Brexit, of course...

I slept in my car in the 'fast' lane of the on the Marginal Tiete around Sao Paulo one night, about 5 miles from home. And when I woke up the traffic still hadn't moved.

For us it's pretty much equidistant M1>M25>A2>M2 or M20 compared with A5>A43>M40>M25>M26>M20 or reverse if going home.

Going south we're commited within a mile of home to one or other. Homebound we've got time on ferry and while still in Kent to hedge our bets.

I was listening to Radio 2 yesterday which is a rare event and the traffic news sounded awful around the M25.

I use Waze, not for the directions per se, but for traffic avoidance and road work rerouting.

So you'll have missed the ferry you were booked on presumably?!

Nowhere to go if you eventually got off, Al. All the roads around were gridlocked very rapidly.

For most people, the only alternative route was the Blackwall Tunnel, targeted by everyone on the M11, A12, and A13 who decided to avoid the M25. Then someone broke down in the Southbound tunnel.... Nothing moved for hours.

We contemplated exiting on the A12, our first and last opportunity, but all reports, and all lorry drivers said it was no go.

Of course we were expecting a couple of hours queuing at most.

The problem wasn't the bridge, it was the main carriageway over the roundabout at J30, where diesel destroyed the surface. We eventually escaped down the slip road before,along the parallel distribution road and back on at J31. Could only do that once one of the wrecked lorries had been moved, as it was dangerously blocking the route.

If the incident had been closer to the bridge, they could have opened the crossover and instigated two way use of the tunnels

Hope it goes smoothly from now, T&E. The only thing wrong with the Channel Tunnel is that the English end is in the wrong place; Southampton or Portsmouth would be much easier to get to, without London getting in the way.

I think we were on the M20 the same day as Humph in 2016. Not, thankfully, for nearly so long, but we were held up where a blue Polo had hit a bridge, which cost us an hour on the road and another as Eurotunnel coped with all the late arrivals.

Then this year we were there on the second — and less severe — day of air conditioning disruption, which delayed us by three hours. It was less bad than the day before only because Eurotunnel had cancelled a lot of day trip reservations to free up space, so you could say we got lucky.

It means that of the three times we’ve stopped over at the nice little manor house hotel near Arras, we’ve only once got there in time for dinner. But we’ve done our best to make up for it at breakfast.