My Life in Car Journeys (Little Ones)

I got in my car, pulled out of my parking spot and I was instantly stuck behind a sheep.

Now, I am a firm believer that the road is not a suitable location for a sheep, I would argue that the mountain or, ideally, a field would be a nonpareil setting for them. But contrary to popular belief, they won't listen. Sheep are the go-to animal when attempting to characterise someone as a mindless follower through the specific use of animal comparison. This sheep was indeed an idiot, and was very slow in yielding right of way to me, daredevilishly slow when considering I had the whirring engine of my fierce Fiesta to assert my dominance with.

I think we should fit cars in rural areas with huge chomping maws with which to butcher wandering animals. I feel this will eventually breed a mistrust of cars in the beasts, and they'll stay out of my way. It would be useful to create a device which can convert lamb into power, as this will offer yet another cheaper and greener alternative to traditional fossil fuel.

More flashing light antics on the way home again, this time a police car had pulled over a large white transit van. This had helpfully played out in a stretch of road where two lanes merge into one, causing confusion and brouhaha. As I drove past my head was filled with the voices of The Trap, cacophonously shrieking "fooching ewwh, ichs thuh fooching filfth!" in grotesquely over-egged Liverpudlian accents. And I was amused.

I also came level with a learner driver at a roundabout, he/she was going straight on, whilst I was turning right. It was a short lived romance however, as I pulled assuredly and safely onto the roundabout, and he/she floundered nervously at the junction. I swelled with a bloated sense of my own road competence, but I have since come to rue the loss of a romance that could have been.

I also saw girls (ACTUAL ONES!) in long socks and short skirts on my drive home, and that really hammered home quiet how much of a lecherous oik I am/can be. I then came home and had a jam sandwich. Mmmm. On both counts.

*****

P.S. TextEdit repeatedly replaced 'oik' with 'irk', which is ironic as I was indeed irked by the end of it, and I feel that automatic correction is an oik, and incredibly detrimental to creative writing. Such as the bit where I phonetically attempted 'Fucking hell, it's the fucking filth!'.

Creative, odd and/or archaic language is hugely important to me. The ladies love archaic language as well. At least those were the particulars bequothed unto mineself.

Ambulation

More tales from the dashboard today. Once again, this comes from driving home from work.

It seems the most excitement, or at least out of the ordinary activity, in my day stems from unusual nighttime behaviour from the drivers of Wales.

There lies an 40 em pee aitch zone just out of the gates from whither I work, this is a different zone from the last entry, just so people don't think I am obsessed with zones where the speed limit is 40 miles an hour. This isn't the case. Anyone spreading such untruth about me is fabricating it and furthermore, is clearly a buffoon.

Temporary traffic lights had been set up in this zone, as They are tearing up one lane of the road for their nefarious ends, They know who They are. I'm talking to you, Local Council. I assume that's who is in charge of repairing the roads. I could be wildly naive in my understanding of road-repairing. In fact, I most certainly am wildly naive in my understanding of Government at every level. I watch The Thick of It for the dynamic camerawork.

Back to the traffic lights; temporary.

I drove towards them in my car, and they were on green, so I deduced, thanks to my knowledge and experience of UK driving rules, that it was okay for me go straight through. Moreover, it would not only be 'OK', but any other action apart from driving through would provoke aggravation from other road-users. I was most definitely in the right, is my point.

A rather sharp turn follows the traffic lights; temporary, and I crested the corner gracefully, with a steady hand, and true steering. Imagine the vibrant disquiet that took hold of me as my eyes were filled with a vision of a wayward ambulance, converging upon my bonnet like a meteor towards a Victorian gentlewoman. So reckless was the decision of the ambulanceteers to plough down a one lane road against a red light, I would describe their motion with the verb; 'to careen'. Ambulances shouldn't careen. If they were, they would be called Careenbulances. You're right, they wouldn't. Careenmobile?

So how did I avert catastrophe and make base safely enough in condition to write this missive to the world.

Well, some would say that I was driving sensibly enough that I was able to reverse at a brisk yet safe and steady pace and avoid the mass of the rampaging ambulance. Rampagebulance.

However, here is the truth of the matter.

I reacted instantly to the dreadful vision, activating the Incorporeal Mode on my Boeing SevenFordFiesta, rendering my vehicle, and myself, ethereal, passing through the charging health-unit without suffering any physical contact. As the cockpits of our two vehicles came level, I dislodged myself from the intangibility process, and once again became Incarnate. I used the momentum I had built up, and sailed just over the driver's head, performing a nimble and concise flip as I did so, allowing me to grab hold of the driver's ears and send him in a gargantuan piledriver down the length of the ambulance.

The driver landed sickeningly in a heap at the far end of the vehicle, limbs splintering out from her torso like a deformed pine cone.

