I just spent 2 days travelling 500 miles around our lovely, verdant isle. Well, I say ‘lovely’ because some of it is. Not much, judging by the views from the M1 and M6, but the odd smattering of green fields and pastures new, a few sheep a’grazing and all that other rural bollocks that ‘we love’. But I was able to witness first hand the UK’s major industry. Roadworks. Never mind Brexit, we don’t need ‘em. We’ll just employ everybody here on the roads. It’s Britain’s answer to any unemployment crisis; repair more roads. Give up your useless, unproductive job selling financial services to the Germans, get yerself a hard hat and stand on the M1 with a cup of tea in your hand. Though in fact on the (approximately) 200 miles of roadworks out of those 500 we traveled, I saw two lorries driving up central reservations and not one solitary road-worker. Not one. What does that do to the tea industry??? Maybe they have automatic machines that operate themselves and its just all too clever form me to understand. But there were no workers. Nowhere the twang of hot tarmac.

If you live in Australia or America, you kind’a know with a fair degree of certainty that a journey of 500 miles would take you so many hours. And it would. Ok there may be a holdup somewhere but you could time the trip with a precision that we Brits are never allowed. Because they don’t dig up a couple miles of motorway, which would be a minor inconvenience, they close off 30 miles of it and reduce it to narrow lanes. And the killer touch, they impose 50mph limits on those sections controlled by the dreaded ‘average speed cameras’. The ones you can’t drive up to at 90 and slam on your brakes for a hundred yards then hit the superchargers again. These are the bastard cousins of the normal (just standard ‘motherfucker’ speed cameras) which work out your average speed along a whole section of road. So I reckon 53/54 is the limit. 50 is agony, 54 is merely deeply, profoundly frustrating.

So all in all, I reckon that my 3 hour journey was increased by 2 hours. Not by traffic, which was remarkably ok, but by the ridiculous speed restrictions. And so many of them. No-one there in road-control-land seems to realise that if traffic moves faster it causes less problems. Or better still, the problems become someone else’s because they happen 17 miles up the road in a different county.

The easy way to slow down traffic is what they do on the way up. They put big signs up offering directions and show you that you are headed to ‘The North’. And as no-one really ever wants to get there you automatically find yourself lifting your right foot a bit. Ok, a little bit.

Home never felt so good.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx