h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Does anyone have any interesting or unusual information regarding motorways - from their origins to present-day chit chat? I would love to discover any motorway enthusiasts out there...

You can e-mail with info to: [email protected]

I await with baited breath.

I don't know about interesting facts, but I've always had a feeling there's something not quite right about motorways.

Have you ever felt a bit odd when driving on a motorway? Particularly on long distances? It's to do with doing very simple, very important things over prolonged periods of time: you can't really take your eyes off the road, and you mind's not exactly being taxed by slowly, steady guiding the car around the gentle curves of the motorway so your thoughts freewheel in the background. This induced insuarity strikes me as being a little bit sinister.

Add to this the strangely trancelike mind state drivers sometimes find themselves slipping into during long periods of motorway driving, and the proto-language drivers use to communicate with one another, and the way that the motorways obviously are not as big as they are described on any map showing them (they'd be thousands of yards wide if they were), and existentially and karmically speaking, motorways are decidedly odd places to be.

And you can never have a wee or a cup of tea just when you need one. We are slaves to the road. You can't stop. Although not stopping is probably the most obeyed rule of the road.

Hardly anyone appears to follow the rules on motorways. Under-taking[*], hogging the middle lane (which generally is the cause of under-taking), high speed tailgating, driving on the hard shoulder, and speeding are all rife on motorways like the M25, and all observable at the nearest rush hour.

My personal theory? Best not ask; it involves leylines, names of power, limbo or purgatory, and the karmic benefits of stealing apples from service stations.

So yes, final thoughts on motorways: good for getting you to Bristol, or even Brighton, but all in all, a bit odd.

[*] Under-taking, or over-taking on the left hand side, is a more dangerous practice than a lot of people would think. You're accelerating in an area from where, in theory, the driver you are over-taking doesn't expect anything to come. Recipe for disaster.