"OFF-ROADERS are stupid and pointless," a friend suggested as we shot along the M6 somewhere near Stafford a fortnight ago. "You just don't need them."
All you need in an everyday car, he reckoned, is something cheap, comfortable, easy to look after and equipped with a healthy bit of oomph. Something, he reckoned, that's a lot like his turbodiesel Citroen Xsara. Anything with four wheel drive or knobbly tyres is just unecessary and expensive.
Seeing said mate utilise this argument - and win - hurt because I've always had a soft spot for 4x4s, and I don't mean the blinged-up, over-imposing "lifestyle" efforts from BMW and Audi either. I mean the off-roaders of the old school, the Jeeps, Isuzus and Shoguns with their unpretentious styling and obligatory Ifor Williams trailers. I especially like Land Rovers, particularly the proper ones which look like they've been styled on an Etch-a-Sketch. But having a soft spot wasn't winning an argument in the mildest winter we've seen in years.
Lukily, I found the answer I was looking for last weekend, when I ventured beyond my usual stomping ground into a place best known as The Countryside. There, there are hills and rivers and windy little lanes made muddy by the near-constant flow of tractors among them. Out there almost every house has a proper off-roader parked outside it, and when it suddenly started snowing I realised why.
After just a few hours The Countryside was no longer green and pleasant; it was like being trapped inside a Christmas card, only with more BBC Look North crews telling you off over the airwaves because you forgot to pack Ray Mears and a shovel into the boot. Naturally, I'd forgotten to bother with either.
With seven inches of the slippery white stuff to tackle my trusty old Rover did alright but I still wished it'd had the word "Land" in front of its name. Certainly, any Land Rover would have been better than the 11-reg SEAT Leon half a dozen of us had to push out of trouble, or the MINI Cooper which struggled to get over a humpback bridge without spinning its wheels, or the BMW 1-Series at the side of the A591 next to a driver who'd just given up trying.
On this cold, slippery, unforgiving day in The Countryside, nobody wanted the Porsches or BMWs the tourists had brought into the village the night before. But absolutely everybody wanted the 25-year-old Range Rover which was darting around the village completely unaffected. Like the local council's rather scabbier Defenders it was untroubled by the conditions, but it also exuded class in a way a brand-new X5 doesn't.
So off-roaders - proper ones at least - aren't stupid and pointless. Just ask anyone who lives in The Countryside.
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