For those wondering, the ad there says born to roam. Now, roaming is a loaded word in the UK. The country is a mix of ancient rights of way and private property. And the people who like to exercise their right to walk on ancient rights of way - coastal paths, routes through the countryside - are very attached to those rights. Those rights, being ancient, are also so deeply woven into our statute books as to be nigh on impossible to remove.

On the other side, you have the landowners. Particularly the rich new landowners who have just bought a massive clifftop property with spectacular views, and who aren’t too happy to see pensioners with flasks of tea and a damp spaniel wandering through their gardens.

So there has been an ongoing battle between the ‘right to roam’ movement, and landowners. I emigrated years ago, so am not up to date, but I’m pretty sure the right to roam guys still have the upper hand.

On top of that, you have additional problems related to offroading (the right to roam guys are almost exclusively footpaths and bridle paths). There simply aren’t the massive open tracts of land you can just go driving through that you would find in the US or Oz. British is densely populated and old, so it’s all been divided up. These problems are exemplified by ‘greenlaning’. As I recall it, there were certain routes that were open to offroading, and people used to go and have fun. But then a couple of things happened. You had more of the nimbyism of landowners not wanting people to have fun on their property, and you had some of the walkers and horseridees who decided that they should be the only ones using those routes. There were also some dicks took it to far and either went and completely mashed up some routes, or took other routes that they shouldn’t have, and that brought things to a head, leading to plenty of these routes closing down, and a bunch of pissed off 4x4 guys.

(Then of course there’s dickhead teenagers on dirt bikes).

So that’s the story of why the advert got banned - the particular word ‘roam’, and an uneasy relationship between he 4x4 guys and landowners / authorities. As best I remember, at least

I’m pleased to say that my Jimny has the same overall dimensions (l+w+h) and the same weight as the previous generation. Not everything is growing