Tag: Commuting

BMT

On By AlexIn Other stuff9 Comments

Tap. Tap. Tap – go the raindrops on the windscreen. My fingers chase the rhythm on the wheel – tap tap tap – as a sea of blurred red brake lights stretch from here to some far unseen clear shore. It’s before 7am on a dark, wet winters’ morning and I’m going nowhere slowly, stopped by the triple roadwork bypass which cones me off from my office.

This first set is allegedly close to completion according to the cheerful signs, if not the actual evidence dimly illuminated by a hundred headlights. But providing my commute starts at stupid o’clock, their constrained one lane twitchery costs me only a few minutes. This is more than compensated by the longest roadworks in history blocking the main arterial road into Birmingham. And what has backing up the traffic for miles, in either direction, achieved during the last eight months?

You want descriptive precision? No problem: nothing, nada, fuck all – the entire premise behind this pointless digging expedition is so a single bloke can perform daily digger burnouts in a vaguely up and down fashion. That’s not quite true, I did one see a second fella with a spade, but he was utilizing this traditional bastion of the manual worker for leaning on while puffing a cancer stick. Let’s hope it’s not the gas main then? Actually on reflection…

Tap…Tap….Tap now we’re moving but so are the windscreen wipers clearing the rain, but with an end of arc tap. But not all the time, no the mnemonic is broken by blissful silence luring the twitchy one inside into a state of near calm, but then TAP TAP TAP. I’ve tried all he speeds, I’ve tried shouting, I’ve turned on the radio but that brought forth Nicky Campbell – compared to which the entire fucking windscreeen could explode, and you’d still be up on the day.

How can that man be so far up his own arse* and still spout such uninformed pretentious bollocks, while simultaneously adding smug, patronising and condescending to his overflowing bucket of wrongness? Radio off, Tap…S I L E N C E… Swish…… TAP – God it’s the bastard love child of Chinese Water Torture and the ‘Get the Parent’ game babies play. Cry, Quiet, Quiet “YES YES YES SHE’S GONE” WAIL…OH FUCK YOUR TURN” – tell you what pass me the dentist drill for a bit of displacement therapy.

The final set of roadworks started today carelessly chopping out a couple of motorway lanes, inevitably on the busiest stretch. The next six months are laid out in front of me with cold, stationary cars and heated drivers. It’s some bloody cosmic hurry up to get me back to commuting, and it’d be a bloody privilege to listen to knees creaking, breath rasping and the imminent crumbling of some key, yet poorly maintained, bicycle component. But I’m holding out for light at one end, and a level of breeziness not troubling the Beaufort scale.

Tap..Tap..Tap, the sound of one mans’ desultory roadside drilling distorted by tightly sealed windows. There are those who’d question why anyone would live sixty miles from the office, but it’d be a dumb question because this is Birmingham we’re talking about. A 100 kilometers is about the minimum blast radius any sane person would choose to run away from England’s second city**

Now a creak has started from the dash, and is perfectly juxtaposed with the percussion brain damage of the wipers. I’m surmising it’s coming from the airbag, and seriously contemplate crashing into the lane weaving cock*** so firing the bloody trim into the boot. You never know, if my righteous quotient is significant, it might take the wiper with it.

Tap..Tap..Tap, calmer now heading home, on the forgotten Ross spur ‘where no cars will go‘. CD is jammed to rock 80s anthems and I’ve got a cruise control, 4 limb, all body drumming experience going on. Mercifully, the creaks and cracks have gone, except for the last of the daylight being inexorably crushed between dark land and a darker sky. But it’s 5pm and that’s getting pretty close to BMT.

Bike Mean Time is coming 🙂

* SO FAR, we’re talking a detailed examination of his small intestine here.

** 2nd to London. So not very good at all really.

*** He’s driving a BMW. So essentially a phallus in a suit.

The Reykjavik Express – Part 2.

On By AlexIn Other stuff2 Comments

Today I have travelled home via another country. This would not be unusual if I were airily spanning oceans after being seriously inconvenienced by airports. Or if my train had Chunneled to France to hunt down some smelly cheeses and fine wines.

But no, my journey from London to Ledbury ignored the traditional route of Reading, Cotswolds, Home, instead choosing to detour via Abergevenny. Interesting piece of social mobility there I thought as we passed our fourth hour searching for clues to where we might be.

Much of the problem was that little could be determined by squinting into the rainy darkness. Although our “train host” – where do they dream these names up from? – hardly aided the process as she came over increasingly sulky and refused to explain our random itinerary.

She started well to be fair offering up apologies and excuses as an increasingly number of stations were lopped from the list of stops. But after two hours of the shirts of extreme stuffedness demanding that they be let off right now and helicoptered home at the train companies’ expense, she somewhat lost interest in being polite and helpful.

They were finally abandoned at Didcot where they could be found calling their lawyers, and asking if anyone realised how important they actually were. Not me, I was cheerily giving them a forehead hosted “L” betwixt thumb and forefinger. Mature Response? No. Appropriate response? Oh yes.

Eventually we rolled into Swindon only to roll straight out again after discovering the station was flooded. Surely that’s something you’d check beforehand “Hello Signalman? Yes got 200 pissed off passengers here, anything I should know? Station flooded you say? Right-o, well best carry on until we get there and then reverse straight out eh?”

