Like my dad, I dream of sports cars. Like him, I’ll never buy one

I’m currently in Cornwall with my family and whenever I spend a lot of time with my children I’m constantly reminded of the opening lines of ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.’

One of the faults my late father passed on to me was an obsession with sports cars. As he cruised along the motorway in his Austin Maxi at a steady 70mph he would point out every fast car that passed us, usually accompanied by a barrage of facts: ‘Ooh look. That’s a Lotus Esprit. I think that’s an S1 — yes, it’s an S1. It has the same four-cylinder engine that was used in the Jensen Healey.’

This lifelong interest of his wasn’t a complete affectation. As a teenage boy at Dartington Hall School, he’d developed a man crush on the racing driver and second world war fighter ace Whitney Straight, the son of the school’s co-founder Dorothy Elmhirst. Straight had gone up to Cambridge by the time my father arrived and already competed in his first grand prix. My father vividly recalled a thrilling ride from Dartington to London in Straight’s Brooklands Riley in which they averaged 90mph.

This exposure to motor racing at an impressionable age left my father with a yearning to own an expensive sports car. Throughout my childhood, he was always on the point of buying one and we spent many a happy hour poring over motoring magazines and discussing the comparative merits of different classic cars. It was taken for granted that the vehicle in question would be British, but should it be an Aston Martin DB5 or an E-Type Jag? It wasn’t until I was relatively old — well into my twenties — that I realised he was never going to act on this impulse.