I had been driving for a few hours, so I decided to take a break at the next motorway services.

These places are grim at the best of times, but when it is dark and quiet they are more miserable looking than Pavorotti’s skinny pallbearer.

I stretched my arms as I made my way to the toilet for a onesy, on route to which I noticed the amusement arcade. The brightest, flashiest and noisiest machine available was a two-man driving simulator.

I can not be certain, but surely putting a driving simulator in a place where people are taking break from driving is akin to selling drugs outside The Priory. There was no-one playing it, unsurprisingly.

After I had finished my onesy and was walking back to my car I was bemused to see a grown man, in a suit, playing the machine. I watched for a few seconds as he weaved his way through the traffic with a level of reckless abandonment rarely seen by people not driving a 20 year-old XR2. That is when it struck me.

It is actually a GENIUS idea to put these machines in service stations.

You spend hours driving along at 75 mile an hour, frustrated by the morons around you, so what better way to release that frustration than driving like an utter twat in a virtual world for ten minutes? It could quite possible help save your driving licence.

This got me thinking, and I believe it would be a good idea to put up virtual reality machines on major high streets so you could take a break from the shopping to go into a booth and slaughter innocent people with assorted weaponry for ten minutes. Virtually. I am not advocating sniper booths.

In fact, playing in games booths like this would almost make it worth suffering the Saturday shopping hordes. Almost.

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