I’m about to confess to a crime. Hopefully the crack Financial Times legal team lets this article through. As readers of this column know, I don’t drive for various reasons. Nor do I have a licence, for various other reasons.

But a few years ago someone close to me was in hospital and I had to drive to see him. I got lost in that grey area between the New Jersey Turnpike and the Palisades Parkway. It is almost as if you have to take a U-turn into the fifth dimension in order to end up where you want to be. Then I saw this police barricade in front of me.