I don’t for a moment think that any further commentary on Family Free Markets taste in cars is required. We drive Landrovers. Most of our friends have at least one Landrover as you can see from this picture of the farmyard taken during the summer

& those few that don’t, generally wish that they did as Mrs FM is pulling them out of the mud at the point-to-point etc etc etc.

Now I suppose that the main difference between my Disco & Mrs FM's Defender isnt the speed at which they burn the worlds dwindling supply of fossil fuels, not the rate at which bits fall of them; it is that the Discovery comes packed with all sorts of electronic gizmos: bluetooth network, trip computers & satilite navigation. The Defender, by contrast, comes with an ignition key.

Like most things in life, all this wizardry is go & bad. I now know exactly how lost I am, but there is no way of overriding the seat belt alarm. Normally I have absolutely no problem with this, but they are times when your humble corrspondent is out over the fields, jumping in & out of the car to open gates, pick up freshly shot badgers etc when wearing a seat belt becomes a right pain in the proverbials … as is the ping ping ping of the seat belt alarm.

However, I see in The Times this morning that matters, somewhat predictably & in the finest traditions of the Nanny State, are set to take a turn for the worse…

You are running late so you take the corner a bit faster than you ought to – but a disembodied voice on the dashboard is having none of it. A new generation of in-car navigation systems will take sat nav from being simply an electronic mapping device to being a driving instructor, telling motorists when to change gear, at what speed to take a corner and even how to drive more economically.

It looks at though when it is time to change the Discovery, I will be buying another Defender as a replacement – one of the old ones.