My day

Every now and then you have one of those days when you're glad to be alive and all is well with the world. Since there exists balance in all things in nature, it is only to be expected that you will also experience Other Days, days where the only reasonable course of action seems to be winding down the window of life and yelling "you fuckers!" out of it with great gusto. If my day today was a vegetable, it would have definitely been an aubergine, and you may know by now how I feel about aubergines. Yes. Satan's vegetable.

So. Up very shortly after five to do the horses and set off for work at around 6:50am. Bit of traffic on the M20; accident. No biggie. Outskirts of Lewisham however: very gnarly. In a fit of thoroughly undeserved optimism, particularly in view of a complete lack of (a) satnav or (b) even the most vestigial sense of direction, I decided to seek out a back route.

It started off pretty well actually, good little route through the surprisingly genteel Lewisham Park until I realised I was heading back towards the main Lewisham roundabout (always gnarly), and opted to carry on a beating my path of discovery a bit further. Big mistake. Crofton Park, Forest Hill, even Catford FFS and finally, finally, some while later, back on the main sodding drag exactly where I had already been, heading down to Lewisham roundabout. Much gnarly traffic, an increasingly turgid bladder, a rumbling stomach and a petrol tank best described as "terminally flaccid". Eventually made it to work some two and a half hours after I set off.

There's only one thing to do after such a journey, which is to go and seek out the biggest soya cappuccino known to man and repair to the office, rocking quietly back and forth while consoling oneself with caffeine, a cheese and tomato panini and the prospect of a meeting about how to clear a building containing anything up to 1000 students in the event of a fire.

So all is well, I'm in the meeting and I'm two thirds of the way down my cup of coffee when suddenly, out of nowhere, an unprovoked Attack of the Anarchic Epiglottis. Paralysed just long enough to send a quantity of coffee lungwards, it provoked an explosion of fluid over the immediate surfaces, including but not restricted to table, colleagues and building maps. As a result of this experience I can say with some authority that the reach of one mouthful of coffee can be quite surprising when expelled at great velocity.

Often after a day like that I like to self-medicate on the way home with the liberal application of some heavy duty dance music on my favourite radio station, Project FM Live.I am also by now quite adept at letting some often rampant WTFery on the part of other drivers wash over me while I make my painful crawl back through the Lewisham badlands. After twenty years of driving I've pretty much seen it all. Broken down all over, had my Beemer totalled by a French lorry (Lewisham roundabout), thoroughly murdered one Volvo and one MG ZR (head gaskets), been pranged, done prangs, been cut up, etc etc.

But today two things happened which I have never seen before and which raised the bar on car-based fuckery to a whole new level. Episode 1: in a two lane road waiting to turn left onto the A2, behind a bus which quite reasonably in view of its width and turning circle of a small oil tanker straddles both lanes. I pull up next to a guy in a van. My peripheral vision clocks that he is becoming quite exercised by this and he inches forward aggressively, cuts me up and starts ranting and raving at me while I sit quite legitimately in the outside lane. WTF. He's still ranting as he sails through the lights. Perhaps he's had a bad day.

Let it wash off as he roars in front of me and takes up the one car-length spot outside the junction box that I might otherwise have taken had I not been so rudely undercut. No matter. Wait for the lights again, but there's nowhere to go that won't cost me money. Last time I inadvertently ended up stranded on that junction box it cost me 60 quid, so I wasn't about to do that again. Quite reasonably, as far as most people are concerned. However. I couldn't help but notice that the sausage eaters in the car behind were becoming rather irritated by this rampant adherence to the rules of the road, gesticulating wildly and swearing with sufficient vigour to presumably cover the inside of their windscreen with a fine film of spittle. The lights going red were the final straw and, unable to wait a moment longer, they swung round and flew past me at at least 3000mph, still gesticulating with sufficient vigour to allow the fact that the lights were red to escape them, only to come to a screaming halt right in the middle of the junction box. I do not ordinarily like to indulge in karmic incorrectness by wishing misfortune and pestilence upon my fellow man, but on reflection it wouldn't hurt at all for Karma to sprinkle her fairy dust on them, perhaps in the form of a 60 quid fine.