Nothing screams more a festive morning without enough sleep than trying to shake a full protein chocolate drink without putting the lid on…..
It was all over the blinds, on me, even on the ceiling.
Definitely self inflicted sleep deprivation. A concert finishing in London at 11pm, followed by a 5 hour drive back to Yorkshire. Add another 2 hours for road closures designed to keep you from making any progress around the dreaded motorway that inspired Chris Rea’s The Road to Hell.
But it was all worth it. You don’t often get the chance to see Paul McCartney in concert and unbelievably get to see him play once again with Ringo Star. Duets via the magic of technology with John and George. Throw in a bit of Ronnie Wood and it was a truly unforgettable night.
We will even forgive Paul for playing that Christmas Song….
Maybe it’s like this everywhere but wow there is a shed load of roadworks right now. A few weeks back a motorway trip from here to London was like a Chris Rea, Road to Hell video. On this weekday, the 200 miles we travelled was for over half of them within roadworks. 3 lanes down to 2 or 1. Most of that done at crawling speed. Usually you can divert down the other possible motorway but that was basically a car park due to its own road work hell. A 4 hour journey ended up being double that. We even had traffic jams on the way back, at 2am…
It’s not just the motorways sadly….. Around our little bit of the Yorkshire countryside, the road work plague has gone into overdrive. We don’t have many roads here and at this time of year they should be muddy but quiet. They are definitely quiet as a good proportion of them are closed, partially blocked or about to be hit..
The Weather is fighting back and vandalising.
Mr Saddo got his map out and counted. I really need a life….
Our village has basically one road which then eventually branches out into 10 smaller roads heading out in various directions. Of those 10 branches 6 currently have road works badly effecting them, 2 more are closed for months and one of the last untouched roads is about to be hit for weeks…
Here when a road closes down the diversion takes you miles and miles in completely the wrong direction. So much worse when the diversion has to avoid other diversions. Deep sigh.
But there is a scary underlying thought here. All these roadworks around the world need lots and lots of signs, cones, barriers, speed cameras, portacabins, trucks, lighting, diggers, steamrollers and traffic lights. A mind boggling amount of stuff. For that motorway I mentioned at the start, apparently someone worked out that in the last 5 years it’s had over 100,000 different road works…. Imagine that spread across all the roads. Now imagine road utopia and there are no roadworks anywhere. WHERE DO THEY STORE ALL THE SIGNS and BARRIERS and EVERYTHING.
They can’t store it, we don’t have the storage capacity anywhere. There won’t be anywhere we can put this stuff except on the roads and motorways. Put the stuff on a road and it becomes a road works…. So we have to have roadworks and lots of them just to put stuff somewhere never mind if we actually need to fix a bit of tarmac.
We have created a Frankenstein Invasion, the Roadwork Monsters are among us permanently. All those dystopian movies about AI being the biggest threat to humanity and actually we end up losing control to ROAD CLOSED signs. I guess we had better just get used to being controlled and diverted in wrong directions.
A trip to the really really really big city…..Clearly it’s still not big enough as they are doing even more building work. Can’t believe no one asked for our Yorkshire Passports to come this far South.
While we were in the SOUTH we passed a local radio station doing an outdoor broadcast. The queue to get on LIVE seemed longer than the queue to get into this place…
I have never seen the attraction of being heard over the airwaves, just for a few short moments. The super wide berth Hawklad took around this Radio Unit clearly demonstrated his thoughts on that subject as well.
Back a few decades and at Warwick University I shared a student house with someone who was desperate to get their voice broadcast. This student spent so much time phoning in radio shows. Music Requests, Quizzes, Call-in Discussions, Traffic Updates, any method to get on air. Proudly telling anyone who would listen of the successful LIVE appearances. Hardly a week went by without another LIVE tale to tell. I’m amazed the Coventry Radio Stations never clubbed together to get a restraining order on him.
One time I did ask why he did this. His response sticks with me
“I hate the thought of being Mr Nobody…”
Rather ironic as I can remember the names of the other 5 housemates but can’t remember his name… It might have started with a P or S. AND actually Mr Nobody is kinda famous. Hawklad loved his Mr Men books and one of his favourite characters was this good looking chap.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 