Spent the weekend in Southend, rehearsing for the English Concert Singers Concert. It's at St John's Smith Square next Friday and there was a lot of hard work.
We had a productive time and the pieces moved from the periphery of my brain to haunting my sleep, which means I'm internalising the music.
To get to Southend means a three and a half hour drive and we just can't find a route that avoids the M25. Getting there wasn't too bad as we were able to choose our time and avoid the known congestion times.
When we left on Sunday at about 4.45 pm we hit all the traffic. It decided to sleet along the Essex stretch (can't say that Essex did itself any favours that weekend with weather, views or facilities) and the traffic on the M25 was continuous from where we joined to past the M40. We took four and a half hours to get back home and some of Monday to recover.
In My Day
Being brought up in London meant that we rarely went anywhere by car; public transport provided most of our needs. When we did drive it was always by A or B roads as motorways hadn't been invented then. The roads weren't especially busy but they were very winding, with almost no bypassing of towns or dual carriageways. Thus, it was possible for it to take us 3 days to get to North Wales from London (see blog May 03 2005).
I did have a relatively early experience of how horrendous a motorway drive can be. Back in 1967 or so, my brothers and I decided to spend the Spring Bank holiday walking in the Lake District. Chris had recently started what turned out to be a life-long love affair with the Lake District and we were all game for it. We also went with Chris's that time girlfriend (can't remember her name, only that she was studying to become a domestic science teacher) who was also fairly game.
We went in Chris's car which was a Mini van. Like all of us in those days, he had a car that was only just on the edge of roadworthy. Of we set, preferring the overnight option. We went on the M1 and joined the then fairly new M6 at Coventry. We were all rather dozy and Chris was driving. "If I cross any of the lanes without indicating," he told me "nudge me because it means I'm asleep.
Which was very reassuring. However, I eventually succumbed to the monotony of the drive and the whooshing of the windscreen wipers and went to sleep like the others (except Chris).
What woke us up was a vile smell of burning oil. "What smell?" said Chris who had lost his sense of smell when he was about ten. The smell of an empty oil sump, that's what. Whether we'd just been neglectful about topping up, or the car used oil or had developed a leak I've no idea.
And it hardly seemed to matter. We limped into Knutsford Services at about one in the morning. Motorway services have come a long way since the '60s so you can just imagine how bad this one was. We had to organise a breakdown company to take away the Mini van and a hire car to enable us to have our holiday. We had to find somewhere to sit while waiting for all this and something to eat. And even the sandwiches these days are better than they used to be.
I do wonder sometimes just where all the cars on today's motorways actually come from. And I have this fantasy that somewhere there are some beautifully empty roads that we can whizz along without variable speed limits, speed cameras and terrifyingly huge lorries. Ah! Utopia!
