WHY DO ENGLISH ROADS

ALL  LEAD TO GROAN...?

IT can only happen in England – and predictably, it did.

A rare venture onto a motorway  during my three-week stay with my family in Manchester...and I spend seven hours crawling less than 200 miles down the M6 and M5.

Yes, the MDM struck again, just as it does every time I visit the UK. I’m talking about what is clearly a government order to the Maximum Disruption of Motorists department to cause drivers as much stress as possible through traffic delays.

I do as little driving as possible when I’m in England. It’s a pleasure to tootle around the Costa Blanca in my little Kia  Picanto because traffic jams, diversions and road closures are as rare as a Manchester football team losing a Premier League match.

But while it takes me ten minutes to travel 10km from my home to the Courier office at any time of day, driving the same distance across Manchester is a good hour’s toil, thanks to heavy traffic, copious sets of traffic lights and random holes dug in the tarmac and dubiously titled  ‘road works’.

I arrived in Manchester way behind schedule  on the evening of December 16 - thanks to a morning snowstorm in Lancashire which delayed the departure of my flight from Murcia by five hours. After a quick visit to see my newly-born grandson at Stockport’s Stepping Hill Hospital, my son-in-law attempted to drive me back to North Manchester  via the M60 motorway, which encircles the city.

We were trying to travel anticlockwise from five o’clock up to to midnight but  when we got to roughly 4 o’clock, damn it, the motorway suddenly came to an end. Flashing lights and diversion signs told us the M60 was closed anticlockwise. No reason...just  a loopy re-route that took us back onto the clockwise carriageway.

So 20 minutes of the orbital clock became 40 minutes in reverse. Thanks guys, maybe in 100 years’ time you’ll reveal the reason why it’s necessary to shut down major motorways, just like that, with no explanatory notice, and force thousands of motorists to make 30-mile detours.

A five-minute lesson from the Spanish roads authority might be a good idea. They have this outrageous idea that you should keep major roads open at all times. Yes, even after a major incident involving the loss of life, they actually try to AVOID shutting down the road for a week? Or even a couple of hours!

Then, two days after Christmas, I set off in my daughter’s Rav 4 to visit my stepmother in Cardiff, accompanied by my two young granddaughters Talia and Daisy. ‘’There won’t be a lot of traffic,’’ insisted my son-in-law. ‘’Everyone is still on holiday.’’

So off we headed at 11am for what in the past has normally been a three-and-a-half hour drive - though admittedly I had tended to travel after the evening rush hour.

Four hours after leaving Manchester, we pulled out of  tha near-stationary 60-mile queue on the M6 and into Stafford services, hoping to find some sort of guide to the traffic ahead. A TV screen with a bold caption reading ‘Live Traffic Information’  told us precisely nothing about the gridlocked traffic ahead or behind – because the monitor was unplugged. The Highways Agency weren’t any help, either   – because we couldn’t find anyone working for them. 

Presumably because, like much of Britain’s 21st-century workforce, they were on their 14-day Christmas break.

As it happens, the queues did ease soon after we left Stafford services and crawled past  junction 14.  For the previous 30 miles overhead signs had been flashing regularly warning of ‘Long Delays, Junctions 14-12’. It was inevitable there would be no delays whatsoever between those two junctions...and of course, there weren’t any.