21-25th Trucking and Clucking

The worst thing about this job by an urban mile is having to do long car journeys on your own. Unlike the train, it’s generally frowned upon to watch an action movie whilst in transit. Therefore you have to spend most of your time listening to average radio, where you are guaranteed to hear one David Guetta or N-Dubz song every 15 minutes.

I had a drive to Leeds to do on a Friday. This meant I spent the whole week stressing about the prospect of sitting in my car in traffic trying to leave London. I was losing sleep over the whole debacle. Despite me panicking to the extent that I set off from London at 10:45am so I could not only dodge a jam and check into my hotel early, to get maximum value from my stay, I still got stuck in an hour’s worth of tossing traffic.

A couple of things I noticed from a long journey are: why do we ration out toilet stops? Why do people get shout outs on the radio? The former is utterly ridiculous. Despite needing to urinate when I’m 1 mile from a services I’ll try and last till the next service station 44 miles away in some sort of piss based endurance game where best case scenario my journey takes the just as long and worst case scenario I write off a perfectly good pair of pants. It literally makes no difference to your travel time, but for some reason once you get into a metal moving thing, you’re loath to stop and get out too soon. The latter also makes no sense. Radio 1 is just loads of shout-outs. Why are we fascinated with getting a person who has a little bit of notoriety reading out on the radio “shout out to Carey in Chigwell who’s stuck indoors revising today”? It’s not like that will make them work harder:
“why did you do so well on your GCSEs?”
“Fern Cotton said my name out loud at 11:30am”

It’s not like anyone else cares or will remember it 3 seconds later. I’ve never arrived at party and gone, “guys, have you heard the news? It’s Mark from Braintree’s birthday today!” For some reason we seem obsessed to the point where we will get terrible DJs in horrendous clubs to give shout-outs. Maybe, if those nutters in the streets shouting about God did shout outs they’d become more popular.

If you’re wondering why there is clucking in the title, it’s because I once again ate Nandos on my own. I’m living the Per-Peri dream.

Before I sign off just want to give a shout out to my friend Gary Smilehat, who became a dad today.
Toodles