Like many people I welcomed the relaxation in the lockdown rules by taking the opportunity over the Easter weekend to visit family who I haven’t seen since before Christmas in that brief window between the second lockdown ending and the third one starting.

It was a very welcome change from staring at the four walls of my living room to be able to meet some family members in their garden.

In fact, we had a busy weekend. We travelled to the south west on Friday and then to south Manchester on Saturday to meet family members in a park.

But what struck me most was a sense of almost normality. Yes, people were abiding by the rule of six and they were more or less observing social distancing but there is little doubt people were taking advantage of their new-found freedoms. And of course, the sunny weather helped.

After what has seemed like a long and fairly bleak winter, it was heartwarming to enjoy a sense of freedom. But I also support the Government’s slow and cautious approach to relaxing the lockdown. It has got so much wrong during the course of the pandemic, it does feel like Boris Johnson has finally learned some lessons. It appears that the over-promising and under-delivering is a thing of the past.

Given how successful the vaccine roll-out has been, it would border on criminal to open up too quickly now and force us into lockdown four later in the year.
I had a holiday booked in Mallorca for June last year which I obviously couldn’t go on because of the pandemic. Instead of cancelling it and trying to get my money back, I simply moved the bookings for flights and accommodation to the same two weeks this year.

I’m not normally an optimistic type of person but I’d hoped that even if Covid-19 hadn’t gone away completely by June 2021, it would have at least been under control enough for me to travel.

Those hopes seemed to be fading earlier in the year as the EU countries made a complete mess of vaccinating their populations.

So I very much welcomed the new traffic light system for overseas travel. I was disappointed but not surprised to see Spain on the Amber list which will make it difficult for many potential travellers if they have to self-isolate for 10 days when they get back to England from sunnier climes. To be honest, that’s something I am more than prepared to do and it is a significant step forward towards a ‘new normal’.

Interestingly, I had considered seeing if I could get my money back from the Spain booking and maybe have a ‘staycation’ in Devon or Cornwall this year but to no avail.

It looks very much like I am late to that particular party and actually finding accommodation at a reasonable price proved to be almost impossible. 

As I said earlier, I was out and about over the weekend which involved a significant amount of motorway driving, including an incredibly long section of the M6 south of Cheshire where the speed limit is restricted to 50mph while work is done to convert it to a ‘smart’ motorway.

By pure coincidence, while I was in this section I was also listening to a discussion about whether or not all-lane running smart motorways are safer or more dangerous than normal motorways with hard shoulders.

For what it’s worth, I am firmly in the camp that says they are more dangerous and that view was reinforced on a journey last year when I had to suddenly swerve round a car that had broken down in the slow lane on a section of smart motorway that didn’t have a hard shoulder.

According to a report on theguardian.com, statistically, overall, the evidence suggests that smart motorways are not more dangerous than normal motorways.

The figures analysed by the Department for Transport between 2015 and 2018 showed the death toll on smart motorways by traffic volume has been slightly lower than on conventional motorways, possibly because speeds are often limited.
But the fact remains that in some cases, it seems clear that a hard shoulder would have saved lives – as a coroner’s inquest in Sheffield recently concluded. Two men were killed in 2019 after a lorry hit their stationary vehicles parked in the left-hand lane on the M1 – six minutes after the initial collision. 

And that was not an isolated case. A number of other fatal collisions have come minutes after cars have broken down, when terrified drivers have been calling for and awaiting emergency assistance. 

Here’s the problem. When smart motorways were first conceived, the idea was they would have emergency refuge areas sufficiently close together to allow most vehicles to reach safety before they finally came to a stop. And all smart motorways were intended to be fitted with ‘stopped vehicle detection’ technology that could not only spot stranded vehicles very quickly but also automatically flash ‘lane closed’ signs on the overhead gantries.

But apart from some relatively short stretches of motorway, the emergency refuges are too far apart and there are miles of smart motorways that do not have the automatic detection systems. Keep this in mind next time you venture on a so-called smart motorway.