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Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Today's drive into work was a very slow one.
The morning journey up the valleys into Treforest is usually a pretty quick one, taking around 30 minutes. The beginning is very slow with many traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and twats in misted up Ford Fiestas delaying progress. Once past the castle and the park and the university halls and the schools, the going speeds up somewhat until the dual carriageway A470 appears over the horizon. The promise of full speed is too much for many drivers and they start trying to do 70mph whilst still in the 40mph zone. This results in a very slow and irritable queue of traffic.
Once the A470 is reached, it's much the same, albeit a little quicker. Stop, start, queue, race, screech, speed.... There's a turn-off that removes the majority of traffic from this road and leaves the rest of us to speed happily onwards. It's a real relief to get to this point but this is short-lived. The options are: get off at the next junction and queue to turn right at the traffic lights that have no turn right facility; keep going and get off at the junction where they are spending 12 months turning a 1-lane bridge into a 2-lane bridge. Neither is particularly quick but I choose the former mainly because there are trees to look at whilst in the queue. From there it's literally downhill into work.
At one of the pedestrian crossings this morning, 2 young lads nearly lost thier lives. They were probably sad and pointless little lives that wouldn't amount to much, but I assumed they wanted to continue using them, for a while at least. Anyway, they stepped out into the road just as the traffic poured towards them. They quickly stepped back onto the pavement and, here's the interesting bit, starting laughing, laughing so hard it was actually really strange. Strange in that they had very nearly died through sheer stupidity and yet they found this hilarious. My theory is that this little episode was a condensed 'life event': everything was normal, then something dramatic and dangerous happened, everyone involved was ok, so everyone celebrated.
"Perhaps this is the origin of celebrations" I thought, as I dodged a Fiesta swerving to avoid pothole.
.....posted at 11:08 am permalink
babyatom's
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