If, for example, you happen to own a Screwpull, you’ll know exactly why you own one: it works beautifully, pulling the cork effortlessly from the bottle of room-temperature New World cab sav, or very slightly chilled Gewurtztraiminer. Somebody’s thought it out, and it shows – but not ostentatiously. And if it isn’t a corkscrew that’s engaged your appetite for design, it could be the sound system which really delivers, or that small cuff detail on your favourite suit These are pleasurable facts, not slippery fictions They matter because you know precisely why they suit you Like the designer, you’ve thought about it And you’ve made a judgement on the design You have, in effect, set the specifications. Vauxhall have keyed into this reflex with the launch of the New Signum as “a car full of ideas”.We’re being asked to consider a series of innovations that will help to get you from A to B in intelligently arranged conditions. And though image matters, colour coordinated special effects and professionally murmured sales spiel are just fast-food. We’ve become part of automotive production, bit-part players in petrolhead pulp fictions devised by Tarantino wannabes.

We might even suspect that we, not the cars, are the final product. The scenarios are invariably amazing: the sterilised soundtracks in which Wagner meets Leftfield; the highcontrast landscapes full of not-quite-graspable meaning; the voiceovers whose message turns out to be massage. We’re riders on the automotive industry’s storm, mere pixels in what the world’s most provocative architect, Rem Koolhaas, refers to as “the violent surf of information”.

And what do we get? Cars that dance, cars that shake their booty, cars covered in mud the colour of Neuhaus chocolate, cars that behave like dogs, cars that just sit there in carefully sculpted shadows. We’re often cast as the gullible soft machines who drive the hard machines. The hope is that he will return to his favourite courts for a last hoorah..

I should, no doubt, cut to the chase Sprint to the specs Dignify the drag coefficient. Get on the good foot and signify Vauxhall’s New Signum in a drum-roll of sardonically ambiguous soundbytes. And we will meet the car’s urbane designer, Eduardo Ramirez-Carcamo, in a minute. The thing is, I can’t help noticing that if you rearrange the letters of Signum, you come up with “musing” Let’s do that Let’s muse

Cars, and car design, have become irony-rich.

He must concentrate on what he wants to achieve and not on what is written about him.”Having for years suffered the indignity of being classed by many as an under-achiever for failing to win Wimbledon, Henman knows what he’s talking about. He has an edge to him, which is good.”He added, however: “But there’s a fine line. “I can see myself being captain in a few years,” he said.Having been Britain’s leading player for the last decade, Henman can empathise with young Murray as the Scot begins to make progress in the world game.”The bar of expectation is going higher and higher for Andy,” he said, “and it should, because he’s a class player But he must be focused on what he’s doing. So far this has not happened.Henman, unlike Murray, was a typical British late developer.