I haven't been with Mina very long, but in the short time we have been together she has become my confidant, my saviour, a faithful travelling companion, my shelter in stormy weather and, if I am honest, a damn good ride. Although she hates going out in the wet and moans and splutters like the venerable old lady she is on cold mornings, I still love her. Some people may say that an ancient Peugeot 205 isn't the coolest car around, but then again, they don't know Mina like I do.

Today, Mina and I are going to visit a client in Bradford. Neither of us have been there before or have much of a clue how to get there. I am going to trust my luck, fill Mina with unleaded petrol, load the MD player up with suitable music and head North. All being well we should be there in about three hours.

It always takes me half an hour or so to get comfortable on a long journey. I have to let the road slowly draw me in and it takes some time for my jaggling nerves to cope with being sandwiched between the numerous mighty Dutch artics which plough along the A1(M) heading for the costal ports. But slowly I begin to slide into the groove. The road opens up, Mina feels the wind in her grill and the taste of tarmac on her wheels and we are off. I crank up the MD with some scratchy Ella Fitzgerald and let my mind unwind.

In the few months that I have been a regular road warrior I have come to see long distance driving as a kind of therapy. With nothing to do for hours on end apart from change MD's every hour or so, or stop for the odd tank of petrol the mind becomes strangely focused. If it's raining the swish-swish-swish of the windscreen wipers seems to provoke the most deeply repressed thoughts to surface. Snippets of books I have long since forgotten bubble up and jostle with songs I haven't heard for years to create a nostalgic glow as Mina and I hurtle along the motorway.

I'm never allowed to descend too far into nostalgia as I have the HAL 9000 of car stereos. Before a long trip I load up the beastie with a pile of MDs (Mina rarely complains about my dreadful singing) but this doesn't stop the HAL 9000 continually breaking in with the latest traffic news. Which is all well and good if it happens to pick out the local news but rather bemusing when it's giving me traffic conditions for Cornwall when I am on my way to Manchester.

The other really surreal thing it does is to spontaneously retune itself to a particular type of radio programme. On one memorably long trip around the Midlands it was locked into regional farmers broadcasting and I spent a worryingly long time trying to not get gripped by the regional price variation in turnips. Even on the rare occasions I manage to turn this function off HAL 9000 automatically retunes itself to PIPE AND SLIPPERS FM (aka Radio 2), which is, I am rather embarrassed, compulsively middle of the road, and thus perfectly matched to my personality. I am honestly scared by the sentient behaviour my stereo seems blessed with.

My route North up the A1(M) was reasonably busy and in-between solving the mysteries of the life, universe and everything and trying to stop HAL 9000 telling me about roads in Penzance I kept Mina chugging along nicely in the middle lane. We reached Birmingham, and the notorious Spaghetti Junction, in a comfortable ninety minutes. Spaghetti Junction is so called as it does indeed look like a large plate of spaghetti with junctions and interchanges crazily intertwined in one of the world's most complex road systems. Its not for the faint hearted and on more than one occasion I have been sucked in and spent the next few hours feeling like a modern day Alice whilst Mina gets hotter and crosser. It's also one of HAL 9000's favourite places and by the sheer number of traffic reports I get about this area (mostly when driving down deserted B roads to work) one might easily conclude that people come here purely to partake in multiple car pileups.

'What shall we do with the kids this weekend?'
'Well last week we went to Blackpool, so why don't we try a multiple car collision on Spaghetti junction this week?'

During a G8 conference a few years back Airforce 1 landed just down the road at East Midlands airport and this reduced the traffic to a total standstill for something like eight hours. I remember sitting for hours in traffic with an empty stomach and a GHG whose look said, 'See, I told you not to come this way,' thinking up marketing slogans for the area. The best we managed was:

Birmingham - it's a great place to crash

Finally escaping from Spaghetti Junction I continued motoring North. The traffic became heavier and I was soon winding my way in and out of jams as we slowly crawled North. At first I didn't notice the strange phenomena occurring around me, but after the twentieth Ford Mondeo (or Rep Mobiles as they are more correctly known) had let me squeeze in front of them, it suddenly struck me that all the Rep Mobiles where treating me with unquestionable respect and doing their utmost to speed me on my way. It wasn't until I had almost reached Manchester that I suddenly realised what was going on. In the back seat of Mina I had hung my suit and shirt and it was this badge of Road Warriordom that the Rep Mobiles were responding to. I wasn't just a stressed businessman, a loner on my way to a far-flung lover or a family man on the way home to my wife and children, I was a Road Warrior. In their eyes I was probably spending a third of my adult life pounding the highways and byways of the UK for work.

