WHEN I WAS nine, I won ten Cadillacs from my father in a bet. The deal was that I’d be able to claim my luxury American gas guzzlers when I was twenty-one. Until then, my father reserved the right to win them back through further bets.

The marque had a lot to do with my father’s aspirations. The multinational oil company he worked for gave its employees cars precisely commensurate with their fingerhold on the slope of the corporate pyramid. At the time, my father was driving a middlebrow Ford with a radio and white-walled tyres. A Cadillac Eldorado or De Ville was a distant future prize but, given his temperament and the forces that were propelling him through life, I’ve no doubt he had his eye fixed on it even then.