That's another close shave you've got me out of

I have only 5 weeks left on my contract, and only a few thousand more miles of driving to be done. I shan't miss the trips up and down the motorways and trunk roads between Wiltshire and Lincolnshire. On this morning, the fifth such Monday left to go, just North of Silverstone, a car rushed towards me and was past in a flash, and I realised it was on my half of the dual carriageway, travelling in the wrong direction. I had not even had time to flash my headlights, and because there was no flash in my mirrors I assumed that the panel truck I had overtaken earlier and which was a few hundred yards behind me was also too surprised to react.

About 5 minutes later a set of blue flashing lights rushed along the opposite carriageway, and a further 5 minutes later, another set went past also heading back towards Silverstone. I had to assume the accident had happened very soon after I was confronted by the mistaken motorist. I felt some guilt that I hadn't done anything, but I still don't know what I could have done that would have prevented the accident. If I had phoned 999, asked for the police, and reported a medium-sized car travelling Southwest on the Northeast part of the A43, would they have been able to issue a warning? We don't have in-car radios capable of picking up emergency broadcasts. I hope no-one died, but even airbags are going to be chancy at a closing speed in excess of 120mph.

Later on, travelling up the M1, frustrated by pairs of lorries running side by side looking for all the world as if they were carrying on conversations through their cab windows, I was just switching back from the fast lane after passing yet another string of artics, when a brief flash in the mirror made me swerve back again, and a car rocketed past me into the left hand lane through the narrow gap between myself and the lorry, easily doing 90 to my 70, too concerned with keeping up his speed to let me finish my own overtaking maneouvre. Two close brushes with accidents in less than as many hours, neither of which would have been attributed to my driving. But being a safe motorist now is not so much a matter of knowing the highway code and observing the laws and limits as of being lucky. The best way to avoid being involved in an accident is to not get into the car in the first place. I am losing my love of the road and the steering wheel. If only the trains were more reliable, more convenient, and safe enough to trust one's life to.

They say that we should pay to use the roads in the future, as part of a plan to reduce congestion, or to restrict pollution, or to simply make the taxation on transport fairer. I certainly wouldn't be prepared to pay extra just to take more and more chances with my life on these roads.

Off-Colour

I've been seeing the world through a yellow haze this past week. It isn't jaundice, just a compensatory mechanism in the brain. At least I have some proof that I have a brain at last.

It's all down to the television. Our large TV set blew up a few weeks ago while I was away working. I was told about it when I got back on a Friday. I lugged it out of the way and put a spare set in place of it. This set had a small screen, and I remembered that I had some clever Fresnel screens that were supposed to magnify the picture, so I propped one of them in place. It worked very well, or I thought so anyway, it just looked a little odd standing on spindly telescopic arms a foot in front of the telly. It was a mixture of Tomorrow's World "Gosh, giant pictures!" and Blue Peter-ish "here's something we made earlier from old coat hangers and a sheet of plastic".

The cold that had started on me as soon as I had stopped eating the Garlic got worse. I set off home on a Friday after a week of snow, expecting a few problems, and well-stocked up with cough-sweets. I got the problems with a vengeance, not because of the snow, but because of an accident that closed the M1 for 2 hours. The consequent delay than caused me to lose another 2 hours crawling through the two sets of roadworks on the A34. I got home 4 hours late, with the cold now in full swing and no cough-sweets left. And there, waiting for me, was a different television.

One of Little Petal's daughters had come to stay for a week while I was away, to get a break from her children. The site of the tiny telly behind a giant magnifying screen had moved her to persuade her partner to drag out their old telly and bring it down to us. It was certainly a more normal size, but it seemed to have a problem with the colours. The reds were glorious, the blues shone with a phosphorescent hue, but greens looked dull and strange, and the yellows were all orange.

There was no remote with this set, and I couldn't make our universal remote control talk to it either, so there was no way to get to any system settings to adjust the colour. I wanted to put the smaller telly back on the shelf, but the cold was such that I didn't think I could lift the new (Ha!) telly down to make the space. For a week I sat and suffered the colour-shift, thinking that at least I was getting an insight into what life would look like to an alien from another planet who should come to visit us. When I got up from the sitting room and walked into the kitchen the white walls shone with a sickly-yellow hue as my brain struggled to un-compensate for the strange colour mixture I was being forced to watch.

It still didn't stop me from seeing a rare treat towards the end of my week off. I am an avid fan of 'Two Pints of Lager', and found an episode late one night that was a musical. I don't know if it was made for a Christmas one year, or just as a spoof for the hell of it, but I wish I'd taped it. I could then have watched it again in better colour. As it is, I'm going to have to wait for the repeats of the repeats of the repeats to come around. Are there any other "Two-Pints" fans out there who can tell me more about it? Such as what the actual colours of the costumes and sets were, please?