You think your life is hard and monotonous? Well, the UK's Road Warriors live a life which is hard for mere mortals to understand. Equipped with their Rep Mobiles, mobile phones and a catchment area which covers half the country, the Road Warriors spend their time cruising from client to client in search of a sale. It may be Landsend on Tuesday and Aberdeen on Wednesday but if there is even a sniff of a sale then the Road Warriors will be there.

Your typical Road Warrior will be a middle-aged guy (female warriors are rare) with a slight paunch from too many cooked breakfasts. He probably has a wife he doesn't like too much at home and a clutch of rugrats whose names he can never seem to remember. His suit trousers will be shiny from too many hours sitting in a car and there will always be a jacket, tie and several shirts hanging on the backseat. This is the badge of the road warriors.

At the end of the day a Road Warrior will look forward to a meal at somewhere like Little Chef, the ubiquitous chain of 'family' restaurants which pop up mushroom-like along the hard-shoulders of our roads, a room in a conveniently placed Travel Lodge and perhaps a drink at the bar with other Road Warriors where they can show off their encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK's roads. You can ask these guys directions from anywhere and they will automatically tell you seven different ways to get there, where the nearest Travel Lodge is, how many speed cameras there are and where the police carry out speed checks. The Road Warriors are a unique breed and undoubtedly keep the country's struggling economy ticking over. I felt a flush of pride that Mina and I had been accepted so readily into this elite group as we sped northwards.

North of Manchester I decided that I should stop for a drink and some motorway food. Not only was I getting a little tired and needed to change the MDs in the HAL 9000 I also don't like to spend more than a few hours on the road without taking a swipe at my expenses. There are about 4 or 5 main franchises which provide comfort for the long distance motorist in the UK, but my personal favourite has the be the Welcome Break services. I know its silly but I get a real kick out of pulling into one of these identikit areas and telling Mina, 'Hey, we have done really well those last two hundred miles. Let's have a Welcome Break.' Once inside, all the services are pretty much the same; a fast food restaurant, a shop selling soft drinks and overpriced sweets and a few video games. I normally spend as little time as possible in the services, just enough for a coke and a call home, 'Hi, I am on the M6 Northbound, it's wet and grotty. I miss you terribly,' and marvel at the people feeding pounds into video racing games. I often wonder how their mind must work:

'Well, I have just driven 600 miles through filthy weather and road works. I'll just relax by playing this racing car game for a bit before I carry on…'

A short while later Mina and I were cresting the hills of the Yorkshire Dales. I had cranked up the music on the HAL 9000 until the sounds of Alanis moaning about how messed up her life was drowning out the sopophoric sound of tire on road and let the wonderful scenery wash over me. Long, low desolate hills crowded both sides of the motorway and it wasn't hard to imagine how brutal this land was in the winter. Mina and I shot through Saddleworth Moor and I tried hard not to equate this beautiful stretch of countryside with the brutal murders which shocked the nation a generation ago. I am too young to have lived through such times but I had read enough to make my foot push harder on the accelerator and send Mina screaming through the solitude. We didn't want to linger there longer than was necessary.

Rolling down to Bradford I made a list of the few things I knew about the area:

1. It was the stomping ground of the Yorkshire Ripper - one of Britain's most notorious serial killers who butchered countless prostitutes and sent the nation into spasms of fear when I was at junior school.

2. It was regularly voted, not to the surprise of the local population, as the worst place to live in the UK.

3. It was once one of the Empire's largest wool producers but today cheap imports, and dubious EU regulations had seen the place turn into the archetype grim Northern honey-pot for unemployment.

4. Bradford is a predominantly Asian town and when the wool industry has been at its peak, people were regularly shipped in from dirt-poor Kasmiri villages to work in the mills.

5. Bradford had achieved a certain degree of notoriety for race riots a few years ago and pictures of an angry Asian youth lobbing bricks at a poor innocent policeman (complete with riot gear and CS canisters) had been splashed all over the tabloids for weeks at end.

6. Bradford is famous for the best curry in the UK.

7. Bradford City supporters, who in the words of a friend, 'aren't the nicest of people and tend to see non-horse drawn vehicles as a novelty', have adopted the chant, 'Just like watching Brazil,' on the terraces.

After checking-in and making sure Mina was secure for the night (which in Yorkshire involves removing anything which can be easily nicked, such as stereo, wing-mirrors, steering wheel and hub cabs and storing them under the bed in my room), I asked reception to call me a taxi and thought, "in ten minutes time…it's curry time.'

