Journey

Everyone is on a journey these days; actors, wannabes, slimmers of the year, they all say it. “It was a tremendous journey, but I made it”. Well, good for you, but what you had was not a journey, it was a challenge, and I can appreciate that whatever you did probably took guts, determination and effort (and possibly botox and cash) but please stop calling it a journey. Life is not a journey. That is a metaphor. This is a journey. Or at least, it would be if the traffic ever moved.

Here I am, third time this week, stuck in a mid-price, mid-range, mid-coloured saloon, midway between junctions on a Midlands motorway, aiming for home. Overhead a number forty shines from a red light circle on a gantry, telling me that I must not exceed that speed. Oh how I wish! At forty miles an hour I would arrive in fifteen minutes, but no amount of guts, determination or effort will help me move a single inch along the black-topped, pitted highway, because, although it is a challenge, it is also a real distance-to-be-covered journey.  

In an effort to pass the interminable time I have already tried three radio stations: inane music, inane chat or local traffic reports that tell me there is a hold up on the motorway. Unless things improve there might just be a hold up. Up ahead, three cars away, I can see a lorry painted with adverts for beer, and it might be worth hijacking the driver, just to kill time, although the getaway could be the slowest that ever featured on Crimewatch. I could wave a torch at him (kept in the glove compartment in case of emergencies) and tell him that I shall shine it in his eyes unless he drives me to somewhere – anywhere – that is not this motorway. But who would retrieve my car when the traffic finally clears?

I have no idea how long I have been here because, as usual, I failed to check the clock as I pulled up behind the BMW in the centre lane, with its impatient cargo in the driver’s seat. The man is tapping the steering wheel rhythmically, perhaps in time to some unheard in-head music, but more likely in time with his rapidly increasing heartbeat. Dressed in a blue shirt, with a suit jacket suspended from a hook on the rear passenger-side door, his patience gauge is reading almost empty, and he is not alone. Many faces in this jam show signs of stress, except the long-haired, bearded youth at the wheel of a camper van in lane one, who is singing, mouth wide as he expels the notes, and his head rocks side to side like a metronome. It must be a happy song because his eyes are sparkling, unless they are full of tears of tedium.

 I must call on dwindling reserves of patience to see me through.