Today I’m thinking strange thoughts. One keeps coming back as I carefully nose the fastest Aston Martin ever made around Bristol. Would Isambard Kingdom Brunel have been happy with the sport shift mapping on the new £174,000 Vanquish S? Brunel died before the technology that would have such a profound effect on human lives – the internal combustion engine – had been invented, but the answer would still have been a definite ‘no’. Were he alive, IKB would reckon it too slow and too harsh as the hydraulically actuated clutch re-meshes the cogs. Then he’d set about fixing it.

As a visitor, it’s difficult to walk anywhere in Bristol and not be reminded of the influence he had over its major architecture and his notable engineering successes. But as a Bristolian the bond is stronger. Not through pride, though: Bristolians are too pragmatic for that. A local taxi driver summed it up perfectly for me a few years ago: ‘Well, we’d be stuffed without our Kingdom. No train station for gettin’ ’em ’ere, no boat for lookin’ at and no bridge for walkin’ over.’

So we’re going to saunter around his train station (Temple Meads), his boat (the SS Great Britain) and his bridge (the Clifton Suspension Bridge) in Aston’s revised Vanquish S. After the closure of Jaguar’s Browns Lane plant I feel the need to celebrate some British engineering, current and past, though I’ll stop short of sticking small plastic St George motifs on the side windows.