Driving Stress

I thought obstacle courses were for school sports days or army training, but over the years a new one has evolved in our lives. It's called the public highway... in other words, the roads we drive on. 

It consists of:

• Road humps, speed cameras, width restrictors, bus lanes, cycle lanes, low emission zones, congestion zones, parking cams, parking restrictions, potholes, average speed zones, 20mph zones (complete with speed bumps too);
  
  
• Roundabouts with traffic lights (aren't both designed to filter traffic? So why do we need two controls both doing the same thing?); 
  
  
• People sticking prams into the back of cars with the roadside door wide open, protestors walking really slowly in the road and not being moved on despite breaking the law; 
  
  
• Yellow box junctions, tailgaters, ditherers in hybrid vehicles saving the planet, pedestrians who do that funny, half-hearted run into the road and then walk the bit right in front of your vehicle; 
  
  
• Vehicles passing you on the inside on motorways, drivers who think the indicator is the new steering mechanism so when used, it entitles them to switch lanes without looking first, vehicles that only drive in middle lanes (why do people hog the middle lane so doggedly, even when it's not busy; this effectively turns a three-lane motorway into a two-lane one - most drivers realise you have to overtake on the right and go around the middle-lane hogger - hence the traffic jams that develop; 
  
  
• Drivers who think that a motorway slip road is something you accelerate on and then just drive out onto the carriageway at whatever speed they fancy, irrespective of how busy it is or how fast the traffic is moving, and with zero regard for who is already on it; 
  
  
• Joggers who think it's okay to run on the road, cyclists with their holier than thou ‘I’m a better person than you,' green, moral high ground attitude (it’s still a vehicle nobhead, get insured, stop riding on the pavement, stop riding across pedestrian crossings and stop taking your vehicle on trains);
  
  
• Jaywalkers, yellow lines, red lines, people pressing the pedestrian crossing light when there are no vehicles about except yours, pedestrian lights, busses getting priority everywhere and sheep (err... if you live in the country.) 

And it's called Driving In the United Kingdom. 

Roll on driverless cars! 

Wait a minute! Don't we already have those? Yeah, of course. We've had them for years. They're the ones that pootle along in the centre lane of the friggin' motorway, totally oblivious to anything else going on around them!

Hinges

The other day I passed a company van on the motorway that had a display on its side advertising ‘High Performance’ ironmongery. To illustrate this, it had a giant picture of a hinge. It made me think. What level of ‘performance’ do you need from a hinge? I would have thought it would be pretty basic. Using a door (a lid would work just as well) to illustrate, I would suggest it needs to perform two functions:

1. Along with its partner (that is something working in co-operation as opposed to being in some sort of civil relationship) it needs to secure the door or lid to the door frame
2. It needs to create rotation on a fixed axis so that the door or lid opens and closes

Other than those two functions I cannot see what else it needs to do. Therefore, I would suggest that its performance should not be measured in degrees of accomplishment. 

Nobody opens a door and says, “Wow, these hinges are right on their game today. Did you see the way they manoeuvred that door. Quality! Big improvement on last week, if you ask me.”

No pundits appear on television to give their assessment of hinge performance.
“Well, Clive, I think if these hinges continue to put in the sort of performances we have seen over the past few weeks, you gotta say they are approaching world class.”

So, in writing this, I don't mean to be critical of a company for trying to promote its ironmongery, but I think ‘high performance’ might just be a step too far for a hinge.

BBQs

Does anyone else get irritated by people using the silly abbreviation ‘BBQ’ - abbreviated in recent years by those whose vocabulary never surfaces above 'txtspk' to BBQ (and even then it still looks like a far east television station) - when referring to having a barbecue? I mean, there’s no 'Q' in the proper English spelling of the word. And, the actual word is not pronounced ‘bee bee cue’. 

“Fancy coming over on Sunday for a bee bee cue?”
“Sorry? A what!”
“A bee bee cue.”
“Uh... not sure... is that some sort of code?”
“Code? No, just... you know, err, a process for burning perfectly good food in my garden 'cos it gives me that sense of being 'back to nature' and makes me feel in control of something, like a tribal leader after a hunt. 

