As you are requesting stories about travel, I thought your readers may be interested in my experiences. (Sorry, you will have to type this into the computer again! I don't have any spare discs to send).
Coming off the M11 and joining the M25 clockwise was like driving into the car-park at the Lakeside shopping centre on the last Saturday before Christmas. Nothing moving. No way forward, no way back. No turning off.
The lanes of the carriageway were blocked to the farthest horizon and, in imagination and in reality, beyond and beyond. Thus modern man meets his painful destiny: stuck in an endless motionless three-lane jam, bound to be late home for dinner and already aching for a pee.
Local radio traffic warnings told us that a serious accident had blocked the carriageway at the junction with the A12, that emergency services had closed the road and traffic was tailing back for eight miles. "Don't, on any account, go near this section of the M25 if you can avoid it," screeched a disc jockey in tones that might have announced The War of the Worlds.
All around me, drivers were nodding to each other, pointing at their radios and grimacing as if to say: "Useful to hear that information now, isn't it?" Others were looking tightlipped, grim, pained. I knew what was wrong with them. A motorway snarl-up is the only circumstance in modern life in which 10,000 human beings may be brought together for an indefinite stretch without a urinal for 20 miles.
If 6,000 vehicles are stuck for more than two hours at the end of a working day, creeping over eight miles on a three-lane motorway, how many of their drivers and passengers are going to be crossing their legs and trying to get their thoughts on something, anything, other than their bladders?
Looking around the Citroen ZX Turbo diesel estate I was not driving, I realised that I had arrived under-equipped and under-provided for at this impromptu gathering of strangers for which no hour of departure had been set and none was forseeable.
The ZX is a most excellent car for going any distance, short or long, but as a motorway rest area it is missing a few crucial accountrements - such as a CB radio to communicate with the other victims; a cellular phone on which to ring home and rant and rave about the misery of it all; a computer linked to the Internet to find out how the traffic is moving on the Washington Beltway; a supply of books on CD-Rom, including War and Peace, a television, video-cassette deck and library of feature films; a fax machine; hot and cold drinks dispenser; toaster and, pardon me for mentioning it, a lavatory.
Almost all of these accessories are available, or soon will be, in cars, along with satellite navigation systems which can detect jams in advance and supply a route to avoid them; but nobody, so far as I know, has ever equipped a car with the one accessory for which, if you really needed it, you would forgo all the others put together.
Into this vacancy in modern life, this black hole in motoring culture steps a gentleman - a name to rank immortally with Crapper and Shanks.
The Emergency Convenient Portable Car Loo. Motorist's Problems Solved". (A link to the brochure is included at the end of this page). He has devised an instrument - it is impossible to discuss this without sounding like one of Les Dawson's ladies in the launderette - that advertises itself, down among the displays for support hose and weeding kneelers, as "Unspillable, Odourless. Portable. As seen on TV".
Not having seen this in use on television, but imagining it as being indispensable in the life of the Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, I was curious. I shortly received a sample, together with "one for your good lady" (she was thrilled). The things inside looked and felt to the touch so much like instruments you might find attached to a hospital bed that we stuffed the boxes quickly in a cupboard and have put them out of our minds.
Also included in the package were some testimonial letters. One said: "We shall never again travel anywhere without our portable convenience." Another exclaimed: "Many women have told me how they dread driving long distances with their husbands and children simply because many men will not stop for toilets until they arrive at their destination. I shall certainly push a 'Ka-Loo' leaflet under their noses now and tell them ... problem solved!"
Another spoke in the tones Clarkson reserves for Ferraris and said: "I never in my wildest dreams thought it could be so successful." I pass this on for what it is worth to those who might value the information. There must be plenty of them. One of the testimonials says: "Please send another - friends say it is just what they want!"