Wednesday 31 May 2017

It's half term - great.

Driving in London is easily the most unpleasant job I can think of. 
    Of course cleaning sewers or the pavements after Saturday night's revelry has to be pretty bad, but actually driving in London's potholed streets must be a close third. Not only do none of the councils of which there are many, or the road and construction companies of which there are millions, never talk to each other, I'm pretty sure that aforementioned councils and construction crews go out of their way to make things as hard for us as possible.
    Remember, most of these street are about five hundred years old and built in the days when a horse and cart were considered juggernauts. Perhaps I'm being naïve but if there are only two routes into or out of a place, then common sense dictates that you don't dig up the second until the first is finished.

    Oh, no, that kind of logic doesn't exist in London. So this week I thought, as it's half term and most of the mad people are either on holiday, or at least stuck in Heathrow Airport where nothing appears to be working, then the roads would be, if not calm, than possibly less maniacal.
    Wrong. 
    This morning my boss's new Merc almost got squashed four times by meandering trucks or road builder/destroyers. Half the traffic lights in this misbegotten city are out of sync, and to make it even worse, the central crossing in the city, that's the city of London, and not the centre of London as most foreigners mistakenly believe (I know it's insane but we're used to it) has been closed to everything except cycles and buses. Several hundred thousand cars, trucks and motorbikes have to use that crossing every day, and to avoid it means crawling miles out of our way at about two miles per hour just to go a few hundred yards.
    For the first time in my life I'm beginning to think of something I never thought I'd say: I'm looking forward to my retirement.

    Something else peculiar has happened. I'm doing well on my new book, but I seem to have lost the ability to do it in front of my computer and these days I'm only happy writing scrunched up in the car on my tablet which has the worst, most antiquated keyboard known to man. Who are these people that give Android apps five stars? Have they actually used the apps at all?

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