#oneaday, Day 279: Saturday Drivers

I don’t know why anyone bothers to try and do anything on a Saturday, particularly if doing said thing involves riding in a car for any length of time.

“Why’s that?” I hear you ask.

“Well,” I say, “it’s to do with traffic.”

When asked to elaborate, I elaborate on the fact that traffic gets bloody everywhere on a Saturday, but particularly in the various town centres of the UK. Everyone decides that Saturday is “shopping day”, which makes a certain amount of sense, given that normal people (i.e. not unemployed scrotes like me) are normally working throughout the course of the week. But to this I respond “why not Sunday? What’s wrong with Sunday?”

It’s a fair question, I feel. Although the opening hours of most shops are shorter on Sundays, opening later and closing earlier, there is, these days, otherwise nothing to distinguish the experience of shopping on a Sunday in a town centre to shopping on a Saturday. Sure, there may be more people coming and going from church. If you happen to be passing by a church, of course. Which, let’s face it, shopping centres aren’t known for being built in close proximity to.

The net result of all this trafficky nonsense on a Saturday, of course, is that any time you actually want to get something done that involves passing through (or even near) a town centre on a Saturday, you had better budget at least twice as much time as you think you need. Because a good 50% of your journey will be spent staring at another car’s arse wondering if you’ll ever see your home again. I experienced the joy of this today, with a trip into Eastleigh town centre earlier in the day (Eastleigh being a town remarkable for featuring a road layout designed by someone who has no idea how big a car is) and later a trip to Southampton (jammed solid) to pick up my friend Tom in order to give him a lift to my other friend Sam’s in Winchester. Oddly enough, Winchester, which is usually a traffic-infested hellhole thanks to being a medieval city that wasn’t really designed with cars in mind, and features a Gowalla spot for the traffic jam which occurs every day like clockwork between 5 and 7pm, was pretty clear. Result.

The above isn’t just limited to town centres, either. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of driving on the crown jewel of Britain’s road system, the M25, will be well familiar with this feeling. Except on the M25 you don’t even have any interesting towny sights to enjoy while you’re stuck behind a million other cars that stretch off to the horizon with no obvious reason for stopping dead on a road designed for driving at 70mph. No, you have concrete, and other cars. And trucks. And that’s about it. Not fun. At all. Better hope there’s something good on the radio, or at least that you have some entertaining content on your iPod.

So basically, my advice to you? If it’s Saturday, then just stay in. You don’t need to go out. Just stay in. Catch up on TV. Watch a DVD. Play a lengthy video game. Listen to some music. Read a book.

Anything. Anything but go for a drive.