In England, my father drives a car. It is black and shiny and slick and unscratched. Throughout it, gadgets warm seats, gauge performance, mollify and coddle. Tech-fairies transmit signals through the air, so that his other devices, his extended digital self, integrates with it thoroughly. It purrs as it drives down the road. It fits in.

In Corfu, my father drives a car. It is black, but the resemblance ends there. The ancient devices in it are mostly defunct. The radio is absent, the windows are frozen in place. Its skin is battered and broken, like a cassoulet’s crust, dented by regular impacts. It sags, it rattles, it leaks. It fits in.

In Havana, I climb into a man’s car. He is sadly not my father. I flagged him down in passing, offered him precious US dollars to give me a lift to an ancient colonial hotel.

The car is a 1950s gem, a Chevrolet or Chrysler, with a polished skin 60 years old. Inside, it is hollow. The leather has rotted, the panels have vanished, all the mechanisms are broken.

Do not pretend your aesthetics are universal; that your ethics are universalisable; that your politics is anything but local.