hazy - life in the M6 area as viewed by clarkson

that's you , my son lol

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article7099122.ece

Blackpool out of season is not very nice. Everything’s shut, apart from a few forlorn amusement arcades that are populated only by a handful of reeling young men, entertaining Wayne on his stag night while Shaz is back at home, having an elasticated panel sewn in to the front of her wedding dress. It’s raining, too.

Still, the drive back home would be even worse. This is because Blackpool is connected to England by the M6, which, right now, is subjected along almost its entire length to a camera-enforced 50mph speed limit to protect the workforce ... which isn’t there.

It’s busy, too, and I don’t know why because none of the towns advertised on any of the signposts seems like the sort of place anyone would want to go. Preston. Congleton. Stoke. Newcastle-under-Lyme. Stafford. It’s a rolling stream of mediocrity, drizzle, tracksuits and mind-numbing boredom.

I’m surprised more people who are forced to use the M6 don’t just drive into a bridge parapet and end it all.

On the way to Blackpool, things had been even worse because I didn’t use the motorways. I started in Norwich and went through places such as Leicester and Rugby and Cannock and Rugeley. They’re all the same. You plough through the retail parks and the light industrial estates, where people move imported goods from one place to another. And then you reach the town centre, which goes like this: pizza takeaway joint, Cantonese restaurant, Indian restaurant, Cantonese restaurant, Cantonese restaurant, charity shop, kebab shop, kebab shop, Indian restaurant, pizza takeaway joint. It’s all anyone seems to do in the Midlands: eat.

But apart from one bit of Birmingham, which looked like Calcutta, you never see a greengrocer. Or a butcher. The retail parks have raped the town centres of business and the shops have been taken over by rubbish restaurants selling fat.

And you never go more than 4mph. You crawl along, with the wipers beating time as your life ebbs away, listening to dreary radio presenters hosting quizzes for stupid people. And then you’re back in the retail park zone and then you’re in the next town and it’s just the same.

It’s all first and second gear. And the only adrenaline rush comes when your front nearside wheel drops into a pothole so deep that you think you’re going to end up in Australia. And it’s still raining. And there still aren’t any greengrocers.

At one point I wound up on the road from Stafford to Stoke, which has more speed cameras than any other stretch in Britain. So even though you could do 100, you can’t because Gordon Brown will help himself to what little money you didn’t give to Stavros in the kebab shop last night. It was all very, very horrible.