Kate Gompertz is a friend of mine. And the reason she's a friend of mine is that she does not mince her words. If she finds someone's new hairstyle ridiculous, she will say so. If she doesn't like the look of your baby, she won't say it has nice hair, or lovely clothes. She'll just say it's ugly.

Anyway, despite all this, I offered to give her a lift to a party. I arrived on time, with a driver, in a large Audi S8. I was dressed correctly, in black tie, with black shoes. My hair was cut. I had even had a shave. Kate would be stumped, I thought.

I was wrong. We hadn't even got out of her drive before she piped up from the back. "What an absolutely ghastly car," she said.

Now, I'm sorry, but no one has ever described the inside of an Audi S8 as 'ghastly'. It's a symphony of subtle lighting, with door handles that blend beautifully into the dash in an elegant, but forceful curve. And at night, the myriad twinkling red lights put you in mind of the straights that separate Hong Kong from Kowloon at dusk. It is, in fact, a magnificent interior. So, what was her problem?

"Well, it's all grey," she explained. Do you know what? She had a point. It is all grey. It's as grey as the inside of a photocopier salesman's shoe. It's as grey as the colour chart in a Dell factory. It's as grey as John Major's underpants on a misty Scottish morning. And so once again, I think it's time for us all to question every single aspect of what we see as the norm in car interior design.

There is not one single thing in the Audi S8, or indeed any large car, that I would have in my house. Do I have grey leather furniture? No, of course I don't, because I have better things to do than traipse around DFS negotiating Ee-Zee-finance deals.

Do I have any furniture made from polished wood veneer? No, and nor have I felt inclined to line even a small part of my walls with fake carbon fibre.

When you do this; when you compare everything in your house with everything in your car, you start to realise that, actually, everything in your car is shit.

Who says that sporty models must look like the marketing director of Lynx aftershave's squash racquet? Who says that men's wash bags are the starting point for anything? And why do you want the seats to be made out of leather when the only people who have leather furniture in their houses are riff-raff?