So its a rotten, shitty, rainy, grey, nasty day. What better thing could you possibly do than drive from Manchester to London? Its in all the guide books. Just after ‘nice things to do on Tuesday evenings’ and before ‘rotten things to avoid before you die’. So to make it really interesting, they operate it as an obstacle course. How exciting! This is how it plays:

Day 1. Drive up to Leeds on bank holiday weekend. The M1 is at its finest; crammed with cars, with roadworks (temporarily suspended because you wouldn’t want to see any workers at all actually doing something on the 18-mile stretch of motorway they’ve marked off with cones, would you? That would spoil all the fun), and with the odd accident or broken down car. All in all, a fairly painful 200 miles and great relief at your arrival. Until it actually dawns on you that it is in fact Leeds you’ve just arrived at, rather than somewhere nice, somewhere desirable, somewhere cool.

Spend the night at father-in-law’s place, go to bed early (the easiest way to ‘make it go away, Mummy!’) to be fully prepared for the main event on:

Day 2. After breakfast set off cross country (M62) to Manchester. In the (fucking) rain. Just in case Leeds isn’t quite awful enough, they send you there. Attend to business there (care homes, wardened flats, fun, fun, fun!!!), have the worst possible version of industrialised, mass-catered, leave-on-a-hotplate-for-a-week-it’ll-be-just-fine, slops and then set off for London. The Holy Grail.

Its still wet, still raining, misty, grey and… well, its Manchester; what d’ya expect? Within 5 miles we had hold up number 1. By hold up number 3, 50 miles down the M6, Waze took us off that road altogether and across country (the other way, A50), over to the M1 because an accident earlier at the M1/M6 interchange had fucked things up beyond all normal levels of fuck-up. The M1 was fine. For about 30 miles. Then it stopped. Just stopped. Engine off, phone a friend, feet up on the steering wheel, stopped. Eventually it started again but then Waze once again took us off the road because there was a broken down coach, 2 lanes closed. Waze led us (‘blindly’ doesn’t even half cover it) round the back of Stony Stratford, over a few farms, through a campsite, across a river (no bridge), in that Waze way, and we returned 15 miles south and into almost flowing traffic.

Arriving home (THANK FUCKING CHRISTTTTT!!!!!) just 5 hours after leaving.

Fun, fun, fun.

Happy rest of Sunday. Mine is.

A xxxx