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On the margin
Page 13
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Sights for tour eyes
Take a stroll with us through the little side roads of haulage, the diversions and detours, the quirky, the quixotic and the downright strange...
On tile Margin spends more time than is strictly good for our health on the nation's roads. Our collective waistline is steadily expanding and our arteries thickening as we attempt to subsist on a diet of cheap pasties, sickly soft drinks and slabs of cake.
There's also the small issue of what it's doing to our brain we strongly suspect that our frequent forays onto these boring thoroughfares are reducing our once-proud mind to something resembling overcooked porridge.
Thankfully help is now at hand from Worcestershire-based Severnpix publishing, which has published the M4 Sights Guide (a follow-up, you'll no doubt be surprised to learn to the M5 Sights Guide).
With the strap "Find out everything you can see from your vehicle on the motorway" (with a warning to refrain from using it while at the wheel) the guide promises to brief readers on the facts, history and landmarks along the M4's 204-mile length.
In essence it's an 'Eye-Spy' guide for the M4, but without those traditional Eye-Spy points for spotting a motorway service area or some such contrived form of competition. Is it interesting, though? Well, that's a tricky one.
On motorway journeys even the London A-Z has been known to generate a flicker of enthusiasm (there's not much plot but the locations seem so real) so it's not exactly burdened by competition in this area. There are nuggets of information to be found, but they rather rely on you not being behind the wheel to be appreciated. A cursory glance also revealed the inclusion of at least three RDCs listed as places of interest and at least half a page is devoted to Port Talbot steel works so it's all relative on the interest stakes.
Finally, a special mention to Telford-based SP Holding Services, To commemorate 20 years in business it's bought a new Volvo FH16 tractor unit covered in images from Lord of the Rings. But because it works in the er... waste management sector it's has decided to call the truck Lord of the Sewers.
Surely that should be Lord of the Flies?