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The rest of the family have been struggling with a bug, with both Catie and me stretched to our limits by our respective long journeys to podcast over the weekend. And I woke up with a scratchy sore throat and a spinning head, which might not have mattered too much if I didn’t have to pack up the car and then drive for eight and a half hours to Scotland.
Somehow we did it, though with a couple of missed turnings meaning we went almost 400 miles. When we’d got in the car the sat nav had said 302 miles, but without thinking I started driving out of the village the wrong way and when the sat nav recalibrated it was 382 miles. Perhaps we were ending up going via the M6 rather than the A1, which might take about the same length of time, but at a greater distance, but that still seemed excessive.
I was conscious all the way that everything I love and care about was in this car: my laptop, my phone and my dressing gown and that if I crashed or someone crashed into me I would lose it all. So that kept me focused, even though my real concern was that someone else would be responsible for wiping out my family in one fell swoop. We made it through today, in this universe at least. I couldn’t cope without that dressing gown. Especially if I was dead.
At one point I saw a car in front of me was overtaking erratically and looked likely to crash so I braked and slowed down, only to be angrily beeped by the lorry driver behind me, which came close (but not that close) to running into the back of the car. I was quite angry with him, as it’s his responsibility to make sure he’s far enough away to brake in an emergency and if he wasn’t then that was his fucking fault. I only got the chance to try and mime that in my mirror and I don’t think he understood. But trying to save your family from harm can put them in harm. Life is a random load of shit and has no respect for who is the lesser twat.
On we pushed. We thought we might break the journey up and stay overnight somewhere, but in the end I felt like I could just about manage it and Catie was doing a fantastic job of keeping the kids in good spirits during what must have been an excruciating journey for them.
IN Scotland I kept seeing a road sign that I couldn’t make sense of.
It said, "Clearing up your litter puts road workers at risk” and the first two times I genuinely thought it was a warning to people not to take their rubbish away with them or possibly not to stop their cars to pick up litter, lest they someone killed some road workers. It seemed odd to be encouraging people to be untidy, but maybe in these mountainous roads rubbish can only be collected by professionals.
Yes, I was tired, but even when I finally understood that the sign meant that it’s dangerous for the road workers to pick up your litter, it did seem extremely poorly worded. At the very least I can imagine it’s caused a couple of tired drivers to crash their cars as they attempted to struggle with the logical mess of the sentence.
Having googled it I see I am not the only one to have expressed concern about the poor wording and yet still the signs remain, even though I reckon they probably encourage as many people to litter as they do to take their litter home. It’s like the sign writer hates the road workers (maybe a road worker ran off with the sign writer’s partner and so the sign writer is trying to get the road worker bumped off), but it is, I think, the most poorly constructed sign that I have seen used over and over again on a UK road.
Also I quite enjoyed
this exchange from a person who asked how many road workers had been injured clearing litter, to find that the answer is none
We got to our expensive house just after 7 with two tired kids and got them to bed. The house seems to be pretty lovely and I was so light-headed from illness and driving that I thought maybe it was actually worth the £7000 we’re paying to live here for a month.
But at least it isn’t expensive and awful like most of the places I’ve stayed in Edinburgh have been. And it’s got a loo brush and the maybe slightly embarrassed owners left us some milk and bread and the use of their spice cupboard and kids’ toys.
Having done no previews for this show it really doesn’t feel like I am really at the Fringe and I suspect that most of my month (when I am not on stage) will be taken up with parenting (so it’s important to have a comfortable base).
Here we go though. Fringe 25 of performing (I have visited on at least two other occasions). How many shows will I have to do to pay for my rent? Looking at current sales, possibly all of them, but hopefully things will pick up.
