For three years in the late 1980s, I drove a red Austin Metro.  The car was a real Friday afternoon job – rough edges, poorly finished and badly equipped.  Its greatest lack, as far as I was concerned, was a car radio.  My Dad had driven cars in the 1960s with excellent radios, but this 1986 example of British workmanship had nothing.

Irish roads in the 1980s were of only marginally better quality than Austin Metro cars and journeys cross country were long and tiring.  Setting out from Oughterard in …