Bank holiday blast

Bank Holiday weekends are not good times to be out on the motorway system.

With the credit crunched everyone who would be off abroad seems to be staying home and a fair number of them seemed to be charging down the M4 towards West Wales.

Naturally management decided this might be a good day to go and see her mum and I was volunteered as duty driver.

Now, motorways are normally a pleasant environment in which to drive. A mass of people driving large trucks and cars who are used to being there and just get on with the job in hand.

Then it becomes a bank holiday weekend. Suddenly all these people who drive a whole ten miles a day decided they need to be somewheres on the other side of the country involving hundreds of miles of driving on motorways they rarely normally use.

Of course hundreds of miles of motorway driving would wear them out so to deter slumber they pack the car with their partners (who will definitely have a "view" on their driving) and children who will begin to brawl about 5 miles from home and keep up a continuous war all the way t their destination. That is of course if they are not being amused by iphones or nintendos which will almost certainly lead to a serious "my turn"ing war.

Sitting in this mobile combat zone will mean that the hapless driver will be oblivious to all around him and the fact that you are driving something humungous festooned with flashing lights will be no guarantee of being seen.

Put yourself in a car and you might as well be wearing your cloak of invisibility.

So management and I made our way fairly easily up the M4 then far more cautiously back home.

We have a series of bank holiday diversions meaning we missed the biggest of the cues and got home in not too impossible a time.

The object of our visit, Managements mum seems to be back on fine form and remarkably well for someone well into their 90's.

But of course this was us and the car decided to replace Citroens famous hydraulic suspension with bricks. This was exactly what I needed on a bank holiday weekend. Our last car off the road.

Just as I was resigning myself to an interesting last 20 miles home the fault cured itself as quickly as it came.

Another drama missed....

The weather tomorrow looks distressing, promising sunny and dry, ideal for the garden - sigh...

R