The car-loving world can be divided into those who prefer to keep their metal clean and those who’d rather not. You will know which type you are, but the bewildering density of car-washing operations that this country manages to sustain suggests to me that the dirtophobics are in the majority.

I suspect the rise in car-wash prevalence has been intertwined with the increased affordability of AMG/M/RS machinery, thanks to the advent of PCP financing.

If you’re buying a car mostly as a rolling status symbol and fashion accessory, it just won’t do to have it dirty. You will want those carbon mirror caps on full display.

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Letting cars get mucky is just more fun, though. And you should not judge the driver for it. I know at least a few petrolheads who let the outside of their car become entombed in road grime but insist on keeping the interior near-spotless.

I’m the same. Brush your coat on the sill as you climb aboard and it’s straight to the dry cleaners, but dammit you could eat your lunch off the transmission tunnel.

So why do some of us love the grime, especially given that we’re now never more than half a mile from a sponge-wielding crack team charging so little that not overpaying feels immoral? It’s in part down to being ‘proper’.

A dirty car is a car that has been used; that is very much in service; a tool. In the age of garage queens, this alone is commendable, meaningful use having its own cachet. It’s why a Border collie is cooler than a King Charles and an E92 BMW M3 seen on the smaller 18in wheels gets extra kudos.

Then there’s the story the mess tells – and nothing tells more of a story than bug splatter. Unlike with mud, a good coating of dead bugs can’t be achieved in a moment.

It requires many miles, and the faster you’re going, the better. Such is the strange romance of carcass stubble that it became the basis of a marketing tagline for the 993 Porsche 911 Turbo: ‘Kills bugs fast’.

Short of driving through a locust swarm in east Africa, I’ve found the most fruitful hunting is to be done on autobahns in the late summer, especially in verdant Bavaria.

You can turn an 600bhp Mercedes-AMG E63 into an insect-collection device that would have made globetrotting Victorian entomologists weak at their bare knees. The big ones make an audible pop as they explode against the windscreen.