Abroad thoughts from home
Dec. 26th, 2004 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaPre-Christmas...
On leaving the house to head home to Darlington(in something of a hurry), I did my usual trick of only just remembering to grab my coat from the rack before leaping into the car. Just to help you get the picture, my coat is an ankle-length black leather trenchcoat; I threw it onto the back seat.
Some time later in the day, wearing the coat to keep out the cold, I ate aSnickers Marathon flapjack and, being a nicely-behaved sort, tried to put the wrapper into my coat pocket. How odd, I thought, as my hand vanished to the elbow, I don't remember ripping the lining of that pocket. In fact, I don't remember my pocket looking like that. In fact, I've got ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
secutatrix's coat on. Damn.
Secutatrix and I have subsequently talked to each other's answerphones, me to apologise profusely and offer her my coat in exchange, and her to tell me not to worry and not to try putting anything in the pockets. She warned that a couple of packets of Lucky Strike and half a bottle of red wine have been missing in those pockets for some years.
Which is nice, but misguided of her. What she hasn't realised is that, now I've got to Darlington, I'm going to get North all over her coat. By the time I return it, the pockets will be going after packets of Regal kingsize and bottles of Newcy Brown. Hopefully by then I'll have worked out how this enables me to take over the world.
I think this venturing north probably constitutes the worst journey home I've had since I stopped entrusting my person to Virgin Crosscountry. Most of the M1 was suffering from vicious crosswinds, of the sort fthat make "Stay In Lane" more a challenge than an injunction, and overtaking lorries a test of nerve rather than acceleration.
My car dates from an era when design philsophy was still at the boxy=good stage, and also has no power steering, which makes it a real effort to drive in crosswinds. I felt sorry for the lorries who were veering and swinging about as gusts caught them, trying to blow them across to the outside lane.
After one minor hold up for the sort of crash which my mother refers to as a bodyshop benefit gig - no injuries, but a lot of expensively dented metal - the traffic came to an abrupt halt. I sat still while a succession of police cars hurtled up the hard shoulder, followed by a paramedic and a fire engine. As the queue inched slowly round the bend in the road, the problem came into view. When the back of the lorry you can see is landscape rather than potrait, something is amiss.
Judging by the heavy score marks on the carriageway as I passed the overturned lorry, it must have heeled over in the inside lane, then slid across all the lanes to end up over the central reservation. The amazing thing, to me, was that no other vehicles seemed to have been involved - I imagine that people must have seen the lorry tipping, and kept their distance.
All the warning signs were encouraging drivers to slow down in the winds. I'm aware that driving more slowly makes you more stable and less likely to tip over - I learnt that racing matchbox vehicles round the garden - but I'm not actually sure of the physics behind it. Is it another of those vaguely unsatisfying explanations that boils down to surface area ?
The rest of the journey was beset by further accidents (mostly minor). Sitting in a queue a little before Wetherby, the car rocking in the wind, I eventully acknowledged defeat, switched off the engine, and got a book out.
By the Wetherby stage, I wasn't worried. I was safely in the North, in my own territory, and on the way home. People have occasionally asked me when the North starts, and I have a very precise answer: as you pass the pair of cooling towers on the east side of Tinsley Viaduct. That's about "Sheffield" to the nearest whole city.
There are landmarks to watch out for before then - like the large, green building near the Matlock turn off, which says in big white capitals "JOY MINING MACHINERY". I have no idea what this building is for (and I don't want to know, because I suspect the reality is crashingly mundane). However, it's the bright lights of Medder'all on the western side of the viaduct that I'm looking out for.
Tinsley Viaduct has had roadworks on it as long as I can remember. It's had roadworks on it as long as anyone can remember. When Daniel Defoe wrote his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain in the 1720s, he wrote of Sheffield "a delightful City, but those Works at Tinsley are a Fair Bugger". They're very benign roadworks just at the moment, causing no real inconvenience to anyone, beyond a temporary 50mph speed limit. No one appears to be doing any real work there, the cones and roadsigns are more like the Barbary apes, or the ravens at The Tower; a talisman to ensure the luck of the area. And as I drive through the array of cones, my very own twin towers let me know that I'm into friendly country and 99 miles from home.
Disappointingly, since the new M1/A1 link road was built, I no longer drive along the section which contains what family tradition used to desscribe as the first sign of civilisation: the sign which reads "Scotch Corner 53". These days I have to make do with a sign advising me it's 40 miles to Scotch - in fact, there are two such signs, around a mile apart. This is something to note with bitterness when it takes you the thick end of 90 minutes to drive between them.
After that, the names and landmarks get increasingly familiar up until the strangely crenolated little building just before my junction. The places have names I've known all my life, so I pass them with none of my usual ridicule for silly placenames: these are simply names. While the River Erewash in Derbyshire always makes me smile, the River Ure is just a river. Despite something of an excess of delight at passing a sign for Thrupp in Oxfordshire last weekend, the turning for Wath is acknowledged merely as a marker for how far I've travelled.
