IT is many months since I last forsook the comfort and reliability of my elderly car and took to public transport for a trip to London, but last week the previous experience was sufficiently far behind me to succumb to the temptation to try again.

I had a meeting in Victoria at the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, the cot death charity of which I am chairman.

After that I had to go to St Paul's, Covent Garden, for a memorial service for the wonderful Jean Anderson, who has made her final exit, stage right, at the age of 93, having worked right up until this year, when she filmed a Becket play soon to be broadcast.

I worked with her in the 70s when she played the doughty road-haulage matriarch Mary Hammond in The Brothers, and again a couple of years ago, in a German film shot on the Isle of Man. She looked and behaved even then like a woman half her age.

Her memorial was a wonderful celebration of the life a wonderfully talented and generous lady, who will be sorely missed by colleagues and audiences alike.

I was therefore going to spend Election Day in London, a city whose attractions are only slightly greater than going to a Black Sabbath Concert with Ian Paisley.

Following the budgetary example of our iron chancellor I decided it would be prudent to avoid the traffic jams on the A40 and the exorbitant cost of parking in London.

I would be green, leave the security of my polluting car behind and glide to my destination in an environmentally friendly, efficient, clean and competitively priced public transport system.

Although I should have known better, I drove to Hanger Lane and entered the big city on the Piccadilly Line. There was just enough time after my first meeting to get me to Covent Garden in time for the service.

With my Rover in hand (a ticket, not a dog or in my case cat. Yes, we have a cat called Rover. Don't ask!), I hastened to St James's Park station, only to find that the Circle Line was, like Monty Python's parrot, failing to show any discernible signs of useful life.

Blackboards, showing evidence of frequent and recent use, informed the muttering, milling, malcontent crowd that there was no immediate prospect of any tube travel between Earls Court and the East End.

I hastened to a bus stop only to discover there was no bus that would get me, or Dolittle, to the church on time. So I took a cab.

It cost the best part of a tenner, after crawling through Central London for 15 minutes. Added to the cost of the London Transport Rover this meant I was worse off than I would have been had I driven in my comfortable car, listening to England losing at cricket on Long Wave.

And now we read about the new transport agenda. As there is not the slightest likelihood of any government providing an effective, affordable public transport system to tempt us from our cars, we are going be given the stick as carrots are thin on (in?) the ground

We are promised newer, better and more speed detection devices, an exponential rise in convictions for speeding, more and more banned drivers, and more and more passengers for a deficient, unreliable and expensive public transport system.