It’s surely no coincidence that the year after releasing Driving Home for Christmas (in December 1988), Chris Rea had a hit with The Road to Hell. One estimate suggests that between noon and 5pm on Friday December 20th, there may be as many as 20 million vehicles on Britain’s roads, all getting in the way of each other’s Christmas getaway.

The UK may not be a huge country geographically, but it’s a densely populated one, with the result that large numbers of us come from somewhere else. Somewhere that, unfortunately, it may not be possible to avoid going back to over the Christmas period.

For the average family that could, and usually does, involve long, gruelling hours of nose-to-tail traffic, clenched teeth, arguments, inexplicable delays and muttered swearing. The Journey of the Magi was a cakewalk by comparison. But it’s much, much worse than that, of course, if you are travelling more than a couple of miles across London.

I grew up in Scotland, where my parents and some of my siblings still live. At this time of year, that can easily be a nine-hour journey – that is, if you’re in north London. I lived in south London, which is a nine-hour journey from north London, or feels like it.

Just getting out of London can make you lose the will to live. Years ago, I set out northwards in the middle of the afternoon one Christmas Eve in a terrible car (an Austin Montego) which was so traumatised by the traffic that it packed up completely in Golders Green at about six o’clock. Then it began to snow. Eventually, this useless vehicle was loaded on to an AA lorry, which got as far as Peterborough just before midnight.

That was all right, because I was breaking my journey there, and thought I’d able to borrow a car. Imagine my joy when it turned out to be another Austin Montego. To give it its due, the engine on this one didn’t conk out. It was the motor for the windscreen wipers. There are times when this is the kind of thing you wouldn’t even know had happened, but December in the UK isn’t one of them. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven across Shap summit in a blizzard while operating a wiper manually with your ungloved right hand, but it’s not an experience I can recommend.

Even that was more fun, though, than later journeys travelling with children. Jean-Paul Sartre did not give you the full story when he declared that “Hell is other people.” To have been comprehensively accurate, he ought to have said that hell is other people small enough to be strapped into child seats in a 25-mile tailback on the A1(M) northbound. It starts before you get to the motorway, though. Once packed into the back of the car, the children warm up for the trip by spilling their drinks, dropping crisps everywhere, complaining about whatever is on the radio and fighting over each other’s Nintendo DS games.

Then they start asking: “Are we there yet?” If I’m lucky, they don’t begin doing this until we’ve reached Kilburn High Street, but I have usually snarled “No, not yet!” umpteen times long before Brent Cross crawls into view.

When I was a child in the 1970s, in-car entertainment consisted of games of I-Spy and asking for Opal Fruits. But Opal Fruits have been renamed (no, not Vauxhall Fruits, they’re called Starburst now) and it’s not difficult to beat a four-year-old at I-Spy if you remember that R is road, C is car and W is white line.

So you’d think the various gizmos all children now have would help matters. They don’t. They will have forgotten to charge their iPad, DS or phone, and left the charger at home. You will never get them to agree on which DVD to put in the machine hanging off the back of your headrest and bashing you periodically in the neck. Unless your children are all the same age, and probably even if they are, fist-fights will break out over the relative merits of JLS, Ed Sheeren and the Arctic Monkeys, all of whom you were sick to the back teeth of months ago. The older ones will sit sullenly tapping on their phones, posting insults and blocking each other on their Instagram and Facebook accounts. They will complain all the way.

Even filling them with junk food at service stations (at three times the cost of the high street branches) to get them off your back only gives them enough of a sugar rush to redouble their efforts to drive you mad less than a third of the way into the journey.

The radio will then interrupt whatever Godawful racket you’ve been forced to tune into to inform you that you’ll arrive in time to get caught up in the worst snarls in living memory along with the commuter traffic of Birmingham, or Manchester, or Liverpool. On the M6, very possibly all of them, in one huge queue extending from Gretna to the Catthorpe Interchange. If you ever get above 20mph, someone will need you to stop for the lavatory.

All of this, and you can’t even drink your way through it (as the motorway’s overhead signs keep reminding you, though they’re surely a bit late for anyone who’s already in the driving seat). All in all, it’s no surprise there are so many family arguments at this time of the year, since everybody is frazzled beyond belief before they’ve even got in the door, having driven for what seems like 12 days before Christmas. But it probably wouldn’t be the same on Skype.

Guest blog by Andrew McKie,  a Freelance Journalist