One of the rare moments when I was overstimulated by the thought of an unseen episode of Top Gear, a programme I didn't even watch when I was stranded in Domodedovo airport for between eight and ten hours both ways, and it was the only programme being looped at the Pret cafe.

I was talking to my mate Terry, though we were in the Doll, and not the Pret cafe, and he happened to mention the one where they'd done a feature on Eastern European cars -- the Lada, the ZiL, the Trabant, the Yugo. Something of the incantatory nature of that list obviously filtered through to a realm in which I was checking out the Nordic equivalent, the Icelanda.

This clearly stepped sideways from Sibelius' Finlandia, which perhaps ought to be playing over the commercial -- though 'Codomatopoiea,' as ever, comes to mind:



-- At least then we would be looking at the car, rather than staring aghast at the video. How abstract can _you_ get?

Anyway the car was simply rolling around a northern street, acting innocently, as in this image from Novy Sad (can you spot the Yugo?):



Obviously, in reality, the Icelanda would be fitted with razor wire tyres, run on geothermal emissions and have cod liver oil caressing its pistons. Its seats would be lined with seal fur and stuffed with millions of kronas, and dangling from its mirror would be a shrunken puffin.

Its engine capacity would be calculated in troll rather than horse power, and it would cable knit the road ahead of it as it progressed using heavy duty but somehow still sheer iceworm silk, rather than travelling on conventional tarmac.

And it would be legally required always to have Bjork at the wheel, like a piskie taxi driver, or a pickaxi drypherr, as they are known. You would need to tell her to 'gefa í botn!'