GPS

Music on the road

On Friday morning my phone alarm wakes me and I take a split second to realise where the unfamiliar buzz comes from and that I am in a hotel room.  I am fast asleep after a restless night, drinking tea to while the time away and reading before eventually nodding off again. 
    It’s dry, just, when I set off from the car park and the sat nav directs me to the college I am visiting for yet another project and yet another interview.  However, the grey sky bursts open as I drive along and by the time I arrive for my meeting the wind and rain are lashing it down.  The car park I enter is a nearly derelict piece of land, with great gaping holes in the crumbling tarmac, which are filled with dirty brown water, wasteland under the angry rain. 
 My umbrella needs steadying against the wind and I cling to it like a life raft as I make my way round the back of tired looking buildings and then when I come to the front it looks a different place.  I realise there is another entrance, which leads to a small but neat and tidy car park right outside the reception – it must be a well kept secret as there are only two cars parked in the bays marked visitors.  I’ve parked in the student car park and I wonder why they have to make do with that miserable piece of land at the back, neglected and muddy.
    After my interview, a pleasant meeting with lots of cups of tea I start my journey back home.  Greyness is all around, cars appear and disappear into a fog of water and I have to concentrate against the relentless swipes of the windscreen wiper.   It is Friday and the M25 motorway is building up for its daily nightmare of traffic jams, worse on a Friday.  I’m lucky it’s only midday and I will be well out of it by the time the rest of London and suburbs tries to get home.  The build up just before the Dartford Tunnel has started and the road works don’t help matters.  A newly erected sign points motorists heading for the tunnel...

Read more...