An eventful one this week. It’s the summer holidays so pretty much anything except admin and Mum stuff has gone out of the window because all three of us are off. Instead we are Doing Things. Well … a bit.

This week McMini gamely came to Mum’s with me and we had a lovely lunch. Duck confit salad (om-nom-nom) and she was in great form. The lovely gardener was there too, one of his first days back after a long illness and a really tough time. He joined us and ate his packed lunch while we ate ours.

However, on the journey down we saw something that shook us a bit. A few miles out from the Dartford Bridge there’s a junction to Southend, I think it’s number 30, I’m not sure. The penultimate one in the stack, anyway – the other side of the Bridge they start at one. There was quite a bit of traffic and I was in the outside/fast Lane, in a long, long queue of cars going at a steady 70 past a bunch of other cars and lorries going slower.

As we passed the Southend junction, a purple Mazda 2 came flying across three lanes of traffic and tucked into the fast lane in front of a grey Jaguar. There are four lanes there. The Jag was about to overtake a car that was going quite slowly in lane three and it looked as if there were about fifteen feet between the Jag and the car it was overtaking when the Mazda barged through this very small gap at speed.

The Jag driver was irritated, and as soon as both of them were past the car in lane 3 he undertook the Mazda and pulled a similar stunt, cutting in a few feet in front of the other driver in a there!-see-how-you-like-it gesture. The young man in the Mazda (I’m afraid it’s always a young man) then completely lost his biscuits. He tried to return the compliment but didn’t have enough grunt to undertake in the room available. He pulled in behind the Jag and drove up close on to the Jaguar’s back bumper, hanging out a bit, as if that was going to help him get past.

Just to go off on a tangent slightly, you do this because a) if they get past they may suddenly swerve in front of you and stop dead, causing you to run into them b) they might do the same thing but with a view to boxing you in, giving themselves time to either reverse their car into yours and smash it, or to get out of their car and smash you before you have time to reverse and escape. Or c) when they get alongside you they might try to side-swipe you or run you off the road. Amazing as it may seem, I have seen all of these things attempted on the UK road network. There are some very angry young men out there and sometimes, just noticing that a woman is driving a car they consider unsuitable for females – or simply being overtaken by a female (even as part of a long stream of other traffic) – is enough to set them off.

After a quarter of a mile or so, the Mazda driver suddenly broke left, swerved through three lanes of traffic, gunned it up lane one, the slow lane, in a few empty yards between lorries and then piled across three more lanes, but he still failed to pull in ahead of the guy in the Jag. By this point I had started to leave a gap so that if they hit each other or stopped in the fast lane to have a pagga, I had time to stop. They continued with the argy bargy but a giant flabby Range Rover drifted into my lane so I couldn’t see much of their antics, only that the Mazda had swerved back across the other three lanes into lane one again, presumably having another go at getting past. Meanwhile the Jag was doing what any self respecting motorist does when presented with an insane nutter, you keep them behind you.

Since the Jag driver was now fleeing for their life, both cars were doing well above the speed limit and the knob in the Mazda was repeatedly weaving through three lanes of traffic, using gaps that were not a great deal longer than his car, then gunning it up lane one and trying to get back across to the fast lane in front of the Jag. I wondered if I should dial 101 (or is it 111?) to call the officially-less-urgent-than-999 police contact line and report them. They kept this up until we got to the speed limited section before the bridge. Once again, I saw the Mazda pile over from lane three to lane one, narrowly missing the back bumpers and front noses of other cars as he went. I slowed down to 50mph along with everyone else, and watched as he used lane one to undertook a lorry in lane two. Lane three had a lorry in it as well and the jag, in the fast lane, passed that. They were about 600 yards ahead of me at this point because by now I was firmly convinced they were going to have (or cause) an accident and I wanted time to stop. Once they disappeared behind their respective lorries they were masked from view.

However, a moment after the Mazda 2 disappeared, the traffic stopped. Dead. I didn’t get time to look much. I was concentrating, first on slowing, then on letting some of the traffic merge in front of me but not so much that I stopped completely and pissed off everyone behind me. We had ended up with three lorries at a standstill in lanes one, two and three and the only lane still open was fast lane; the one I was in.

