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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Sleeping on the M5


Up the fucking motorway one two many times this month. Leave at shit o'clock in the morning in the polluter (new name for van) when it is dark and cold and cold and dark.


Get there, then spend hours measured in least remembered minutes in a bright office. Looking at people. Wondering if they have an inner life (of course they do) or are they just wallpaper (of course they're not).
I do the thing with work, one pointless thing after another, with both joy and dedication (who are sisters if you believe Christians).
Then I eat stuff burnt in the subsidised canteen.
Then I do more worky work. With diagrams. With bullet points.
And I say some stuff which gets listened to ("I'm going to have a piss now") and other stuff that doesn't ("I hate you, I hate you, is that a doughnut?").
Then I'm back in the van, where first I smoke a cigarette, and then I turn the key in the ignition and the fucking oil light blinks, so I ignore that harbinger of engine death, and then I reverse the big dusty van out of the corporate carpark.
Back down the M42, tackle beamer twats for priority on the M40 interchange, lane swap randomly to the M5.
Evesham, Gloucester, etc. longwave radio 4 cuts out under bridges and whines under stretched wires across from pylons.
Into the Michael Woods services just before Bristol, because of screenwash lack, and the slightly white up-crap from the road is fogging my scratched windscreen.
Back out on the last stretch of M5 elastic for junction 15, 16, 17, 18 and off onto to the A4 (which goes to Bath, which is full of cunts). Portway. Home.
190.7 miles roundtrip according to Google. Every mile one inch longer on the way back (and that accumulates).
It's dark and I turned off all the lights this morning.