Character Building

There are certain sets of circumstances which bring out the best in my tattered character. I hesitate to give examples because of my innate modesty, but those who have a slight acquaintance with me will be able to formulate a select list. Those who know me well, however, might find themselves struggling.

In an eerily pseudo Manicheanistic way the positive, as it were, posits its negation. For my less pretentious readers, I could perhaps suggest one or other of the Newtonian Laws of Motion (do we still believe in these giving the existence of Dark Matter and Stephen Hawking?) which states that for each action there has to be an equal and opposite reaction. Therefore, if there are circumstances which bring out the best in one (or me) then there have to be circumstances which bring out the worst in one (or me.) And may I say how right that is.

There are, as it turns out, many circumstances which do not massage my angst levels to those tending towards equanimity. For the sake of brevity I will merely list a selection of twenty, chosen at random, from the encyclopaedic collection of people, events, habits and peccadilloes that, shall we say, disturb me.

1 Rap music
2 Mobile phones being used blatantly in public
3 Baseball hats worn backwards; in cars; at all
4 That Woman
5 That Family
6 Salads in McDonalds for their sheer hypocrisy
7 Selfish supermarket car parking
8 Ford cars – I’d rather eat worms!
9 Tastefully decorated Christmas trees
10 Cats – evil.
11 ‘Rat’ dogs especially when wearing little tartan coats
12 Thick china cups
13 Sunglasses worn anywhere but on the nose
14 Ruched curtains in small houses
15 Foreign laager pretending to be real beer
16 The National Library of Wales not being in the Capital City of Wales
17 Simple fireworks for their lack of vulgarity
18 Microsoft for the crimes past, present and future
19 Printer cartridges for the parsimony
20 Airport coffee costing more than flights

A list, I’m sure you will agree, which shows only restraint and justified irritation.

But one thing stands out and has to be put in a category by itself; something so intolerable that ordinary exasperation fails to cope and one has to resort to full-on fury: traffic jams.

I am known for my placid and easy going demeanour, my tolerance (see list above) and my laissez faire approach to the difficulties which life throws at one. But traffic jams strip all pretence of civilization from me and one is left with naked fury devoid of reason seeking on whom it may wreck a terrible revenge.

Returning from the thoroughly enjoyable pre-Christmas obligatory traditional talkathon with Aunt Bet, with the blanket of fog wrapping itself irritatingly around the car, I looked forward to the more expansive driving experience of the M4 after the more darkly restricted roads of Gloucestershire.

Having been thoroughly rattled by the suicidal locomotion of drivers speeding through wispy obscurity into possible oblivion, it was with something like relief that the murky inclinations and declinations of Chepstow gave way to the boring expansiveness of the M4. Here the merely suicidal driving of the narrow A roads from Gloucester gave way to the more homicidal driving of those lunatics who, because they were on a motorway, obviously felt themselves freed from any restraints and drove as if they were on runway one from the west seeking to fly off into the clearer air above the very thick fog which shrouded the motorway lanes and we other ‘granny’ drivers had suddenly become invisible and irrelevant.

And of course the inevitable happened and there was an accident. And my live stopped just outside Newport.

Now Newport is not my favourite city at the best of times; I am proud to share the prejudice of my fellow citizens in Cardiff and express a lively loathing for the city. Newport has always been rather sinister to me. I think that it is something to do with the town (sorry, it’s achieved city status now) City Hall. It always reminded me, with its stark central tower and symmetrical featureless, stepped blocks of building on either side, of an American State Penitentiary. Ugh! Also Newport has taken over from my childhood experience of Cowbridge as ‘Road Work Ahead Place’. I know that the Brynglas Tunnels do not help traffic flow, but the amount of time that I have spent delayed on the tedious roads in and around Newport in well beyond any reasonable expectation. And here I was again, stranded in the Mother of All Traffic Jams fewer than twenty miles from home.

The journey from Gloucester to Cardiff should take about 90 minutes; I started my journey at 5.00 pm from Gloucester and arrived in Cardiff at just after 10.00 pm.

I would like to say that, as I sat and sat and sat and sat and sat in my car, I thought beautiful thoughts and analysed the situation and my fellow stopees – but I didn’t. I fumed and I shouted and I hit things and I swore and I despaired and I phoned people and I played solitaire on my handheld and I ate mints with manic intensity and I fumed and I seriously thought that I might be there forever.

It is now in the past and I have risen above the experience and will use it to become a better person. As I said at the time, “This too will pass” – my philosophy of life is easily able to cope with the minor inconvenience of being slightly delayed by an accident on a motorway.

None of that is true. This event has seared itself into my memory and I know that every slight traffic jam that I enter now will suddenly become the possibility of a repeat threat of the experience being trapped outside Newport for hours and hours and hours.

“This too will pass!”