Volvo makes a ‘mighty’ statement with trendy, powerful V90

Britain, 793. The Dark Ages: no English Premier League football, no street lights. Into this foggy, climatically noxious land so disdained by the Romans thunder the Very Violent Vikings (Gothenburg chapter), a gang of oversized, hirsute blokes so tough they wear the horns on the insides of their helmets.

Leading the charge west (not east, as in real history) are Erik, Ingvar, Leif and Trevor, all out for a bit of general mayhem of the lock-up-your-daughters kind. Britain is going berserk, plummeting pell-mell into the sort of rabid anti-Europeanism it won’t see again until Brexit.

But just imagine: what if those exquisite, shallow-draught longships had hit the beaches like a force of landing craft? What if Erik and his hairy mates had taken Britain by storm in a motorised division … of Volvos?

As they drove around, rather than yelling and cursing and pillaging their way through the place, but pointing out a site for a future self-assembly furniture warehouse here, a Spam café there, tossing Malmö Limpic Stout empties into the generously proportioned boot, Erik and chums would have accelerated Western civilisation (assuming that to be a good thing) by 500 years or so. That is because the ubiquitous Volvo is such a civilising apparatus. Skull smashers or not, even the Vikings would have gone all pipe-and-slippers while experiencing the relaxing comforts of a car designed to soothe, placate and charm the blood-splattered axes right out of their meaty hands.