We all know that classic car enthusiasm is a bit of a disease, but sometimes you find yourself in a situation where how gravely debilitated you are by it is pulled sharply into focus.
This happened to me on Thursday in the most mundane and unexpected circumstances.
Due to fly to Zurich on Friday for a work trip, I was busy booking some parking at Heathrow Terminal 5 on-line and all was going well until it asked me to fill in the registration number of the car I would be arriving in for the benefit of its booking and numberplate recognition systems.
Let's get this trip into perspective: it involved driving from Putney to Heathrow (all of 15 miles that can take hours at the wrong time of day) at 4am on a gruesome winter's still-dark morning, leaving a car in a concrete monstrosity for the day and then driving back into town at the worst possible time, Friday rush hour.
There was no sane reason not to just plug in the details for the Merc family wagon and be done with it.
Yet, the cursor was hovering over the box because I knew in the back of my mind that when the time came I would want to go in my Jensen.