Whatever way one looks at it we are not a sun people. We might be a sun-loving people but that does not mean we know how to behave when it appears. This is proven by our recently acquired propensity for the open top car.

Open top cars are a difficult phenomena. Much of this has to do with the cars themselves. If, for example, one wanted to make a duffle coat that looked as well in good weather as in bad you wouldn't simply think it would be possible by cutting the hood off it. Yet manufacturers believe that a good open top car can be made by simply cutting the roof off a car which was originally designed to have a tin cover. Hence we have the unedifying spectacle of cars which were rubbish in the first place becoming more so because they no longer have a roof.

As you might imagine being a fully paid up card carrying coward I am not going to dare to name any of these naff vehicles that increase their naffness when topless but no doubt you will have your favourites. For me it is the Nissan Micra. The Nissan Micra is an insult to the concept of the car, a small piece of bubble designed only for trips to the corner shop to buy chocolate before Coronation Street.

Take the roof off a Micra and it seems to me it is no longer good for even that purpose since all and sundry will be rolling around in the street not only at the sight but at the thought that someone believed it was a good idea to spend money in order to invoke this derision.

The Micra is, however, an example of the second thing that is wrong with most open top cars. The manufacturers think they can be made cheaply by decapitating other cheap cars so they never have the cache that an open top car should have. Whatever way you cut it a Peugeot is a Peugeot and a Renault is a Renault. When Bentley were making open cars in the 1920s that is what they started with – the idea of an open car - and then designed something that cannot be anything other than an open top car even if it is raining or snowing. But in any weather it is a thing of incredible beauty.

The second problem with open top cars is that only females can drive them. When a woman, any woman, drives in a convertible she looks enticing and racy, hair flowing in the breeze, sunglasses adding mystery even if perched on top of the head. And when a woman does drive a convertible she seems to take on a new air of confidence defying any male to impinge on her space on the road or to foolishly attempt to outcar her, irrespective of what he is driving.

Unless it is the aforementioned 1920s Bentley (or similar) when a man drives an open top car he looks like a pillock. I say this from the vantage point of a pillock who has tried a range of open top vehicles all of which had the same outcome – humiliation and a vast hole in my bank account when it went back after just a few days or, at best, weeks. Driving an open top car a man looks as though this is the last desperate attempt to be trendy and attract the attention of females all of whom are actually thinking how much better that car would look if I was driving it.

And it stands to reason that since open top cars are for summer they are generally going to be sprayed in the most garish of summer colours which further emphasises the mistake this purchase was for a man in the first place. Even a bright red or canary yellow Ferrari looks stupid if it is a convertible and Lothario Larry is behind the wheel. (I will accept that a canary yellow Ferraris probably looks silly in any guise but I have seen them.) But truth to tell the colour doesn't matter as I found when I had a black open top Italian stallion (a poor man's Ferrari) for only two days before a colleague asked me when I was opening the hairdressing salon.

There is only one exception to this rule and it is an ancient open top military jeep of any kind. This contraption is especially cool since any woman worth her salt will refuse to sit in it let alone drive it and hence it will offer hours of fun away form the home on one's own. Plus in these peace-loving times it will not invoke the outbreak of place-specific petrol-bombing it might have in a bygone era. Now where exactly did I put that Autotrader?