every ten minutes down the road called "The Little Highwayman" or "The Coach and Rat" and there are no penguins to speak of. So, nothing to describe or photograph, although it was at this point that we realised that we didn't have a camera and therefore couldn't impress the others in the office with our exciting adventures even if we ever got around to having some.

Thankfully we hit upon something of vague interest when we got to the sixth identical roundabout. A brown sign read "Roman Villa" and pointed towards the left. We had to follow it. This was, after all, our heritage. Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett had to go all the way around the continent to find Roman remains that interested them. We could do it the modern suburban traveller's way and just pop down the road for fifteen miles or so. Now following a totally unknown and extremely gloomy road in the dark with only my battered old Volkswagen's headlights to find the way we inevitably missed the turning. One of my passengers had been recounting some fearsome ghost tale about being alone in a car (sadly entirely irrelevant given that there were three of us) as we sped past the turn. I stopped and did a U- turn, panicking about other cars and whether I could turn 180 degrees in time to survive. I did, and we made it to the turning swiftly and safely to find that the villa was closed and a scary three and a half miles away. One "I'm too hungry to bother" later we set off down the road again at speed. Requests for lavatory stops were becoming frequent but no one in their right mind was going to relieve themselves in the snow among the desolate a creepy looking trees that had sprung up around us (especially not after our conversation's unwarranted erring into Blair Witch / Last Broadcast territory).

Nothing happened for ten miles. This is not the kind of thing you need on such an 'adventure'. When you've only got a few hours to waste on your trip, things have to happen quickly. If you have to set fire to things, cause public outrages, become briefly notorious for wearing face-paint to the barber's, and get into fights with the elderly then so be it so long as it happens fast. It happens in the cinema. Take Road Trip, the recent teen comedy. Every three minutes the protagonists' car blows up or they meet a talking dog. For us, it was just road and snow. And the snow was getting impenetrably thick, so going nowhere fast was now going nowhere the speed you drive when you're being tailed by a police car.

Then, all of a sudden, we were being followed by a police car. Excitement at last! Sirens blared violently into the early evening dark, and we stopped by the verge at a junction. The police car zipped off followed depressingly by three ambulances. We tailed them in what was now a sombre and snowy motorcade. At the first opportunity we took a turn into the nearest town. Death on the roads is not what you want to be reminded of on a road trip. Further, both my passengers were calling for a toilet stop and some food.

We turned off into what seemed to be Cirencester but accidentally took the wrong exit from a roundabout into a quiet street, passing as we did so the strictly unappealing trucker café "Greasy Joe's". If I used that name for a bar in a novel, I would be laughed out of the bookshop, but there it was in all its absurd neon nomenclature. Two wrong turns later we found ourselves in an industrial estate. I once needed to pick up some amplifiers from an industrial estate near Hereford and I swear it took me over an hour to find. There should be a law against that kind of thing. We stopped and young David got out of the backseat and wandered confidently to the nearby public lavatories and, having investigated and apparently decided against the disabled toilets, walked into the ladies'. At this time, lost enough to realise that the lack of map had served its purpose, my other passenger Kate started to look for one in the glove box. Since our last conversation had involved the notion that we should go to Cornwall (in the far south-west of England), it was to both of our surprise that apart from a tattered old A-Z of Peterborough, there were no less than two maps of Cornwall. Our minds were made up. They were, that is, until David returned and claimed that he wasn't going anywhere without spare underwear. He had gone to the ladies' toilets because, he said, he wondered if they were less revolting than men's ones. They were. At that moment it clicked that I was not sitting with a modern day Jack Kerouac. Kate was laughing too much to comment.

Three roundabouts later we hit Cirencester proper. It lasted for two roads and a cinema before it promptly stopped and became another suburbia. I had rather figured on it being full of exciting landmarks that I could critique in the lucid style of Laurence Sterne or the angst-ridden whine of Tobias Smollett. We turned left in an attempt to circle back to the town centre (if Cirencester had one) and got lost again.