While I’m lucky not to have a long commute these days, I still undertake epic drives on a regular basis and it’s getting harder, I have to admit. This summer there were several brutal drives – the worst of which involved being blind on the road in poor weather conditions.

On the trip over, drive one, we were about to reach the end of the motorway section of the journey when we were hit by a thunderstorm so severe that the road disappeared under several centimetres of water. I’d experienced similar rain just once before, back when I was commuting 80 miles to Nottingham. I was on the M1 and it was chucking it, and the scariest bit was when I hit the brake and realised the discs were wet and — nothing happened for an extended moment.

But the M1, like most British roads, has catseyes™, those reflective glass balls of British genius, one of the few things to be proud of in this country (which is why I get the rage when they’re removed). So even on the darkest night, in the nastiest weather, you can see your lane.

When the thunder hit in France, I was driving up an incline with one of those slow vehicle lanes, but then I was at the top of the hill and the lane finished, and I couldn’t see the road, or the white lines, or the edge of the road, or the car in front of me, or the one behind me.

So I slowed down. But such caution is itself terrifying because not everyone seems to respond to danger. Or do some people just have x-ray vision? Anyway, you slow down to 50, 40, and then someone screams past you in what you think might be the outside lane, still doing 80.

And that was daylight.

The next brutal drive was when we left the East for a week on the Ile d’Yeu, and drove across France to get there. That’s 935km, 580 miles. London to Edinburgh is 396 miles, so driving across France is like driving London to Inverness.

We did it overnight, and the thunderstorm hit quite early in the drive, just as the sun had set. One minute we’re saying, ooh, look at those clouds, as we pass a service station, and within a kilometre, we were in the blackest night and I was again creeping along at 20 mph because I couldn’t see the flaming road. I crawled along for a few km, terrified of someone ploughing into our rear end at speed, and then pulled into a rest area (the kind without a service station). But it wasn’t for long, because the storm passed over and I drove on, heading away from the mountains as quick as I could.

You know when those French farmers drop loads of manure across the road in protests? I feel like dumping a lorryload of catseyes™ outside the APRR HQ.

Our final brutal drive was this weekend, driving home. After a lot of warm weather, it had rained, and there was fog. So of course I was driving through the night (on 30 minutes sleep), and struggling to see the road in the absence of catseyes™. Even worse, there was a (long) diversion, taking us onto tiny, windy country backroads, which often didn’t even have white lines.

Bring on the self-driving cars, yes please.