Driving north to my parents’ late at night, I realised there were so many lorries on the road that I was queuing behind them. I have taken to driving at night to avoid the traffic, as the motorways have become so busy in the past few years that what was once an 80- minute drive from Surrey to Coventry is now two-and-a-half hours (or more). Without whingeing about the numbers of cars on our roads, or making claims about population increase, I simply state as a fact of my experience that the M25 has become so impossible I have to start out after 9pm. The M40 going south to north used to be a smooth journey, but now it snarls around towns and cities, even when you are clear of “the 25”. So I drive late at night. And driving the other night, I realised the road was a fast-moving queue of brightly lit freight. Both the inside and middle lanes were full of those huge lorries so high they make you wonder why they don’t topple over. I couldn’t get around them because I only like to drive below 60mph and the fast cars, going 70mph and more, flashed and hassled me out of the fast lane. So I sat behind the queues of lorries and pondered what was in them. And one word came into my mind: stuff. Some were food and fuel lorries, of course. But how many were carrying non-essential items purchased on the internet in the run-up to Christmas? Consumerism is another word that came into my head as I sat behind Amazon lorries, shipping containers, and haulier after haulier stretching to the far horizon …