault in any way, but there is still something slightly nauseating about this: the Americans have a spy base outside Alice, called Pine Gap. So it is that geostrategic “considerations” and neoliberal “economics” vibrate through the rudaceous rocks of the MacDonnell Ranges as our elders sing up a nightmarish dreamtime.

“Ah, well,” I say, “you must be used to desert country, then.”

“Ye-es,” the Israeli waitress bridles a little, “but Israel isn’t as desert as here.”

One of the many great things about Australia – where I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years, my first sojourn being on a working visa exactly like the waitress’s – is a genuine, if slightly abrasive egalitarianism: the original Digger mentality of mateship suffuses even the 21st-century globalised food industry, such that tipping is frowned on as shameless evidence of a de haut en bas attitude. These young folk are being paid adequately by the establishment, but that’s the problem: they have no incentive to get the tucker to the table quickly, and they aren’t trained. Thus my long wait for the undiscounted bill has become tangled up in my mind with all the world’s woes, and I snap back: “I’ll thank you not to lecture me on geography, young lady. Your state has been snaffling up deserts throughout my lifetime, beginning with the Sinai. Granted, its most recent acquisitions have been relatively piecemeal ones on the West Bank of the Jordan, and only semi-arid, but still . . .”

Later on, my eldest takes me to task for this solecism, bringing the misfortunes of the Middle East into the heart of the great southern continent, but I am unrepentant. True, the parallels aren’t exact, but both Israel/Palestine and Australia are polities that have pursued the old colonialist agenda under modern dispensations; both are states in which there’s a grotesque disparity between the conditions in which the indigenous people survive and those that the expropriating incomers enjoy. The Red Ochre Grill, with its pseudo-gourmet dishes confected out of “native” ingredients (emu, kangaroo and camel meat mostly), is a perfect instance of this phenomenon, a sort of gustatory colonialism, if you will.

Outback of the restaurant, in the sandy slough of the Todd river’s bed, the “Long Grass people” – Aboriginals bushed by the grog – stand in for benighted Palestinians. The rates of alcoholism among them are eclipsed only by those of diabetes. An old Australian friend in Darwin put it to me thus: “As you drive south to the Alice you’re travelling along a broad highway of renal failure.”

True, from time out of mind all sorts of holidays have been taken in other people’s misery. Yet there is something particularly queasy about whites working away in the well-appointed restaurant while, out in the darkness, welfare-dependent blacks are killing themselves with Coca-Cola.

A friend of a friend comes by to pick up some fags I’ve obtained for him – Gauloises filters. Global markets being what they are, you can buy cocaine (DOC Colombia) and heroin (DOC Afghanistan) on the street corners of almost any British city, but when it comes to child-murdering nicotine, certain varieties are tightly contrôlés, in particular those whose denominated origin is that faraway land of which we know so little: France. I picked up a carton for him at La Cave au Tabac by the Gare du Nord in Paris, because his normal supply line was being disrupted by “hordes” of migrants and asylum-seekers trying to board lorries and trains bound for the Channel Tunnel.

The one time I took a trip to Booze Alley, the strip of hypermarkets outside Calais where Brits stock up on cheap(er) plonk and snout, I made a side-excursion to the bidonville that had sprung up beyond the razor-wire-topped fences surrounding the Tunnel infrastructure. This would have been at least a decade ago and the migrants were only (!) in the hundreds, yet the situation was already accorded a national disgrace – the problem being to identify which nation’s face should have been empurpled by embarrassment. Now the benighted are in their thousands, yet Hollande, Cameron et al continue to kick the political football back and forth across the Channel with an ease envied by all those who – from committed smokers and long-distance hauliers to the shanty-dwellers themselves – are suffering from new restriction on their movements.

