Early goings and late returnings…

I seem to spend a lot of time in the car. I don’t mind, in fact I quite like it, - the going, the arriving, the returning - early morning goings and late night returnings sometimes. You know that you are going early when you get to hear the world service on radio four before listening to ‘Farming Today’, and you really know that it’s very early when you pay the £3.50 reduced fee M6 toll by getting to the toll booths before 6.00am – because to do that you must have left at 4.30 in the morning darkness.

There aren’t many upsides to getting up at stupid o’clock and driving halfway across the country, but there are a few, and here is one of them - this fantastic sunrise that I was lucky enough to see on the M6 toll road the other week as I was going to Reading. It was even more spectacular a few minutes earlier, but by the time I’d managed to pull into the services and start snapping the sun had arisen just that tiny bit more and the sky had begun to lose some of its drama.

A couple of days later I was returning from another trip to Scarborough and got very stuck in traffic - lots of traffic. In fact, a few minutes after I took the picture below, the M60 closed and I spent the next two hours driving two miles further along the road so that I could get off at the next exit (exit 17) to double back on myself and find an alternative route.

I arrived home from the 118 mile journey from Scarborough some four and a half hours after I’d set out - very stiff and aggravated. Oh well, at least I got to see and photograph this totally natural ‘no artificial colours’ sunset – and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t been stuck and stationary.

Yes, even bleary-eyed early starts and joint-stiffening traffic jams can have an upside sometimes - if you're lucky.