It took about 30 seconds to file through. There, in lane three, was a metallic silver-green people mover. I’m not sure what it was, cause I was driving so I couldn’t really look that hard. I think it might have been an old Renault Espace, or the model below because, though it was a people mover, it was one of the smaller ones. It was facing in completely the wrong direction and its left front wing had collided with something resulting in a big crumple and the presence of a lot of other bits of metallic silver-green people mover all over the road.

Total kudos to the drivers of those three lorries. They had stopped, in a line, to temporarily block the three lanes so the poor woman driving the green thing could walk across to the safety of the hard shoulder. A lorry was parked on the hard shoulder a couple of hundred yards further on, although I wasn’t sure if that had been involved or was just there, and another woman in a bright blue Suzuki Jeep (or at least a 4×4) had stopped and was giving the poor woman a hug. She was probably late fifties or early sixties, and clearly shaken. I couldn’t help wondering if the Mazda 2 had clipped her, spinning her car round 180 degrees, or if his sudden appearance, overtaking her on the wrong side, or cutting across her path had given her a start, shocking her into an instinctive swerve before she had time to check the space around her. The good thing is that the whole area of road is on CCTV and the dart charge cameras photograph the numberplate of every car that goes over there, so if the idiots in the Jag and the Mazda are required for questioning, I suspect the police will have no trouble finding them.

What is it about men in their twenties or thirties who drive hot hatches that makes them such utter and complete wankmuppets? I have not seen a lady driving like this, indeed, I have never seen anyone but young males, either alone or in a very small, hot hatch full of enormously tall men, driving like this.

After a quick debate with McMini I rang 999 and was relieved to discover that I was the first person who had called and was not, therefore, wasting their time. It’s really difficult to know whether to phone the police in situations like this or to just assume someone else will. I explained about the Mazda and the Jag, and I explained that while I hadn’t witnessed them cause an accident I was not surprised that there had been one. I explained where the lady was and that her car would need recovered and possibly someone would have to come and pick the debris off the road.

As the old adage says, I guess if idiots could fly, this place would be an airport.

On the up side, a cause for smugness. McBicycle was not happy and needed fixed. Yesterday, I fixed it. I realised after lockdown and my knee op, that it had got salt water on it at some point and a lot of the gubbins to move the big cogs at the front gears had seized net result, 9 gears rather than 28. Indeed, it wouldn’t change gear at all. I put WD40 on it, which is not what you’re supposed to do, but I decided I should un-seize it before I washed it, and since I was going to wash the WD40 off, I hoped it would be OK. So having squirted the offending bit with WD40 on Thursday afternoon, I spent yesterday removing the chain and cleaning it with bicycle de-greaser, plus the deralier (I think that’s how it’s spelt) cogs which were all totally filthy, and cleaning the gear mechanisms too, before putting it all back together and putting bicycle lubricant all over it. Yes, there is such a thing. Mine is called ‘Wet Ride’. Snortle, yeh, don’t even go there.

The result is a bicycle which will change through all it’s gears, and a lot more smoothly than before, to boot. I love fixing things so it was a very enjoyable afternoon all round.

Last but not least, my triffid flowered again.

On a completely different note …

In case no-one knew – and we’re talking my organisational skills here, so that is a very real possibility – I have reduced the cost of Small Beginnings, the first K’Barthan Extra, to zero. That’s right, you can pick up a copy for NO PEE. Mwahahahrgh. You can also pick up a copy of the audiobook for free from my store as well, if you’re into that kind of thing. This is the one I’m talking about:

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1

Destiny called and everyone else was out.

When your very existence is treason, employment opportunities are thin on the ground. But when one of the biggest crime lords in the city makes The Pan of Hamgee a job offer he can’t refuse, it’s hard to tell what the dumbest move is; accepting the offer or saying, no to Big Merv. Neither will do much for The Pan’s life expectancy.

This is free to download from all the major ebook retailers for August and also in audio from my store – but I can’t make it free from the book vendors in audio so if you’re after that one, it has to be just from my store.

If you’re interested in the ebook, click here.
If you’d like to give the audiobook a go, click here.

If you aren’t interested but you want to help, feel free to copy and paste either of these links into the social media thingy of your choice and share away:

Audiobook: https://payhip.com/b/ubYs
Ebook – free from all the main vendors: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/infosb.html