The late Paul Fussell was that rare thing: a literary critic who’d also been a professional soldier. In his marvellous book The Great War and Modern Memory, he advances the theory that the first few months of the First World War represented an ironic reversal of unprecedented sharpness – more like an ironic handbrake-turn, in fact. In August 1914 the troops marched off to victory, gaily caparisoned, flutes a-tootling, drums a-thrumming, and within months they were bogged down in the hell-hole of the trenches. For Fussell, this was the wellspring from which the blackly absurdist bile of Beckett in due course bubbled, but I wonder: isn’t the current impasse de Calais of a similar ironic cast? In August, when London and Paris feel crumpled and vacuous, so much of the population having been squeezed out of them, one becomes conscious of the great migratory flows of the lesser-spotted bourgeoisie. They all head off gaily caparisoned, iPhones a-tootling, stomachs a-rumbling for French grub; meanwhile, the Syrians and the Sudanese, the Libyans and the Baluchis are trapped in the hell-hole of a shanty town that can be seen clearly through the tinted windows of your southbound SUV.

What can we do to help the poor migrants? The answer is: we’re doing all we can by taking our holidays as near to their immiserated homelands as we dare, in the hope that some of our safe and prudent sterling will seep sideways into their economies. We’re doing all we can by descending on retail opportunities in our hordes, because, savvy types that we are, we know things will only get better once they are bought in larger quantities. There’s a JG Ballard story in which all the northern European holidaymakers basking on Mediterranean beaches are simultaneously informed that their services are no longer required at home, but nor can they return. Happily, if fantastically, the exiled hedonists form themselves into a new nation, whose territory is enormously elongated but only a few sunlounger-lengths deep.

Perhaps the solution to the migrant crisis is of a similar order. Rather than attempting to discourage others from following them by treating those already here like shit, the government should strip our most egregious vacationers of their citizenship, starting with Labour MPs hanging out in honey-coloured Tuscan villas. The many central London properties left vacant can be easily adapted to act as hostels for the incomers; one well-appointed study could be easily partitioned to house, say, 40 or 50 Eritreans. I know this seems harsh, but you have to consider the facts: at this point in the political calendar, apart from working tirelessly to have themselves elected as leader or deputy leader, most Labour MPs are woefully economically unproductive, and many of them are ageing. Some, such as Chukka Umunna, wouldn’t even make the effort to campaign. By contrast, the Calais migrants have a proven record of initiative, daring and hard work. They are youthful, determined and – contra right-wing slurs – passionately committed to the free market.

I don’t mean to suggest it’s Labour MPs alone who should be swapped for migrants; I’ll happily declare Tories, Scots Nats and entire marauding phalanxes of Pilates instructors stateless as well. As for those hauliers parked up on the M20, they can stay put – there’s far too much heavy-goods traffic on British roads; forcing them to settle in their thousands actually on the motorway will kill thousands of birds with a little bit of gravel. As for my mate’s mate, we didn’t develop this sophisticated transport infrastructure just so he could buy cheap fags; so I suggest we do away with it altogether. He can buy his Gauloises filters from the hauliers, who undoubtedly have whole container-loads of them – certainly sufficient, given the epidemiology of lung cancer, arterial sclerosis and respiratory disease, to last him the residuum of his life.

‘Instead of checking their privilege, these .99-calibre twerps are more likely to check their wing mirror and overtake at speed, chortling all the while.’

During the Kosovo crisis in the late 1990s, the sight of Tony Blair’s snake hips, cinched by the waistband of his black Levi’s 501s and wiggling their way between displaced Kosovans, impacted on me in much the way the ordinance dropped by USAF bombers did Slobodan Milosevic. He was forced out of office: I dropped my trousers. Up until that point, I had considered black jeans a reasonable bridge between the dandiacal excesses of my youth and the soberer sartorial realities of middle age, but Blair eradicated my false consciousness. Indeed, looking back, I am hard-pressed to think of any more significant “legacy” of the Blair years than this: from that day on I’ve been unable to contemplate such strides without nausea and uncontrollable shivering.

Perhaps only Jeremy Clarkson has had a comparable effect on my wardrobe. I say “Clarkson”, but of course I really mean the trinity of Clarkson, Richard “Hamster” Hammond and James May. Between them, the three erstwhile Top Gear presenters embody the worst a middle-aged man can get: flowery-patterned shirts worn either loose and smock-like or tucked into jeans; an orphaned suit jacket or skimpy “bomber”; sensible Cornish pasty shoes or daft ankle boots. It has been said in the press that Clarkson’s adoption of denim as a second skin (including on occasion the hideous “double-denim” solecism) has single-handedly brought the fabric into disrepute.

