Ian McMillan: On the road for a long day's journey into night

Memory tells me that every Wednesday night there was a 45-minute play, and memory also nudges me in the ribs forcefully to remind me that, in my sensitive wispy-bearded way, I thought I was intellectually superior to my mam and dad because they were watching Rawhide next door as I listened to people murmuring on the wireless.

I still suffer a bit from that, actually, scuttling off to the conservatory to listen to avant garde jazz while the

rest of the family watch Strictly Come Dancing. Not much changes, I guess, except the beard has gone.

One play that's stayed in my mind was called Night Run to The West; it

was based on an LP Hartley story and it was basically a tale of thwarted love, but what really struck me was that it was about a truck driver doing, as the title suggested, a night run to the west, from London down through Bristol towards Cornwall, as the sky gradually lightened and the dawn cracked open like an egg.

Maybe it's because my dad was a sailor and he sailed the seven seas in all weathers at all times of the day, and maybe it's because some of my most precious memories involve being driven through the very early

morning to family holidays to beat the traffic, but I love the idea of the night drive.

It helps that I don't drive myself, of course; so I'm always the passenger gazing out at the stars and the ghostly shapes of trees and the solitary 3am dog walker who raises a hand in salute as we drive by.

Actual drivers aren't so keen on them, I realise, because they have to keep their eyes on the road rather than that bush that looks like a swan.

So you can imagine how happy I was late the other night to be catching a taxi (for reasons too complicated to bore you with but which include a poorly leg, a theological college, and my grandson's football match) from Manchester back home, across the fabled and gorgeous Woodhead pass.

I waited outside the community centre in Rusholme where I'd just done a gig. The taxi rolled up. I was excited at the thought of the night trip. I clambered in.

"Barnsley!" I announced with glee. The driver looked sad. Sadder than sad.

"Sorry, mate, I thought they said Blackburn," he said.

He drove off, leaving me on the Manchester pavement with a couple of bags and the promise of a replacement, who duly turned up, and we began to drive into the dark.

Down the Hyde Road and the late revellers walking in groups, then through Mottram and Tintwistle and Crowden, a solitary dog-walker raising his hand in salute, then up the winding road and past that sign that announces, at the edge of a pitch-black moor, that you're

entering Barnsley.

I was glad that my Blackburn man didn't want to take me, because the replacement driver turned out to be a hockey player, who waxed lyrical all the way home about the delights of hockey and family and seemed to share with me a joy of night travel.

It's odd that it is only a relatively short journey across the tops before the road starts to snake down towards the Flouch near Penistone; the sat nav ticked it off as less than 10 miles, but in the middle of the night it feels endless and frighteningly remote.

Behind you is the glow of Manchester; to your left is the glow of Huddersfield and Emley Moor's comforting red lights, and ahead of you Barnsley is waiting with open arms.

Not for the first time in my life I felt that I was in a radio play as the taxi driver and I ranged widely over conversational topics from family to memory and from politics back to hockey and football.

Or maybe we were in a film, the kind of film that turns up at film festivals, full of low light, sweeping headlights as cars zoom past going the opposite way with sleepy travellers to Manchester Airport and a slice of moon peeps from beneath a cloud.

My mate, Luke, says that if I ever have any tattoos done, I should have "whimsy" on one arm and "nostalgia" on the other because they're the two things that help me to function.

He could be right, but you should have been on that journey with me, avoiding a startled cat in Wombwell that looked at us with the eyes of a witch's familiar.

Nostalgia and whimsy? Surely not! Night Run to the East!