Ironically she had landed on one of the medical pallets set up in the back, although the irony was lost on all as the now-driverless ambulance sped over the lip of a sheer drop, sending the helpless crew into a fatal nosedive.

I once again became impalpable, rising gently through the roof and hovering calmly in the still evening air, high above the vehicular pogrom below, which was quickly setting the surrounding greenery into a vivid blazing torment.

Women drivers, eh?

Hazardous

On the way home from work today in my car I was much perturbed by an happenstance which took place before me.

There was a car in front of me, and another in front of that, but the crux of this tale focuses not on these, but on the vehicle just in front of them.

I could not see the colour nor the variety of this car, as it was dark already by this point, nor am I able to discern the details merely from its shape, as cars really are not my area of expertise nor interest.

The car in question was driving in an aggravating manner, and the specific area of driving in which it was aggravating was in the area of its speed. It was going at the wrong speed. We (the drivers and the cars) were in a zone which had been decreed by the government as a 40 miles per hour zone. This means that you are able to drive at that agreed speed in this area, and no higher. Of course, it is completely legally acceptable to drive at a slower pace, although it is generally frowned upon by red-blooded drivers. And also horned upon.

The car in question was driving at around 10 miles per hour lower than the highest point of allowed speed, clocking in at around 30 miles per hour. I felt that this was slightly too fast to be genuinely annoying, and yet not fast enough for me to feel the benefit of the 40 zone, which I was using in order to minimise the time it would take me to get home.

It was too fast to briskly and comfortably overtake the car, especially with the bulk of traffic coming the other way, it would have been too dangerous a manoeuvre to attempt, especially bearing in mind that my car is not the Batmobile, nor the car used by Inspector Gadget. The Gadgetmobile?

More distressing than this, however, was the insistence of the car to drive with its hazard lights flashing. This confused me, as the car was still moving steadily, and yet it was proudly broadcasting the fact that it was a hazard. I wondered whether the car was towing the one behind it, and indicating this with its hazards. No, it was not. It was merely, in a subtle, undetectable way, being hazardous. We approached a junction, and I turned off the road and went over a bridge (always lovely) rather than trailing behind the hazardous car on the new road. This detour surely added precious seconds to my journey, and unquestionably resulted in the death of at least two seals. Which I now must wipe off my bumper.

The feeling I experienced in reaction to this hazard-car was not annoyance, or anger. It was far from road rage. It was more an illogical, deeply rooted unease, a feeling that something is intrinsically but indefinably wrong, such as when the volume on my radio is on an odd number rather than an even number.

This was mean't to be an examination of how little events can affect you in strange ways, but nothing of note happened on the alternative route home. Perhaps if I'd followed the car with its hazards on, or the Duke of Hazards which I am not calling it, I would have been killed in a huge towering blaze started when their hazard lights got really hot and did an explosion, transforming the reasonably paced car into a coasting fireball.

Probably all that would have happened is I would have gotten home and written a slightly different blog.

Sometimes, a butterfly in flaps its wings on the other side of the world, and all that happens is it gets caught in a butterfly hunter's net. That's right, hunter.

Although sometimes a butterfly flaps its wings on the other side of the world and is struck by a nuclear blast, and we all know what happens in that instance.

What am I Driving At?

I am spending a lot of time driving at the moment; driving to work, driving to the radio and driving a golf ball straight onto the green. Hilarious joke I think you will agree. Incidentally, I have absolutely no interest in golf.

I amuse myself with a friend on the trips to and from the radio, and with podcasts on the way to work, but I find myself bored on the way home. “Well Gilder, simply put another podcast on your iPod!” I hear you bellow. I would, of course, do this if it did not mean I would likely be out of new podcasts by midweek. So instead I make time for a little bit of silence, for thinking about silly ideas and for hate.

One of the ideas I enjoyed toying with was of mounting a wide-angle lens camera (either still or video) onto the bumper of the car that could record the journey, where the happenings around the car can be kept seen in a far more expansive scope than can be seen from behind the windscreen. My reasons for wanting to do this are far from artistic, having their roots in petty pedantry and the constant quest for what is correct. Like a scientist, except interested exclusively with the occasions where I feel I have been wronged, or individuals have acted in a particularly foolish way.

I have chronicled before my experiences with Captain Poon and his hilarious rugby jersey, but road-based idiocy isn’t usually as amusing. I am repeatedly exasperated by jaywalkers who insist on timing their reckless road-crossing to ensure they pass as close as is humanly possible to the back of my car without actually having their foot chewed up by my tyre. In this bracket also reside the people who feel it is necessary to stand on the absolute edge of the pavement as a zebra crossing, as though they have so little time to spare that they are willing to risk having their wrists broken by a passing wing-mirror.