I’m sure I’ll never wear black jeans again, but I have continued to affect the blue variety. I have also gone on driving cars although I haven’t actually owned one for almost a decade. I don’t live in the Cotswolds, nor am I a multimillionaire; and while I may have the occasional meltdown, I like to think I behave in an open-hearted and egalitarian way towards people I work with, regardless of their status or seniority. As for the weird racist dog-whistle Clarkson has blown repeatedly over the years, well, words fail me: this behaviour is so unbelievably crass and revolting, it calls into question all our assumptions about what it is to be a Briton in the 21st century.

I say “a Briton”, but what I mean is that moiety of modern Britons who find in Clarkson, whether willingly or with revulsion, aspects of ourselves writ large. Very large. Yes, I mean it: Jeremy Clarkson, like it or not, is the archetypal middle-aged, middle-class, white British man: the John Bull de nos jours; and his success as a journalist and TV presenter is almost wholly a function of this capacity he has to personify a great, indigo-legged mass of privileged pricks, many of whom labour under the delusion, as Clarkson does, that they’re an embattled minority. Instead of checking their privilege, these .99-calibre twerps are more likely to check their wing mirror and overtake at speed, chortling all the while.

In our fervid nightmares, Clarkson is the Little Englander who smirks at us from behind his vast leylandii hedge; the sexist pest who seems to think your name is either “darling” or “love”; the saloon-bar bore trumpeting “Land of Hope and Glory” with nary a care for those who always, always will be slaves. Together with Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn, Clarkson forms a triumvirate of British bullocks who seem always to have reigned over us. But where Clarkson differs from Farage and Littlejohn is that he’s both a lot smarter and, I suspect, rather more handy. I once did a radio programme with Littlejohn and when things inevitably grew heated, the sad skinny bigot began quivering with fear lest I give him a clump. As for Farage, having laboured through his political memoir The Purple Revolution (don’t worry, I was paid), I can assure you: what you see is indeed what those around him also get.

But Clarkson’s newspaper columns are invariably witty and well written: back in the 1990s my wife used to edit him, and she reports that he was a delight to work with: always filing on time, his copy letter-perfect. Moreover, on screen his blokeish persona is, gulp, distinctly engaging. Even I have been known to watch the occasional episode of Top Gear, despite not giving a tinker’s fart about whether one car is “better” than another. It would be nice to imagine that Clarkson’s petrol-filled head is sloshing with suppressed homosexuality, which is often the case with men who prefer the company of their own, but I fear this isn’t the case. Nor can we comfort ourselves by imagining him to be deluded, suffering from a denim false consciousness akin to my own. No, Clarkson is comfortable in his skin, comfortable in his arrogant bellicosity, comfortable in stinking up the atmosphere with his self-promotional hot air, and most of all he’s intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich so long as those people are him, May and Hammond.

Was anyone surprised when they clicked on the Amazon icon and saw the Three Whizzing Men swim into being? I wasn’t: after all, they’ve driven cars in some of the most exotic and inhospitable environments on earth. After that, the cruise up the broad brown concourse of Jeff Bezos’s back passage was always going to be (as Clarkson might well put it) a doddle.

To celebrate the new car show by Clarkson, Hammond and May on Amazon Prime, Will Self has uploaded the first episode of his own new car show, “Bottom Gear”, to YouTube.

“From a distance we must, I think, resemble a particularly duff channel ident for BBC1 – this slow-revolving blur of sluggish human animals”

We are practising mindful walking on the shore of Holy Isle: a group of 30 or so, mostly in our fifties and sixties, we have formed a large and ragged circle. “Lift, raise, lower, touch,” our leader instructs us; and so we do, foot after foot planted on the sheep-shot-bedizened turf where the person in front has just lifted hers. From a distance we must, I think, resemble a particularly duff channel ident for BBC1 – this slow-revolving blur of sluggish human animals. And we are being viewed from a distance: a side-wheel paddle steamer of antique vintage is sailing down the sound between Holy Isle and Arran; there are passengers on deck waving and shouting at us, but we pay them no attention at all, being mindful only of lift, raise, lower and touch – an interior communion between body and locale.

