Taking Stock - January 25, 2016

Some people claim to enjoy a long drive – or at least they like the idea of one.

Clearly they haven’t spent any lengthy period of time on the M6, dodging towering lorries, swerving around people doing 55mph in the middle lane and crawling through the roadworks at Stafford which seem to have been running since 1982.

Don’t let the likes of Clarkson, May and Hammond fool you.

Driving is miserable in modern Britain unless someone happens to have handed you the keys of a supercar and closed a significant chunk of a Welsh A-road. It is, however, far preferrable to stopping.

Unfortunately, with a journey so long it almost unavoidable - the plumbing of the human body demanding that at some point you pull over for a Welcome Break.

The cheery posters as you pull in would have you believe a motoring oasis awaits - a nirvana on the oustkirts of Nuneaton.

There’s no mention of the fact you could feed a family in Vietnam for the price of a Twix or that most of the people who work there, oddly, appear to be too young to drive.

On the way to Essex I pulled over at a service station across the road from Stansted Airport.

It had been a four-hour haul to reach that point and getting out of the car I couldn’t help but thing there had to be a better way.

And then I realised there was – or at least there used to be.

It seems a different age but it really is just a few years since the journey from Blackpool to Stansted took just 25 minutes.

Back then we really were going places – Dublin and 
Girona to name but a few.

This week came the news the airport terminal is soon to be demolished – yet another sad indictment of this modern Britain, run for the good of the corporate balance sheet and not the public.

I miss hearing the jets roaring off from Squires Gate to sunnier climes (mostly)

And, legs still aching from a ten-hour round trip, I’m left wondering why the Fylde coast’s sky high dreams were allowed to drift away.