The following item is about cars - or rather, specifically, the Ford Mondeo. And to do the sort of profound and conscientious investigative work this column usually requires, I tried to look up Ford Motor Company in the phone book, writes Kevin Myers.
Nothing. No mention of Ford at all. Funny that, isn't it? You'd think that Ford would he happy to have people know their number for people to find out where the nearest Ford shop was.
As you all know, Ford is Ireland's greatest contribution to world motoring, with the Ford family emanating from Cork. You can get the man out of Cork, but not vice versa. For years, the Ford Motor Company retained residues of the Ford origins in its organisational DNA. Long after Fair Lane, where the Fords had originally come from, had been redubbed Wolfe Tone Street, the name lingered on in the Ford Fairlane car. And of course, in the 1920s Ford pioneered inward investment to Ireland, locally recruiting the man who was to be first great international Irish business executive, Sir Patrick Hennessy.
I say all this merely in order to impress you with my knowledge of motor cars, but in fact it is just about all that I know about them. Though had Ford Motor Company not been furtively ex-directory, I might have managed to get my hands on a brochure, which would have furnished me with all the necessary motoring lingo about rack-and-onion steering, AIB-braking, and overhead-synchromesh poppet-suspension.
One thing I do know about without recourse to a manual is that Tony Blair once defined Mondeo man as the ideal target voter. The quintessential Mondeo man was working-class, but upwardly aspirational; so while he wanted to vote for the party of his class, he still didn't want to pay high taxes. So Mondeo man had to be wooed - but this didn't mean he was admired. For beneath the Mondeo man label was the snobbish implication that this particular car was for the flashy arriviste who wanted to show off, but who was ignorant enough to think that a Mondeo was the way to do it.
The Mondeo was thus for the man who owned a time-share apartment in the Algarve, who had a Manchester United season ticket, and whose blonde wife Cherylle had her roots done every week by Doreen. The Mondeo, in other words, was emphatically not for PLU. So when I booked a car through Hertz (simply because it was the cheapest) from Heathrow Airport last week, it never entered my little bean that I might be hiring a Ford Mondeo. Yet that's what I got. So, appalled, and donning my standard-issue Shinner balaclava for purposes of concealment, Mondeo me crept into my car and slunk shamefully out of the car-park.
Or rather, tried to. Despite being diesel-engined, the Mondeo leapt out of Heathrow like a hare being chased by shotgun-toting greyhounds, the tyres shrieking in disbelief. First gear was good. Second gear felt like being launched by a steam-catapult off the deck of an aircraft carrier.
At this point, let me confess. I have misled you. I told you I know nothing about car terminology. That is not, strictly speaking, true. I know one word: torque. Let me use it now. The torque in third gear is sufficient to strangle a California redwood. You can start the Mondeo in third, and remain in it all the way up to 100 m.p.h., though I dare say Mr and Mrs Hertz won't be very pleased if you do that too often.
Fourth gear is happy cruising time, but with a sort of an accelerative g-spot just beneath your right toes. Fifth gear is high-speed cruising. Sixth gear - yes, sixth gear - is slightly less than sonic. So effortless is the Ford engine, so silent and vibration-free its endeavours, that it conveys no sensation of speed. Only the speedometer will tell you that you are now entering earth-orbital velocity, and it is time to reach for the oxygen. This is in a diesel, remember, with quite astounding diesel economy: I drove 600 miles - six hundred miles - on a single tank.
But this isn't all. The Mondeo was built in the fourth dimension. It has room where no space appears to exist from outside. At one stage I drove with a friend who is 6' 6", and before he gets into a car he usually gets a butcher to truss him up like a chicken, but preferably without the few pounds of stuffing up his backside. In the Mondeo, however, he was a broiler transformed. He lolled in the front seat like a happy German who has caught the early sunbed. Meanwhile, in the vast boot, the England cricket team was beating New Zealand under floodlights, while in the unoccupied areas alongside the spare wheel, a dozen or so sturdy asylum-seekers were irrigating paddy-fields.
As impressive as the Mondeo's space and speed is the sheer intelligence of its ergonomic design: its dashboard is clear and sensible, its gears are sweet and unerring as blades sliding into oiled sheaths, its visibility like being in an all-glass spacecraft, and its seats are extraordinarily comfortable. Finally, and not least of all, it is beautiful. When its showroom days are finally over, it will continue to be cherished as a classic.
Yes, this may sound like a puff, but it's not. This is simply a passionate love letter to quite the very best car I have ever driven. To be sure, his wife's cuffs might not always match her collar, but Mondeo man surely knows his motors.