Tomorrow I have a genuine clash of commitments to brighten up my start to the weekend. Firstly, our local Methodist Church organises on the first Saturday of each month an event called CAMEO which acronym stands for ‘Cone and Meet Each Other’ This event is designed so that the widowed, bereaved and those who find themselves in a similar situation meet for a coffee and biscuits, followed by a talk or presentation on generally local topics. This, as the demographics would suggest, largely consists of widows rather than widowers but there is a very large overlap between this and the U3A (University of the Third Age) membership and is an event tat I usually attend but tomorrow there is competition in the form of a free concert of the Brandenberg concertos in our local parish church and, for me, the concert wins out (and I expect that I shall bump into members of my U3A Classical Music Appreciation group there). Later on today, I have offered to take my American friend to one of the local hospitals in Worcester where she has a couple of scans organised, but we had arranged to have a light brunch together before the hospital trips. The car parking can be a nightmare in the local hospitals and sometimes it can take as much as three quarters of an hour to locate a parking space after much circling around and if your blood pressure was not elevated at the start of this little venture, it almost certainly is by the end of it. After my own little hospital visit the other week, I was surprised to get a letter written by the consultant which started off by thanking me for my attendance. This I showed to my son who came around the other day who informed me, probably correctly, that no consultant had ever put pen to paper as it were but the whole letter would have been AI generated after some inputs from the hospital. There is an unexpectedly little political row going in our political scene at the moment. As England progress to their next opponents in the World Cup, and this is scheduled to start at 1.00am in the morning, then the Government in an attempt to court some popularity is going to pass some emergency legislation to allow all pubs to stay open until 5.00am in the morning. But this is far from universally welcomed as the pubs chains say that they themselves are staffed by people who are already juggling with second or third jobs and they doubt that they can get the staff to work all the way through the night. The England manager (German!) is suggesting that parents allow their school age children to stay up all night to watch the match whereas our Education Secretary and school leaders are saying that they expect their pupils to be in school at 9.00am the following morning. I am certainly not going to stay up all night to watch this match but if I happen to wake up in the middle of the night, I might just allow myself a pee to see what is going on. England playing at altitude against Mexico on their home ground are almost certainly destined to lose in any case so who put oneself through the agony of watching it all? As my domestic timetable works out, I have to get the car into the garage to have its annual service by about 8.15 I the morning so I don’t intend to do this on zero hours sleep. A thought that has just occurred to me is that wonder what kind of state the mechanics will be in who are due to service the car that morning? In any case, I have the international Rugby competition to which to look forward starting this weekend and whilst any people follow Wimbledon avidly at this time of year, I have long lost interest in this sport.
In the mid-morning, I journeyed down the road and picked up my copy of my daily newspaper and bought a small, speciaiist pie for my American friend and I to have as a sort of brunch before we made tracks to Worcester Royal Hospital where my friend was timetabled to have a couple of scans. The first of these went fine and then we had a coffee and then set in search of the mobile MRI scanning unit which was based in a sort of caravan arrangement in the hospital grounds and was quite hard to find – there were no signs to it either. Eventually, we located the unit and when the scan was completed we set off for home just a little after 4.00pm.This is when the fun and games started because we ad only just got onto the M5 motorway when we ran into the mother of all traffic jams. After about an hour and hardly any distance having been travelled, I phoned my son and got the news that the motorway had been closed some ten miles up the road. A lorry had jackknifed and burst through the barrier separating the two carriageways, spilling its entire load of diesel fuel across the road. Evidently, this had to be cleaned up, the lorry removed and then the carriage way checked for signs of damage whilst we were stationery in our vehicles for hours on end. Eventually, we got off the motorway having spent five hours covering a distance of about 8 miles. Both my friend and I felt the need to go to loo but of course we were stuck in the car, not even able to navigate to the left hand most lane where it might have been possible to relieve ourselves on a suitable verge which is what some male drivers actually did. So this was probably the worst motorway holdup of our entire lives, but we survived it OK without mishap and got home just after 9.00pm in the evening, heartily relieved. We listened to a mixture of Classic FM, a local radio station where we got commentary on a cricket match and then a combination of Radio4 and Radio4 Extra. After this incident, we are resolved to make sure the car is equipped with some portable receptacles in case we ever find ourselves in a similar situation with no loos in sight. I personally think the motorway authorities could have acted more expeditiously to find a solution to getting us of off the motorway because closing the motorway for some 6 1/2 hours and having a ten mile queue of largely stationery traffic is not really acceptable.