Road Rage

Two and a quarter hours, it took to drive home tonight.

I’ve done the journey door to door, in an hour, once, when all the lights were green, and there was no other traffic on the road.  We’d left the city centre at eight thirty in the evening, and I think Ireland must have been playing  a match or something.

On an ordinary day, if there’s no real traffic, and you get lucky with the lights, it takes an hour and fifteen minutes.

Today it took two hours and fifteen minutes, and needless to say we were in His Nibs’ car.

I hate driving His Nibs’ car, and being the contrary pair we are, he hates driving my car.  He says the seat in mine is uncomfortable.  I say his speedometer doesn’t work, his car stereo doesn’t work, and for some inexplicable reason, if you drive the fecking thing at more than fifty five miles an hour there’s a very real danger that boiling oil will start spewing out of the engine. 

Not that there was any chance of driving at fifty five miles an hour today.  Wishful bloody thinking.

His Nibs went to sleep, of course.  He was right, I would have done the same.  Anything is better than sitting there looking out the windscreen and going nowhere.  I thought the pig noises were a bit much though.  I know he’s a snorer, God knows I know, why do you think I look ten years older than I am?  It’s lack of sleep.  But it’s hard enough to listen to him at night, without listening to him during the day as well.

So with no functional radio, his snoring, and the angry growl of a slowly overheating engine were the only things I had to listen to.

In these situations, where there’s such a sudden stop to the traffic, I like to turn on the radio at news time and find out why.

We stopped at Junction 8 on the N7, and didn’t get into second gear again until Junction 10 on the M7.  By Junction 9, I was practically eating my fists.  All I wanted to hear was the AA report, where they say something like “the traffic is stopped dead until Junction 10, then it’s fine”. 

I’m the same in the dentist.  I need to know what time the suffering will end at.  Since there’s no stereo in the car, I tried turning on my phone radio.  It’s one of those ones where you need the headphones to hear the radio. I don’t have the headphones.  So I tried His Nibs’ phone.  Apparently the radio doesn’t work if it doesn’t have much battery.

Why is it that every time I get onto a Luas or a train, there’s a large group of teenagers, listening to dreadful music on a phone that doesn’t need headphones?  Yet the only information I can get in the car is that the hundreds of euro I’ve spent over the years on anti-snoring devices for His Nibs has been a complete waste of money.

Then, of course, there’s always a twit who makes everything worse.  Like the gom who decided the outside lane was moving faster than the inside one, even though we were all stopped, bumper to bumper.  So she turned to her extreme right and stopped her car across both lanes.   When the inside lane eventually started moving again, but the outside one didn’t, we were all stuck.

Not to mention the crowd of eejits who decided, about two hundred metres before the Naas exit, to fling themselves into the exit lane, tear down it, and then almost immediately screech to a halt and start indicating right to re-join our lane. 

I struggled to control myself.  Actually, if it wasn’t for the very unusual looking man in the next lane, who kept rolling up beside me in a purple Suzuki Wagon R, I don’t think I would have made it.

It’s impossible to describe this man.  He was very, very odd looking.  And he had the most intent look on his face I’ve ever seen.  As if driving the car in stopped traffic is like playing one of those electric buzzing games.  It was like driving along beside Mr. Bean.  He fascinated me, I admit it.

 

 

Finally, we passed Junction 10 and I got up to third gear.  At this point, His Nibs woke up, and wondered why I was wearing my cranky face.  When he finally noticed the time, and that we should have been at home at least ten minutes previously, the penny dropped.  He wondered why I hadn’t just driven down the second lane, if the one I was in was so backed up.  I managed not to give him a belt in the chops.

Then he suggested that since I was so uptight and stressed out, maybe he should drive.  Just as I finally put the car into fifth gear.   I refused.  I don’t know why, maybe I’m a martyr.

When we started moving again, there was nothing to indicate what the delay had been.  Not that I was hoping for mangled limbs strewn across the motorway and burn marks all over the road surface.  Jesus no.  But I had assumed there’d at least be roadworks, or a Garda checkpoint, or even two drivers squaring up for a fist fight, their cars abandoned in everybody’s way.

But there was nothing.  No explanation whatsoever.  Just an hour of our lives that we’ll never get back, and a man left coping with a psychotic wife for the evening.