On leaving the house to head home to Darlington(in something of a hurry), I did my usual trick of only just remembering to grab my coat from the rack before leaping into the car. Just to help you get the picture, my coat is an ankle-length black leather trenchcoat; I threw it onto the back seat.
Some time later in the day, wearing the coat to keep out the cold, I ate a
secutatrix's coat on. Damn.Secutatrix and I have subsequently talked to each other's answerphones, me to apologise profusely and offer her my coat in exchange, and her to tell me not to worry and not to try putting anything in the pockets. She warned that a couple of packets of Lucky Strike and half a bottle of red wine have been missing in those pockets for some years.
Which is nice, but misguided of her. What she hasn't realised is that, now I've got to Darlington, I'm going to get North all over her coat. By the time I return it, the pockets will be going after packets of Regal kingsize and bottles of Newcy Brown. Hopefully by then I'll have worked out how this enables me to take over the world.
I think this venturing north probably constitutes the worst journey home I've had since I stopped entrusting my person to Virgin Crosscountry. Most of the M1 was suffering from vicious crosswinds, of the sort fthat make "Stay In Lane" more a challenge than an injunction, and overtaking lorries a test of nerve rather than acceleration.
My car dates from an era when design philsophy was still at the boxy=good stage, and also has no power steering, which makes it a real effort to drive in crosswinds. I felt sorry for the lorries who were veering and swinging about as gusts caught them, trying to blow them across to the outside lane.
After one minor hold up for the sort of crash which my mother refers to as a bodyshop benefit gig - no injuries, but a lot of expensively dented metal - the traffic came to an abrupt halt. I sat still while a succession of police cars hurtled up the hard shoulder, followed by a paramedic and a fire engine. As the queue inched slowly round the bend in the road, the problem came into view. When the back of the lorry you can see is landscape rather than potrait, something is amiss.
Judging by the heavy score marks on the carriageway as I passed the overturned lorry, it must have heeled over in the inside lane, then slid across all the lanes to end up over the central reservation. The amazing thing, to me, was that no other vehicles seemed to have been involved - I imagine that people must have seen the lorry tipping, and kept their distance.
All the warning signs were encouraging drivers to slow down in the winds. I'm aware that driving more slowly makes you more stable and less likely to tip over - I learnt that racing matchbox vehicles round the garden - but I'm not actually sure of the physics behind it. Is it another of those vaguely unsatisfying explanations that boils down to surface area ?
The rest of the journey was beset by further accidents (mostly minor). Sitting in a queue a little before Wetherby, the car rocking in the wind, I eventully acknowledged defeat, switched off the engine, and got a book out.
By the Wetherby stage, I wasn't worried. I was safely in the North, in my own territory, and on the way home. People have occasionally asked me when the North starts, and I have a very precise answer: as you pass the pair of cooling towers on the east side of Tinsley Viaduct. That's about "Sheffield" to the nearest whole city.
There are landmarks to watch out for before then - like the large, green building near the Matlock turn off, which says in big white capitals "JOY MINING MACHINERY". I have no idea what this building is for (and I don't want to know, because I suspect the reality is crashingly mundane). However, it's the bright lights of Medder'all on the western side of the viaduct that I'm looking out for.
Tinsley Viaduct has had roadworks on it as long as I can remember. It's had roadworks on it as long as anyone can remember. When Daniel Defoe wrote his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain in the 1720s, he wrote of Sheffield "a delightful City, but those Works at Tinsley are a Fair Bugger". They're very benign roadworks just at the moment, causing no real inconvenience to anyone, beyond a temporary 50mph speed limit. No one appears to be doing any real work there, the cones and roadsigns are more like the Barbary apes, or the ravens at The Tower; a talisman to ensure the luck of the area. And as I drive through the array of cones, my very own twin towers let me know that I'm into friendly country and 99 miles from home.
Disappointingly, since the new M1/A1 link road was built, I no longer drive along the section which contains what family tradition used to desscribe as the first sign of civilisation: the sign which reads "Scotch Corner 53". These days I have to make do with a sign advising me it's 40 miles to Scotch - in fact, there are two such signs, around a mile apart. This is something to note with bitterness when it takes you the thick end of 90 minutes to drive between them.
After that, the names and landmarks get increasingly familiar up until the strangely crenolated little building just before my junction. The places have names I've known all my life, so I pass them with none of my usual ridicule for silly placenames: these are simply names. While the River Erewash in Derbyshire always makes me smile, the River Ure is just a river. Despite something of an excess of delight at passing a sign for Thrupp in Oxfordshire last weekend, the turning for Wath is acknowledged merely as a marker for how far I've travelled.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-27 02:46 pm (UTC)On a related note, the "JOY MINING MACHINERY" sign is always one of the high points of travelling to Whitby, it's my second favourite building name type sign, only beaten by "The Institute Of Grinding Technology" down in Bristol.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 12:57 pm (UTC)I only have 'The Meaning of Liff', which I was going to suggest, but I was very much beaten to it! :) It's Ver' ver' good. I especially like the definition of 'Wetwhang'...