How much do you want to sit in here?

LIFE, contrary to the cliché, doesn't begin at 40. It begins at 25.

I excitedly reckon this because as of tomorrow it will be exactly twenty five years since I made my first car journey (although whisper it quietly it was in a Volvo 340) on March 1, 1986. There's lots of things that make it, to my mind, an anniversary worth celebrating.

I can, for instance, take out cheaper car insurance. I can rent things that aren't vans. Best of all, it means I can afford to own an old sports car for the first time, which is about to go through its MOT.

Unfortunately, my other half isn't looking forward to March 1 because I'm having another British sports car delivered to the Champion offices. The 2010 Lotus Elise. And I didn't arrange it so I could use it as a birthday treat. Honest.

What you or I see when we see an Elise is the classic sports car of the future, the finely-fettled drivers' tool which saw Lotus reinvent itself as a master of all things lightweight following the flop that was the front-wheel-drive Elan. What my other half sees, on the other hand, is what you see above; two thin, rock hard seats perched low in a noisy car with next to no visibility at all, accessible only once you've scaled those ridiculously wide sills.

I keep trying to explain to her that sports cars like this - and the even less comfortable Caterham Seven, which I've also squeezed myself into on a couple of occasions - are supposed to be raw and cramped, which she's accepted on the strict proviso that I pay for the osteopath she visits afterwards. Perhaps the only answer is to persuade Lotus to launch a "passenger version" of the Elise, with the driver's side stripped out for thrills and performance and the passenger's retrimmed luxuriously for frills and pampering.

The prospect of an Elise, two conveniently-booked days off and some nice weather is enough to send me into a bout of childish excitement, which is why by the time this week's Champion drops though your letterbox I'll be blasting the Toyota-engined screamer along a mountain pass in the Lake District.

For me, it'll be seat-of-the-pants thrills. For my long-suffering other half, it'll be a pain in the backside.