I Adoor You

I have just dropped the car off at the garage. The problem? Well, on Saturday night as I pulled the car up outside the Charter's Arms in Rotherham to see Goat Leaf and 6Needles play, I went to lock the driver's door. The handle froze in the upright position and try as I might I couldn't get it unlocked again. Helpfully I had the back door unlocked as I had given Rhys a lift and he'd left it open he wasn't aware that the car wasn't blessed with central locking. I decided to leave the back door unlocked so I could at least gain access. You might be thinking I could have got in the passenger side door. Well, I could, had that door been working. It hasn't worked properly since I've had the car and only opens from within, as long as someone isn't pulling on the handle from outside, which is everyone's instinctual reaction to getting into a car and leads to me gesticulating wildly from inside for them to step away from the handle. Along with this, the passenger side back door has never worked either. So I was down to one door.

 And your exits are... well, nowhere, really.

I left the car unlocked as described before and went to the gig, which was wonderful. Surprisingly nothing was taken from the car as it sat outside unlocked in Rotherham. I got the car home eventually and thought of dealing with it in the morning. Problem was, when morning rolled around, to gain access to the mechanism that I needed to unlock the door entailed me taking the door panel off. The door panel would not come off with the door shut and I couldn't open the door with the door locked. You see my predicament? I gave it up as a bad job and I spent some part of Sunday morning cleaning the interior as it had been pointed out to me that my car was in quite a state, not that I think there's anything wrong with have a foot-well full of my finger nail clippings. I mean, it's not like they're someone else's, is it? But, apparently this does not constitute clean. I gained access to the vehicle as I had left the rear passenger door open overnight and cleaned the car. I thought, as I was out and about (I was using a vacuum at the local garage to clean the car through one open door and the windows...), I'd get on with some shopping and drove to Morrison's. The passenger door appeared to be working when I unlocked it from outside now, so I was confident that I'd be able to get back in again after buying my post-nuclear fallout supplies ready for when the balloon finally goes up and locked all the doors as I don't really trust the clientele of Morrison's. After buying my tinned foodstuffs I tried to unlock the door. Would you know? The fucking door wouldn't open now I was in the middle of a busy car-park on a Sunday afternoon.

 What I needed, but not what I got...

Mild panic set in as it appeared that I was now locked out of the car with two bags of shopping. This panic was replaced with delirium as I then realised that I could get into the boot to open the doors from within. So I opened the boot, took the parcel shelf out and lowered the back seat to facilitate ingress. I crawled into the boot (remember, in Morrison's Car Park on a busy Sunday afternoon), over the back seat and as I couldn't reach the front door handle, wound the window down of the rear passenger side door. I then clambered back out and thrust my hand through the front window and tugged like a demon at the door handle. This door handle is particularly tricky to open even from sitting in the driver's seat, so it was like a puzzle on the fucking Crystal Maze having to open it from the back window. All that was missing was some middle aged investment banker in a jump suit shouting 'Get the Crystal! Get out! Get Out!' at me

You are now entering the 'Car Zone'

Further to this, my boot is full of archaeological tools and hasn't been cleaned for a while. There was muddy Wellington boots, muddy low ankle boots, a muddy shovel, a muddy drawing board and a muddy waterproof coat. This mud gave me a khaki coating of dust and mud as I scrambled around in the boot. So there I was, in the middle of a busy car-park on a Sunday afternoon, covered in shit and tugging away at a door handle through the rear window. I managed to get in the car and away before the Police arrested me for TWOCing.

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.