I had a truly excellent weekend in Devon: great company, Pixar, monkeys and Katie Melua. That’s a pretty much perfect combination right there.

To keep me entertained on the drive I bought the audiobook of On Chesil Beach. I thought this was a good plan - I always like Ian McEwan, and this was an unabridged version of a fairly short novel. So I set off, windows wide open to stop me burning up, having set up an iPod playlist with a bit of music and a podcast for when I needed to concentrate, then the book once I reached the motorway. This worked great, and the book started just as I hit the traffic jam.

I don’t know if you’ve read On Chesil Beach. It’s about two virgins with sexual hangups on their wedding night. It’s far from obscene, but has a few choice phrases in the first ten minutes.

Couldn’t do it. You know how in heavy traffic you always end up next to the same cars? All their windows were open too. I tried, but I had to turn it off. ‘Engorged penis’ was the final straw. What a wuss. It was stop-and-start for much of the M25, so I gave up - I’ll listen to it when the world’s cooled somewhat.

Lots to write about, but I’m a little bothered this evening and the words won’t flow. More soon.

A local village has an annual tradition of building scarecrows. The results are placed by the road / on public benches / leaning against lamp posts, for everyone to see. It’s obvious that a lot of work goes into them, and I’m sure it’s a lovely endeavour for the whole family. However, driving through this village at 0030 creeped the living shit out of me. *shudder*.

In 2004 I spent five weeks driving across America. I don’t remember struggling with the ‘wrong’ side of the road other than at roundabouts, of which there were, mercifully, only two. Once home I pulled onto the right-hand side exactly one time, which scared me enough that it hasn’t happened since. The one thing that broke and never came back, though, was instinctively knowing which side of the motorway I should be on. Not, like, which slip road do I use, but whether it’s the left or right lane that’s for standard, non-overtaking, driving. I regularly have flashes of ‘hang on, should I be here?’, and need a moment to figure it out. I haven’t yet got it wrong - subconscious seems to know what it’s doing - but the certainty has gone.

It’s exactly like how I instinctively know left and right, but east and west need cognition. The default motorway lane switched from instinctive to cognitive, and hasn’t changed in four years.

I bring this up because last weekend I used a foreign keyboard for two solid days. Along with various cool cyrillic characters, it switched the @ and “. I had to type a lot of @s, and this entire week I’ve had the same cognitive pause with every email address. Normally I’d think it temporary, but it feels identical to the motorway thing. Damn it. That could get annoying.

I drive the road between Stratford and Solihull eight times a week. I have done for over two years. It’s interesting to me how every journey will still bring some new experience.

It was nearly midnight, and raining heavily. The wipers were on and working hard, and I noticed a particularly persistent clump of bird shit clinging to my windscreen. I hate cleaning cars, so I quite like it when the rain does the job for me. I hoped I’d have a sparkling view by the time I got home. A few minutes later the clump detached itself and lowered abruptly onto the dashboard.

I smiled at my mistake, and continued to drive through the countryside outside town. A few minutes later streetlights appeared, and I spotted the spider.

I used to seriously dislike spiders. I’m a bit better now, and sometimes even find small ones quite cute. But if they have bulbous bodies, forget it. I don’t pretend this is rational. I don’t seriously think they’re poisonous. They’re just nasty. The one on my dashboard had voluminous lumps for a torso. Urgh.

An unpleasant spider crawling over your dashboard is quite distracting, but just about bearable. But when it starts heading for the steering wheel, something has to be done.

I pulled over at the first opportunity, opened the window and turned on the light. The spider veered and headed towards the radio. I pulled a piece of paper from my pocket. The spider started to slip into the crack of the cd-box above my radio. He was half inside when I clicked open the sprung flap, intending to scoop him up onto the paper and out of the window.

Did you spot my mistake?

The sprung flap. The spider pinged into the car. His initial trajectory was underneath the light, so I knew he was somewhere in the front, and not on me. But that’s all I knew, and I couldn’t find him.

I have never itched so much in one five-minute journey.

