In the end I settled on six cars that you would expect to find in such a show — among them the Ford Model T and the VW Beetle — and six more that I believe deserve greater recognition, including Josef Ganz’s Standard Superior (or what’s left of it) and, well, the Honda Civic. And then, in a darkened antechamber, I displayed the car that I believed, above all others, advanced the state of motoring: #the13thcar. I chose the Corgi James Bond Aston Martin DB5. (It’s item No 261 in the 1965 Corgi catalogue, if anyone’s interested.) What I really think about... supercars, America, foreigners, car launches, Top Gear, the battle of the sexes and cars " My first job was designing a plastic roof for a horsebox,” he says. “But I loved experimenting; I designed a lorry with a working tail-lift in 1962 and, although they never made it, it got the attention of [Mettoy founder] Philipp Ullmann.”

Thank you for continuing to support our Die-cast Diaries blog. Our next edition is scheduled for publication on Friday 1st December. As it was, the baddie’s supersonic upward trajectory was arrested only by the ceiling (unless you played with your toys outside, in which case he was in your neighbour’s garden), from where he would fall to the dark and heavily patterned carpet that characterised the 1960s and 1970s and become invisible. He was, you remember, less than an inch long and not even a complete man, all of his legs below the shins having being sacrificed to make way for the mechanism. From the Hoover bag he made his way to the dustbin and a rubbish tip far, far away.The Batmobile was even more successful than the Bond Aston, selling five million near-identical examples and helped enormously by Batman’s near-permanent place on Saturday morning children’s telly of the 1960s and ’70s.

In 1977, Bond-car mania exploded once more when Corgi issued its ingenious model of the submarine Lotus Esprit, this time coordinated in advance in partnership with Eon Productions to hit the shops the week the film opened. It is the working ejector seat that is so deeply ingrained in the consciousness of people about my age. It was an unimaginable marvelTo open the roof and trigger the ejector seat to jettison Bond’s adversary, Marshall positioned a tiny release button under the Aston’s sill. There was a similar control to deploy the concealed machine-guns, while the pop-up bullet shield in the boot was activated by pushing in the exhaust pipes. Corgi management had to be convinced the miniature mechanisms were strong enough to withstand being played with relentlessly. There was no time for the usual modelling process involving painstaking drawings, beautiful 1:12-scale masters in hardwood, resin casts, and accurate reduction by pantograph to produce the moulds for diecasting. There is a more upbeat side to all this, though. Aston Martin, we know, has existed for more than 100 years under conditions of constant commercial brinkmanship. It is often said that the tie-in with Bond and Goldfinger saved the company during one of its more parlous periods. Yet in the long term I think it’s the toy that saved Aston. And the people at Corgi knew they were selling children a spring-loaded tragedy in waiting. They knew, the bastards, because the second-generation Bond DB5 was sold with a spare baddie. But why just one? You needed a bagful.