MILTON KEYNES

Where better for drifting away than an urban jungle in the dead of night – the perfect playground

BLEARILY YOU MAKE YOUR WAY BACK across the dark landing, navigating the creaky floorboards like a somnambulating ninja so that no noise should trigger more crying from the small set of lungs next door. You sink into bed and, as your eyes close, you wonder if perhaps you can get just one more hour until a demand for milk is made…

The street lights flicker, illuminating the road ahead in pools of orange. There’s something a bit Initial D, a bit Midnight Touge about the scene, yet it looks like your commute to the station. It is your commute to the station. But there won’t be many trains running out of Milton Keynes Central at this time of night. A dual carriageway stretches ahead of you, part of the much-mocked MK grid system laid out in the 1960s. And at the end of the half-mile stretch of tarmac is… a roundabout. One of 130 roundabouts. The perfect playground.

You look across at the large piece of metal pipe protruding from the floorpan. Things begin to make sense. The yellow stripe marking 12 o’clock on the steering wheel starts to take on more significance.

Select first with a clunk, pull back on the big handbrake, lots of revs, then sidestep the clutch to leave a perfect 11 on the road as you rattle up through the gears.

Hard on the brakes, second gear, don’t match the revs but instead clutch-kick the rear of the car out to the right. Hold the slide on the throttle until the last moment, then lift off, and as the rear tyres grip and flick the back of the car across to the left, let the wheel run smoothly through your hands. Pick up the throttle so as not to hit the lock-stops and then hold the drift past all four exits as you complete a full lap of the circular road furniture.

Spot the exit through the side window, bring the car smoothly back into something like a straight line and admire the ghostly white miasma in your mirrors as you accelerate away. It’s like the roundabout has blown a flawless smoke ring at the sky.

You make your way across the city in a series of growls, chuffs and chirrups, the rear wheels spinning in unison with the locked diff. The larger, more open roundabouts allow for faster drifts; quick, positive pulls on the big handbrake lever pitching the Nissan 200SX into highspeed slides. A petrol station attendant looks up as a wall of sound and smoke provides the briefest of interludes to his otherwise noiseless night shift. It’s past so fast that it might have been an apparition were it not for the lingering vaporised rubber, illuminated by the forecourt lights.

In a flash you realise you’ve passed the station, so you prepare to back it into the next roundabout and return on the other side of the road. There’s a wail of protest from the tyres. Perhaps they’re down to the canvas? Oh, no. It’s more of a cry. Time for milk. Just a dream.

‘ HOLD THE DRIFT PAST ALL FOUR EXITS AS YOU COMPLETE A FULL LAP OF THE CIRCULAR ROAD FURNITURE’