Tanya Gold

The Mercedes G-Wagon, the Geländewagen, is a beautiful word on the tongue, even if it means ‘off-road vehicle’. But Mercedes, which sounds like a long and expensive hiss, is good at noise. There is no better door slam than the G-Wagon’s and no more pleasing sound to a door handle pushed inwards with the ball of the thumb. The G-Wagon was designed at the suggestion of the last Shah of Iran and that’s a good reasons to love it. I sometimes attend rallies that are pro-Iran (and anti-Islamic Republic of Iran) because I love the cause, and the campness of the iconography: the Lion of Iran hugging the Lion of Israel. Now we have an inspirational car too, and it works thematically, being likewise camp and savage.

I think I know why Rolls-Royce names its cars for the spirit world. They are called Ghost (the saloon, though it inhabits the wilder shores of that name), Phantom (the flagship saloon with bespoke art gallery on the dash) and now Spectre (the coupé). I think that, like the slave at the general’s triumph in Rome, it exists to remind the driver that he is mortal, and he will die. He is unlikely to die in a Rolls-Royce, it is true, though I heard a story about a Rolls-Royce driving through a forest in a storm. The collision light blinked, the driver slowed and saw the moose in the road, braked and saved both an embarrassing death.

I have been waiting for the VW Golf GTI, because the boy – it would be a stretch to call him a man – I liked in 1991 had one. He used to drive me round Regent’s Park in his Golf GTI, and although he went to St Paul’s Boys School and was a religious Jew, I thought this made him seem dangerous. I knew nothing. Behind the ambivalent smile his secret was this: he really cared about maths. My sister has a Golf now. The Golf is the bestselling European car of all time. Globally, only the Toyota Corolla (compact) and the Ford F-Series (truck) beat it: 37 million Golfs have been sold since 1974, which is the equivalent of every single person in Poland owning one, including the babies. It’s 52, as I am: the defining car of Generation X’s good fortune and hope.

The Ford Capri is a paradigm of self-deception, but cars are men’s mirrors, and they want to be deceived by them. Thanks to The Professionals (1977-83), in which Bodie and Doyle of Criminal Intelligence drove a silver Capri and a gold Capri, almost two million were sold. Even the police used them, which is absurd. They only had two doors. Even so, I’d like to see a villain stuffed into a fastback coupé, ideally through the window. I like the old Capri because there was something jaded and stubborn about it: a weary postwar British sex appeal. It was our version of the Ford Mustang, produced from 1969 to 1986.

The oddities at the Penzance Rotary Club Classic Car & Bike Show included a golden thing that looked like the affair baby of an Alfa Romeo roadster and a Silver Ghost; a three-wheel Messerschmitt Cabin Scooter with the nerve to call itself a cabriolet and a picnic basket on the back, presumably for your body parts after it kills you. But the most beautiful car was the Aston Martin: a Vantage sports car. It is always an Aston Martin unless an understated Ferrari is lurking. Then it is still, probably, an Aston Martin. The time when a 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta was normal has gone, along with the optimism that made it The Vantage is as gorgeous as the new Aston Martin DB12 S, which I drove in France in May.

The obvious thing to say about themed restaurants is that they are usually bad. The Rainforest Café in London, for instance, was nothing like a rainforest, though it is slightly more like a rainforest now it has gone. But there are exceptions. The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop in Bakewell, Derbyshire, for instance. Perhaps the sort of tourists who go to Bakewell for tarts are more dangerous than the ones who go to Bath for buns. They certainly look as if they read a lot of crime fiction and are capable of murder in their heads. But The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop out-gilds its myth. It’s rare.

Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly has a caff down from Charbonnel et Walker, where you can buy a box of chocolates as big as a cow, though I never have. Perhaps the time is now? I am being facetious of course: it is Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud, who oversees the Maison de Haute Pâtisserie at the Connaught Hotel, and two unfortunate branches in Qatar. I wonder if the Hamas leadership visit and stick their fingers in pistachio gâteaux. The café is a marvellous construct, as the arcade is. It exists so that spoilt Regency women, the Chelsea hags of then, could shop without walking in horseshit. I know how they feel. It isn’t lunch in the common sense of it.