Sometime in the 1970s, the journalist Bernard Levin was sitting at a table at Keele services (north) with Arianna Stassinopoulos, then the love of his life, when a small boy passed by.
"[He] knocked over his large cup of Coke, casting sticky fizzy drink and ice cubes all over the great man's exquisite footwear," reports someone who was there.
That someone was Mike Jackson and the small boy was his son. He recalls the incident in his guide to the sights and delights of the 234 miles of the M6 from Carlisle to Rugby published yesterday.
"The guide attempts to identify and describe every object of some significance that a passenger in a vehicle would easily be able to notice whilst travelling along the motorway," says Mr Jackson, in his introduction.
But the book is less a travel guide than a compendium of everything trivial, bizarre and even ludicrous along a highway used by 100,000 vehicles on a typical day.
On the journey, Mr Jackson, a former producer of BBC's Antiques Roadshow, reflects on the power of the modern supermarket and on his time spent working with Roland Rat in Birmingham. He also tells us that he hated his school in Newcastle and recalls how he was finger-printed as a suspect in a murder case after falling in the Trent and Mersey canal just off the motorway in Cheshire.
There is information here that not even the most frequent user of the M6 may know (or want to know): at Penrith, a factory makes the dough balls for every Domino's pizza place between Aberdeen and Nottingham; a fifth of the popcorn eaten in Britain is made at Hollywood Express in Preston (whose 1955 bypass became the first section of British motorway); and a plant in north Cheshire dries all kinds of grass in seven minutes and sends out so much steam that truck drivers call it the smoke factory.
As for the sights, Mr Jackson dawdles in Cumbria, where the panorama of the Howgill Fells is one of the great glories of the route. He heads south, past the Settle and Carlisle railway (13 tunnels, 21 viaducts) and Shap summit (1,036 feet above sea level) towards Lancashire.
He passes Lancaster University (which, he fails to note, was allegedly built in imitation of a Tuscan hill village), is rude about Wigan (where he was accosted twice by the fattest beggar he had ever seen) and continues over Thelwall viaduct (now a bottleneck because of essential repairs) into the M6's busiest stretch.
There is not a lot on Stoke but quite a bit on Red Hill Farm nearby. Here Mandy Berrisford has diversified into koi carp. "The tiddlers are anaesthetised in Japan and flown over in a sealed metal flight case. When she opens the box they look dead, but come round after a few hours as she nurses them in aerated spring water."
Just north of Birmingham, Mr Jackson points out the Grosvenor Casino (Britain's biggest, with 17 tables for 200 players), the Aqualux shower factory and the RAC control centre in a blue glass palace at the M6/M5 junction.
He celebrates Spaghetti Junction, finds an anti-graffiti poster daubed with graffiti in a tower block at the Chelmsley Wood estate (which probably does not merite le detour ) and comes over nerdy at a salt barn at Coleshill near the M42: "The walls are made of reinforced concrete lined with corrugated asbestos on wooden beams, with all fixings in stainless steel so that the building is not vulnerable to corrosion."
The guide also takes in the 27-mile M6 toll road, which opened this year and gave early users the uncanny experience of almost empty carriageways.
But Mr Jackson's butterfly mind has failed to alight on a bridge which spans the new highway. It is labelled Lichfield canal aqueduct but no waterway runs into it or out of it. With each end left dangling, it sits forlornly dreaming of narrow boats to come.
· M6 Sights Guide, Severnpix Publishing, £11.99
