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As I stretched my oversized rubber boot towards the brake, the tip of the toe caught on the bodywork and stuck for a nanosecond too long, causing the rear wheels to lock. Front and rear began to slide in a perfect but totally uncontrollable drift towards the woods.

I started to see strand after strand of barbed wire intertwined between the trees. The consequences of destroying the machine weighed heavily. Fifty miles per hour across wet grass into blades and bark became my immediate reality. Raw adrenalin surged around my system. Time slowed.

I made a split-second decision to save my own skin. I threw myself off and hit the deck hard. Clad in no less than three Barbour jackets and my mother’s Hunter Wellingtons, I scrabbled at clumps of grass to divert my speeding body towards a friendly looking pine.

Meanwhile, the farm’s one and only All Terrain Cycle thundered into a sizeable birch on fast forward, the barbed wire ripping the bodywork apart like a cheese-slicer.

My body cartwheeled across the slick grass and I came to rest in a bed of stinging nettles against the pine tree. I lay flat on my back with tree roots embedded in my shoulders, wheezing to get the wind back into my lungs. I glanced down to see my three pairs of socks dangling from my toes. They had been the only way to fit my ten-year-old feet reasonably snugly into the wellies. The boots themselves, cowards, were nowhere to be seen.

The elation of survival and the absurdity of my situation sank in. I was alone, crashed out at the bottom of a remote field in the corner of a tiny island on a planet the size of a speck of dust in the limitless universe. I burst out laughing.

I wiped the mud from my eyes and hobbled over to make a cursory inspection of the three-wheeled cycle. The bodywork was smashed around the wheel arches, the plastic speedometer was cracked and the foam seat, where I had been sitting just moments earlier, was slashed to pieces by the barbed wire. It looked really cool. Dad was going to kill me. But my addiction to speed was all his fault in the first place.

My father was more into cars than anyone I have ever known. He would watch Formula 1 on the TV religiously, snoring his way through the final laps on a Sunday afternoon. It was my cue to find something more interesting than watching a bunch of cars drone around a stretch of tarmac. And that something normally took the shape of a Lotus F1-styled pedal kart. It took me eighteen years to realise the connection.

The thrill of driving and risk taking had been instilled in me from an early age. No two journeys in my dad’s car were ever the same, but they generally began with some kind of stunt and always broke the speed limit.

When I was four, Dad was a manager for a transport company and his star was rising. His gift was his ability to eye up a business and sharply turn it around. We all climbed aboard his Rover SD1 and headed over to his boss’s place for lunch. It was a cool hatchback, shaped like a wedge of cheese with a hint of Ferrari Daytona around the kisser. Cooler still, I had the matchbox version in its racing livery.

Dad was decked out in a tan suit with ludicrous lapels that were très vogue in the Seventies. His colour blindness always guaranteed something special and today was no disappointment: a psychedelic paisley tie and a bright yellow shirt, dripping with Old Spice.

He came from a working-class background and was raised the hard way. When he earned a slot at the local grammar school, his mother had to dig deep to afford the uniform. Nan didn’t take any crap. When it came to parting with her hard-earned, she bought the uniforms she liked most rather than the one for the institution my dad was actually attending. Sporting the cap from one school and a blazer and tie from two others, his first days at college were inevitably bloody, but he never lost his unique sartorial style.

My mother had swept her hair back in a chignon and boasted pearl earrings, elegant gold necklace and frilly blouse. Fabulous, darling. I sat in the back with my