Mate. Calm down You got the sausages in Waitrose. You didn't hunt down some wildebeest and make burgers out of it. And, what's more, take a look around your territory. Yeah, you've got a perfectly good kitchen just ten metres away full of the modern appliances that can prepare food to a high standard with limited effort from the chef. And another thing, if you're going to 'get back to nature' shouldn't you be cooking over a pile of logs and not on some fancy contraption with dials all over the front that you plug in to the electrical supply?

And why do we plan barbecues in the UK anyway? We live in the northern hemisphere. It 'pleuts' down with rain even in the height of summer. There's no point in inviting all your friends around for such an event weeks ahead of it - well, not unless you live in the Outback of Australia where you are guaranteed barbecue weather. In this country you are more than likely to be holding the barbecue skewer in one hand and an umbrella in the other, prodding the slowly incinerating sausages around the grill, a steely determined and optimistic look on your face as the rain dribbles down the back of your Hawaiian shirt into your baggy shorts and your toes freeze in your flip flops. Your guests will also need an umbrella, a good set of waterproofs and a lifeboat crew on speed dial. But, no, the hardy English, irrespective of the weather, will show up in shorts and tee shirts, crack a beer pulled from a makeshift ice bucket that is not required because the temperature would make a hardened skier consider another layer, and ignore the looming cumulonimbus as they queue for an incinerated sausage.

So if you must drag out the barbecue, do it on an off-the-cuff basis. Meanwhile, I will continue to cook my sausages in the oven.*

*Having said that, see 'SAUSAGES' published in July 22 in this blog.

Flying Irks

Is travelling by aeroplane (is it ‘airplane’ these days?) getting more difficult instead of better? I am due on a flight in the morning and for the past few days I’ve been bombarded with tosh saying, ‘You need to do this, you need to do that, you need to fill in this form, your bag size must not exceed this, we need your Advanced Passenger Information, you need to check in before you get to the terminal or else… you must download your boarding pass (I would if you send the flippin’ things), you can choose your seat for an extra £794.’ Why would I want to choose my seat? It’s a two hour flight to Turin so unless there’s an option to sit between two porn stars who will ply me with Champagne throughout the flight, I’ll take my chances, and if I end up sitting next to the village idiot on his or her (equality needs to be fair across all categories) first trip abroad, too bad. 

I got offered ‘priority boarding’ too. I said, “NO!” Priority boarding might work if you were the only passenger to get it, otherwise you join the scrum to get on with fifty other ‘priority’ boarders who get on just before the backup scrum of the ‘no priority whatsoever’ bunch who don’t give a toss ’cos they’re getting on the same flight as the you and it ain’t leaving without them!

To top it all, just as I was leaving to drive to Stansted, I get a text that has some bollocks that says you need to check in THREE hours before your flight for ‘security’ reasons! Three hours! What security reasons? Specify, please, if you want me to dump my luggage and then sit for the next two and a half hours twiddling my thumbs. I mean, would you pitch up at a bus stop three hours before the bus is due?

It’s all nonsense to control the population, bit like religion! 

I'm just going to pitch up and say, “Look, I’ve done all that stuff you asked for, I’ve paid for my flippin’ flight, I’m the customer, I don’t work for your airline, but you do; so now do some of the work yourself. Oh, and stop looking at my bag as if you’re thinking, ‘Nineteen point seven kilos! What’s he need all that stuff for?’  

Let’s see how I get on!

Eating Out

I think restaurants are taking the customer service thing too far!

I popped into town for a walk (I’m a man of leisure these days... writing only) and decide to have an early evening supper (saves me cooking or bothering the servants on their day off). I found a nice place where I can sit with a glass of red and make some notes (for the chapter I’m working on.) I check the menu and order the Chef’s Special Burger.

Ten minutes later, I’ve got what seems like a perfectly cooked, tasty burger. I take one bite and the waiter comes along and says, “How’s everything? All okay, sir?”
I’ve got a mouthful of burger so I just mutter, “Yeah, all good, thanks.”
About ninety seconds later a waitress comes over and says, “Everything alright with your burger, sir?”
Again I’ve got a mouthful of food so I just mumble something and nod my head to indicate, ‘Fine,' although what I'm actually thinking is, 'Please just piss off and let me eat in peace. If there was something wrong with my bloody burger, I’d come and find you and tell you.’

