The main road (not actually a road but I’ll come to that) through this village connects with another lane that runs to another village. The not a road through the village also connects an A road with another A road about four miles away. But this main road through the village is actually a lane. It’s called [insert name here] Lane. It doesn’t have a road number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The village school is just 70m off this lane. Ironically that school is on a road. But that road doesn’t run through the village, it doesn’t connect anyplace with anyotherplace, and it also doesn’t have a road number. It just runs down to other roads with houses on them, a small parade of three shops, the village pub, and the village play area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of the school, though, every weekday morning is the same on [insert name here] Lane at about 08.45. It goes a lot like this…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through traffic crawls very slowly up the lane, it creeps around the parked cars, traffic carefully eases into the end-of-driveway gaps the parents leave between their school-run vehicles (you know the ones, the Range Rovers, the Mercedes 4x4s, the BMW X3s, the Audi Q3s).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Watching the slow movement of traffic through the village during school-run, it’s like some kind of slow-motion, motorised slalom as the through traffic creeps forward. There’s a bit of courtesy, the northbound cars slowly dodge into the end-of-drive slots to allow oncoming vehicles to pass, and to wait their passing turn. It’s civilised. I don’t have a problem with the school-run parking because, frankly, the slowspeed slalom the school-runners create on the lane slows the through traffic to way below the mandatory 30mph speed limit. And this is, frankly, a Very Good Thing. Sometimes I feel it’s a bit of a shame that the temporary obstructions are all gone by 09.00.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, this morning was a little different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the line of through traffic slowly negotiating the school-run obstructions was a large 4×4 truck. It was attempting the slalom, but the driver was hindered by a few things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. as well as being in a large 4×4 truck, he was towing a flatbed trailer, just over one car-length long. He was also handicapped by
2. a chronic lack of common sense
3. a complete absence of good judgement
4. the inability to compute his way out of a problem of his own devising and
5. a lack of skill to drive his vehicular combination<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sheer length of his 4×4 plus the trailer meant that this combination was never going to squeeze into any of the single-car-width, end-of-driveway gaps that the school runners leave. Never going to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But for reasons best known to himself, he pulled out into the face of a line of oncoming traffic (a line about 1\/3rd of a mile long), and started the slow slalom. Yes, he tried to squeeze his 4×4 truck and its long trailer into a gap that a VW Golf might just have fitted. At the end of unsuccessfully trying he was, essentially, parked with half of his truck stuck out in the other side of the lane and all of the trailer behind him, parked parallel to a parked and unoccupied car, completely blocking the lane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there the traffic sat for five minutes. The truck driver seemingly unaware of (or not caring about) the jam that he had caused, and the line of oncoming traffic getting longer and now backed up for half a mile, way past the school. It was glorious, a wonderful spectacle. If it hadn’t been such a lovely sunny morning, it would have been funnier to watch it all happen in the pouring rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After about five full minutes of traffic inactivity I walked down the lane towards the 4×4 truck. The driver could see I was going to have a word, so he got out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
‘You’re going to have to reverse,’ I said. ‘I’ll clear the few cars behind you so you can go backwards.’
‘I can’t reverse.’ He said, with a degree of\u2026 obstinance.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘I’m towing a trailer.’
‘Well maybe if you can’t reverse it you shouldn’t be towing it?’ But this just bounced off him because his riposte was:
‘Maybe everyone should just walk to school.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there you have it. It wasn’t his fault that he tried to squeeze into a gap that was at least 70% smaller than the combined length of his towing\/towed combination. It wasn’t his fault that reversing the combination was beyond his ability. The whole traffic jam wasn’t his fault at all. None of it was anything to do with him. It was all a problem of someone else’s making. He got back into his truck, crossed his arms and sat there obstinately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eventually the blockage (I like the French word for it: Embouteillage) cleared as 40-50 kind drivers in the oncoming line gradually inched closer to each other to create a gap big enough to allow the slaloming traffic to ease forward one by one which, eventually, created a gap sufficiently long to accommodate the towing\/towed combination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We allow these people to vote, apparently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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