Men at work?

In around two months from now our tranter of choice – Bourne’s International Moves – will pitch up on the doorstep eager to crate up all of our precious goods and chattels for the bracing sea voyage around Cape Horn and on up the west coast of the Americas to Vancouver.

I am – of course – kidding! All our worldly possessions will in fact rather traverse the Panama Canal…

At least – I hope that is the plan!

The point is – big, scary things are about to transpire and pretty much everything that happens between now and the date of our departure is ineluctably bound up with the process. It is doubtless for such reasons that neither the Kickass Canada Girl nor I have much time nor patience for the minutiae and trivia of everyday life.

One such item of trivia – trivial at least as far as I was concerned – was the decision to schedule in the midst of the working week some apparently essential water mains restoration works across one of the roundabouts on the main arterial route into London that forms part of my daily pilgrimage to the School. This ‘work’ entailed the blocking of all bar one lane around this particular roundabout for three days – as far as one could tell without any concomitant commitment to actually turn up to carry out any form of labour – there being no sign of such on any of the occasions on which I struggled past the site.

This apparently careless arrangement added at least half an hour to my journey in each direction – resulting in my total in-car time rising to around four and a half hours each day!

Given that my working life has but seven weeks to run before I retire you might imagine just how dim a view I take of having to spend such an extensive proportion of it sitting in traffic.

I realise – of course – that those of you not approaching retirement may curl your lips disdainfully at the petty grumbles of one about so to do – and I do naturally sympathise… really I do!… but I find it increasingly difficult to maintain an appropriate sense of perspective as to the true import of the activities with which we fill our days.

Oh well! Thirty five working days – and counting!