As we know, there is absolutely nothing you ever encounter on holiday that works very well as a part of your everyday life. The sunshine, for instance. If we had an uninterrupted blue dome sitting over Britain 365 days a year, we’d spend all day at the beach and never do any work. This would turn us all into Australians, and pretty soon we’d only be known on the world stage for our large prawns.

Buying a foreign holiday home won’t work either because, as Daisy Waugh pointed out recently in this paper, it doesn’t really matter how well you speak the local lingo; one day, just after your swimming pool has exploded, you will be in the local hardware store when you realise you don’t know the word for pliers.

Do you know how to say “jump leads” in French? A friend of mine once spent a good half-hour in a chandlers in Cannes pretending to be a dog by barking. Then he pointed to an imaginary lead around his neck and jumped up and down, which was very imaginative but wrong. The words he needed were “batterie connecteur”. You didn’t know that, did you? You would have gone round to a neighbour’s house and pretended to be a dog as well, and then your neighbours would have clocked you as mad.

Beer’s another problem. Back in 1984, I spent some time wandering around China, where, so far as I could tell, it was always 120F and raining. This made me very thirsty so I spent most days drinking gallons of the local brew, which is called Tsingtao. It was delicious. I loved it. And then I tried some when I got home and I decided that actually it was exactly the same as drinking watered-down mouse pee.

And then there’s the hire car. This isn’t a problem in Europe, where, at best, you’ll get a diesel-powered Renault Scénic that won’t have enough power to get up the drive to your villa and will smell of sick.

No one ever harbours a desire to buy a version of what they rented in Spain or France. But America’s different. I once rented a Corvette in Vegas and spent the whole time wondering why I didn’t have such a thing at home. Then you have the Mustang. I know it has a live rear axle and that its massive 5-litre V8 has less power than Luxembourg’s milk marketing board. But that doesn’t stop me coming home and pressing my nose every night against the plate glass windows of that American car dealership in Barnes.

This year, though, I didn’t rent a Mustang. On my recent trip to Canada, I got myself a Ford Flex, and it’s got me thinking.

As is usual for an American car, it came with a half-timbered steering wheel so that drivers are made to feel like they are in Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Americans like it in Anne Hathaway’s cottage. It gives them a sense of being. There was also some wood — well, I say wood but it was more like Fablon — on the dash. And the seats were quilted. By someone who has 10 thumbs. And is blind.

Then you have the doors. They are huge, and they open right down to a point below the sills. That means they won’t open at all if you park alongside any sort of kerb.

There’s a similar problem with the four-wheel-drive system. The Flex is designed to be a bit of a low rider so that Obama Barrack doesn’t find it threatening. Good. That’s fine. But it means the undersides drag along the ground if you attempt to drive down a rutted track.

Furthermore, the dials are awful. Like the dials on nearly all American cars, they look like they came as a job lot for £2.50. All in all, then, it’s a terrible place to be, furnished and equipped with all the care you’d find in a North Dakota motel. And while you can connect an iPod, you can’t control what tracks or playlists it selects.

However, you tend to overlook all this because of the headrests, which, like the headrests in a 1990s Aston Martin Vantage, are just that. Not some safety device to keep your hair on in a crash. But a place where you can actually rest your head as the miles glide by.

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