Thursday 6 May 2010

Driving Home for Christmas

You know what I hate most about this job? No, it's not the wind that shot blasts us with gravel when it picks up a bit across the site. It's not the fact that I have spent two and a half weeks putting two meter slots across two hundred meters of a 19th century field boundary and finding nothing but a belt buckle and modern drain pipe for my trouble. It's not the fact that we are watched by Chris the site foreman during his 'break' to make sure we are earning our keep. It's not the aforementioned Chris who comes and talks to me without listening to a word I say back. No, it's none of that, it's the drive home.

The drive out to work isn't so bad, we leave at seven AM, go around several roundabouts, connect onto the A59 and then the A1, off a slip road, into Tarmac's site, sign our names on a piece of paper and go round the corner to work all in time for eight AM. The journey home, however, is a different kettle of fish. We go through several picturesque villages before hitting the A1, we drop off it onto the A59. This is where the first problem begins. At Kirk Hammerton (this place always gives me a chuckle, imagine naming a village after the guitarist of Metallica. The next town over is Lars Ulricham) a feeder road drops over half of the road using travellers of North Yorkshire into my path. Bam! The traffic comes almost to a standstill for about ten minutes as we crawl along at less than walking speed. Then we're free and past Kirk Hammerton, it all gets a bit too cozy until we hit the roundabout before the one at Haxby. The traffic here gets awful bad, it's a as though everyone in England lives in Haxby, has the same job in the same office and are all released from work at the same time. Either that or there is a local sport centred around sitting in your car at round-abouts. Villagers in Devon dodge rolled flaming barrels of tar, people from Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire chase cheese down hills. The denizens of Haxby sit in their cars and attempt to go slower then the one in front. Eventually we are free of the Haxby roundabout and the road opens up again, there is hardly another car. It takes an hour to drive to work, it takes an hour and a half to drive back. Fucking Haxby cunts.

It's Election night in the UK and I won't say any more about that except that I told the Polish couple on site, Kamil and Gosia, that Lauren voted BNP. Now they hate her.

I'm tired and I can't be bothered to find some pictures or links for this post. If you don't like it, you can suck a fat one.