The M62

AAARRRGGHHH!!

I am pig, hog and boar sick of this fucking road. Allow me to whinge...I mean explain:

My current job is in the North West, near Liverpool. I live in North Yorkshire. This means I have to traverse the Pennines at least twice a week. The most direct and supposedly quickest route across the Pennines is on the M62 motorway. The problem is that it sucks. By God, it sucks.

I drove over it this morning, and didn't leave particularly early admittedly. This factor doesn't make much difference, because at the end where it morphs into the M60 Manchester Ring Road, it is invariably snarled up with thousands upon thousands of cars and lorries. Even if I leave at 6.30 or 7.00 am, I still get stuck in traffic around Manchester.

This morning, however, I had the added pleasure of rain, especially at the highest point of the motorway, where you are cheerily reminded that you are on the highest motorway in England. And up there, where the clouds converge it is not just rain, it's monsoon conditions. Even with the wipers flailing across the windscreen like demented, giant, Roger Moore eyebrows, the visibility was shockingly bad. It's always at this point that I seem to get some sleepy residue in my good eye, meaning I have to rub it out and rendering my vision even more blurry. At this point it's just a case of hoping I don't get sideswiped by a Lidl lorry (the shame!) or an Audi Awhatever (the wanker!).

And naturally the rain made the traffic worse. The approach to every other junction seems to be heralded by flashing lights and temporary 40mph speed limits indicated on the gantries overhead. This makes the drive a sequence of slowing down, speeding up then slowing down again a couple of miles later. It drives me mad.

I have been offered alternative routes to try, but they are no better time-wise. They involve either negotiating what is supposedly the busiest stretch of road in the world near Glossop (or taking a week to avoid it around some crazily convoluted short-cut) or tackling the searingly intense insanity of the M6 to get up to the A59, upon which you always - ALWAYS - get stuck behind some gimp in a Skoda.

AAAGGHH. Time to invest in a personal jet pack, I think.