Baby you can drive my car

Well, if they ask me, I'll tell 'em. 70 mph on a motorway is quite fast enough; no need to put it up to 80 mph.

Just because almost any tin pot jalopy can touch a cool ton and still have change out of five pounds there's no need to go scaring old ladies and vicars with an extra 10 mph under your belt. No, I say keep the 70 mph maximum. If anything reduce it - to a nippy 40 mph.

I don't know about you but I find driving on the motorway a bit disconcerting. There you are on the inside lane travelling at a modest 70 mph, undertaking all the little scaredy cats in the middle lane who daren't bang along with all the fighter pilots in the outside lane, but feel it's too much of a hassle having to overtake  if they drive in the inside lane.

I rather like tail-gaters. Immediately someone sticks their face on my back bumper, I slow down, and down and down. It's fun watching them overtake me giving the universal motoring greeting of love and respect.

I also enjoy getting lost. That's not strictly true, but since when the missus and I go adventuring in the car we'll most certainly end up lost, I might as well get some pleasure out of it. It's not the long bits - you know from London to Inverness or somewhere foreign. That's fine, it's when you get to Inverness and you've got to hunt down No 28 Soggy Bottom Lane  that things get sticky.

It's at such times that  Heisenberg's uncertainty principle kicks in: you can't have both position and momentum. If I know where I'm to head for, invariably we'll be travelling at the speed of light as we flash past our preferred destination. Often if we're just visiting a town and not somewhere specific in that town we'll park at any place that's convenient - even if it means taking a bus to the centre. Saves hours.

Another ploy is to encircle the destination; with the missus taking regular bearings. Applying the third way rule - "I think this is the third time we've been this way today", we invariably summon up the courage to ask some yokel or other where we are and whether it's within  an ocean's width of where we thought we were. Usually it isn't, and so we decide it didn't look that interesting any way so we might as well go home and have a nice cup of tea.

No, driving is not for the faint hearted. Travelling at 80 mph means we'll get lost further from home and that would not be nice.

I'll stick to cleaning the car and planning trips to the municipal dump. And not a motorway in sight.