Eventually you acquire a ticket and trek back to your car where your wife greets you with a 'Where have you been?' Ignoring her, you squeeze past the pillar, collecting a matching set of dust for the front of your jacket, discover that you can't reach the windscreen as the door only opens three inches, so you just sort of throw the ticket at the dashboard (it flutters to the floor but your wife doesn't notice so you say, 'Fuck it,' and lock the door), and squeeze back out where your wife sees what a scruff you've turned into after she spent all that time dressing you and beats the dust from you with paddled hands while saying, 'Honestly, I can't take you anywhere.'

 And that's just the beginning. Arguing quietly, you have to find your way out of this dank hellhole via an unmarked door leading to a curious chamber that seems to be a composite of dungeon and urinal, or else wait two hours for the world's most abused and unreliablelooking lift, which will only take two people and already has two people in it a man whose wife is beating dust from his new Marks & Spencer jacket and berating him in clucking tones.

 And the remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally mark this, intentionally designed to flood your life with unhappiness. From the tiny parking bays that can only be got into by manoeuvring your car through a fortysixpoint turn (why can't the spaces be angled, for crying out loud?) to the careful placing of pillars where they will cause maximum obstruction, to the ramps that are so dark and narrow and badly angled that you always bump the kerb, to the remote, wilfully unhelpful ticket machines (you can't tell me that a machine that can recognize and reject any foreign coin ever produced couldn't make change if it wanted to) all of this is designed to make this the most dispiriting experience of your adult life. Did you know this is a littleknown fact but absolute truth that when they dedicate a new multistorey car park the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It's true.

 And that's just one tiny part of the driving experience. There areall the other manifold annoyances of motoring, like National Express drivers who pull out in front of you on motorways, eightmilelong contraflow systems erected so that some guys on a crane can change a lightbulb, traffic lights on busy roundabouts that never let you advance more than twenty feet at a time, motorway service areas where you have to pay .4.20 for a minipot of coffee and a jacket potato with a sneeze of cheddar in it and there's no point in going to the shop because the men's magazines are all sealed in plastic and you don't need any Waylon Jennings Highway Hits tapes, morons with caravans who pull out of sideroads just as you approach, some guy in a Morris Minor going 11 mph through the Lake District and collecting a threemile following because, apparently, he's always wanted to lead a parade, and other challenges to your patience and sanity nearly beyond endurance. Motorized vehicles are ugly and dirty and they bring out the worst in people. They clutter every kerbside, turn ancient market squares into disorderly jumbles of metal, spawn petrol stations, secondhand car lots, KwikFit centres and other dispiriting blights. They are horrible and awful and I wanted nothing to do with them on this trip. And besides, my wife wouldn't let me have the car.

 Thus it was that I found myself late on a grey Saturday afternoon, on an exceptionally long and empty train bound for Windsor. I sat high on the seat in an empty carriage, and in fading daylight watched as the train slid past office blocks and out into the forests of council flats and snaking terrace houses of Vauxhall and Clapham. At Twickenham, I discovered why the train was so long and so empty. The platform was jammed solid with men and boys in warm clothes and scarves carrying glossy programmes and little bags with tea flasks peeping out: obviously a rugby crowd from the Twickenham grounds. They boarded with patience and without pushing, and said sorry when they bumped . or inadvertently impinged on someone else's space. I admired this instinctive consideration for others, and was struck by what a regular thing that is in Britain and how little it is noticed. Nearly everyone rode all the way to Windsor I presume there must be some sort of parking arrangement there; Windsor can't provide that many rugby fans and formed a patient crush at the ticket barrier. An Asian man collected tickets in fast motion and said thank you to every person who passed. He didn't have time to examine the tickets you could have handed him a cornflakes boxtop but he did manage to find a vigorous salute for all, and they in turn thanked him for relieving them of their tickets and letting them pass. It was a little miracle of orderliness and goodwill. Anywhere else there'd have been someone on a box barking at people to form a line and not push.

The streets of Windsor were shiny with rain and unseasonally dark and wintry, but they were still filled with throngs of tourists. I got a room in the Castle Hotel on the High Street, one of those peculiarly higgledypiggledy hotels in which you have to embark on an epic trek through a succession of wandering corridors and firedoors. I had to go up one flight of stairs and, some distance further ON, down another in order to reach the distant wing of which my room was the very last. But it was a nice room and, I presumed, handy for Reading if I decided to exit through the window.

I dumped my pack and hastened back the way I came, keen to see a little of Windsor before the shops shut. I knew Windsor well because we used to shop there when we lived in Virginia Water down the road, and I strode with a proprietorial air, noting which shops had altered or changed hands over the years, which is to say most of them. Beside the handsome town hall stood Market Cross House, a building so perilously leaning that you can't help wonder if it was built that way to attract Japanese visitors with cameras. It was now a sandwich bar, but, like most of the other shops on the pretty jumble of cobbled streets around it, it has been about a million things, usually touristconnected. The last time I was here most of them were selling eggcups with legs; now they seemed to specialize in twee little cottages and castles. Only Woods of Windsor, a company that manages to get more commercial mileage out of lavender than I would ever have thought possible, is still there selling soaps and toilet water. On Peascod Street, Marks & Spencer had expanded, Hammick's and Laura Ashley had moved locations, and the Golden Egg and Wimpy were, not surprisingly, long gone (though I confess a certain fondness for the oldstyle Wimpys with their odd sense of what constituted American food, as if they had compiled their recipes from a garbled telex). But I was pleased to note that Daniel's, the most interesting department store in Britain, was still there.

 Daniel's is the most extraordinary place. It has all the features you expect of a provincial department store low ceilings, tiny obscure departments, frayed carpets held down with strips of electrician's tape, a sense that this space was once occupied by about eleven different shops and dwellings all with slightly differentelevations but it has the oddest assortment of things on sale: knicker elastic and collar snaps, buttons and pinking shears, six pieces of Portmeirion china, racks of clothing for very old people, a modest few rolls of carpet with the sort of patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard, chests of drawers with a handle missing, wardrobes on which one of the doors quietly swings open fifteen seconds after you experimentally shut it. Daniel's always puts me in mind of what Britain might have been like under Communism.

 It has long seemed to me unfortunate and I'm taking the global view here that such an important experiment in social organization was left to the Russians when the British would have managed it so much better. All those things that are necessary to the successful implementation of a rigorous socialist system are, after all, second nature to the British. For a start, they like going without. They are great at pulling together, particularly in the face of adversity, for a perceived common good. They will queue patiently for indefinite periods and accept with rare fortitude the imposition of rationing, bland diets and sudden inconvenient shortages of staple goods, as anyone who has ever looked for bread at a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon will know. They are comfortable with faceless bureaucracies and, as Mrs Thatcher proved, tolerant of dictatorships. They will wait uncomplainingly for years for an operation or the delivery of a household appliance. They have a natural gift for making excellent jokes about authority without seriously challenging it, and they derive universal satisfaction from the sight of the rich and powerful brought low. Most of those above the age of twentyfive already dress like East Germans. The conditions, in a word, are right.