M6 blues...

I was driving along the M6, traffic stop start, very slow, through the storms and sunshine on my way back from Brighton, five hours in, delays, accidents, weather.

It’s a long way from Brighton to Manchester and after a while the motorway landscape all looks the same M23, M25, M40, M42, M6… ‘oh no, not another delay’ as the traffic slowed to a standstill in front of me again.

At this rate it’d be midnight before I got home. With a resigned sigh I glanced out of the side window and ‘double-take’… at last, there it was through the rain splattered glass - beautiful bright and lasting, the first one in ages. It stretched, a perfect arc, across the fields for miles, moving with me as I shuffled slowly along in the traffic - a semi-circle of coloured light shining against the blue sky, white clouds - mysteriously alchemised from within their substance.

And then, as I watched – very faintly, but definitely there - the ghost of another a little way from the outside of the first. Look closely, you can just see it reaching down to kiss the distant centre lane. It made me smile, and for a moment all the rainbows I had ever seen remembered, filling my head with colour.

I watched for a while as I sat in the traffic. Slowly, almost imperceptibly it began to fade, dimming, becoming watery, thinner, transparent with too much light. Two minutes later it was gone, a few short moments after that the sky turned black as it started to rain and the traffic began to move once more.

M6 blues… and violets, and greens, and yellows, and oranges, and reds… rainbow.