Not many people realise how strong Buddhism is in Scotland today, or that arguably the reason for this is topographic as much as spiritual. Refugee Tibetan lamas were invited to a Buddhist centre that had been started in a house near Eskdalemuir in Dumfries and Galloway in the mid-Sixties. Over the years they transformed Johnstone House into a thriving community and study centre; pupils have included such cultural luminaries as David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. A cynic might suggest that the affinity the Scots have for Buddhism is born of negative character traits: full of anger and deeply sexually repressed, they are obviously ripe for a credo that makes pacifism mandatory and abnegates fleshly desire. A more charitable view is that the connection between Tibet and Scotland was cemented through northern India.

Exiled in 1959 after the Chinese invasion, many Tibetan Buddhist clergy fled initially to Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, where they found a landscape not dissimilar from their own lost horizons – a hilly one of ­coniferous woodland, rhododendrons and isolated tarns. No wonder the lamas who got as far as Scotland felt right at home, inasmuch as any being who has transcended the bounds of earthly existence can feel at home anywhere. (Or possibly this is the whole point: they feel at home anywhere.)

The Samye Ling Monastery in the Borders (ling means “place” in Tibetan) established this outlier community on Holy Isle in the early Nineties, opening their Peace Centre in 2003. Their aim is to make Holy Isle into Europe’s biggest spiritual sanctuary, and to that end they have become enthusiastic curators of the island’s biodiversity. The Peace Centre occupies an old farmhouse, the orchard and gardens of which have been fully renovated and planted with native species; the old stone dykes have been repaired and the community’s water comes from natural springs; electric power is drawn in part from the sun; sewage is disposed of through a natural reed-bed filtration system. All visitors to the island are asked to follow the Five Golden Rules of Buddhism, one of which is to refrain from taking any life.

So it is that herds of wild Saanen goats and ancient Soay sheep remain running wild on Holy Isle while they’ve disappeared from Arran just across the sound. True, no one has morally instructed the Eriskay ponies – a herd of which is also in residence – and during my stay I heard dark mutterings about the corpses of males forced off the cliffs on the uninhabited west side of the island during very un-Buddhistic battles over mating rights. Still, the lack of wanton human predation is palpable as soon as you arrive on the Island: oystercatchers nest on the rocky foreshore and swifts flit over the bracken – up in the skies the upthrust wings of peregrines can be seen turning and turning in a widening gyre over the peak of Mullach Mor (“Big Top”), the 313-metre ­summit of the three-kilometre-long island.

I expect regular readers know I’m not the sort of fellow easily swayed by the irenic – but I have to say Holy Isle soothed my troubled psyche more than anywhere I have been in recent years. The sheer profusion of life in the gardens and open spaces around the Peace Centre banished all gnawing anxieties about ageing and death; the meditation practice ensured that I stayed resolutely in the here and now, rather than drifting away to either that “other country”, the past, or another island that is yet to erupt volcanically from the turbid present: the future. Should I have been surprised by this? After all, Holy Isle has been so called for a very long time – in the 7th century it was home to Saint Molaise, who meditated in a well-appointed cave halfway along the eastern coast. Thus the Celtic Christian tradition of isolated anchorites has mutated organically into the modern Buddhist way, because the Peace Centre has its own outlier cohort of monks and nuns who undertake long, silent retreats in sequestrated cells.

I was so chilled that I didn’t recover myself until I was chugging along on the train from Ardrossan Harbour back to Glasgow Central. I was sharing the compartment with a middle-aged Scots Buddhist nun whom I’d seen wandering about Holy Isle looking very striking, what with her slaphead and her dark orange robes. To begin with, we sat in contemplative silence – but soon enough we began arguing (albeit gently) about independence.

It is a cliche much beloved of the ­British that all things American are bigger. Of course this gee-whizzery doesn’t apply to every standardised object, and ever since the oil crisis of the 1970s there have been plenty of dinky little hatchbacks on US roads. Even so, there are occasions when even I – a demi-American – am stunned by its embrace of the gargantuan. One such occurred last summer, when Family Self arrived in Los Angeles. I had reserved a standard rental car, but as we waited, bleary-eyed, in the Alamo queue, I reflected on the huge amount of freeway driving I’d be doing and thought, sod it … when in Rome … so I requested an upgrade to an SUV.

