The Highways Agency
Middle of the M1
(or if closed, by Junction 15 on the M4)
October 2nd 2009
Dear Sir/Madam/Time Stealers/Bastards
REF: Last Night’s Shitty Journey Home
I am writing about a matter of a certain high degree of importance. I know everyone at the Highways Agency is busy working out exactly where to put cones on roads so to create the pretense work is happening, whilst never actually putting any workers there, or making roads bigger or smaller without reason. Lest I forget of course all the strenuous cases of out of work highwaymen who have little to do since the appearance of cars. But I must stop your ever hectic schedule to write to you about yesterday’s huge waste of large chunks of my life that I will never get back. I regret to inform you, that this is all your fault.
Last night it took me five hours to get home which is not right. I know you have little idea of what I was travelling in and where I was coming from which makes this statement rather redundant. For example, were I on a horse and cart going from Inverness to Lands’ End during peak rush hour, then five hours would seem like an achievement, if not an impossible feat. No, I was commandeering my trusty VW Polo steed from Staffordshire University to London at 10.30pm . Suddenly that five hours becomes a silly amount of time. At most, according to googlemaps, that distance, travelling at the correct speed limits, should take only 2 hours and 36 minutes, which if you are able to do the most basic of maths, you would realise is less than half the time it took me. Why did it take so long you might ask? Did I happen to steer through a black hole and lose two hours of my life? Perhaps just as I was getting near London I moved the clock forward two hours so as to distract myself and distort my sense of time? No, it took that bloody long because you decided that last night would be the perfect time to close the M1 junctions 18-16 exactly at the time I would have needed to take them.
Not only had you closed said junctions, but the chosen diversion was to take several back roads around and about Milton Keynes. Now I’m not sure if you have ever been to Milton Keynes, in fact I know you haven’t. For if you had, you would never be so cruel as to divert people to such a hub of absolute nothingness. It appears to have been designed on graph paper for the Stepford Wives, if those robot women were designed for a lower social class. The area has concrete cows for god’s sake. How crap does a place have to be before even their livestock are made of grey substance? The diverted route was solid traffic of lorries and other comedians. I’m sure there were other people in there, but to be honest, who else would be travelling such distances at that time of night? Two hours it took to get through the winding paths of dullness, thinking myself lucky that I had purchased a small bottle of water and some Pringles at my previous stop. It was of course my error that I chose to buy the new flavour of Extreme Chilli, which was not remotely satisfying. The taste was not dissimilar to eating spoonfuls of paprika that had been tablespooned onto small circular pieces of card. Had I known I would have been stranded on the A428 for a small eternity I would’ve chosen my late night snackery more wisely. It wouldn’t have mattered should some larger scale emergency occurred anyhow. Being trapped in my car unable to drive in any direction would have been a simple death trap should a zombie apolocalypse have happened. Had you even thought of that? No, I bet you hadn’t. Its that kind of incompetency that really angers me. Have you not read the Zombie Survival Guide? Traffic jams are ideal for the undead to capture and devour or infect the living. I know how to deal with this sort of thing, but how many others out there do? Needless to say I thought about this far too much, had to lock the doors and got scared everytime I saw a shadow. Again all your fault. Even the chilli Pringles, I blame you for that too. And when the ice caps melt and the UK is submerged under several thousand tons of water that’s your fault too due to all the fumes caused from the lorries that just sat there going nowhere. I turned my engine off so its not my fault. Although by starting the engine again and again I used more petrol than I should so now that’s your fault as well. And you owe me petrol money.
Why did it happen? Well it’s hard not to take it personally as its the umpteenth billion time I’ve been caught in late night road mayhem. Yes, I know the logic says you should do roadworks at night when there aren’t many cars on the road, but there are still some cars on the road. Most importantly, mine. I suggest that should you consider doing this again, you give me a call and we can arrange some sort of special bridge or tunnel for me, so I can drive over or under the offending area. Or perhaps lend me a small plane for the day so I can be flown to my destination and back. Of course it might not have been roadworks. Some say it was a lorry accident which, while not nice, surely the lorry could not have been large enough to cover two whole junctions of motorway? If a vehicle that big was moving along the road then I would be inclined to advise you fly it using those big military helicopters or perhaps chop it up and take it in parts. Its far too big to be allowed on normal motorways. What on earth would it be carrying anyway? Or is this all part of some larger conspiracy that I’ve stumbled upon where you are taking gigantic lorries that are transporting UFO’s or somesuch across the UK? I can’t blame you if it was a lorry accident, but it is your fault if that lorry contained little green men and was the size of Wales on wheels.
What can you do about it? Well I demand you get me those two and half hours back that I lost. I’m not sure how you would go about doing that, but I suggest you contact a Time Lord. You may well have one in the back of your mega lorry. Should this ever happen again I will start a petition to destroy all the roads ever, and then we’ll see how long it takes for you to get home when you’re knackered. Oh and I suggest you have a word with Pringles as well. There is nothing ‘extreme’ about powdery card.
Yours ‘lucky not to have been eaten alive by zombies thanks to you idiots’
Tiernan Douieb
