A tale of vengeance, lust and an Aston Martin

I learnt to drive when I was 40, because I had no choice: I had a baby, and he couldn’t drive himself. I am an anxious driver: when a car drove towards me during my first lesson I screamed. I failed my test so many times I had a favourite test examiner. He was called, inevitably, Dave. I think I passed seventh time – I stopped counting – and I was ready to buy a car. I got screwed on a Vauxhall Corsa: it had been a write-off, the garage didn’t tell me because I didn’t ask, and it had the habit of dying on me on the A30, like a guinea pig made of aluminium and composite plastics. I paid £5,000 for it, and, when I decided to sell it three months later, webuyanycar valued it at £250. This made me feel furious, and powerless.

I got a job as motoring correspondent at Vogue in revenge for the Corsa. I know this sounds mad. I planned to drive an Aston Martin DB11 past the garage that sold me the Corsa. My revenge didn’t get that far – the garage is in a narrow road, consider my paintwork! – but, unusually for revenge, it gave me more than it took away.

It was raining when I first saw it, deceptively low, neat and quiet: lovely lines, a soft-top, dark grey. The DB11 is pretty, unthreatening even; just another luxury consumer product, a toy for men I will not meet. Not when you switch it on. Even thinking of this car, seven years on, my pupils dilate, my breathing quickens, and I drool. It’s a normal response – I tell myself that – that explains the emotional absence, the lack of motive, at the heart of most motoring journalism; it also explains why someone would spend £200,000 on a DB11 when a Ford Mustang is a quarter of the price.

They won’t go there, but I will, because it is as obvious as the subconscious blooming into view. It’s lust.

I drove it on the bit of dual carriageway near Morrison’s: it’s fast but straight, which the A30 is not. The DB11 has a 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine, which means it goes from 0-62mph in four seconds. (The Corsa took 17 seconds, if it got there at all.) Perhaps the paradoxes make it interesting: you are moving but still; alive but in danger; powerful but dependent. Or perhaps I just can’t accept that I wanted to shag a motorcar.

I didn’t know that cars could do this, and the Corsa was never going to tell me, because it didn’t know either. Perhaps the closest thing it came to was travelling on a roller-coaster but not feeling stupid, because rollercoasters are stupid, because they don’t go anywhere. It’s not a subject of envy either, unlike other marques: people love Aston Martins like they love football, and sex. A man overtook us, slotted in, opened his window and held his hand to his ear in the gesture of I’m listening. It meant: make the car make the noise, and I asked it, and it howled. I spent the weekend burning petrol and listening to ABBA. I felt a sense of self-acceptance and serenity that is completely alien to me without the application of medical grade opiates. Driven at speed – stationary it’s just another GT, a room with chairs – the DB11 is a mind-altering substance as fine as any I have met. If I felt off my face, I was. It took days to come down, and I was not the same again. Briefly, it ruined me.