Just came within centimetres of hitting a deer at 60mph. Damn thing ambled out in front of me, slow as you like, and after a split second of braking I realised it was way too close and just managed to swing around it. Can’t have missed it by much, and the back of my car was going on its own little adventure for a while there. I don’t think it was big enough that I’d have been in danger, but I’d have wrecked the deer, the car and my week. There aren’t any signs down that stretch of A-road, but I’ll certainly be watching out in future.

I wasn’t ready to drive to London late on Thursday, so headed straight to the Harrow campus on Friday morning. After a full day of lectures I met up with Abi at half 6, then we headed off on the supposedly twenty-minute journey over to our friends in Kilburn. Having never really driven in London before, I came to this conclusion: I have no clue how people do it without dying.

It was mental. I’d wait for the exit to clear at a yellow box-junction and have three people overtake. People jumped red lights as I was trying to turn right in front of them, then took umbrage at my being in their way. And don’t even mention roundabouts. We reached our destination an hour later, then set off for Devon at about 2000. We arrived at 0300, after hitting two major traffic jams on the M4.

I’m normally ok in long queues of traffic, but watching the SatNav’s ETA tick over into the early hours was a little depressing. So, I kept the others and myself entertained with classy music, and taught them the Norbert Dentressangle game¹, which I’m sure they greatly appreciated. I, of course, won the latter
Next morning it was up at 0700 for the wedding, and it turned out to be a lovely day indeed.

1. three points for the first person who shouts ‘nooooooooooooooorbert dentressangle’ on first sight of a truck [↩]

I’d agreed to drive to Liverpool this morning, on an errand to pick up some hard-to-find tiles for a friend. Driving distances doesn’t bother me much - I just plug in Hettie the TomTom, stick on some podcasts and I’m away. Usually.

I was up at 0645, and in the car half an hour later. I haven’t replaced Hettie’s stolen holder yet, so I had a wodge of blu-tak to hold her down. Once attached to the dashboard she wouldn’t boot up. I figured I must have left the power on - satnavs by their nature don’t have auto power-offs - so I reached for the charger, couldn’t find it, and realised after five seconds that it was probably stolen too. Don’t know why it took me so long to realise. Hmmm. Problem.

Contrary to popular opinion, satnav users are perfectly capable of navigating by other means. My map-reading skills have always been ok - it’s remembering the instructions while driving that I struggle with. I can remember maybe three steps, but place / road names simply fall out of my head after that. Thankfully, hurried consultation with the ever-so-clever Google Maps (you can drag the planned route around, and it’ll re-calculate timings!) revealed the entire drive to Liverpool consisted of “M6 J21a. M62 to end. Right, second major left, look for shop.” So for the first time in three years I drove somewhere without a little voice telling me the way. Admittedly I lost confidence on the second major left and pulled over to check. But still, I’m chuffed that I managed it without getting lost at all.

I arrived home around 1400, which wasn’t too bad. By this afternoon I’d forgotten that I even went…By this afternoon I’d forgotten that I’d been…I’d forgotten, by this afternoon, that… I apparently can’t do tenses/elegance tonight.

After realising I had no contact lens fluid at my parents’, and being warned never ever to sleep in them by my optician, I risked the journey home. A kind RAC man turned me around before I hit the 0.7m of water at Henley-in-Arden, but the motorway was clear, albeit with a large number of breakdowns. The A46 into Stratford was a worry but turned out to be clear for the most part. It never fails to amaze me that, despite truly appalling weather conditions, people are still prepared to roar past me in the last metres before a blind corner. It’s mind-numbingly stupid on a clear day, but with that much water on the roads it’s pretty much criminal.

I didn’t get a good look at the Avon, but it was peeking over the edge of the manual river-boat crossing, which is certainly as high as I’ve seen it. Yikes. I also took a pass around the local Waterstone’s, just to see what was happening. Despite the rain there were plenty of people, some in costume, milling around and it all looked like good fun. I was jealous and half-considering joining them just for the atmosphere, when somebody shouted ‘HARRY POTTER’ from one end of the street. They could so easily have followed it with ‘lives’ or ‘dies’, and it’s not worth the risk.

