The Highway Code

'Little Dog Syndrome'

I watched an advertisement the other day that I laughed at.  At first I wasn't sure what angle they were going for as people zipped along pavements with furious expressions, sending passers-by hurtling in random directions and narrowly avoiding collisions. They revved and snarled and seemed truly incensed about life and their surroundings.  The tag line was something like 'You wouldn't act this way on the pavement so don't act this way in a car' and I actually cackled.  I sat there thinking, 'That is so totally OTT, people just DON'T act like that when they are driving'.  I thought it was just another far fetched ploy by the advertising companies to make a little money with an analogy that didn't quite fit.  Today however, I regret I was proved wrong.  

Today I took my first long distance drive. (All you Americans out there will mock my definition of long distance but regardless, it was the furthest I've yet gone solo by car.)  I drove from Barnard Castle in County Durham to Newark in Lincolnshire, a drive that takes around 2 and a quarter hours.  Straightforward, direct and for the most part relatively pleasant, this journey should have been a doddle.  All I had to do was drive through town, join the A66 for 10 miles to the Scotch Corner roundabout and then A1 South all the way to Newark. To be honest I don't think I did too badly.  After crawling along behind a 'monster'* tractor in an uphill struggle towards the A66, (all the while worrying that either he or I would have engine failure and start sliding downhill,) the 10 mile stretch towards Scotch Corner was a delightful stream of ups and downs as the dual carriageway rolled gracefully along with the hills.  

*'monster' - wheels the width of my car and twice the height that would no doubt squash me and my little Polo into the tarmac... never to be seen again.  

At Scotch Corner (I for some reason always picture a Scotch Egg when I hear this place mentioned...) I completely disregarded both intuition and parents' advice telling me to position myself in the right hand lane and swerved across into the left hand lane. It was one of those moments where you wonder whether your brain and hands belong to two entirely different human beings as there appears to be no obvious connection.  I knew I should be in the right lane but my hands weren't having any of it.  Somehow I managed to scrape little Polly Polo across at the last minute, screaming at me for trying to accelerate away hard in first gear and not at all thanking me for it afterwards.  

Once onto the A1, I cruised along for a little while at a safe 73mph singing along to oldies like American Pie and Build me up Buttercup when all of a sudden I felt a whoosh of air as another monster vehicle practically took the side of my car off.  It was a big silver beast and was gone before I got a good glimpse of who was driving such a pretentiously enormous car.  A presumed case of 'Little Man Syndrome'.  I grumbled and edged across into the left hand lane for safety.  Natasha Bedingfield 'I Bruise Easily' came on and I giggled at the irony.  "I bruise easily, so be gentle when you handle me." 

I began to understand what my driving instructor used to say about how you can very quickly be dragged into a torrent of fast moving traffic when on the motorway.  It reminded me of the swimming pool at Center Parks where the rapids take you around on a little course and everyone moves at a different speed.  If you don't want to be smashed about you have to 'go with the flow' and weave in and out of people, all the while feeling slightly out of control of your own body. On a motorway, if you want to avoid being stuck behind a lorry you have to pick your moment carefully in which to fuse with the deluge of cars next to you.  Once you have accomplished that tricky manouever, the ominous black SUV is starting to threaten annihilation from behind so you brake and get sucked back across into the slower *and safer* moving traffic once again. And such is life on a motorway. Forever speeding up, slowing down, speeding back up again. Hardly economical really.  

At one point I almost ended up on the M1 but spotted the tell-tale sign at the last minute that told me to re-align with the right stream of traffic.  Lucky me.  I feel like I did an OK job; Polly was in one piece by the end of it, I played a continuous stream of sing-along songs to keep my cool and I arrived at the correct destination without even having glanced at a SatNav (which is more than I can say for a lot of people...)

Photo from this link