I’ve been driving down to Hove for work for fifteen months now, three or four days a week. The majority of that journey is on the A23. To keep myself entertained on the journey down I keep a lookout for the mileage signs by the side of the road. Mentally checking that I see them all each day. At first there were the ones I noticed at 20 miles, 15 miles, 11 miles, 8 miles, and 5 miles, and there was only one destination on them all – Brighton, as if that would be the only place anyone would be going once south of Crawley/Gatwick. And being numbers obsessed, the first four of them pleased my strange little brain, as the distance between them lowered by one mile each time (5, 4, 3). The only way I would have been happier would have been if there was a 6 miles one, so it would be 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 reduction.
As it turned out there was another little mileage sign on the southbound journey, but it took me nine months before I noticed it at 13 miles. Which upset my little sequence.
So, each morning there are six mileage signs to look out for. And how often do you think I see all six of them on the same journey? Hardly ever. In the last six months since I’ve found out there are half a dozen signs, I’ve only mentally clocked all of them about half a dozen times. And that is when I’m trying to spot them. It’s not as if I’m speeding past them, I’m that happy idiot trundling along at sixty on the inside lane. I’m not sure how I’m missing them.
I’ve also been convinced that there are no mileage signs going north until after the Handcross turn off, then there are two lots a mile apart, each with five destinations on them – M23, Crawley, Gatwick, Redhill, and London. That was until last week when I thought I saw another. I missed it Monday, but I can confirm there is another after all.
I wondered how I had managed to miss it for fifteen months. But the position of it doesn’t help. After the A281 turn off, the road sweeps down and curves right as it passes the Tate’s garage. A stretch where everyone else seems to be doing over a hundred, and it’s nigh on impossible to get out if you’ve stopped to get fuel. You then go under a bridge and the road starts to curve back to the left. And there it is, almost part of the trees/bushes surrounding it. A third sign. Crawley (16), Gatwick (21) and London (46) on it.
It’s probably not ideal finding this. It’s only going to encourage me to search every tree on the rest of the journey to see if there are anymore hiding in the foliage now. When to be fair, nothing should really be distracting me when I’m driving. I should just be doing the standard rotation of “front, rear-view, front, right wing, front, speedo, front, left wing, front”. And not “tree, bush, tree, bush, front”.
Moving on, Monday night saw unexpected item in the freezer area. Helen thought there was a bag of sausages in the draw of the freezer, only for them to be a pack of frozen mice for Heather’s snake. This did take me back to my Manchester days, when The Chemist asked Hopalong what was in the silver foil on the top shelf of the freezer. A question that Hopalong tried to avoid answering before admitting they were mice for his girlfriend’s snake.
There was also a lot of talk about hunting for moose (Helen’s son had been up to the Canadian border to spot them – not take an AK-47 to them). How it would be cold, and was likely to be difficult. I managed to restrain myself from chipping in and telling them how easy it would be to find them, they’d be next to the yoghurts in the supermarket. (Yes, I do know they are spelt differently, homophones work better when spoken.)
Back in work on Tuesday and I continued my ongoing comparison of one of the managers to Paddington Bear, by pointing out it was surprising they had had tea with the Queen. It will be a matter of time before the NLP kicks in and someone calls the manager Paddington to their face. It won’t be me, but it will be my fault.
Additionally, another of the managers turned up wearing what appeared to have once been a pair of curtains. Probably got up and thought, ooh, these curtains look nice, I’ll quickly knock out making a dress of them. I had to resist the temptation to tell them to “pull themselves together” all day.
My really happy dance though came when I went to the toilets and finally, after more than six weeks without any, the cleaner had put some paper towels in the dispenser, and so I could dry my hands properly and quickly. It’s amazing what makes me happy. It means that I don’t have to use the Cannon knock off version of the Dyson hand drier. The useless one that you have to stick your hands into, that; first, takes and age, secondly can’t be speeded up by rubbing you hands together as there isn’t room, and finally, is incapable of drying all of your hands, as (failing to get into Stevie Wonder’s band) it can’t do fingertips.
And to finish up this waffle there was the indentation left by the cat that amused me no end when I got home last night. When I came in, he was sat, as he often is, on the pouffe in the living room. When I went to sit down on the sofa he had moved, but he had left an indentation in the blanket on top of the pouffe in the perfect shape of a cock and balls.
Little things and little minds indeed.