Transcendence via Traffic

[coalescent]

Ah, I love the Today program. This morning, as part of a piece on the expansion of the M25 to ten lanes (!), was an interview with Ian Sinclair, author of The London Orbital:

Interviewer: You sound so gloomy, yet you love this road. You have an amazing sort of fantasy love affair with it.
IS: I have a love affair with it because it's the landscape of surrealism. It's the landscape JG Ballard predicted as science fiction, and which we now live with, which is boredom and terror. All that the road does is create revenue to have more oil wars, which produce more petrol to put more people sitting on this thing which has become the third suburb of London.
Interviewer: I'm sure lots of drivers below us who are stopped with agree with you. But, they're on it, and they've got to be on it every day, and they'll probably have to suffer the jams for the next two years. Do you think we're going to need another orbital to orbit this orbital?
IS: Yes, we'll have orbitals within orbitals within orbitals, until we all achieve hallucinogenic transcendence. And then we've really done it, at that point.

You heard it here first. And yes, I think it's fair to say that when we all achieve hallucinogenic transcendence thanks to the M25, we certainly will have done it. For at least some value of 'it'.