I tried to get to ‘The North’, but it was closed

A few days ago I had to head North to Cheshire for a wedding, and it was quite definitely closed.

For a start there’s the great wall of the M6 which, as well as providing a barrier which would put the ancient Chinese into a envious frenzy, provides the perfect deterrent for invading southerners. To get North of Birmingham these days you’d be far better of mounting an elephant-mounted expedition of Hannibal proportions. Every day people queue patiently on the twisting moat of tar that is the M6 in a line worthy of an Alton Towers ride on a blistering August day and never actually get there. Those aren’t cows in the fields, they’re weary travellers hunched over trying to use their bush-tucker skills to drink the moisture from grass.

What’s more if you stop at Knutsford services you may notice that it appears a Saga tour has just come in for a pitstop, but these people were actually in their twenties when they set off North from home 50 years ago. Today they use all their wits to survive on Hobnobs and Ritazza coffee.

If you do, by some miracle get there, Cheshire isn’t so much the home of a grinning feline friend so much as the shiny-toothed gormless footballer these days, framed by the window of a mock-tudor 4×4.

The thing is I can almost see why they have them. It’s purely so they can distance themselves from the driver behind as they sit in a grid-locked road. People in Cheshire don’t have long driveways as a status symbol, it’s just that it’s the only bit of road North of Birmingham where you’d have half a chance of getting into third gear. What’s more, they don’t have large gardens because they hark back to some age of aristocracy, but because they can’t actually travel anywhere so they need something to look at.

And then, aided only by a support helicopter and a team of trusty sherpas, I arrived at Alderley Edge. At school chucking-out time and things got worse. As women off-roaded across pavements and grassed areas, using their National Trust car stickers as a permit to park absolutely anywhere, the little darlings came running out from school. In almost any other urban area, a boy in a black and yellow blazer and coordinating yellow holdall would be beaten by his peers like a misbehaving Gordon Ramsey pancake, but here it’s chic. And everybody looks the same. Like ticky-tac houses.

And as I sat in a 2 mile queue with only a dozen cars in it, I came found myself becoming increasingly frustrated. Southerners have long moved on from mocking northerners for their flat-caps and love of pigeons, but it’s hard to shake off the image of an industrial past when it takes as long to get from London to Manchester as it did by a horse-drawn carriage even when it was held up by Dick Turpin…