Roads and egos

Friday 21st: I decided to go home. The home in Wirral. I have so many different addresses now. My car almost feels like one as well. I can fit all I need to live in it, the back seats would serve quite nicely as a bed. It hasn’t come to that though, yet.

I didn’t even have to be in work, but my infallible internal alarm system had me up and wide eyed at 6am. Great. I have never managed to do so much in a morning however, always the optimist. I had a full cup of coffee to start with, no halves. And no water.

Knowing I would not have the internet for, gasp, 3 whole days, I checked all my emails (more reviews, yes!) and bid it goodbye. Am I becoming too dependent? Maybe.

It was easy to pack the car up, I’m really getting good at this now. My favourite item to be packed was the little stash of sweets and chocolate I’d been saving for the whole of Lent. I was so impressed with myself for not eating a bag of jelly belly beans for over a month. Not one. They would soon find their resting place though. I had chocolate and other sweets too; Mars planets and a single Lindt truffle, heaven; and a pack of love hearts, some of my favourite sweets ever. Chalky, sweet goodness, mmmm. It constantly surprises me that I still have all my teeth and no fillings.

It was a lovely bright day, the nicest it had been so far in Oxford. Never mind culture shock, I’d had temperature shock. So I set out in high spirits across and up country. Almost immediately on leaving Oxford though, I was downcast. Traffic. The main A road out of the city was jammed. We crawled along for 20 minutes, only to see NO REASON at all for the delay, one minute we were waiting, the next moving. I hate that.

Then the motorway was blocked, for no discernable reason, huge, depressing queues, then clear roads. Whenever that happens I wonder if it really is that someone has braked. Quite possibly. If so, that someone was braking on every single road I drove on. The M40, the M42, the M5, the M6, Stafford service station… yes, even the service station had a traffic jam. I chuckled to myself eventually at the drivers who hadn’t realised that you could get all you needed from the petrol station, which was not jammed. Which I did, and felt not at all smug.
Then the A550 which I escaped onto from the M6 clogged up, and the M53, even the B road into Wirral