We had a Mini, too. It was the early 1960s, and it was about the only car those days with front-wheel-drive. Snow chains on the back wheels were as useful as driving with the handbrake on.

Nobody much falls in love with their cars these days. Modern vehicles are too bland and reliable.

Nobody much gets into fights about cars any more, either, unless some fool takes a 20 cent coin and scrapes its edge along your duco or backs into you at the lights.

It wasn’t always so. I once got into a stand-up face-down with a kid on the school bus when I announced that my mother was about to take delivery of something called a Mini Minor. ‘‘Morris Minor, you fool,’’ declared the know-it-all in the seat ahead of me, and things escalated until the bus driver applied the brakes and came back to separate us.

It was the very start of the 1960s. Nobody in the bush bought little cars or cared tuppence for them.

My mother, however, had already fallen in love with a picture in an English magazine of something called a Mini Minor. She was elegant and cool, our Mum, and canny about the cost of things like petrol, and she ordered one of these revolutionary fuel-miser machines with the motor mounted sideways, driving the front wheels. It was the first in our district.

It seemed too small to be possible, but our family fitted because it was a perfectly practical box on wheels, and we fell hard for it. My father drove a Holden, the preferred vehicle of the country, but it was the Mini that took us on our holidays. My mother insisted on it. We put it on the Princess of Tasmania, sailed across Bass Strait and motored around the apple isle, and somehow the Mini’s little boot accommodated all the luggage needed for a family of four.

Yes, and we drove to the Snowy Mountains, my brother and I becoming maybe the first from our school to roll around in snow, and we fell about chortling when that other Mini came by with chains on its back wheels.

The Mini had that indefinable thing called style. It was simple and it worked brilliantly.

Coco Chanel was, in the 20th century world of fashion, the greatest exponent of the idea that simplicity is style.

“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off,’’ was her signature advice. The Mini was the motoring equivalent of Audrey Hepburn in one of Chanel’s little black dresses. Hardly an accessory required.

Style can be found anywhere, but you have to look hard. When you find it, you’ll fall in love, for it happens rarely.

Architects live in quest of the simple beauty of dwellings that meet the needs of their inhabitants without frippery while suburbs of big inefficient houses sprout across the land, accessorised with rooms and doodads that will never be used.

City planners and government budgetry officers dream up roads instead of cleaner and more useful rail links, forgetting that roads follow a form of Parkinson’s Law, which holds that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Cars, Parkinson might have said, will fill all the space made available. There is no style in an endless traffic jam.

Computer and mobile phone manufacturers have gone bust or into decline offering increasingly whizz-bang and complicated technology while Apple came up with a simple idea - a screen that asks your fingers to do what they were designed to do: touch.

Public speakers regularly bore for their countries. Yet Opposition Leader Bill Shorten managed to fold into a single sentence the definition of grief when he spoke at the national memorial for the victims of Flight MH17 on Thursday: ‘‘Some of us have dreams from which we do not wish to wake.’’

Acres of books and theses and articles go unread because their authors failed to heed or read the straightforward advice of Cornell University Professor William Strunk in his 52-page booklet Elements of Style, written in 1918.

‘‘Vigorous writing is concise,’’ declared Strunk. ‘‘A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.’’

Strunk could just as well have been advising about the design of a house, a city, a suit, a little black dress, a sculpture or, yes, a car.

He’d have liked the Mini. Without chains on the wrong wheels.