“Will that be a standard SUV?” the Alamo woman asked. I concurred, and five minutes later the biggest thing I’d ever seen on wheels not transporting a Saturn V rocket was driven on to the lot.

Observing my amazement, the Alamo woman said, “It’s a Chevy Suburban. They’re real popular.”

“Suburban!” I expostulated. “That thing’s big enough to contain an entire suburb!” Needless to say, I sent it back. (Either that or, given the Chevy Suburban’s enormous mass, it could be we managed to achieve the velocity necessary to escape its surly gravity.) Anyway, this incident gave me cause to reflect once more on the plague of vast private vehicles now afflicting our cities. Not so long ago, even in LA, I wouldn’t have dreamed of driving an SUV (or four-wheel drive, as they’re confusingly called on this side of the Atlantic water feature); I passionately concurred with the view that these hypertrophied hunks of death metal were the dernier cri of a civilisation choking on its own tailpipe.

Don’t you remember how they were nicknamed “Chelsea tractors” and their headscarved and gilet-wearing, yummy-mummy drivers were excoriated as pluto­cratic planet-despoilers? The grim joke was that the only reason they were driving these behemoths was so little Barnaby and Charlotte wouldn’t be jolted by the newly introduced speed bumps. I recall quite continent pundits arguing like the crustiest ecowarriors that right-thinking folk should feel no compunction about running an ignition key along the glossy flanks of these big beasts in an effort to drive them from our tarmac pastures.

A decade on, no one so much as raises an eyebrow when they see a Humvee inching its way into a city-centre parking place – while we share our twisting and ancient thoroughfares with a bewildering array of VW Touaregs, Porsche Cayennes and Volvo XC90s. Indeed, no major car marque is now without its model engorgement, and the British, who usually are among the highest spenders on car flesh worldwide, have embraced them enthusiastically.

Embraced in particular the model that’s the grandaddy of them all: the Land Rover. Once upon a time, a Land Rover was a mud-caked, boxy object full of threadbare Barbour jackets, spittle-streaked collies and rolls of wire fencing, to be found only securely off-road. That all began changing with the launch of the Range Rover in 1970; since then, and throughout many iterations, the Range Rover has transmogrified into a vehicle that resembles nothing so much as the gun wagon of a Mexican cocaine cartel. I see them round my way all the time: severe militaristic body; matt-black paint job; tinted black windows; black wire mesh over head- and tail lights; bonnet slightly humped like the nacelles of an aircraft; carburettor intake like the steely gills of a predatory shark. The overall impression conveyed is one of extreme menace and imminent danger.

Which is why I never cease to be flummoxed when, upon squinting through their glass darkly, I see dear little kiddies in their car seats, and perfectly ordinary-looking mummies driving them to school. There are all sorts of ways we externalise the anxieties we are prey to yet can’t accept: we starve and scratch and medicate and exercise obsessively; we booze and fornicate and gamble and count the cracks in the pavement to ward off the bears – but surely these suburban armoured personnel carriers are the strangest reification of our fears there has ever been. Or, rather, the strangest reification of the terrors we inflict on others.

Because when I said they resembled gangsters’ wheels, I wasn’t being strictly accurate; what they actually look like are Special Forces vehicles that have been adapted for nefarious civilian use. Yes, their most obvious design affinity is with Predator drones or stealth fighters, and if the average Iraqi or Afghan were to see one come cruising down their way they’d probably leap for cover.

What crazed and febrile people we are! Like the biblical Nebuchadnezzar, we reduce other nations to dungheaps – but then, terrified by our own deathly potency, we pop out to the shops in cars suitable for a war zone. I doubt the average Range Rover Evoque owner would admit to this (not without a little gentle waterboarding, that is), but at least there’s one True Brit who is prepared to speak his truth. As Jeremy Clarkson is on record as saying that the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue is “the best car in the world”, we can only conclude that it’s the best car for menacing those folk Clarkson has a proven antipathy to. People who – for instance – have the wrong sort of paint job, and who are woefully underpowered.