June 20 Like turning up at a vegetarian conference eating a hog dog, arriving at a festival of cycling in a car isn’t a good thing.

Indeed, you can almost feel those two-wheeled fanatics cursing your combustion engine and health damaging particulates.

So when I arrived at the Eroica Britannia (www.eroicabritannia.co.uk) in Derbyshire in my Golf GTE, I wanted to hoist a flag declaring that my car was actually running on electrical power rather than petrol.

You see, the GTE looks so similar to the standard Golf, you just wouldn’t know it was a hybrid. But I think the VW was just about the coolest four-wheeled machine there.

Even if only a handful of people at the Eroica actually realised I was running on clean air…