(A Christmas Tale – In Lieu Of Cards)

Buckle up, gentle readers, tis close on the season to be jolly. And if you’re anything like us, you may be travelling tracts of motorway in order to enjoy celebrating Christmas with friends, family and loved ones.

But hold-up! What’s this? Our smart motorways now have their own Christmas light displays, to report on potential hazards, these mainly on gantries we have seen on high, sweetly reigning o’er the lanes, echoing their informative strains, Gloria in excelsis Deo!

Yet who the hell actually reports these alleged “Reports”? I mean, do YOU have the Highways Agency number stored for easy access in your phone? Can you command it – hands-free of course – to dial the number so you can report a loose horse grazing the central reservation – or a group of ramblers enjoying a bracing stroll along the hard shoulder? By the time you’ve got through to someone who sounds more than vaguely interested, and they might have peered through murky, rain-lashed cameras to verify your “Report”, you’re already 20 miles north of where you saw the incident. As a result, on go ALL the warning signs for about 20 miles either side of your purported location and we all slow-down and bunch-up while observing apparently nothing upon which the gantry signs are reporting.

Perhaps more pertinent might instead be to replace the various Reports Of Obstructions; Debris; Pedestrians; Lane Closures; Horse-riders or Accidents with alternative truths such as Reports Of Delay Frustrations; High Blood Pressure; Missed Connections; Angst or just Speed Limit Imposed Without Reason?

Don’t get me wrong – your humble author is very much in favour of anything which encourages safer driving – but the frustration lies in the distances over which these non-committed reports are repeated, thereby inducing Aesop’s Boy & Wolf protocol, where the signs are perceived to be relaying false claims and we thus quickly stop believing them.

On the flipside, how clever are we? Look at us all tanking along in fluid formation, speeding relentlessly to our various festive destinations. In the main, when we join the shoal, we adopt acknowledged Highway Coded protocols to keep us all moving; any aberration from the given norms (like crashing into each other) only serving to disrupt our desperate ETAs while we’re driving home for Christmas. 

The most-recently updated Highway Code (when did you last read it?) insists that – when driving on motorways – we should “overtake only on the right” (Rule 267) and to “not overtake on the left” (Rule 268) – but then sadly makes no provision for dealing with those comatose drivers who are happily cruising the middle lane at 65 mph, ignorant, aloof and with scant heed for the empty inside lane and fellow road-users.

However, by conducting my own under-taking experiments and sailing past these dozing miscreants on the inside, lawksalordy, I’ve concluded that even this renegade action only tends to wake-up about 1% of them – who then might consider moving their Hyundais or Kias into the under-populated left lane. (If you hadn’t already noticed that mid-lane-hoggers are almost always Hyundais and Kias, you will now.) 

It’s also interesting to note that although my experimental inside-lane manoeuvres represent “a failure to observe provisions of The Highway Code” and “might be used as evidence in legal proceedings”, the key word here – “might” – is hardly a sufficiently strong deterrent and would perhaps carry more motivational weight were it to read “will”. 

Meanwhile, in other hurtling observances, we note proud slogans on Royal Mail trucks proclaiming “Deliveries. Up to 27 million homes.” Or “16 billion items delivered . . . every single year” although we again won’t be availing of this boastful service. Instead, we’ve elected to split this year’s Christmas Cards & Postage budget and direct it equally towards Crisis and Mary’s Meals, about which charitable works you can find out more by clicking the links.

So, our thanks and reciprocal wishes if you’ve already sent us a card; our apologies that we won’t be reciprocating with hard-copy; our compliments of this Christmas season to you and yours; keep left unless overtaking; move on down that line – and enjoy your festive journey, on whichever side of the road you may travel.

Merry Christmas!