The organic smell of success

I'm in trouble. I have smelt. That sentence immediately gives the wrong impression, doen't it? It suggests that I detected something, when in fact, other people detected me. I shall change it therefore to 'I have been smelt'. And I'm going to blame the organic food craze for it. At this point I am certain that all the female readers are thinking 'farting vegetarian male'. You're wrong.

My little petal has a cold. She's had one since Christmas, although it has mutated from one form to another, either a runny nose or a dry rasping cough. I, on the other hand, have been completely free from it. In fact, I don't think I have had a cold for nearly two years now. I believe that this is due to a few things; I take a lot of exercise, I prefer to live slightly colder than she does, and I try preventative medicine. In my case, garlic. Each autumn and winter, I eat a clove or two of raw garlic each day. Not straight from the cluster, that would be gross. I chop them with a knife, and then crush them with a fork, and mix them in with some salad, typically Watercress, Spinach and Rocket, all in a pitta bread. Afterwards, I eat an apple, because it kills the odour of the garlic. Nobody knows that I am a secret garlic-eater. Or, nobody knew.

I was in the supermarket getting my supplies, and had already got the garlic, salad, and pitta breads, when I saw a sign on the organic shelves. They had large bulbs of garlic at a tempting price. I put my little stocking of normal garlic back into the tray and plucked out three large firm organically-grown bulbs. Anything organic has got to be better for you than normal things, hasn't it?

I didn't immediately notice any change when I chopped and crushed the cloves that evening, apart from the fact that each clove was about as third larger than a non-organic clove. So I was going to eat a little bit more of it than I would normally, where was the harm in that? And it was organic, so I was getting even more goodness. I did notice that the crushed garlic tasted more bitter than I was used to, my eyes watered a little and there was a burning on my tongue, but I'm not a weakling, I manfully chewed the pitta bread and ate my apple.

The next morning I did notice a slight smell of garlic in the room when I woke, so I opened the window to let the room breathe a little. For the rest of the week I carried on eating my slightly larger than usual cloves, and went home on Friday feeling a better and healthier biplane.

My little petal noticed the difference straight away. "You stink", she said. I had a hot bath, but the next morning she declared that I wasn't going to share the same bed with her if I was going to carry on like this. I stopped my raw garlic intake. Later, on Sunday, we took a phone call from the hotel. Had I got something in one of my bags that had gone off? Could I check before going back up there next week, because they had spent all weekend trying to get the smell out of the bedroom, and there was still a hint of it there. I had to confess it wasn't anything in my bags, it was just me.

When I woke up at 3:00 on Moday morning to set off for another week away, I had a burning nose and throat, and as I sit typing this I am snuffling and snorting and bitterly regretting my excursion into the realm of organicly-farmed vegetables. What, I am wondering, did they fertilise the garlic with? Do I really want to know? Suppose they put on the wrapping the full details of their organic method, just as the normal food has to list all the E-numbers, what would we read? This product has been covered in variegated animal shit.

This week, I shall be mostly eating junk food as a detox-method.

Now is the winter of our disbelief

turned into slushy puddles of failed promises underfoot. The only thing that surprises me is that nobody is really that surprised. A prime minister being questioned by police, aides arrested, a lord arrested (twice), but it's all business as usual for both the police and the government. Perhaps new labour have flirted so close and so often with controversy that we are all happy to accept that things have always gone on this way, and it's only the rabid curiousity of the press that has resulted in these items getting on to the front pages. After all, what's a reward for a donation compared to war on false premises? Quite right, nothing. We've had dodgy lords for centuries, it always was a way of rewarding someone who new when to put the purse in and keep his mouth shut. Dodgy prime ministers? Well, Disraeli used to 'rescue' fallen women. Allegedly.

I suspect also that someone around number 10 might have been breathing a sigh of relief that so much other news has been making it to the top of the list to bump this item steadily down to the bottom of the cess-pool. The continuing release of home office catastrophes, for example. Marvellous, and much more relevant to the fears of everyday people, worried about foreign rapists and absconding criminals. Rich knights just don't figure in the ranks of bogeymen. Or the recent Celebrity Big Brother storm in a far-eastern teacup, it's on the streets and in the factories every day and every night, and much more meaningful to us than those strange P's and K's referred to in the scribbled notes and rattled e-mails.

And what is so sinister about P's and K's anyway? I can hear Tony Blair exclaiming. It's not what you think. It's just swearing. We swear in number 10, honest. Everybody swears. It's just part of life. It's just that, well, educated people tend to be a bit more euphemistic than the inmates of the Celebrity Big Brother house. When you read P or K in our emails it's completely wrong to think of Peerages and Knighthoods. No indeed, what we're referring to are 'phucks' and 'kunts', to put it in terms that Jade Goody would understand. We just spell some words slightly differently.

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