I was driving to my gig in Wellingborough, having been prompted by a Joss Stone song to wonder why the king had got his horses to attempt to put Humpty Dumpty together again. With their be-hoofed legs they were surely only going to make matters worse. Even had their brains grasped what was involved in reconstructing a giant living egg then clearly they were the worst people to ask to undo the damage. Almost as bad as the soldiers to be honest, not a class of people renowned for their gentle patience. They would rather be putting broom handles up each other's arses and hitting each other with rolled up mats than doing this delicate work, but they were on a hiding to nothing once the horses had trampled all over the shattered shell.
I was mainly thinking, that's all funny enough, but no doubt someone has already made the observation already and thus this amusing thought must itself be consigned to the dustbin of comedic history (or warming up as it is otherwise known). Such are the vagueries of my job.
As I was driving a lorry behind me flashed its headlights. What did this mean? Was I driving badly? Was something wrong with my car? Had he seen a mad axeman get into my car when I was parked at the services and was trying to warn me that he was on the back seat about to kill me? Or was he trying to tell me that my Humpty Dumpty idea was tired and hackneyed and that I shouldn't perservere with turning it into a routine?
Of course there was no way of knowing what it meant and I was on a motorway and couldn't stop, so all I could do was look in my mirrors to see if I could spot any smoke or madmen behind me. The lorry then overtook me and beeped its horn. What did this mean? What should I do?
Ultimately its an entirely useless signal as it could have a thousand meanings (Simon Streeting famously and arrogantly used it as a means to let other drivers in in front of him) and just left me more confused than if they'd done nothing. Finally paranoid that my tyres might be flat and I somehow hadn't noticed I pulled in at a parking place on the A road I was on, but could see nothing wrong.
I carried on my way and another car flashed me, this time from the front.
I have had electrical problems with the car in the past and I wondered if my lights weren't working. Sure enough I stopped at a garage and realised my own headlights were not working again (so ironically I would not be able to use my own lights to make ambiguous signals to fellow drivers), though the side lights were still on. But how would the lorry behind me have spotted that? Was this what he'd been trying to tell me? The backlights seemed fine. It was a mystery, which made me wish all cars had some kind of intercom system which would enable us to talk to any driver we wanted. I can see no harmful ramifications of that idea.
I managed to get to the gig despite being like the car version of Apollo 13. I didn't do the Humpty Dumpty joke.
