When I pressed the button, anyway, a map appeared. It showed the motorway I was driving on, and it showed me – or at least my car – as a little red arrow heading determinedly forward in an eastbound direction. How many satellites were trained on me at that moment, I wondered, in order to calculate this ever-changing position? I’d read somewhere that it was always about five: five pairs of eyes keeping me under constant surveillance, from their vantage point high up in the sky. Was this a reassuring thought, or a frightening one? As usual, I couldn’t quite decide. There are so many new facts of life that we just don’t know what to think about. All I knew for certain was that it had been different, very different, back in Donald Crowhurst’s day, when he had drifted unobserved for months in the mid-Atlantic, and had believed that he could fool the world, with the help of some bogus calculations pencilled into a logbook, into thinking that he had spent that time battling with storms in the Southern Ocean. Not much chance of pulling off a deception like that nowadays.
The motorway traffic was getting heavy, and it was a relief when I saw the exit for Junction 8/9 (Maidenhead and High Wycombe) signed up ahead. As I turned off and drove up the slip road, I soon found myself braking too sharply. The brakes on this car seemed ultra-sensitive: you only had to give them the lightest of touches. There were two lanes of traffic backed up towards the roundabout, with about ten cars in each. I came to a halt, and took advantage of this temporary stillness to press one of the other buttons alongside the screen.
The button I chose was labelled ‘INFO’. When I pressed it, three green columns appeared on the screen. It took me a few moments to work out what they signified. Apparently, each one represented five minutes’ driving time, and told you what your petrol consumption had been during this period. During my first five minutes I had been averaging 34 miles to the gallon; in the second, 49, and in the third, 51. Not bad, but it wasn’t going to win me any prizes. I had been hoping for an average of 65 or more. Was I doing something wrong?
After negotiating the roundabout and joining the High Wycombe road, I slowed right down to 45 miles an hour, and immediately my fuel efficiency began to rise. I seemed to be averaging between 75 to 80 miles to the gallon now, so I drove at this speed for a mile or so, until the driver stuck in the lane behind me started flashing his lights angrily. I speeded up, feeling obscurely guilty even though I had been engaged (looking at it from one point of view) in an environmentally friendly act. It would be difficult to drive at that speed all the way to Aberdeen, I realized, even though I was bound to win Lindsay’s £500 prize if I did.
Ten miles later, the A404 joined the M40 and I took the first exit at the roundabout, swinging on to the motorway and heading north-west. On either side of me England – or what little you could see of it from the perspective of the motorway – lay stretched out, reposeful and inviting, dressed modestly in muted greens and greys. I could feel my spirits beginning to rise. I was in the mood for adventure after all.
My plan was this: today, I would drive to Birmingham, at a careful, unhurried pace, consuming as little petrol as possible. I would arrive mid-afternoon, check into a hotel, and then pay a visit on Mr and Mrs Byrne, the parents of my old schoolfriend Chris Byrne and his sister Alison. They still lived in Edgbaston, in a house backing on to the reservoir, and I had already spoken to Mr Byrne over the weekend: I’d phoned him to ask if he still possessed (as my father believed he did) a spare set of keys to the flat in Lichfield. To which Mr Byrne had answered, Yes, we’ve definitely got them here somewhere. (Although he didn’t seem to know where, exactly.) So I intended to pick up the keys, and visit the flat itself the next morning. All of this would mean a very slow start to my journey; but it still gave me plenty of time to reach Shetland, and in any case, there was no point in driving all the way to Kendal tonight, because Lucy would not be able to see me. I’d already been in touch with Caroline about that, and she’d told me that Lucy was going round to a friend’s house that night, for a birthday tea and sleepover. So, I would have to take her out to dinner on Tuesday evening. That was fine. I could still get to Aberdeen on Wednesday afternoon in plenty of time to make the five o’clock ferry. In the meantime, visiting Mr and Mrs Byrne might be a pleasantly nostalgic way to spend a couple of hours.
I settled down to a steady 55 miles per hour. Every other vehicle on the motorway was going faster than this, even the heaviest lorries. My petrol consumption was back down to 70 miles per gallon, and I began to think of all the petrol that people would save if they drove at this speed all the time. Why was everybody in such a hurry? What difference did it make if you arrived at your destination half an hour later than you could have done? Perhaps it was motorways themselves that were the problem. Motorways allowed you to drive faster, yes, but more than that, they made you want to drive faster, they obliged you to drive faster, because driving on them was such a boring experience. I had only been on the M40 for about fifteen minutes, but already I was bored. There was absolutely nothing to see, nothing to look at, apart from the little punctuation marks that broke up the motorway itself – roadsigns, chevrons, gantries, bridges, all of which merged into one indecipherable, meaningless sequence after a while anyway. There was countryside on both sides, but it was featureless: the occasional house, the occasional reservoir, the occasional glimpse of a distant town or village, but apart from that, nothing. It occurred to me that the areas bordering our motorways must make up a huge proportion of our countryside, and yet nobody ever visits them or walks through them, or has any experience of them other than the monotonous, regularly unfolding view you get through the car window. These areas are wastelands; unaccounted for.
‘Welcome Break, 3 Miles’, one of the signs said; so I decided to come off the motorway here, and have some lunch. The next services – operated by Moto – were another twenty miles away, and the ones beyond that were more than forty miles. I didn’t want to wait that long. Besides, even though I didn’t fancy Kentucky Fried Chicken at the moment, the face of Colonel Sanders beaming out at me from the welcome sign was somehow reassuring. So I entered the slip road at Junction 8A, negotiated the network of mini-roundabouts, and found myself looking for a parking space in a car park that was, at this time of day, full almost to bursting point. Eventually I slotted my Prius between a Ford Fiesta and a Fiat Punto, and turned off the ignition with a sense of relief.
It was 1.15, and I was hungry. All around me, people were heading for the main food hall – business people like me, mainly, wearing dark suits, collar and tie, sometimes with the jackets slung over their shoulders (although it was cold, today, and I for one was going to keep mine on). I felt a surge of well-being at the thought that I was part of something again: part of a nationwide process, part of a community – the business community – that was doing its bit, day in and day out, to keep Britain ticking over. We all had a part to play. Everybody here was involved in selling something, or buying something, or servicing or checking or costing or quantifying something. I felt connected again: back in the mainstream.