So near and yet so far

Long standing readers of my blog (who really should pull up a chair and rest their weary legs) will know that I have had my fair share of journeys from hell over the years. Today's trip was a real doozy though.

Things started promisingly enough. The sun was shining, I treated myself to an iced coffee to sup on on the way, and even the 10 mile stretch of roadworks around Nottingham wasn't too bad all things considered. One slightly odd occurrence occurred when I was in the loo at the services and noticed that the chap using the urinal next to mine was apparently talking to himself. I was relieved (in both senses of the word) when I realised that he was using a bluetooth headset - a whole new meaning to 'hands free' I suppose ...

I had my usual selection of podcasts to listen to, to whit Freethought Radio featuring an interview with the literally amazing James Randi, Skepticality with Swoopy talking to Dr Randy Olson about a more measured and effective response to the ID community than sniping from blog posts, and a fascinating In Our Time devoted to the extraordinary archaeological find of the great library of Nineveh (Cthulhu fans listen out for the bit about the suspiciously squamous fish priests). I also had my GTA IV soundtrack cd for some excellent cool tunes for driving along to.

As I say, things were fine until I got to the M6 at around a quarter to ten. It's usually another fifteen minutes or so to the office from this point, but the Radio 2 traffic bulletin was warning of a shed load at Wednesbury just as I joined the back of queue and everything ground to a halt, and stayed that way for the next two and a half hours. My iced coffee turned out to be a mistake as I found myself bursting for a wee and eventually had to resort to nipping to the hard shoulder where I found a handy door in the fence to go behind in the nick of time.

I eventually got to the office not far short of half past twelve which gave me just enough time to clear my inbox before going to Tesco for lunch where they were actually selling sushi - shock, horror - although the price tags said it was a 'discontinued line'. How can they discontinue it when they haven't even had it for a week?

I managed to get a few things done in the afternoon, although one of my PHBs decided to wait until four o'clock before breaking the invoicing routine and expecting me to fix it before I could sneak out to beat the traffic.

At least the journey home only took two hours, compared to the five hour slog in the morning. I was slightly worried when "Supper's Ready" by Genesis popped up on my mp3 shuffle and I found that I could still remember all of the 20 minutes worth of rather silly lyrics to it, including the immortal line "Can't you feel our souls ignite?" to which the answer is "Yes, I rather imagine that you would" ...