A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it. Obviously. It was designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want.

The driver was a woman, and I can tell you for a fact that she was very beautiful. She had fine dark hair cut in a bob, and as she drove, her hair riffled in the warm breeze. I would tell you about what she wore, but I’m very bad at clothes and if I started telling you that it was an Armani this or a what’s-her-name Farhi that, you would know instinctively that I was faking it, and since you are taking the trouble to read what I have written, I intend to treat you with respect even if I do, occasionally and in a friendly and well-meaning kind of way, lie to you. So I’ll just say that the clothes she was wearing were exactly the sort of clothes that someone who knew vastly more about clothes than I do would admire enormously, and were blue. Impossibly tall palm trees towered above her, silent Mexicans moved over impossibly perfect lawns.

The gates of Bel Air went by—and behind them, perfect houses nestling in perfect bouquets of shrubbery. I’ve seen exactly those houses on television and even I, sceptical and sarcastic old me, have felt that I really, really wanted one of them. Luckily, the sort of the things that people who live in such houses say to each other make me giggle until tea squirts out of my nose and so the moment passes.