My daughter has just bought her first car. Ordinarily this would be no big deal. All daughters buy a first car at some point. But the daughter I’m talking about is only 10 years old.

She did the right thing: saved her pocket money, pretended to believe in the tooth fairy and hoarded cheques from her grandmother until she had £50. Enough to buy an M-registered Ford Fiesta 1.3 with a radio that doesn’t work, no MoT, wind-down windows and the ultimate 1980s luxury — a lift-out sunshine roof.

Of course, when the time comes, she’ll be able to part-exchange it and get £2,000 from Cash Gordon but until then she’ll be using it in our paddock. Getting all the “need for speed” out of her system so that when she’s old enough to go on the roads, she won’t end up in a tree or, like her dad, on television, endlessly going round corners, shouting.

Obviously, the job of teaching her how to drive it fell to me, but before we could actually set off, we had to have a lesson in how to get an M-registered Ford Fiesta going. This involves a lot of looking under the stairs and in all the kitchen cabinets, shouting: “Where are the bloody jump leads?”

Soon, though, as the poor child’s enthusiasm waned, we had the bonnet up and the leads connected and we were treated to the unmistakable sound of a starter motor clicking uselessly. “This is your first lesson, darling. All jump leads, no matter how much you spend, don’t work.”

We were therefore faced with the prospect of a bump start. And there’s a dilemma if ever you’ve seen one. Do you put a 10-year-old child, who has never driven a car, in the driving seat and do the pushing yourself? Or do you get behind the wheel and expect her to push a ton of metal?

In fact, what you do is go back to shouting at the jump leads and making sparks until eventually, usually after about three hours, the little Ford’s rusty old 1.3 will cough into life.

And so it begins. “Right, sweetheart. I want you to let your foot off the clutch pedal very smoothly and very slowly while keeping the revs up with the throttle pedal. Okay. Okay. That’s good. Oh, never mind. You’ve stalled. Doesn’t matter, darling. Don’t cry. Everyone stalls when they first learn. Just turn the key and let’s start again ...”

But, of course, we couldn’t start again because the battery was still flat. Which meant I had to charge it up, which is why I spent an hour last bank holiday Monday driving round and round our paddock in a £50 Ford Fiesta.

God, it was fun. I pounded my way round so often that soon a circuit began to form in the long grass, and then, as I pounded some more, I started to experiment with the handbrake and the apexes ... and the stopwatch.

My daughter, I’m afraid, learnt nothing at all during this time. She just sat in the passenger seat, bouncing. But I learnt, once again, that anything with an internal combustion engine gives you just the biggest adrenaline rush when you remove it from the clutches of the authorities. Behaving yourself in a Ferrari simply cannot be as much of a laugh as running wild in a small half-broken Ford in a field full of buttercups.

Once, I spent two weeks in an upmarket hotel, dining three times a day on exotic seafood in unusual sauces. It was great. But by the time the holiday ended, I wanted a cauliflower. I wanted a chicken leg, cold with some sandwich spread. I would have torn out my own eyes for a poached egg on toast.

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