Father slammed shut the boot of the car, and climbed up into the drivers seat.

“Is everyone ready?” he asked, and started the car engine.

My father was tall and thin, but with the wiry strength possessed by many people who worked in the building trade. He was content. He loved working with his hands, and especially loved working with old buildings. It seemed to me that there wasn’t a building within the village, in which we lived, that my father hadn’t worked on. And he would often point to a building, and explain in detail what work he’d carried out, to bring the building back to life. His eyes gleamed as he spoke, and it was obvious to anyone, that there wasn’t another job in the world he would rather do.

And when he stopped the car just outside the village, to check that that work was progressing on the old farmhouse, we were not in the least surprised.

Eddie and Danny came to meet him, and they discussed what needed to be done over the next two weeks. It wasn’t that my father didn’t trust Eddie and Danny. He wouldn’t employ anyone else to help him with the building work. He just found it very difficult to leave a building project until it was fully completed.

My mother grew impatient and peeped the car horn. The three men laughed. But my father knew it was time to go, and he returned to the car, and we set off once again.

Out of the village we headed for the A34, and then to the M40, which I called the Scotland road, although I now know that the M40 does not go all the way to Scotland.

We had been driving on the M6 for several hours.

“Are we there yet?” I asked, surprisingly for the first time. I had grown out of that old joke.

“We’ve still got a long way to go yet. We’re just coming up to Carlisle, where we’ll join the M74, which will take us to Glasgow,” mum said. “It will be another two to three hours before we get to your grandfather’s house.”

Mum was right. We soon left the M6, but it seemed like forever before we reached Glasgow. I liked driving through Glasgow on the motorway. The road twisted through the city. It went high up into the air, and you could look down onto the buildings. Then it would dip low down, and the buildings looked like they were growing up all around you.