The dreadful M25.However, I must say, I only drink decaffeinated (tea and coffee); I know people will think that's not the real stuff, that's not coffee you can't drink coffee unless it makes your heart beat fast.
Well there are other ways of making my heart beat fast!
My brother, replied to my post on Americano coffee saying 'going into Starbucks is like going into prison for sex; you know you're going to get some but you know it's going to be rough.'
But when I say wake up and smell the coffee I am talking about taking your time through life. I have done a lot of driving since being here and most of the time has been on motorways.
I started in Southampton, went up to London and I've been to Suffolk, Edinburgh, York, Birmingham and more than once to some of those places.
When I went to Edinburgh I could see the wonderful city almost immediately and when I went to York I saw it straight away.
In Birmingham last weekend I didn't see it at all; I got out of the car in Tamworth, which was about half an hour's drive from Birmingham, a few minutes from a motorway – a freeway in America – and in Birmingham the motorway seems to go right into the city centre. So when I got out of the car there it was as if I was in outer space and landing on a satellite.
At one time, when I worked for the post office on the motorbikes, I got to know all the routes for the whole south part of the city – that is stretching from the east side right over to the south west – postal districts 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 and a lot of the outer places and last weekend I didn't know any of it. I will presume that the suburbs are still the same but what saved me on Saturday was the old district numbers still on the street signs.
And what are the district numbers? They are what preceded the postal code (UK), zip code (USA) and the PIN code (India).
But you know – it got me to where I wanted to go faster than any other way and to get to the place in the centre of Birmingham from London I used the magical Spaghetti Junction.
Here is a map of it:
that is the original Spaghetti Junction.
Now it seems to me that we are using these motorways and missing where we are and what we can see, what we can hear and what we can smell. In other words we don't smell the flowers in those places we don't smell the coffee.
In Los Angeles I used to love to drive up Vine Street and come to Hollywood and Vine – even the name gives me a tingle; I would see a great building there called the Taft Building and I used to love to drive down Fairfax on my way to the farmer's market. I loved the architecture.
I mean look at The Capital Building – a stack of records piled on top of one another; the same architect designed the big restaurant at LAX airport; look at it:
The Capital Building, Hollywood; home of Capital Records.
There is an awful notorious motorway which circles London called the M25 – all motorways are prefixed with an M by the way - it is an awful motorway. It has a clockwise direction and an anti clockwise direction and in theory you can take any direction to reach your destination.
Now you will know what I think of the private motor car (whose days are numbered I have to say as it just can't go on) and motorways have been built to service the private motor car for the past 60 years in the UK.
Motorways are not meant to be pretty but on some of them you can see trees, some countryside and maybe some buildings - but not on the M25.
A few months after it was built they discovered it wasn't wide enough so they had to widen it in some places, then general maintenance meant more road works and repairs and it also attracted big trucks and when you use it you don't smell the coffee or see the trees you are up the arse of lorries and vans and you smell their exhaust fumes as you weave your way through the multitudinous traffic cones that spring up every ten miles or so.
If you look at the M25 at the top of the page you will see that there is another 'ring road' closer to London called the North Circular Road and South Circular Road and this does the same job but is not a motorway. That is a smaller circle to go around but people have actually been sent to the outer circle to go all the way around London to go the other way. For example the people in west London who want to travel east travel all the way out west to the M25 and then go all the way around to where they want to get off. Most of the time, even when they've travelled 100 miles they are still only 15 – 20 miles from the city.
Sometimes it is faster to go all the way round on the hellish motorway and you can save time but . ..
and this is the big question:
What is time?
Time is the one thing the lag is thinking about; the poor prisoner in his cell. Nothing is more important to him than time whereas to us the free people – free from that kind of prison perhaps – should never have to think of time and if we do? What are we but prisoners to the old enemy time.
So you save an hour by travelling around that monstrosity which will eventually spread exponentially as more cars are sold and more of us want to buy them and what do you do with that hour?
Nothing.
You may think you are doing something as you look at the garbage on TV, dangle little Johnny on your lap but why didn't you go the other way?
Last night instead of going around the M25 I travelled through London; I passed the British Library which half the people on the M25 probably don't even know exists; I passed Saint Pancras Railway Station which truly is one of the most wonderful buildings in London; I drove to the north of Bloomsbury where the likes of Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and EM Forster were part of The Bloomsbury Set – oh how a little drive through London gives you food for thought.
Hope all is well on the M25!!
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