"Well, they'll be setting off now," I said as I got up. As I was having my breakfast, I said: "They'll be nearly there." And, as I got my bag ready for my London trip, I said: "They'll be putting their tents up now." After all, Darfield to Leeds is about 30 miles at the very, very most.

When I got home from London that evening, my wife told me something that made me realise that time can be an elastic thing. She's just had a text from the girls and they'd taken 13 hours to get to Leeds. They'd set off at half past seven and they had pitched camp at half past eight in the evening because of floods and road closures and that thing that people always call sheer volume of traffic.

Of course, they weren't the only ones and my heart went out to them all. Thirteen hours in a car that was hardly moving; a whole day from sunrise to sunset spent moving at the speed of a snail with gout. A day wiped from your life. When the great playwright Samuel Beckett was told that something would help to pass the time, he replied: "Yes, but it would have passed anyway." And that's what my girls and everybody else in that queue must have felt. Time would have dripped slowly like a tap. It would have moved like a slow, slow cloud sauntering across the sky, and at times it would have appeared to stop.

I tried to think of times I'd been stuck like that, times when a day I'd never get again crossed itself out on the calendar.

There was the time in Washington when our flight to New York was delayed by several hours and my wife and son and I sat there, and sat there, and sat there. My son read a big fat book from start to finish. I paced like an expectant father, every two or three minutes going to glance at the screen for news.

Eventually, we boarded the plane and sat on the runway for two more hours. The irony of it was that the flight was only 50 minutes long and, because I was trying to have a luxurious holiday, I'd booked a car in New York to take us to the hotel so I rang the car company and the friendly man said: "That's okay sir: we'll track the flight." Excuse me while I laugh sardonically: Hah-hah.

We eventually got to New York and we were met by a very tired-looking Chinese man holding my name up on a board. "Welcome to New York," he said. "I've been waiting here all day." I felt sorry for him. "Do you think there'll be waiting charges on the bill?" I asked. "Oh yes," he said. I felt sorry for me.

There was the time I was going to Dundee to read my poems to an expectant crowd at the university. Just south of Newcastle, the train ground to a juddering halt and stood for several hours. I gazed out of the window at a tree. I counted the leaves but kept losing count. I looked at a bird bringing food to the nest. I fell asleep. I woke up. Time stopped and at one point it appeared to start rumbling backwards so that by the time I got to Dundee I'd be a teenager.

In fact, it was the train moving forwards slowly, very slowly. This was in the days before mobile phones so I couldn't let the expectant crowd know what was happening. The train terminated at Edinburgh and I rushed on to one to Dundee. Just as we approached Dundee station, a man stood up and picked up his young lad and put him on his shoulders (thinking back now, he must have been a very small man or it must have been a very tall train) and the boy leaned over and pulled the communication cord.

We stood for more hours. The day had gone; I'd watched it go by through the window very slowly. So I know exactly how my two girls felt, and I reckon there should be a way of getting those wasted days back. At the end of every decade, you should be able to send a form off somewhere and somebody will send you a voucher to reclaim those wasted days and stick them on the end of a holiday. I haven't quite worked out where you'll send the form, yet, but it'll give me something to do next time I'm stuck at an airport or in a line of traffic.