The bit where I hated myself.

Seriously – my April Fool’s Day post might have read like a whimsical live blog, but that was the worst evening of my life...a kind of truculent suicide descended upon me as I realise that I had been driving around the edge of London in the wrong direction. The German translation of the second Bridget Jones film (On the Edge of Reason) is Am Rande des Wahnsinns – on the edge of craziness. That’s where I was, driving on the edge of craziness. When I ended up in the right direction but slipped off onto the M11 without realising I could have driven into a tree and ended it right there. I wanted to stop on the hard shoulder and lie face down in the grass until the police came along and peeled me away.

I shall probably look back on that evening as my lowest ebb, the point at which my spirit sank to depths I couldn’t possibly reach again. I certainly reached roads I couldn’t reach again. Motorism is a depressing business in this country, it’s not the most mellifluous activity, what with all the roadworks and delays and jams and pickles that are thrown in your way.

Drivers are the most oppressed people in society, I think – tax to hell and back and no thanks. The country runs on the pounds and pounds of tax I hand over every time I fill my car. It’s justified by all that environmental bollocks, but none of it goes to helping out mother nature, it goes to bailing out mister Darling. It’s quease-making when you stand in a petrol station queue and realise quite how much money (that’s already been taxed when you earned it, remember) you’re forking over to the Treasury.

Life is tough enough these days, they ought to make things easier. Most motorway journeys take more than half an hour – they should put up a big screen every 100m and show episodes of Fawlty Towers on a loop, putting the sound out on an FM signal. It would have made my 1 April much more bearable.