I was driving home the other night in great pain. Some fool had gaffer-taped my arms to a chair, and in the course of struggling free I had removed several hairs and a great deal of skin, which had been badly burnt just two days earlier, on a volcano in Chile. Mine is not really a conventional job.

Anyway, I was in a bit of a hurry. Not only did I desperately need some cream to soothe the impromptu Brazilian on my arms but also it was the first night in about a hundred years when my entire family would be all together under the same roof at the same time.

I wanted to hear about my eldest daughter’s school trip to Auschwitz and how my son had got on in his rugby match. As a result, I decided I wasn’t really very interested in Mr Brown’s speed limits. The man’s a fool anyway. On the one hand he tells us about the importance of family values but on the other he insists that we drive home so slowly that our family will be fast asleep in bed by the time we get there.

However, because the half-term traffic would be light, and because I was driving my own very fast Mercedes CLK Black limited edition, I was confident I’d do the journey from Guildford to Chipping Norton in no more than 75 minutes. But alas, it was not to be.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the snarl-up symbols on my satellite navigation screen look quite so colourful. Every single road was either closed or jammed. And the Chris Evans radio show was nothing more than an endless stream of misery from Sally Traffic.

Roadworks on the M25 forced me onto the M4. The A404 past Marlow was solid so I took a lane through villages that haven’t appeared on any map since Dick Turpin was knocking about. Even the road from Oxford to my house was a non-stop stream of temporary traffic lights because some idiot at the council had decided that a pavement should be constructed.

A pavement? In the middle of nowhere? In the Cotswolds? Have you ever heard of anything so stupid in your entire life? Ramblers are entitled by law to come and sit by your fire and have sex with your wife whenever the mood takes them. They are allowed to walk wherever they please without let or hindrance and now I am denied the chance to get home and see my family because someone with a beard and a warped mind has decided they should be allowed to walk in the road as well.

We are talking about a madman, someone who cannot pass a shop window without being overcome by a need to lick it. Someone who may well be extremely dangerous. I think it is important we find him and kill him as soon as possible.

Because of him, and the traffic, and the roadworks on the M25, which are due to end after I’m dead, and the average-speed cameras and the Highway Wombles pretending to be policemen, it was one of the longest and most miserable journeys of my life.

But it could have been so much worse if my Mercedes hadn’t just come back from hospital in Norfolk.

When I first tested the 6.2-litre CLK Black, only 300 of which were built, I was overawed by its massive range of abilities. It was not just the thunderous 507 horsepower or the insane wheelarch extensions, though these two things on their own were probably enough. It was the knife-edge handling, the constant sense that you were driving something that was actually designed to kill you. It was called the Black, I suspected, because that was the colour of its heart.

I signed my review off by saying that no one’s life was complete without one and shortly afterwards put my money where my pen was. Yup. I bought one.

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