Let me make a confession. I have a sun-roof in my car. With a single press of the button, I can slide the lid back, leaving me free to inhale the balmy summer airs of the Irish countryside.
But as we all know, there are no balmy summer airs in Ireland. Such reptiles do not exist. In other words, the sun-roof in my car is just about as useful as a device for repulsing Martians or extracting camel-teeth from my tyre treads.
But that is not the point, for strange appetites and even stranger visions sidle into your brain when you get a car. You don't buy a car for the world in which you actually live, but for one you want to inhabit. That world exists in Technicolor, with radiant blue skies, with your carefree elbow out of the driver's window, and a cheerful breeze ruffling your hair through the skylight. In the back seat, there's a hamper with salmon, champagne and strawberries, and somewhere ahead is a golden and deserted beach, idly caressed by a warm and radiant sea.
Car showrooms
This nonsense fills your brain because car showrooms have vaporisers in them which pump happy-LSD into the atmosphere. If, for example, some old wino were to enter the showroom with a hangover like a thousand-bomber raid, and with his mouth tasting like an alligator's colon, in the mistaken belief that it was the Simon Community, he would within seconds be mentally transformed into Russell Crowe. A brief manly yodel, and with a single leap he has taken the yelping receptionist in his arms, as he steals off with her to a better place.
And the bag lady who inadvertently walks into a car showroom thinking it's a public lavatory, and who last changed her underwear for Dev's funeral, inhales the intoxicating molecules and instantly becomes Britney Spears, and before you know it she is doing pelvic thrusts and showing the world her belly-button.
That's the basis of the car-industry. It tells you that you are what you're not, and then sells what you'll never need. A sun-roof is one of those things. Such a device, obviously, is of use only when the weather is warm and sunny, which is how it got its name. It's not a rain-roof, or a wind-roof or a snow-roof, which all pretty much come to the same thing, namely something you keep in place.
It's a sun-roof. But as we all know, we get sunshine about as often as yaks mate with jellyfish. We have had no measurable amount of sun this year, or indeed last year. But even if we shifted to the south of France, sun-roofs are actually very little use, even when the sun is shining. You can't use them at over 35 m.p.h., because then it is too blustery and uncomfortable, and insects the size of sparrows and with bites like sharks get lodged in your hair, where they start a pub-brawl.
Traffic jams
In other words, sun-roofs come into their own only in traffic jams. That's what they should be called: jam-roofs. But you don't buy a car to sit in a traffic jam. No: you buy a car to be attractive and powerful and sexy in a country where the sun always shines, and where beaches beckon, beer cools in the icebox and barbecues sizzle.
Unbelievably, this is the world inhabited by our imaginations, early each summer. Garden centres fill with people browsing through the selection of vines and citrus trees, dreaming of the harvests to come, the grapes to be plucked, the wine to be made, the sweet, home-grown oranges growing amber in our orangeries. Exotic furniture is coveted for our terraces, as if long summer evenings were our birthright. Swimwear is so carefully chosen and chemists' shops fill with Ambre Solaire.
How is this possible? This is the equivalent of Tuareg nomads stocking up for a seal-hunt on the Negev. We all know that we have the worst weather in Europe. No, apart from the Falkland Islands, the entire world.
We have neither winter, spring, summer nor autumn. Instead we have a single season which we should call mudder. Mud in the sky and mud underfoot, mud in the home and mud in the garden. Mud everybloodywhere. Some valiant little native plants have adapted to eke out a frugal existence in this mud; but imported flora have as much chance of surviving as a frog in a blender.
Central heating
Maybe our ability to magic ourselves away to a never-never weather-land is what sustains us. We'd probably go mad if we actually accepted that we live in a place where you need sweaters and central heating in June, and where the opportunities to cut your grass occur once a month - for about five minutes between the time it has finally dried out, and the next downpour, the rain-clouds for which you can see advancing across the distant skies like stampeding cavalry.
That's why we don't demand cars for Irish conditions. Those cars would have headlight-wipers, and wipers on our side-widows. They'd have vast washer reservoirs, and gauges which told you how full they were. They'd have places to put wet umbrellas and dimmed headlights that lit automatically with the ignition. They'd have air conditioning with vents on to windows to stop them misting up and huge, carefully designed tyre-flaps to prevent tornadoes of mud being hurled on to the windscreens of vehicles behind. They'd have a tiny man who came out of the dashboard when it's about to rain. And he'd be a busy little fellow.
Instead, we've got sun-roofs.