On Sunday I cleaned the van myself, with waterless cleaner and a great heap of rags, there being no water at the storage site. I scrubbed off the dust and the green algae that had crept across the body panels in the damp. The inside needed nothing. It never has. It looked, as it always has, like something just out of the showroom and never lived in.

The drive itself was a hundred and ten miles, up and round to a site near Bedford. The weather was balmy for the time of year, the low twenties and clear. I set off wondering whether I had chosen the right day, the route taking me around roughly half of the M25 (the great orbital motorway that encircles London in a single unbroken ring some hundred and seventeen miles round) from the M23 in the south up to the M1 in the north. I had not chosen well. The north-east quadrant was closed after an accident, so everything heading north had been swung clockwise, all of it piling onto the traffic already going that way. There were long stretches at a dead standstill. The first fifty-five miles, as far as just past Heathrow, took two hours. The second fifty-five, mostly motorway up the M1, took one. The ring road’s average speed is about twenty-five miles an hour against a seventy limit, so the whole hundred-and-seventeen-mile loop takes some five hours to drive round, and my morning sat squarely on that dismal figure.

Three things stood out from the crawl. The first was an aircraft. As I passed Heathrow a large jet lifted off and crossed more or less overhead, perhaps a couple of hundred metres up, the sound of it deep and thundering through the cab. A long-haul twin of that size, a 777 sort of thing rather than the very largest, leaves the ground at something in the region of two hundred and fifty to three hundred tonnes. A few hundred tonnes held aloft because the air moves a little faster over the top of the wing than beneath it. I sat in stationary traffic and thought about that for a while, the plain physics of it, which is no less of a marvel for being explicable.

The second was the road as memory. I drove this exact stretch, south to north, as a daily commute about thirty years ago, home near Gatwick to work in Kings Langley, the very same morning run I was making today. Around eighteen months of it, when I was accountant for a car sales firm. Back then they were widening the motorway from three lanes to four, and five in places. I am genuinely not sure how I managed it. We are far more resilient when we are young, and have less sense of what we are spending. There is a small irony in it, the road enlarged all those years to carry ever more traffic, and here it was today at a complete stop.

The third was the police. At two separate points on the M25, an unmarked car threaded through the stationary lanes with its blue lights going, one a BMW M3, the other a hot version of a VW Golf. Both looked exactly like the cars you would expect to belong to someone with rather grand ideas of themselves: heavily tinted, immaculate, sitting on big wheels, built to the eye for a lap of the Nürburgring rather than for police work. How convincingly disguised these things have become struck me each time, two cars I would never have looked at twice until the lights came on.

I reached the auction site, did the paperwork, took an Uber to Bedford station and the Thameslink home, about two and a half hours of trains. The auction follows next week.

There is a symmetry to the day I cannot ignore, a van bought to cross the world yet scarcely driven before being given up, and given up along the very road I knew intimately three decades back. What is most honest to record, though, is how little I felt as I handed it over. I never bonded with it. I want to be fair: it is not a bad van. It is a genuinely good example, everything working as it should, every control precise and clean. But it always felt like just a van, and nothing ever formed between us. The contrast is with Morrison, which has real character, a more physical thing to drive, noisier, harsher, given to wallowing on its great tyres and raised suspension. You always know when you have driven Morrison. Today I drove a hundred and ten miles to part with a vehicle I had owned for two years, and felt no pang at all, and that absence is the truest thing I can set down about the day.