So last week we headed up to collect Carol’s brother Colin from Lancashire and then headed over, for a few days away, to a little place called Crookham Eastfield up in Northumberland. It’s very close to the River Tweed on the English-Scottish Borders and it’s a lovely, fertile and peaceful part of the world, rich in places to visit.
Driving eh. I used to do well over 40,000 miles a year when I was in business (a lot of it the daily 4.5 hour commute from Buckingham to C London and back) and, believe it or not, pretty much enjoyed all of it. I’ve always been a guy who loves to drive. Until the last year or so….
I don’t want this posting to become a rant about how bad driving on British motorways is compared with Continental ones, though it might veer towards that I suspect. Fact is though that I have being driving 50k miles a year in this country for the last 20 years and now spend a lot of time on French, Swiss and, mostly, Italian motorways. So I reckon I’m well-placed to comment generally. And in general I find motorway driving increasingly painful, especially in the UK.
Right, well absolutely no-one was interested in my lorry-spotting musings in in-car ent 3 so I’ve gone for a more popular way for several adults to kill an hour whilst stuck in traffic; your pet items to consign to room 101. It actually works really well with 3 or more folk involved, as I was last week travelling back to Brighton with my lovely daughter and son-in-law, E and S. Grandson S was happily focused on the tracks from the CD, Happy Songs (some classics, some dogs but I’m proud to say that at 5 he knows all the words to James Brown’s I Feel Good). Grandson G was fast asleep – probably dreaming about what it’ll be like to be all grown-up and to have so many things to hate.
Conscious of the fact I’ve been doing a lot of footie and tv posts recently I thought I’d better add fill up the more specialised sections. Hopefully a few more of you will be enjoying the delights of car 3rd name collecting (or at least spotting). No? I bet you do – it gets to you. Here’s another pastime which I thought was my personal property. Actually as I’ve been validating some of my findings, I discover there are armies of people doing it – I’m talking lorry-spotting. Sounds dull as hell I know but as I’ve said before, I needed something to keep my mind active whilst commuting. But I didn’t just collect haulier names, there had to be a point to it….
Pasta Paulie 