M is for Motorways
Written at 8:50 a.m. on 2007-10-25
M Is for Motorways
While god was creating the world and everything in it he was very very busy and this left Satan bored, with no one to talk to. So, he decided that he'd invent something of his own and he sat down to have a think. Estate agents? Nope, already got them up and running and selling fundamentally unstable heaps of shit to unsuspecting first time buyers. Call centres that ring you at 7pm to ask you if you're the mortgage holder every night for 6 months? Already done. Those annoying perverts that ring you up to enquire what sort of underwear you're wearing and don't even seem to be discouraged when you tell them you're wearing an enormous pair of gray flannel bloomers? Out there already. So he scratched his head for a bit longer, had a gin and tonic and suddenly inspiration hit him. "I know what I'll create" he thought, "A road that you need to use to get from A to B but I'll design it so that at all the times people might need to be on it it jams up entirely turning it into a 10 mile stretch of carpark". And lo, the motorway was born.
On paper the motorway is a wonderful idea. It's a bit long road with several lanes that takes you directly from A to B. In practice things are not quite that simple. Want to go from A to B in order to get to work? Forget it my friend, so does everyone else and the motorway will be nose to tail for the duration of your journey. Want to go from A to B because it's a bank holiday weekend and you've booked a lovely cottage in Northumberland? Hope you like the interior of your car because it's pretty much all you're going to see since some pillock has overturned a caravan in the middle lane and the whole motorway is now shut ten miles ahead of you. Every time you want (or, more accurately, need) to use the damn thing it is blocked solid. If it rains, snows, is too bright, is too dark, has a wind blowing from a westerly direction, has the moon in the 3rd lunar cycle the motorway blocks solid and the situation isn't made any better by lorry drivers. Lorry drivers are the only group on the road who don't believe that the law about not using mobile phones while driving doesn't apply to them and who believe that the wing mirror on the left hand side is only there to make the lorry symetrical. Who hasn't almost been wiped off the motorway by a lorry randomly swinging out? No one who's used the cursed thing more than 3 times, that's for sure.
So how do you avoid the hellhole that is the motorway? Well you have several options: you could buy a farm in the country and never leave it, you could buy a bicycle and cycle along the city roads although this option does come with a very real risk of ending up as roadkill or you could become a hippy, give up driving and spend your life living in an ashram in Epping Forest and taking large quantites of mind altering drugs. For the rest of us the only option is to keep queing and hope that you win the lottery so you can take early retirement. Happy motoring folks!!
