But even they seem to exist outside real time. You are the inhabitant of a non-place, serviced every twelve miles or so by little homeopathic doses of the real world, called service stations. On joining the motorway, we enter a territory which is stripped of everything save function: the whole environment is designed to enable and control safe driving - the human element exists only as a variable in the formula. There is something about the minimalism of the motorway which both refines its aesthetic appeal, and - less enjoyably, perhaps - informs the experience of using it. At the same time, when you stopped to study the standard issue motorway furnishings, fresh from their packaging, so to speak - towering, spindle-thin lights, or the empty concrete trestle of an illuminated sign - they looked a lot like sculpture.
On a hot afternoon, with caloric waves shimmering above the pristine road surface, it was hard not to find a resting place for the mind in this vista of virginal motorway it had the same appeal as a fresh fall of snow, or sand smoothed into crescents by the wind. In early summer 2000, as you drove off the M60 towards Prestwich, you could just see, on the far side of a colourless embankment, the brand new stretch of motorway which will soon complete the circuit of the Manchester ring-road.
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