Now I’m paranoid. Either they are trying to poison me, state execution style, because I’ve been a little bit negative about something the Government's done, or complained about Just Stop Oil protestors sticking themselves to the road, or some sarcastic remark I've made about the European Empire (maybe even the Eurovision Song Contest) or they’ve just employed a dodgy chef who made it here in a boat and the geezer’s never cooked a burger before!

I’ve left the burger, half eaten. Too risky. Now ordering another vino.

Car Stress

So, cars... anyone remember when most drivers could fix their cars on the street, when they went wrong? Even amateurs could have a go. A grease and oiled stained Haynes Manual was part of a driver’s toolkit.

Remember those jobs? Car won’t start... uh, yeah, better check the points. Nobody these days knows what the points were! Memory tells me they were a metal ‘thing’ with two ‘arms’ that had to be a thousandth of a millimetre apart or your car would not start or work properly. To measure this precise setting, you had to have a contraption that resembled a pacifist’s Swiss Army knife. It had a number of ‘blades’ ranging from a millimetre thick to minus four thousand light years thin, this latter one being so limp that you had to give it 1960’s viagra to make it work. To set the precise gauge setting of the points it was usually the middle ‘blade’ that did it. More luck than judgement. Once you’d set the points, you closed the bonnet and optimistically tried to start the car.

Then there was something called the distributor cap where you had to spray some kind of anti-moisture stuff into it to dry it out to increase the chances of the engine firing up. Then there was a thing called the choke. You pulled this out, especially on cold mornings, to give your engine a massive fuel fix, bit like an addict getting a first hit of the day, to get it going. Trouble was, you didn’t know whether to pull it out all the way and risk ‘flooding’ the engine so it packed up (hence the weird word ‘choke’, I guess and its strangulation connotations) or just halfway and hope for the best. The good old days, eh!

But modern cars! What a bloody nightmare. In ten years time today’s generation of cars will be seen to be the biggest cause of nervous breakdowns of this current era. You no longer ‘tell’ the car what to do, it tells you! If they are not bleeping with an array of warning sounds that make the Starship Enterprise sound obsolete, they are displaying an avalanche of information messages that set your teeth on edge and cause an involuntary, “what the f*cks wrong now?” curse as you try to make that simple trip to work. ‘Warning. Service required in 346 years’; ‘Diesel fluid additive low. Top up or your vehicle will disintegrate after 100 miles’; ‘Checking tyre pressures. Warning, near side rear tyre 0.00043 lbs per sq.in. less than recommended pressure.’ And then there’s the ‘lane departure’ bleeper with its accompanying screen image that shows a flashing orange warning. “I’m only going through my gates, for f*cks sake. I do this every night. I missed them by fifteen feet... again, like I did last bloody night! Calm down!”

I’m off down the scrap yard to find a Ford Cortina!

Impatience

I walked into a local bar that I’ve been to several times before. I made that eager face... you know, that face that says, ‘I’m next so serve me now before I pass out with thirst,’ at one of the girl’s behind the bar.

She approached me and said, “Sorry, I can’t serve you.”

My brain did a ‘what the feck’ blush type thing as it tried to recall what the hell I had done last time I was in that bar. I’m normally well behaved... well, for a Capricorn who has an alternative side. The bouncers weren’t moving towards me, so it had to be something else. But what? Often it’s an age thing. So, yeah, sometimes I get mistaken for being younger than I am, but the only reason they don’t serve people on the underage ticket is if they are under eighteen and I realise, even with the assistance of a top Hollywood specialist effects make-up artist, they’d struggle to get me within ten years of that.

I was momentarily lost for words, an odd occurrence, like being short of oxygen for a second, but the young lady then declared that she was simply a glass collector and at seventeen years of age, was not allowed to serve alcohol. I swallowed my paranoia, styled it out with a shrug and waited for an adult to take my order.