Tuesday, June 9

Home early

A real life story this time :)

I don't really know the real reason, but the last half year or so my commute home is usually very smooth. It rarely takes more than half an hour. I don't think the global recession hit London that hard that people have stopped driving cars. Probably some other routes got opened and they now avoid the A40. Whatever it is, I am not complaining. But yesterday it went all wrong.

I left work already a bit late-ish, around six o'clock. And within five minutes I got already stuck in a jam to reach the highway. I have been stuck there before so I didn't get worried yet. The queue slowly moved forward and eventually I reached the ramp to get on the highway. But it was blocked by the police. From my surprised dead end spot I had a nice view on a completely empty A40. I heard later on the radio there was a major accident a few miles towards where I wanted to be. I hope everybody involved will be ok. But it did mean I was in a fix. A normally very busy highway was completely empty in both directions. No wonder there was such a jam. Everybody trying to get into and out of London to the west was forced to take the local roads.

Normally the twisty local London roads are already congested, but now the traffic of a four lane highway is passing through. And to make things even worse the road I have to take passes through Southall. Southall is a suburb filled for 75% by Indians and 25% Somalians. It is a great place to wander around on a lazy afternoon. The main street is filled with great shops, restaurants and tiny arcade markets. But Indians are the worst drivers I have ever met. For some reason need to get with the car exactly to the place they have to be. No matter that they blocked themselves and the road, and it would be much faster if they let people pass, or park at the big parking two block down. No matter what time you get there the place is always a complete deadlock.

So imagine my joy. Fortunately I had my bag of Haribo Tangfastics and my White Stripes, CSS and TingTings cds. I tried to get into a fatalistic I'll get there eventually mode and joined the thousands of other drivers in the long queue. Since I had probably expected the worst in the end it was not all that horrible. I managed to make the 12 mile journey in less than two hours, and by eight o'clock I was already home. Pretty exhausted, but not as worked up as many of the other drivers that I saw on the road that day.

After saying hi to my sweetheart, kicking off my shoes, and making a cup of coffee I am having a look at my computer screen. It had a lovely steam pop-up window with a message from Lani reading "You are home early today :-)".

6 comments:

  1. Ok, so who was logged onto your pc and ignoring my "Hey you're home early!" message over Steam's IM at 14:25 CET yesterday afternoon?

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  2. That must have Joscelin *grin*

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  3. It never occurred to me you might be sharing an account :-)

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