Oh When I Come To The End Of My Journey

From Hell, Hull and Halifax …...

The day got off to a good start. Breakfast on the ferry was nice but why do they call it an English breakfast when it has an American “hash brown” and not fried bread? I like fried bread when you can get it, as my formerly svelte figure will attest. And the fact that I followed the breakfast with 4 snack size pain aux raisins. I say snack size, it's just that they weren't very big. The ferry then docked on time and we disembarked at 08:30. Thus began the worst part of our journey.

3M and I both took early retirement after working at first in the City of London and then Canary Wharf. Every day for 25 years we'd travel up by car (prior to that by train) and were acclimatised (hardened?) to rush hour traffic. Since moving away we've gradually forgotten the ardours of struggling to get through the Blackwell Tunnel. Today it all came flooding back. Peak rush hour. On a grey, damp day. But in Hull. It took us two hours to fight our way past the Humber Bridge to get to the M62. Oh, the horror, the horror.

We then had an uninterrupted run to Westmorland Farm/Tebay services, one of only two places on the road in the UK where I'm happy to eat. Had a pleasant lunch and on our way back to the car Bullseye wanted to play with the ducks. Blip opportunity, I thought. Except I couldn't focus my camera, the focus ring would not budge. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, nope, wouldn't move, hence the unfocussed pic above. So. Harrumph. Oh, calamity.

Off we went, driving up to Stirling services for a last hot drink before the final run to Inverness. Got back in the car, switched on the audio only to be greeted by a “unrecognised device” message. The wretched iPod had hung and was totally unresponsive. I like to think it was just a coincidence that the last track played was Death Is Not The End by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. Couldn't switch the thing off so threw a CD into the player, drove off with me muttering “why can't car manufacturers supply connections for MP3 (or Flac, if you will) players with the same bells and whistles as they do for that proprietary company that everyone foolishly drools over”. Oh, drama.

After that, we got to Inverness with no further incidents where I turned into Scarlett O'Hara and mumbled “tomorrow's another day”.