Just an hour before clambering into Ford’s strongest vehicle, the Ranger, we had been pottering around the Cambridgeshire countryside in a Ford Anglia. Chalk and cheese, although both shared a noisy drive! I reminisced about my childhood (not that we ever had a Ford Anglia) with memories of tense holiday journeys, three kids squashed in the back and home made sandwiches and cakes in a carefully prepared picnic basket – again possibly imagined rather than real -  but you get the general idea.

So back to clambering into a Ford Ranger and my first thoughts being, who would buy such a monster, and my finishing thoughts were…rather nice if you have the matching lifestyle – and off my mind went yet again into fairy tale world of living another life. Or maybe I’m just fickle. Show me a bit of nice paint work and a pleasant car to drive and I can convince myself it’s what my life is missing. Mind you, husband would love it, not for any adventurous activities that he takes part in (because he doesn’t), but for the maleness of it all.

Once you’ve banished thoughts of those dusty trucks so prevalent in the Mid-West, with supped up wheels and men in cow boy hats, and actually driven one, I can understand the need for such a vehicle for certain businesses and lifestyles. And what makes it all the more appealing, setting it worlds apart from other 4 x 4s, is the fact that you can’t label this car as having kerb appeal or as a status symbol.

This is a true work horse, a dressed up truck with no illusions of grandeur, yet with a fair amount of comfort and one that’s easy to drive and manoeuvre, to the point where I kept forgetting I was driving a truck apart from when glimpsed in the huge wing mirrors!