Every so often, events conspire together and I end up driving an extremely nice car for a few days. Most recently, the events involved laundry, overdue library books and a diarrhetic cat. The car is a Mercedes from their Heated Leather Seats in a Fuel Guzzler range. It belongs to my dad.

To people from other parts of the world this car might not look hugely impressive, but in Glasgow things are generally smaller and grubbier and here it is clearly the car of a much older and richer man.

The car originally came into my family as follows: my dad’s boss upbraided him for taking the bus to work. My dad, as he approached his fifties, had gone from working in IT for local government to being communications director for the regional fire brigade. Initially, the only change this made to his morning routine was that he got a bus in the opposite direction. But the British Fire Brigade organisations are based on military hierarchy. Superior officers are expected to continually emphasise their superiority. This means signing all memos with your name followed by a list of qualifications and professional society memberships, and it definitely means driving a better car than staff on a lower pay grade.

My dad’s boss took him aside. “This bus thing, it has to stop,” I imagine him growling with real menace. “We’ve given you a suitably large and convenient parking space and we damn well expect you to park something big and impressive in it every day.” And so my dad’s public transport days came to an end and the West family became, for the first time, a two-car household.

Now, the fact that my dad had to have pointed out to him something that everyone else in the history of the Fire Service has apparently intuited makes me think there is a gene called the car gene and the West men do not have it. I never realised that driving a car is a political statement until the first time I drove to work in the Merc.

I was working in the biotechnology industry at the time. As anyone who has seen an episode of The Big Bang Theory knows, the sciences are also very hierarchical, but in a different way from the Fire Brigade. Everyone knows who has a doctorate and who only has a masters, everyone knows who has been trained to do the most exotic lab techniques and who is being published in the highest-impact journals. I only have a bachelor’s degree and when I set foot in a lab things have the tendency to burst inappropriately into flame. So when I showed up at work driving the best car it went down like a turd in a punch bowl.

(No careers guidance officer ever said to me, “Listen, you might want to reconsider, non-executive pay in the life sciences is dire,” but it might have been useful to know. And check out what’s in the staff parking spaces outside any biotech company building if you don’t believe it.)

The people in my department were a jokey bunch. Wear a different-coloured shirt to work, there would be jokes. Bring a different packed lunch and there would be jokes. But drive to work in an impressive car, no jokes. No-one asked about it. No-one even mentioned it. Eventually the receptionist, a non-scientist, stopped by to ask how I had enjoyed sailing to work in my boat. The others stared at their computer screens in stony-faced silence, attempting to shut out this horrendous breach of protocol.

Anyway, I gave my dad back his car and eventually I left the job and I forgot all about the political aspects of car driving until last night. I was going for dinner in the west end and I had the windows wound down to clear some mist from the front windscreen. The CD changer clicked over and the opening notes of one of my dad’s Dire Straits albums began to play.

For a moment I had an out-of-body experience. I had somehow become that person who shows off his sound system by broadcasting ‘Money for Nothing’ at a high but tasteful volume through the open windows of his Mercedes. I began to re-evaluate my entire life.

“This cannot continue!” I yelled, mashing my hand into the dashboard audio controls. Mark Knopfler vanished, replaced by a radio station: current hip hop. “Worse yet!” I cried, clawing frantically at the sound and window controls, suddenly just one more mid-life crisis at large on the streets of Britain.