Post #2428811

I once heard someone say "Chris Rea is from Middlesbrough, I bet 'Driving Home For Christmas' is about a traffic jam on the M1." This amused me as a bit of folk etymology for years. Tonight I discovered via Wikipedia this is literally true - it was 1978, Chris Rea had just finished recording at Abbey Road studios in London, and his wife drove down from Middlesbrough to pick him up because he was out of contract and the record company wouldn't pay for his train ticket home. So now I'm intrigued that even in 1978 it was cheaper to drive >500 miles, about 10 hours of driving, than to get a train. That was back in the nationalised British Rail days. I am old enough to remember the tail end of those, and I don't recall that train travel was particularly cheap back then either.