Most Sunday mornings in winter, I can be found in a cold garage doing what owners of classic cars do instead of driving them: checking the oil, listening for drips and apologising to a battery. It is an expensive hobby. It is also, I have come to realise, a very long apprenticeship in wanting things.
Every classic car owner has one car he does not own. Mine is a Jaguar E-Type. I have never bought one. I have, at a conservative estimate, gazed at four hundred of them, at auctions, on village greens and in the car park of a Cotswold pub, where a man in a flat cap once let me sit in his for ten minutes and then, quite rightly, asked me to get out.
That car has been selling me Jaguar for decades without making the company a penny. That is the whole trick.
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