But it does look very pretty...

The other day, I was heading up to London (en route to Wales), so I did the usual student thing of taking a stupidly cheap coach. The coach in this case was the Oxford Tube, which is really rather good - £7 student return after 3pm, which is, bizarrely, rather cheaper than buying a single - although it does take quite a while. This isn't a problem, as I can listen to music or audiobooks (of which there are some very entertaining free ones available - try How To Succeed In Evil in bite-sized podcast form).

What's more, the route takes you along the M40. Motorways as a whole aren't very pretty, but there's a couple of bits on this one - the cutting where you will always see at least a couple of red kites soaring overhead, for one - which do look really good. In this case, the sun was low in the sky, and as the coach came out of the low hills and started onto the plains, with more hills in the distance, beautiful farmland all around, and golden light streaming over everything and basically making the whole scene look like a postcard, I sighed inwardly and thought "That really is a beautiful sight."

Which was immediately followed by the thought that I always have in situations like that: "So why did they go and build a thwacking great motorway through the middle of it?"