I drive a 2007 silver Ford Ka. It is not the coolest car in the world.

Still, I quite like it. I live in Reading, after all—a town that is perennially beset with traffic problems. Even if I owned a Ferrari, I’d be stuck in the exact same slow-moving one-way system. Plus, I couldn’t physically fit a Ferrari onto the tiny patch of land that the estate agent tried to convince me was “off-road parking” when I bought my house.

You couldn’t even give me a Ferrari, that’s how little I want one.

(Obviously that’s complete nonsense. If you’re reading this and have a spare Ferrari that you’d like to give away, please do get in touch.)

Yes, I’m very much a fan of my car, which I call the J-Mobile—on the basis that my other half and I both have first names beginning with J (see what we did there?).

Technically, it’s the J-Mobile 2. The first J-Mobile was a 2002 blue Ford Ka. It looked identical apart from the colour, to the extent that I was mercilessly mocked by my then-students when I turned up to school one morning in my “new car”. They genuinely thought I’d bought it simply because I prefer silver to blue. Things like “lower mileage” mean absolutely nothing to secondary school kids.

To be fair, aside from significantly fewer miles on the clock and a suspension system that wasn’t completely shot, there was little to distinguish the two J-Mobiles at face value.

Nonetheless, the blue Ka had reached a point where it was more expensive to maintain than it was actually worth, so the scorn of my pupils was misplaced. But then, these are the exact same young people who subsequently decided I was “quite cool” because I wore a Superdry jacket and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt on a school dress-down day. Which is incredibly superficial.

Then again, I wore those clothes specifically because I knew it would make the kids think I was cool. So who was the more shallow?

The kids, of course. I was just trying to give myself a survival advantage in the dog-eat-dog world of secondary school maths teaching.

Anyway, the current J-Mobile has a defect that the old one didn’t. It’s a small problem most of the time, but it is currently only possible to unlock the driver-side door from the interior. Consequently, you can only gain access to the vehicle via the passenger side.

It’s a minor irritation at times. It becomes occasionally problematic when other cars park a little too close to the passenger door.

However, it has yielded one surprising positive. When my wife and I are travelling together, I always have to let her in first, so she can then lean over and let me in. It’s an entirely practical arrangement… but to the casual onlooker, it makes me look incredibly chivalrous.