The taxi arrived a few minutes later and was driven by what looked like a Yemeni tribesman (incidentally, he drove like one as well) complete with baggy pyjama trousers, striped waistcoat and long wispy beard. His man-about-mountain look was topped with a pleasingly eccentric bowler hat which he wore at a rakish angle. I had asked him to drop me at the Mumtaz, which annually wins the best curry house of the year award but something obviously got lost in the translation as he dropped me in the town centre and sped off before I could complain.

I liked Bradford instantly. Its dramatic geographical location, its sturdy looking brown stone architecture and abundance of pubs all looked encouraging. The soft watery sunlight of the English summer added to the charm and I felt that this was perhaps somewhere I could quite easily spend a few days (of course, the stupidly cheap beer that they sell also helps) and set off at a brisk trot for the Mumtaz.

Walking up hill and down dale to the Mumtaz was like walking through a kaleidoscope of culture. The houses were your standard issue grim Northern town 2-up 2-downers whose fronts were covered in a thick layer of industrial grime left over from the glory days of the wool trade but the streets were cleanly swept, the window boxes were busting out with pretty flowers and graffiti was limited. I could have seen this scene in any number of Northern industrial towns such as Salford, Manchester or Wakefield but on closer inspection I could see that things weren't as they first seemed. Long pyjama trousers, beautifully tailored and embroidered shalwar kameez hung wistfully drying on washing lines, whilst behind the prim and proper net curtains I caught the odd glimpse of Qurans on mantelpieces and the soft, yet hypnotic hum of Pakistani music. Once or twice a fully veiled women shimmered past me leaving me heady with her rich perfume. It felt like I had fallen between the cracks of two cultures.

Now that we are officially a nation of curry eaters (curry was recently declared our national dish) I was quite excited about eating at the Mumtaz. The only problem was that it was still very early and people were just making their way home from the office. Aside from the undeniable fact that having your first scorchingly hot curry is a rite of passage in the UK comparable to losing one's virginity (though I guess extra points would be awarded for combining these two important actions) there are certain other parts of curry etiquette which must be followed:

1. You should never enter a curry house when its light outside.
2. You must have drunk at least two pints too many before you enter.
3. You must be with at least 10 other people.
4. Everyone must order the hottest thing on the menu and wash it down it gallons of alcohol.

As a frequent diner alone (not by choice I may add) I have long since mastered the art of having a good meal in a restaurant by myself. I go armed with my notebook, book and a newspaper. I still get a little bit embarrassed about sitting in restaurants alone and having twenty-five staff fuss over me but sometimes, especially with the strange hours I keep, you have no option and this was how I thought the Mumtaz would be. I imagined that 5pm on a school night the place would be deserted and I was therefore a little bit shocked when I found that the queue stretched almost twice round the block.

Eventually, after civilisations had risen and fallen a few times, I was ushered to a table for one and presented with the menu. Soon my table was groaning under dishes of sag peneer, samosas, butter chicken, lentil dahl and plates piled high with popadoms. The food was as good as I had been lead to believe but the naan breads were even better. They were perfect tear-drop shaped pieces of light bread which had been stuffed with either spicy lamb or succulent fruit and were fresh from the clay oven in which they had been hand cooked. They were whipped so quickly from the oven that they were still cooking when they reached the plate and continued to rise rather theatrically as the other courses were served.

After I had somehow crammed my third stuffed naan down my neck and called for the bill the owner wandered over to compliment me on my prodigious curry eating skills and I complimented him on the exquisite bread. 'Really,' I told him loosening my belt, 'it's the best naan I have had since I nearly fell in a tandor in Pakistan. Could you put me a couple in a doggy bag for tomorrow? I have another long day ahead of me.'

'Of course sir,' he smiled, gesturing for a waiter to fill a bag with piping hot bread for me, and with that I left the house of the rising naan and went off in search of a couple of pints and new adventures.

About the Author
Philip has written close to 75 articles, guides and tales for BootsnAll. He is a regular contributor to several travel magazines and has published work in 6 languages. When not travelling he can be found at home in a quaint little village just west of Cambridge, UK, where he lives with his beautiful golden-haired girlfriend (GHG) and, in September 2002, their first baby. Philip's pet hates are KLM, Air Portugal and getting up at silly o'clock for meetings in Copenhagen. He promises to answer all correspondence except those asking the predictably dull question, 'how easy is it to get laid in Brasil?'

Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our Europe Insiders page.