So tonight I had perhaps the longest journey home I’ve ever had. A 40 minute journey took 2 hours.
It started off badly, with a shunt on a main slip-road. I figured I’ve divert around it, so I queued past. The Police were on scene and the accident was blocking two lanes of the slip. Two miles down the road, another accident, this time blocking one lane of the dual carriageway. This was yet another shunt, and again the Police were on scene.
Next up, after a delay of around 30 minutes, I hit the motorway, and quickly find out that a lorry has crashed about 4 junctions down. This was having a terrible knock-on effect, and the local traffic reports were reporting that it was taking “over an hour” to get through as traffic was backed up for about 10 miles.
So, like a huge amount of people on the M6, I queued down, watching all the idiots driving down the slip-road, and went through Stafford. This is never a good idea because everyone else was doing it, and even the rat-runs and the rat-runs around the rat-runs were blocked. I managed to double-back on myself a little and got through Stafford fairly quickly but..
..then I got stuck behind someone being towed. The rope seemed to be pretty short, so he was constantly braking and every junction took ages to get across because the lead car couldn’t pull out quickly enough.
I was stuck behind it, but decided to take a very bumpy back-route through Cannock Chase. Sadly, the towed car did too, so I sat behind at 20 mph without any hope of overtaking. Then, that’s when we came across yet another accident. You couldn’t make it up. Virtually in the middle of no-where, a head-on collision and yet more Police waving people around. It took ages…
..in my earlier years I’d have been getting pretty annoyed by now, but with age comes wisdom.. or I’d like to think that anyway.
By this time I was hugely late, Billy had gone to bed and my dinner was stone cold. But instead of getting annoyed I figured that being late was probably a lot better than being in one of the FOUR accidents I’d been near on my route home.
Eventually the two cars moved and I was finally, finally on my way.
..until I turned the corner and got stuck behind 6 cyclists…
..then a horse…
..then, just yards from my house, an old guy walking in the middle of the road. Not crossing, oh no. Just walking… in the middle… of …the… road.
2 Hours…