Two men have lost their appeal to European courts over the use of speed cameras. They claimed it violated their human rights to be forced to reveal who was driving the car. Or something. Maybe they had a case. I don’t care: it’s transparent bollocks, and everyone knows it. 

I wish they’d just come out and say what they really mean: “I want to drive faster”. This is it. This is the sole motiviation behind complaints about speed cameras. They couldn’t care less about road safety, and they couldn’t care less about their civil liberties. Nobody spends time talking about speed limits and safety measures on the railways. It’s obvious what this is really about, and I’m sick of it.

The never-ending complaints about devices that punish people for breaking the law are moronic, laughable and pathetic. ’Money-making devices’, ‘nanny state’, etc. etc.. For crying out loud! It is not obvious to me that it’s safe to do 90 on the motorway. It is not obvious to me that it is safe to do 40 in a 30 zone when ‘it’s quiet’, ’the houses are set back’, ‘I have a 2 litre car’ or whatever tedious excuse people come up with when they just want to drive faster¹. Neither is it apparently obvious to the road safety experts who create the laws.

If you really, really think that it’s safe to drive faster, bloody well start a campaign to have the limits raised. Or a variable speed system. Or a free-for-all where the onus is on fragile humans to keep away from massive kinetic machines. Whatever. Something tangible, backed up with proper, statistical evidence that isn’t something you heard Jeremy Clarkson say. Complaining about enforcement and not the law itself just makes me think you have no case.

I’ll bother listening once speed-camera campaigners have something to say that doesn’t smack of a complete disregard for the expertise of road safety experts, other road users and the legal system. Until then it’s just the ramblings of a bunch of speed-junkies.

1. incidentally, I suspect the feeling of speed is entirely subjective: 50 feels terribly slow once you get off the motorway. People don’t want to drive faster, they want to drive faster than everyone else [↩]

The guy overtook me at 80-90mph in the 50 limit. Nothing particularly unusual for my drive home, if a little faster then the usual tailgaters, but a few minutes later I caught him up. He’d dropped down to 30. A couple of cars were between us, and more quickly piled up behind me. The cars ahead began to overtake, but there was definitely something off about the suddenly slow sports car at the front. I hung back. The people behind decided to overtake 3/4 cars at once, and I quickly extricated myself by pulling over for a few seconds. The road was straight, and in the distance I saw the original car accelerate and start overtaking people on a blind corner leading into a steep hill. I saw them all briefly a couple of minutes later, and he appeared to be pulling the same stunt. Christ.

Scientists: I implore you. Whether it’s jetpacks, trainable dragons, teleporters or Minority Report style public transport, please do something to separate the car and the male ego. I don’t want to die just because some jerkoff thinks his three-litre engine makes him a god.

I’m sorry to be this guy, but I feel it necessary to momentarily sink into the land of Mr Telegraph.  Parking for 2.5hrs in a Worcester multi-storey just cost me £6.20. £6.20! This is a lot of money. It’s not indicative of disgusting Labour policies, modern youth, or a campaign against drivers, though. It’s just a lot of money.

In an unrelated vein, what is this white kak all over the front of my trousers?! It’s not what you’re thinking, although quite honestly there are similarities. I think I’ll change before going out again.

Given the large signs indicating the correct motorway exit, the presence of a sat-nav unit telling me to turn off and my having driven the route many times before, I wonder how I nevertheless managed to miss the M69. Oh well, doubling back only added twenty-five minutes to the eighty minute journey
I had a great and busy weekend with Abi, including seeing Coriolanus at the RST, a social dance¹ and trips to the Butterfly Farm and Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I knew nothing about Coriolanus before Saturday, but enjoyed it very much. It was surprisingly fast-moving and unpredictable, neither of which I’ve found to be common Shakespearean traits², and the production was beautifully lit and staged. I really recommend it, especially since balcony tickets are £12.

