The UK today boasts 25,000 roundabouts: the most in the world as a proportion of road space. (France has more in total.). I reckon that in the next five years there is a fortune to be made in the bicycle delivery of food and emergency supplies of water to motorists stuck in roundabout queues.

We have come across some doozies. You need to understand that the Brits don't use roundabouts as in Australia where it is primarily single lanes entering from three or four directions. Here they use roundabouts for as many as five or six entering roads with any one of them having up to three lanes or more.

As the volume of traffic has increased over the decades, they have had to introduce lights at the roundabouts. Now I thought the idea was to replace traffic lights with roundabouts where you give way to traffic already in the roundabout.

With anywhere up to 24+ lanes entering a roundabout, there is always going to be traffic in the roundabout and if you give way to the right, you could sit there for days. So, they put lights in to regulate the entry of all lanes.

The Grovehill junction in Beverley, East Yorkshire is the best of them all with 42 sets of traffic lights when built a couple of years ago. That's what it says on the Nett, however locals told us over breakfast at our B&B in Whitby that they have since installed another 5 sets of lights. It wasn't working with 42 and needed another five to be more efficient.

We've regularly negotiated up to five roundabouts within a couple of kilometres and taken 20 minutes to get through.

It seems obvious to me that they have gone so far down the roundabout rabbit hole that they can't get out. Flyovers are the obvious solution, however road congestion is so bad, there isn't room for them to be built without diverting traffic to other roundabouts.

To cap it all off, farm and industrial vehicles are allowed to use motorways such as the M1 and A1. We came across two on our travels south and in both cases they were traveling at around 40km.p.h. and causing traffic behind to merge to overtake, on a road allowing 120km.p.h. This resulted in a 10km tailback traveling at around 60km.p.h.

Drew had warned me that times taken to travel were nothing like Australia. We look at a map and plan a 30min trip and take 35min if there is traffic. Here you plan a 20min trip and it takes an hour or more. Occasionally I have observed a principle I learned 40 years ago when driving here in the UK. It was that you should drive on roads with three or four digits in their title, not on 2's and 1's (being motorways). The reason was, that you got to see more villages. Now it means that we could probably reduce the time to get anywhere. Today we ignored the motorways to drive from Southampton to Salisbury. The satnav said 31 minutes. Using 3 digit roads through The New Forest, we were held up at the roundabout entering Salisbury and did it in 45 min. Coming home where the roundabout didn't affect us, we did it in 35 min.

If I never see another roundabout as long as I live, I'd be grateful however as we plan on visiting Drew and Keith again, I'm going to have to work on my attitude .. and meditation.