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The best holidays begin well before you land. Mine started on a SkyAlps turboprop out of a small, deeply civilised airport called Bolzano, where the security queue takes approximately the same amount of time as tying your shoelaces and the bar is somewhere you would happily choose to sit on a free afternoon. No theatre, no performance, no baffling queues for things you did not ask for: just a compact, calm, elegant little terminal and a flight that feels like the beginning of something good. Bolzano is, without much competition, my favourite airport in Europe.

Wiltshire Roads, Cold Mornings & Electric Surprises

Christmas. Snowdonia. Mud. Ice. Mountains. Yr Wyddfa. Logic suggested I should be flinging a rally-spec electric Mustang up the side of Eryri National Park like some sort of eco-conscious mountain goat. Reality, however, intervened. I took the Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally to The Ritz instead. Champagne. White tablecloths. Soft lighting. Our own table, suspiciously close to David and Victoria Beckham.

A Proper Festive Audi SQ6 SUV Test, Puddings Included

Images By Hayden Povey.

The modern SUV has become the de facto family chariot. Tall, comfortable, laden with technology and more often than not, about as likely to see mud as a Dyson showroom. Yet for all their polish, there’s a sense that the SUV has lost touch with its original brief: utility.

Images By Hayden Povey

I’m feeling rather smug about this analogy, which came to me while wistfully gazing into a warm pint in my local. Jonah Lomu, the insanely powerful New Zealand wrecking ball is, I’ve decided, the perfect way to describe the BMW M5 Touring for anyone in need of an automotive frame of reference.

For the Alpine A110 R 70 Tour, we took that feather-light French racer—the automotive equivalent of a bespoke Yves Saint Laurent dinner jacket—and let it loose on the winding backroads of Sussex, heading to the rather fabulous Star Hotel in Alfriston.

I have officially entered the realm of the middle-aged man. Because for a little while now, I have been yearning for a bit of rose-tinted, unfiltered wanderlust. The kind where you simply go wherever the wind (or Google Maps) decides to take you. And while the grim realities of motorway snarl-ups and the endless dual carriageway roadworks have been quietly airbrushed out of this scenario, I’m going to roam up and down England and Wales – just for the sheer love of it.

Predictive damping, torque vectoring, regenerative braking and active aero might all sound well and good but what if you just want less of all that? What if you just want to reconnect with the outright physics of driving again? Enter the A110: a lightweight, mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive sports car that does away with all of the above.

The BMW 5 series is widely regarded as being the key stakeholder when it comes to executive driving. It just sort of materialises like a very well-dressed civil servant who’s read the briefing, made a cup of tea and is waiting for you to catch up. It doesn’t shout because it doesn’t need to. Instead, it diligently follows its own plan to be the most complete saloon in BMW’s existence.