[st d] I thought you had your tongue well and truly planted in your cheek when you wrote your original motorway exposé. Thanks for your clarification - it was your statement "I drive at about 90 most of teh time, occasionally creeping up to about 110 for brief periods or dropping to 70 if the road is clear." that led to my interpretation. In my judgement there is nothing wrong with speed itself, it's where and how and by whom it is used. These days I tend to treat everyone else on the road as incompetent, the idea being to keep alert to the fact that I am controlling a missile of significant mass and an error made by someone else could lead to an early demise - mine.
Of course we are all good drivers, of course we all have superb reactions and car control skills. Naturally all our cars are all in tip-top condition and handle like an F1 top ten machine. If you believe all that then you're a cylinder short of a block. Some of this comes from bitter experience and these days I stick to the speed limit (I cannot afford to get caught) even though there are places where said limits are really silly. Don't get me wrong, I was no angel in my younger days, I'm just thankful still to be here.
By the way, give me a bullet with wheels that will handle, a winding road and no traffic (ha!) and I'll be in seventh heaven. ;-)

[Dujon] That would be Lincolnshire (on England's east coast) then, which has one of the highest rates of road deaths in the country. Everyone who likes going fast, especially the motorcyclists, make that mistake. When I was a reporter, I attended so many inquests into the deaths of people who make exactly the same mistake, and over-cook it on corners just as a tractor, or a pensioner, pulls out of a farm gateway. If you're going to speed, please do it on motorways.

(pen) So it's true, then. They say The Fens are even worse, but all sorts of things are said about The Fens and its inhabitants.

There is no such thing as a winding road with no traffic. Even if there is no traffic, you can't see that there's no traffic.

[penelope, Raak] Indeed. Hence my 'ha'. Hill climbing is a great way to scratch that itch, but the inital costs are a bit steep these days with all the safety considerations. So I now confine myself to being an old plodder, ever alert to inebriates and idiots. I got rid of my clubman style machine a few years ago and puddle around in a family hatch at present. Chances are that my reactions are not as good as they used to be anyway and there's no way I'm going to test out that assumption on a public road.