Bank Holiday Blues

Isn’t it great to be back at work after the Bank Holiday?

I had a pretty traditional bank holiday – I trashed the bathroom and bought a sofa!

But I also experience the motorway on Friday evening as the great bulk of London decided to make their way South West to Devon and Cornwall for their short break. I had never experienced this before and it was, I can tell you quite alarming. The motorway was overfull and the traffic was moving quite slowly out of London, but that didn’t stop some people trying to reach their destination much quicker than the rest of us. These were the people, often in highly priced cars who simply forgot, or just ignored the basic practices of driving on motorways.

One of the key ‘rules of the road’ in this country is not to undertake. Visitors to Britain will notice that lane discipline on the roads is quite strict and most people do stick to the rules. But not on a bank holiday Friday on the motorways out of London. It was exhausting, not only having to cope with the slow moving traffic but watch out for the kamikaze drivers zipping along on your offside, these are the ones that are not to visible in the mirrors and because of the discipline one doesn’t often expect to have large cars zipping past the passenger doors.

The other thing I noticed was that when we stopped at Reading Services, the place was heaving. This was I expect because all the townies, enroute to Cornwall, were panic buying at the Marks and Spencer’s outlet that is now part of this particular Motorway service station. I guess they were filling up on food in the expectation that in deepest darkest Cornwall they would have to spend the weekend living off pasties and fish n chips rather than this slightly upper crust junk food that they are used to.

I was in London to get visa’s for my wife and family, who are, as you know, Ukrainian, we had to go to Croydon to be exact. When ones goes through this, it has to be planned meticulously months in advance, the right papers have to be generated and collated, bank statements and pay slips have to be saved, letters with names and dates from utility companies have to be placed in date order and so on.

I have been quite satisfied with myself that over the past few years all the visa’s I have had to apply for have been granted, due I am sure to my meticulous planning. So it was a bit of a shock to find that upon arriving at the IND offices in Croydon to find that not only had I used the wrong form fro Vitaly, but I had also forgotten to take my PIN number for the credit card I was going to use to pay the £1000 fee! Disaster! Fortunatly I had just been paid so could use my debit card, the downside of this, of course is now we cannot eat for the rest of the month nor pay the mortgage!