And, like many successfully evolving species, they’re getting bigger. By next year the only way past them will be to strip the car down to its component parts and reassemble it on the other side. Or roads could be turned into slalom courses, with fines for anyone going the wrong side of a post.If you try and avoid the main road, you’re likely to come up against a series of obstacles, such as newly blocked off side-streets that leave you reversing in circles and feeling like Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail. You expect to turn into a street and meet an 800-year-old man with a beard who bellows: “You have done well to get this far, my friend But to proceed, you must drive across the canyon of faith. Then you must defeat the double-headed dragon that can mutate into a dustcart and park in front of you for 25 minutes.”Despite this, London is perpetually and irredeemably clogged with traffic. Eventually it will end up like Athens, where no cars move at all I don’t think cars have engines in Athens. Instead, each morning half a million Athenians walk to their cars, which have an allotted place in the traffic jam; they get in and spend their day tooting at everyone and yelling at cyclists; then they all get out and walk back home.The congestion-charge solution to the capital’s transport problem involves a novel twist to free-market competition.

The idea seems to be to make public transport and driving compete to see which can be the most unbearable The trains get worse, so more people drive. So to get people off the roads, driving is made even more impossible.For example, if Ken Livingstone is right, and 15 per cent of London’s traffic disappears as a result of the new charge, all those drivers will pile on to trains and tubes that are already packed. So some passengers will think: “Sod this, I might as well drive and pay the fiver, especially as now there’s 15 per cent less traffic.” And the spiral will continue, until railways are covered in speed bumps and trains aren’t allowed to stop at stations without a resident’s parking permit.Then Livingstone would have to raise the stakes further, until local radio traffic reports begin: “Try and keep clear of the Aldwych underpass this morning before 10am, as this is currently under fire from B52s dropping daisycutters. And the Westway is down to one lane until 6pm as the other lanes have been declared a central pillar of the international axis of evil.”Perhaps we’ll end up with the scenario I once saw in Communist Prague, where, true to the stereotype, there was a mini traffic jam that involved three consecutive Skodas being pushed.

Maybe rush hour in Prague consisted of hundreds of people, bumper to bumper, pushing their Skodas – with an old man at the front holding up the whole street by pushing slower than anyone else, while occasionally a teenager overtook the entire queue and everyone sighed: “He’ll get himself bloody well killed, pushing like that.”
More from Mark Steel. I take great pleasure in welcoming back our expert on modern English, Dr Wordsmith. Dr Wordsmith spends his time at the cutting edge of the evolution of the English language, in the bars and pubs of this country. (Several bars he frequents have even created cocktails in his honour: there is a place in Edinburgh which has a lethal potion called a Split Infinitive, and a health bar in Spitalfields where you can get a nutritious Mixed Metaphor.) But he is in the office with us today, with his cocktail shaker and a bag of exotic ingredients, ready to answer all your questions. Take it away, Doc!

I take great pleasure in welcoming back our expert on modern English, Dr Wordsmith. Take it away, Doc!
 Dear Dr Wordsmith, I am constantly amazed by the inability of the English to pronounce the sound which occurs at the end of the Scottish word “loch” This seems to be present in many languages Hebrew has it German has it in abundance.