This was at the Butterfly Farm:

I don’t need to own anything with a name that includes both ‘giant’ and ‘hissing’.

1. that a whole bunch of my friends failed to turn up to, disappointingly [↩]
2. not a criticism, just an observation [↩]

A man on the radio just now was disgusted after being fined and getting three points for reading a text on the motorway. He was only checking to see who it was from - he wasn’t talking or anything! Maybe people should get points for demonstrating they have no sense.

And then there’s the guy who uses his mobile at 100mph on the motorway because he’s been driving for 42 years without an accident, but it’s ok because he’s in a big, fast Volvo (his words). I just don’t know how you justify that to yourself. What is it with the bravado that goes with driving dangerously? The number of people who give me smug little smiles while explaining how fast they’ve driven, or that they use their phone…

If somebody steps out in front of me and dies, I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing it hadn’t happened. If I’m going too fast, or on the phone, I’ll spend the rest of my life knowing they might still be alive if I’d been obeying the law. It’s a complete no-brainer - I’m in control of a massive machine travelling at high velocity only metres away from fragile beings: the onus is entirely on me to do everything I can to be safe, and my judgement is nothing compared to qualified road safety experts.

I’ve been called a ‘goody-goody’ when people discover I only drive speed limits after asking questions that assume I go as fast I possibly can. I’m fed up of this. I like the exhilaration of speed as much as the next guy, but there is no justification for putting yourself above other people on public roads because “it’s quiet”, or “the houses are set back”, or my favourite “I have to keep up with traffic”. It sometimes seems like most men¹ are incapable of making this distinction, but maybe that’s unfair. Thus far I’ve quietly fumed when people look down their noses at me, but one day I’m going to react badly.

Man, some issues get me annoyed rather quickly. I should stop listening to the Jeremy Vine show I shall have some lunch and calm down.

1. let’s face it, it’s normally men [↩]

Some decent commentary for anybody who, like me, is far from convinced by the road pricing = slippery slope to killing babies hysteria…Firstly, there’s a great fisking of the recent email campaign encouraging people to sign the petition:

The government’s proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to purchase a tracking device for your car [they've made this up] and paying a monthly bill to use it. The tracking device will cost about £200 [they've made this up too] and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working mother who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month. [Since the scheme doesn't exist, none of these people have actually paid anything to anyone. What the BBC did was make assumptions off their own bat of what charges might be, without making any allowance for the savings on petrol tax.]

On the Telegraph’s front page ‘black boxes will cost £600′ article:

…[T]he Telegraph has:
* Assumed that the most expensive variant of the scheme (intelligent black box in every vehicle) is adopted
* Assumed that the maximum estimated cost is the correct one
* Assumed that mass-production for every vehicle in Britain produces no economies of scale

There’s plenty more. The BBC ran a survey:

The e-mail comes after 74% of the 1,006 people questioned for a BBC-commissioned survey said they were opposed to charging motorists by the mile.

But 55% of those spoken to said they would change their minds and support such a scheme if the money raised was used to improve public transport.

If you ask me this suggests that the majority aren’t, in fact, opposed to the idea.

More than 25% said nothing would make the policy acceptable to them.

Nothing. Nothing at all would make the policy acceptable to them. The eradication of all taxes and free bouncy castles for everyone? Not enough. Ok, that’s a bit silly. But still. A Downing Street petition (they didn’t tell us it was there!) in favour of road pricing can be found here (via B4L, which also includes links to pro-road-pricing arguments).

I drove through a red light this evening. Not a clue how or why. I’d been sitting there waiting, and can only imagine that something somewhere turned green - possibly the lights further around the roundabout - and I moved off. First time I’ve done that (or, at least, that I’m aware of having done that). I wasn’t particularly tired or distracted, it just happened…weird. There was nobody around so it was safe, but the junction was at a slip road exit so it’s possible there was a camera somewhere. I’ll completely deserve the points on my license if that comes through. Pretty stupid.