Of course it isn’t just pedestrians that annoy me, it seems as though this week the road-faring characters have been well and truly out in style and no mistake sonny Jim! People are bombing into/out of junctions, failing to indicate at roundabouts and, my very favouritest thing of all, manically swinging an all-in-one-go U-turn in the middle of the road. I’m half expecting to see a Dukes of Hazzard style jump interrupt my commute, sending a car barrel-rolling over my bonnet, playing out the horn-blast just as the windscreens come parallel and a toothless, silver-haired geezer flashes me a thumbs up and a cheeky grin. Before landing the vehicle on its roof where it bursts into flame, the trickle of fire slowly winding itself to the petrol tank as the driver struggles furiously to escape from the seatbelt that is holding him upside down in what has become a motorized oven, and before he has time to utter an antiquated expletive the flame reaches the petrol tank sending the car into a molten inferno which I see slowly shrinking in my rear-view mirror and scream to myself “That’ll serve you, you COCK~!”

As I’m sure you will have gathered by now, I have borne witness to some damn stupid feats of driving. I attempt to only get angry in retrospect, as I feel exploding behind the wheel is likely to cause a troublesome occasion. What I certainly never do is stare directly into the rear-view mirror of the car in front, gesticulating wildly and screaming muffled obscenities. The reason behind this is that, should something go awry on the road, what I want is for everything to be in order again as fast as is humanly possible, and I don’t feel that antagonising the driver in front will achieve this aim. I have to turn right on a four-way intersection in order to make my way into work every day. The traffic is passing both ways parallel to each other, and so it is only possible for me to turn right once the traffic passing in the opposite direction has cleared, but the vast quantity of furious tools that don’t understand why I don’t simply drive headlong into oncoming traffic so as to be less of a bother to them is truly astounding. I am 100% sure, however, they are incredibly busy and on their way to do something of incredible value. Such as taking their seatbelt off and driving as fast as possible into a wall.

So I have become worried about some of the things I write here, and how they would be taken in a new context, such as if I was involved in a road accident. What impact would this blog have? It is mostly intended to be frivolous, and even this somewhat more exasperated piece is really meant to be amusing, though I’m not really certain I am achieving that at this point. This query originally occurred to me as I was driving through a 40 zone that is a notoriously dangerous strip where several people have been run over and killed. This time of year it is dark by the time I pass through this stretch on the way home, so I always pay particular attention going through there, though having never seen people walking, the main impetus for vigilance is idiotic over-takers. There is a gag about over-takers soon seeing undertakers there, but I’ll be huffed if I am going to wrestle that one out properly now.

On the side of this particular bit of road, there is a wooden fence lining the road, and standing flush to the fence are steel girders. In order to explain the slightness of gap between the fence and the girders I would say that if you tried really hard, you could fit a single emaciated idiot in there, multiple if they stood side by side. So there were between 3 and 5 emaciated idiots jammed betwixt fence and girder, and I worried as I went past that they would slide something under the car, such as a rock, a Police-style stinger strip or the sliding trapper from Ghostbusters. Thankfully they did no such thing, but I was left wondering what sort of trouble I would get into if one of them foolishly darted out into the road and I ran him/her over, whether it wouldn’t be seen as accidental because I’d written a flippant blog about running someone over. Similarly should any sort of RTA occur to me, would this blog be dug out as some sort of character evidence, even if it is 2030 and I am in my forties and I look back on the person who I was when I wrote this blog and think I/he am/is an idiot? Would I be condemned because of my feeble attempts at comedy?

I later realised it definitely wouldn’t. After all, we will all have hovercars by 2030 and so there are no tyres there for people to get chewed up by. Although they might get mutated by the radioactive waves upon which my Ford Glider zips over their heads. Although hopefully I will, by then, be the President of a huge global umbrella company named Gilder Inc. and so I will be able to manufacture my own hovercars and so I could be driving the Gilder Glider. Or I could be a super-villain and be called the Giddler.

I have to drive into Cardiff tomorrow; I am going to the Chapter Arts Centre in order to attend a comedy open spot. It will be my first time in an actual comedy bill, as all my other live forays have been in competitions or fully open mic nights, so it will be interesting to see whether my stuff is able to stand alongside the material of professional comedians in any way, or whether I truly am a self-impressed pretender. The reality is likely somewhere in the middle, but true populist drama needs the extremes, so for the sake of goading a reaction out of readers I am either a genius or utterly shit.

I am not looking forward to driving in, as I have never driven directly there before, having been a passenger and led astray by the sat-nav last time, and then trekking quite a way to reach the actual building. Hopefully it will all go well, and I will be spared death, both in reality and in metaphority.

I think when somebody dies they go to a wonderous place, and that place is called Metaphority.

That is quite enough rubbish for one day, have a nice *insert appropriate time of day here*.