M40 motorway: Commuters celebrate 'boring' road with calendar

Jim Thornton and Michael Lee regularly used the M40 on the way to Stoke, where they were setting up a new office

A pair of commuters bored by their experiences of the M40 have created a calendar to celebrate its ordinariness.

Advertising executives Jim Thornton and Michael Lee regularly use the motorway - which runs through Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire - to travel for work.

Mr Thornton said they came up with the idea "to relieve the tedium" of their regular long journeys.

Pictures include a factory and a model village's sign taken from the motorway.

The "Otmoor Bend" - built to avoid the Otmoor Nature Reserve in Oxfordshire - is May's photo in the duo's 2023 calendar

Banbury's Prodrive factory, which can be seen from the motorway, is also included

The Bekonscot Model Village sign in Buckinghamshire is the image for January

Mr Thornton, from London, admitted though they "slightly struggled" to find 12 pictures along the 89-mile (143 km) stretch, it had been "great fun".

"On about the fifth journey, I remember saying 'this is the most boring motorway I have ever been on. There is nothing interesting about this motorway and we should make a calendar of just really boring photos of the M40,'" Mr Thornton told the BBC.

"Michael, God bless him, took this as a challenge. He clearly wasn't very busy because he then researched various landmarks along it and we discussed ones we should have in."

The pictures are:

• January - The sign for Bekonscot Model Village in Buckinghamshire

• February - The Stokenchurch BT Tower in Buckinghamshire

• March - The Christmas Common Overbridge in Oxfordshire

• April - The Stokenchurch Gap on the Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire border

• May - The "Otmoor Bend" in Oxfordshire

• June - Middleton Stoney Water Tower in Oxfordshire

• July - The Prodrive factory in Banbury, Oxfordshire

• August - Umberslade Interchange sign in Warwickshire

• September - The Umberslade Obelisk in Warwickshire

• October - "Pylon Alley" in Oxfordshire, which they say links East Claydon and Cowley substations

• November - Viridor Ardley incinerator in Oxfordshire

• December - The Existential graffiti wall in Buckinghamshire