John Walsh: Tales of the City

"Good God, look at that," wheezed Elliott Graham (played by Michael Gambon, in Stephen Poliakoff's Joe's Palace). "How can anyone possibly need a car that size in town?"

The object of his old-fashioned scorn was a hefty four-wheel-drive Toyota, the kind of car better known as a Chelsea tractor. It's a nice irony that the Gambon character can get worked up over the inappropriate largeness of a vehicle when he owns an empty house the size of Leeds Castle and a castle the size of Patagonia. But any abuse is now fair game, it seems, when it's directed at the demon SUV.

I'm not sure when we started calling giant cars "ess-you-vees" rather than "four-by-fours" but I suspect that it was after a cunning marketing campaign by Range Rover and Mitsubishi. There was always something faintly ridiculous about using a jeep capable of negotiating ploughed fields and land-mined battle zones just to whizz young Binky and Dahlia to school. "Sports utility vehicle" sounds much better, with its suggestion that your family routinely takes adventure holidays that involve crossing mountainous terrain, taking shortcuts through national parks and carrying skis and shooting paraphernalia on the roof rack.

Even as SUVs I found them hard to stomach, as they came inching past my skinny, 80-miles-to-the-gallon, eco-virtuous car in the side roads off Dulwich village. "Bastards," I would mutter, grinding my teeth as their smug faces passed by, beaming with condescension, two feet above me. "Bastards. Who the hell needs a car that size in town?"

So when Vauxhall offered me the use of one – their new Antara – for the weekend, I obviously retorted, "No thank you, damn your eyes, I have too much respect for the environment, and I do not want to look like a Chelsea pillock. Take your vile 4x4 away and wrap it round a tree, and jolly good riddance." Well, I was going to say that, but instead I said, "Thanks a lot, I'll give it a try." It's been quite an experiment.

Car enthusiasts tell me the Antara is a "crossover," namely a four-wheel-drive that wants to be an ordinary family estate. Their TV commercial says nothing of the sort. It shows a cool young dude slaloming around the roof of a skyscraper before driving his SUV off the edge and landing on the skyscraper roof next door – rather than, more logically, plunging 25 storeys to certain death.

Just walking around it is intimidating, because of the enormous boot – it's like walking round a horse with a gigantic arse. The brake is a large metal hoop. The engine snarls like an awakening behemoth. It was very satisfying, sitting high above the traffic like a princeling on an elephant, with lots of room around you: just changing gear means you have to yank your arm in great swooping gestures north-west and south, as though conducting an orchestra.

I set off with a car full of children to Hampshire for their granddad's 80th birthday. On the outskirts of Clapham, I passed a young mother and daughter on a mini-tandem bicycle. She glanced up at me with a look of fury, as if I were driving a van with ACME ROADHOG painted on the side. At the lights in Battersea, I smiled at the chap in the Prius beside me: here we were, I wanted to tell him, both of us ordinary chaps, driving environmental symbols, one good, one evil. Funny, eh? He shook his head, sadly, at my folly. On a long road in Hammersmith, I came upon an altercation between two drivers. Neither of them was giving way, and the traffic had backed up in both directions. There were motorists standing on the road, all of whom greeted my arrival with cries of "Oh no!" and much smiting of foreheads, as if it really is the absolute last straw in a Traffic Situation when a bloody 4x4 comes along to screw things up even more.

It seemed shockingly unfair that they should all – the cyclist, the Prius fan and these motorists – have it in for my borrowed car just because it existed at all, with its ski rack, its big wheels and its huge thoroughbred bottom.

The drive was just fine, except for the odd experience of watching the needle on the petrol gauge move, infinitesimally but unmistakeably, while you're driving. On a 100-mile round trip, three-eighths of the tank disappeared. But this was not as scary as the feeling you get, while driving an SUV, that you've become a social pariah, a monster of middle-class conceit, by virtue of being in a car that's slightly larger than you absolutely need. When will my neighbours start rebuking each other for living in houses slightly bigger than they need?

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How interesting, but slightly yucky, to learn that Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to conduct sophisticated negotiations in his hot tub. It was there, we learn, that in 2003 he first suggested to his wife that he should run for governor. "I had to work on her for 14 days," he says – and one dreads to think what kind of wrinkled prune the poor woman must have become by the end. But his jacuzzi is also the place where "I learned to negotiate, bringing Democrats and Republicans together right there".

It's an alarming thought, all these grey politicians in their patterned aquatic briefs sharing the hot bubbles with Arnie. Would it work here? Does Gordon Brown possess a jacuzzi? Or does he bring warring factions and conflicting parties together for peace negotiations in his plain, white, common-or-garden, No 10 bathtub?