SEMI-MENTAL JOURNEY

It all started out so swimmingly. The weather was glorious, the wood pigeons were cooing their socks off, urban foxes were waving at people along the way and the roads were as quiet as a mouse with laryngitis. My drive was perfectly straightforward – A720 to Edinburgh, M8 to Glasgow then off at Junction 15. No problem. I didn’t need sat. nav. for that. As I tootled into Glasgow and traffic started to scream past either side of me, I panicked. I couldn’t remember for the life of me whether I had to come off at junction 15 or 16. When I sailed past the slip road for junction 15, I knew that that I had missed the correct one. I drove down 16 instead, turned right at a sign that read ‘Port Dundas’, which I thought was near to where I wanted to be. It wasn’t. All of a sudden I was in a strange and alien place that I had never seen before. Roads carried on into the middle distance, then swung round, turned in on themselves, and I passed on the return journey buildings I had seen on the way out. High trees on either side of the road hid landmarks as efficiently as Persil cleans clothes. The only road signs I saw were bent, so I couldn’t guess their correct direction. The white paint at give-way signs and roundabouts had all been scrubbed off with wear and tear, so I almost crashed several times, without realising I was on a roundabout at the same time as a tattooed van driver with a hedgehog haircut and a woodbine in his teeth. I bumped through rutted industrial estates between streams of huge trailers, skirted a canal every now and then, glided round a huge cemetery before I managed to find a road that headed back into the city. I dodged under, over and round the M8, a hideous concatenation of swirling, whirling concrete guaranteed to terrify even the most ardent motorist and send him scuttling back to public transport. At one time, turning right instead of heading straight on, I ended up in the car park of the Infirmary. Increasingly desperate, I pushed on, past subway stations, a cathedral, districts with strange-sounding names like Ballanloch and Muchrie.  I drove along roads which were gaily carrying me along at 30 m.p.h, but then were suddenly blocked off, almost out of spite, so I had to retrace my steps a number of times. I had ground my teeth down to mere stumps when, by chance, I spotted the train shed roof of the main station, which I had seen often enough. I picked up the bus route and doggedly followed a number 61, because I knew it passed my destination. It was awkward having to pull up at every stop, but I pretended I’d been taken ill, and I got to my destination eventually. I left the house at five minutes to seven, and arrived at my destination, a journey of sixty-nine miles, at nine-fifteen.  I reached the office a sweating, lumpen, nervous wreck.  My colleagues were all fresh as paint.  'Had a quiet journey?' one said.  'Nothing out of the ordinary,' I replied.  If they only knew.