M25 smugness

I listen to Radio 2 now and then. Ergo I listen to endless national traffic reports. Ergo I hear a lot about the M25 and the stationary traffic thereon. Inevitably there is always a report about this motorway winding around London. Traffic isn't moving anti-clockwise, cars are at a standstill, there is very heavy congestion moving at a snail's pace clockwise. It's attained a kind of mythical status in my mind of a ribbon of cars encircling London that just don't move. You drive on to it at your peril as you'll be stuck there forever circling round and round such is its image in my mind.

This last weekend David and I travelled 520 miles to Kent and back. We had to travel on the M25. I don't mind confessing as we approached this legendary road, I was slightly nervous to be meeting it. Why would anyone join the M25 just to be stuck in a queue? Would we indeed have to sit on it as I anticipated? Would we be part of the slow moving snail travelling anti-clockwise?

Of course we had Radio 2 on in the car to keep us abreast of the current M25 situation as we approached this circular highway at 5.30pm on a Friday evening. Surely as M25 virgins we would meet heavy congestion during this last rush hour before the weekend. I drove on to it from the east, going in an anti-clockwise direction at about 6pm and we held our metaphorical breadths. About an hour and a half later - hallelujah - we had endured no tailbacks, no jams and were off it. We felt relieved, spilling over into smugness as we cheered when Junction 5 appeared with no queues having been endured.

We were very lucky. Our friends who tried to join the M25 to the north of London at the same time as us were not so happy. They ended up in a three hour standing queue. They could have set up camp at the side of the motorway and phoned for a take away (delivered perhaps by scooter driving madly down the hard shoulder). The motorway was closed with them on it due to a suspicious man and package. Oh dear such was their frustration and despondency that when they did get going again they just turned their backs on the M25 and went back home and did not rendezvous with us at our final destination.

We took on the legendary M25 and we won.....some of us anyway.

PS More about our final destination in Kent in a later post - suffice it to say it was a towering experience (a clue there).