I’m never going to complain about the M25 again. There have been times when I’ve felt that I’ve spent a fair percentage of my life sat in tail-backs on that infernal motorway but I realise now that I have nothing to moan about in comparison to what happened recently in China.

A traffic jam developed that extended for 60 miles, from the capital Beijing to the northern province of Inner Mongolia. Traffic at the back of the queue of the north-south motorway was apparently moving at an average speed of two miles a day!

The jam lasted for over ten days with trucks parked nose-to-tail along the length of the Beijing to Tibet expressway. Ironically, the jam had been caused by a set of roadworks that was intended to alleviate the congestion caused by thousands of trucks bringing supplies into the city.

Local villagers along the way apparently took advantage of the drivers’ predicament, selling food, water and cigarettes at highly inflated prices to their captive audience. Who says free enterprise doesn’t exist in a communist state?

China is now the largest car manufacturer in the world and it is projected that around seven million cars will be on the roads of Beijing by 2015. Drivers in the city are already restricted from using their cars on one day of the week, based upon the final digit of their number plate, but this hasn’t stopped the increasing congestion in the city. China has also embarked on a massive expansion of its road system nationwide in order to try to cope with the ever-increasing volume of traffic.

However impressive (if that’s the correct word) that this line of slow-moving vehicles is, type ‘longest traffic jam in the world’ into a search engine and you get told that it was actually in France, from Lyon towards Paris on 16 February 1980, and extended 109 miles. Now this was obviously fairly short-lived, only lasting for a few hours during the day, so although it may have beaten the Beijing log jam by nearly fifty miles, the Chinese still have the distinction of claiming the longest-lasting traffic jam (not that it’s much to boast about, of course).

So the next time you’re sitting in stationary traffic on the M25 or wherever, consider yourself fortunate enough not to be a truck driver in China heading for Beijing.