#28

Amongst the usual road bastards encountered on my week daily commute (along the A452) to and from work, like the manic under-takers and the evil-diesel belchers, I encountered a new and oblivious type of road bastard today ... this is a new breed that drives-across a set of traffic lights where the tarmac is hatched in yellow road paint (a box junction I think they are called, where you can get fined if you stop on the yellow hatched area) but he stops as soon as he's driven-off the hatched area, even though there are two or three car lengths of unoccupied road infront of him, leaving you, in the car behind, stranded on the hatched area whilst he's in the I'm-alright-Jack-no-fear-of-prosicution zone. Now I've mentioned the manic under-takers I guess I ought to have a moan about them as well.... I can only hope the perpetrators of this crime are foreigners and hence don't know any better, it would be a national disgrace if any of these people turned-out to be British. Any British person found to be manically under-taking (in other words over-taking on the left hand side instead of on the right and at at an alarming rate) should be disowned by Britain, stripped of their citizenship, and deported along with all the other disgraced people like those who don't know how to queue and all the people who pronounce the letter 'Z' as 'zee' instead of 'zed'.. (yes especially those ones -- it's bloody 'zebra' not bloody 'zeebra'-- what bloody school did you go to?). I'm not talking about the sort of under-taking people do on the motorway where they slowly and safely go past any idiots that have permanently occupied the overtaking lanes when there are perfectly good vacant lanes to their left, oh no, I'm talking about the bastards who razz past you on the inside on urban streets just as you are trying to pull back into the left lane after passing some parked cars. Indicating left when ever you're changing to the lane on your left has now become a necessity on British roads if you don't want to be rear-end shunted. Bastards. Well at least my exposure to road bastards has reduced of late because I don't have to drive clean across town, in addition to my commute, to visit my Mum in hospital in the evening because I'm very happy to say she is now back home and doing quite well. She's getting about very well considering she had a hip replacement only 2 weeks ago. In fact on the surface, apart from walking slowly with sticks, she does a very good impression of being well and normal, but upon questioning she insists she still has much recovery to go, and of course it would be absurd to expect she was A-OK after such a short space of time. The drive across Birmingham and out the other side (from Sutton Coldfield to the Royal Orthopedic Hospital) along the A38 was quite amusing. The part after the city centre towards the hospital is generally quite an amusing stretch of road -- it is one of those two lane roads that has had the white lines repainted to make it into a 4 lane road where you are practically touching wing mirrors with the car on your right and on the other side you are practically rubbing your tyre along the curb. I don't know if it's just me that finds driving down it quite stressful, but once by the time I had reached the hospital I found that I had temporarily lost all feeling in my right hand through gripping the steering wheel so tightly. Of course the whole lane system is made a mockery of since buses and lorries take-up one and a half lanes making for a kind-of vehicular Tetris (but hopefully without the rotations). My hat goes-off to anyone who commutes down there every day, month on end, especially with all the speed cameras-- I'm not a speed camera hater generally but that stretch of the A38 changes from 30 to 40mph and back again so many times that it's easy to miss one of the changes when distracted by doing frivolous things like minding pedestrians crossing in front of you whilst keeping rigidly to your narrow lane (daring not to steer more than a tenth of a degree too far either way). And the stretch of the A38 through the city centre itself I've always thought to be an amusing concept ever since I was little. It is a dual carriage-way (lanes of proper width on this stretch) going through a few tunnels and over an overpass which all runs parallel right alongside vernacular ground-level two-lane roads either side. There are no slip roads or traffic lights or roundabouts to join these roads, no, instead in between the tunnels and over-pass, where the roads are briefly on the same level, there are are short gaps in the barrier where two lanes become four and people wanting to change from one parallel road to the other must engage in a (hopefully) ballet-like movement: converging, merging then diverging: swapping with cars on the parallel road wanting to change to the road they are now leaving. Considering that the traffic on both roads are sometimes moving at different speeds (due to traffic jams etc) and that, in any case, the slow lane of the inner two-lane road has to merge with the fast lane of the outer two-lane road, it is quite impressive how well the system seems to work... it does benefit from a lot of give-and-take on the part of drivers and perhaps simply may not have been viable in other parts of the world with different driving ethics, but even these British driving ethics don't always save the day as I found when stuck in a snarl-up at one of these merge points last week where the system had broken-down and there was dead-lock with cars at all sorts of angles in an untidy herring-bone pattern unable to progress until one vital car at the front moved unKaplunking the whole thing. There was much unBritish honking of horns.

While I think about, following the huge interest (not) from featuring the last one of my ad-hoc cooking aids (at the bottom of #16) I proudly present my 'sausage regimentor device'. I made it from a strip of stainless steel, bending it back and forward. If you have ever been annoyed by disobedient sausages (which when being grilled and turned to an unbrowned part promptly roll back again) then this is the device for you. You simply put this device in your grill pan and place a sausages in each corrugation. This cradles each sausage and so to whatever precise position you turn them they stay like that and don't roll-about of their own accord -- so you are finally in control and don't have to put up with those mutinous sausages that insist on being blackened down one side by rolling themselves to the same position every time. This device has proven very effective indeed.