This reversal of fortunes triggered a tremendous shunting exercise which put me in mind of Thomas the Tank Engine on speed. This worrying grinding went on some way past Cheltenham Spa which first woke and then surprised the bloke opposite me who thought he was heading home to Oxford. He was grumpy enough, when finally let off for bad behaviour at Newport, for me to silently award him a “possible Northerner” badge.

We did finally arrive at Ledbury – albeit by some circuitous route – before the sun came up, but the final scores on the doors were “Working 8 hours” “Commuting 8.5 hours“. It failed the alien test* a million times over, but did give me time to write to First Great Western with suggestions on renaming all their train engines. For this one I’m sure they’ll accept my proposal for “The Reykjavik Express”

* try explaining something you’ve done to an alien recently arrived on the planet. If they look at you strangely and then blast straight back to their home planet, accept you’ve just done a very stupid thing.

The Reykjavik Express – Part 1

On By AlexIn Other stuff9 Comments

I shouldn’t be writing this. I should be entombed in the graceless catacoombs of the tube system, pushing and shoving to gain access to an office that seems to need me more than I need it. But I’m marooned just outside Reading after the train failed to stop at a platform.

Let’s examine that statement shall we. How the fuck can you miss a platform? The vocational sphere of a train driver is surely little more than pressing one button marked start, and another one labelled stop. So rather than abandoning the three confused looking passengers expecting to alight at Charlebury, we backed up 8 trains on the single line and added thirty minutes to a three hour journey.

Which I could have spent reading the paper if they’re were any or working, assuming my oh-so-clever 3G connection would connect to something, anything really. I wasn’t alone in the connectivity isolation as demonstrated by the Crackberry generation grumbling around me. They switched their attention deficit to calling sleepy colleagues, so noisily confirming what a bunch of self important cock ends they really are

“Ah Good Morning Peter, sorry not too early is it? Thing is, I’m a little bored on a late train, so can you listen for a bit while I chunter on about pointless shit to show these other chaps what a thrusting executive I really am.”

I am an imposter here, a cipher in actions but not in thoughts. We all look the same, uncomfortable in suits and encumbered by technology stuff, but these are not my people. The reality of work is just because you’re good at it, is not a fantastic reason for carrying on doing it.

It’s taken me twenty years to work that out – which is a bit rubbish really since it’s quite a simple concept – and the obvious conclusion is that the trappings of a well paid job have absolutely nothing to do with any actual enjoyingment of carrying it out.

In the end I just gave up, plugged white noise into my ears and dribbled off into a broken sleep. The only upside was the volume of my mp3 player must surely be leaking into the general population. And so while they tapped vigorously, clipped brusque conversations and tried extremely hard to out-important each other, what they were really thinking was “I KNOW that riff, is is Tom Petty or the Beatles?”

Answer, neither – but since you only had a tinny base line to work with, on the return journey I’m going to augment it with some air drumming. Musical Charades to puncture the pomposity of the business carriages. We’re going to take the train back. C’mon whose with me?

This commuting lark.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road RidingLeave a comment

This week is worringly my third anniversary of an employment period I was absolutely not going to extend past the first twelve months. It is also my fourth winter commuting by bicycle, although the frequency has dropped from four times a week to once a month. Assuming I can be arsed to ride that often.

Which I should as it is now far easier then when I was playing with the traffic in London. The bike friendly train company solves the logistics puzzle of two bikes for one journey. No longer is my commute tediously extended by a half clothed dash between buildings in order to abandon grubby steed, grab a shower and finally trudge over to my place of work.

And this is the first Yuletide period I’m no longer convinced every motorist secretly wants a dead cyclist for Christmas. Riding the Kona is fast, fun, and almost entirely without a high ratio of traffic cockage. So I can only explain my rubbish commuting statistics to a combination of the lazy bastard gene and a nice car parked outside.

Two weeks ago, I made a determined effort to greet the frosty pre-dawn blackness with a powerful light and slightly weaker legs. The lightening sky promised one of those perfect autunmnal mornings with a low sun bathing the countryside in soft glowing rays. I nerver got to see that once my new light comically dived into the bushes, and left me making a speedy – if terrifyingly dark – progress down the biggest hill of the commute.

Five minutes of searching for the remains proved conclusively a rear light maketh not a useful torch. I slunk home, hit the shower and grumped workwards into the car. It’s taken me all this time to raise the enthusiasm to try again. And the faint hope of a repeat sunrise was dashed by the kind of drizzle that doubles suicide rates.

First I was too cold, then too hot, then a bit frightened on dropped bars and wet roads. It was one of those mornings where getting on with it distills simply into counting the alternatives, and finding none.

But then days like this remind me that the choice is really between being dry and warm now or fit and fast come spring. And with a 1000 feet of climbing on silly racing ratios, even one or two twenty five mile commutes a week are going to put me firmly in the second category.

And even when it’s all gone a bit dark and horrible, there’s always a guilt free bacon sandwich to look forward to. Or possibly two – this kind of physique doesn’t come without sacrifices!