Kamikaze Fridays

I recently had to complete a Health and Safety assessment at work. Now, for all the cries of ’elf ‘n’ safety gawn mad in the tabloid press I’m all for it – after all the majority of the advice is merely common sense (which Voltaire is claimed to have noted is actually not so common). However, the training sessions are mind-numbingly boring. Apparently, leaving exposed electric wires or toxic substances lying around is a health hazard. Who’d have thunk?

Amongst the other mundanities was a section on avoiding an accident whilst driving. This was all perfectly sensible stuff like not playing with a smartphone whilst driving or avoiding downing a bottle of champagne before setting off. However, the one item that they didn’t touch on is one of my bugbears – driving on a Friday. For some reason, Fridays seem to be national driving like a knob-head day.

There may be good reasons for this – certainly many people will be tired after a full week at work and there may be some who will have long journeys ahead of them after working away. However, I have noticed that even those that I would regard as professional drivers – HGV drivers or coach drivers – appear to be running with a screw loose. As for the bulk of the travelling public there is a kamikaze mentality amongst the legions of rep-mobiles: either mindlessly tailgating on the overtaking lane of the motorway or pointlessly lane swapping for no good reason.

Personally, I won’t play along with this game and I am happy enough to pootle along at HGV speed in lane one of the odd bits of motorway I use and more than happy to leave a big gap behind the car in front if it means avoiding some manic breaking later. On the face of this you would think that this would slow me down but it actually makes no difference whatsoever as the factors slowing down any decent progress are not the vehicles top speed but the number of cars queued up at the next junction or roundabout.

In some respects I long after the days when I could simply get the train or bus into work but I actually found that to be just as stressful. Aside from the bloody minded awfulness of other people one has to compete with the fact that public transport is usually run for the benefit of the public transport providers rather than the passengers. On some occasions I was even left with the likes of Scotrail asking for us to make alternative travel arrangements as they were incapable of running a Hornby OO train set let alone the real thing. I suppose that’s what it comes down to – do I want to worry about getting home in one piece or getting home at all?