I went to hell and back to meet my new granddaughter

I have finally understood what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways. These dehumanising slabs of asphalt covering our continents are Prometheus-like chains that lure us into non-stop movement and uniformity. But before you start screaming that you’ve been isolated for months and would give up a night with Jennifer Lawrence to roar down a highway, let me explain.

It all began when Alexandra and I decided to visit my daughter and the new baby in Austria. It was my idea to drive there, the Swiss-German-Austrian borders having opened that very day. When the wife suggested a chauffeur, I said no. When the son assured me that I’d get lost, I threatened financial repercussions that I can no longer enforce. I then recounted stories of travels past that ended happily.

Back in 1956, the South African tennis player Abe Segal, the Bermudan female champ Heather Brewer and yours truly took off from London to Germany by car. Abe was the driver — he had reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon that year — while I sat in the back behind the two lovebirds. Driving around the French countryside in those days was like reaching match point. We kept stopping in quaint, leaf-covered inns that just happened to be on our way. The food was simple but terrific, the wine superior. The innkeepers may have been gruff at times, but some of them had daughters with large breasts. Abe and Heather were wonderful to travel with because they got me out of a couple of jams while crisscrossing France, Germany and Switzerland. Roads followed the contours of the land. They were narrow and tree-lined, dotted with cream-coloured houses and surrounded by green hills and fields. Traffic was non-existent, and auberges, with auberge owners and their daughters, were everywhere.