James Barker, 32, architect Possibly the most tortuous few hours of my life.
To this day, there is no direct train service from Fort William to Inverness, forcing passengers to take a tortuous seven-hour trip via Glasgow.
The region, known for its sugarcane, is a tortuous eight-hour drive from Delhi and a lifetime away from the 21st century.
Driving out of Dalaman airport ready for a tortuous three-hour trip along a winding mountain road, off which buses would occasionally plunge, I discover there's now a tunnel and a super-smooth highway.
"As we've proved time and time again, we fought like dogs to get the result," said Diamond, Sale's director of rugby, who has also been around long enough to appreciate a touch of good fortune when it materialises, a reward for his side's tortuous 10-hour trip down the M6.
It took me two weeks to work it out, tortuous long sessions, hours and hours of talks with them, which they resisted - we don't need to go through all that agony.
Many farmworkers have come from remote villages without electricity, down tortuous gravel roads, hours from a semblance of a supermarket.
The legislation which passed through the Dáil after 24 hours of tortuous debate will not stop the annual abortion trail from Ireland to Britain.
Michael Hewson, senior market analyst at CMC Markets: "After hours of tortuous negotiations Greece was finally granted its second bailout in the early hours of this morning and thus now will be able to meet the €14.5bn bond payment in March, and avert a messy default.
The opera in question was Wagner's Tannhäuser, which lasts several hours, has a tortuous plot, a misty Middle Ages setting and a tragic end.
