This Month

NOTES, THOUGHTS AND EXPERIENCES LIFTED STRAIGHT FROM THE PAGES OF THE EDITOR’S DIARY

26TH MARCH 2022

Parking used to be simple. You pull into the parking space, get out of the car, find the parking meter, feed it with money, take the ticket, display it in the windscreen, and job done, you go merrily on your way. But nowadays you can’t use real money, you have to struggle with a phone line, or even worse, one of the awful apps. And because I rarely have the same car twice when I’m out and about, I have to go through the arduous steps of changing the registration number of the car, and I’ve come to realise that voice control systems do not like my Essex accent. So what should take just a few seconds ends up as a halfan-hour job that eats into your parking time. And that’s without the stress of finding a parking space in the first place. Bring back the old days!

29TH MARCH 2022

I’ve seen it happen lots of times on television, but watching a TPAC manoeuvre – short for Tactical Pursuit and Containment – unfold on the motorway is a thing of beauty, especially if you’ve got a front seat view of it being carried out. When I joined the M25, I overtook a Peugeot 308 SW police car that was travelling at quite a slow pace, and it stood out, as Essex Police don’t usually buy Peugeots, instead running Ford Focus Estates or Vauxhall Astra Sport Tourers. So I took particular interest in it, and as it overtook me further up the road, and then it slowed down once again, it piqued my interest, as it was obvious that it was on an exercise. The speeding up and slowing down carried on for around 20 miles, and then I spotted a marked BMW X5 in the distance. The Peugeot sped up until it was just behind the X5, and soon there were unmarked cars with discreet blue lights in the grille and bumpers arriving en masse. In total, there were five or six marked and unmarked cars all jostling for position around the target car, an 05-plate Ford Focus, driven by a youngster. With precision timing, the ‘Follow Me’ sign lit up on the back of the police X5 and the driver of the Ford couldn’t do anything but comply, as he was surrounded by an unmarked Skoda Superb and BMW 1 Series and the marked Peugeot 308, all with the blue lights shining brightly to usher it off the motorway at the next junction.

30TH MARCH 2022

If I have to travel anywhere of any distance, I prefer to do so at night, when the roads are quieter, and I can cover ground more quickly. Usually it’s just me travelling, so I haven’t got to worry about young kids being inconvenienced and work around their sleeping patterns. And normally it works quite well, except when the Highways England decide to close the motorway. Over the past few months, junction 27 to 28 of the M25 has been closed from 9pm, resulting in a detour towards London, before a relatively slow jaunt along the A12, before the reaching the A127 and heading for home. If the roadmen really want to annoy me, they’ll close the A12, too, as happened a few weeks ago, meaning a jaunt around Romford. Often, it’s a good job that I know the roads as well as I do, because the detour signs are often nonexistent or incomplete, resulting in motorists not having a clue where they are going. Now I know that the roadworks have to be done, and doing them when the roads are quieter inconveniences fewer people, but it’s still very frustrating. There seems to be an unhealthy compulsion of completely closing off roads of late, rather than leaving one lane open, or creating a contraflow on the other carriageway, and this has to stop. Similarly, advance warning of a closure is pretty poor, and often it isn’t until you reach the junction of the road closure that you know about it. In this digital age, surely we can do better?