Boss Radio

Many moons ago when I first bought Miss Streetpilot the satnav, I had this strange obsession with getting her it to take me to places that I already knew the way to, just to see if she it had a better plan. And so it was that I tried to find Lee on Solent in her its memory bank. Now for those who don't know about this stuff, the Solent is actually a bit of sea that flows between the Isle of Wight and mainland UK, but since it was once a river it's still known by its river name.

This confused me. So I searched for Lee on Sea.

It wasn't in there of course, so, since I knew for an actual fact that this place was on the sea I tried searching for different spellings of 'Lee', and eventually I found Leigh on Sea.

It was further away than I thought it would be, and it also apeared to be in entirely the wrong county. So I finally did what any sane woman would have done long ago and looked in a book. And there I discovered my error. Leigh on Sea was in fact next door to Southend on Sea on the East Coast. That's the other side of London... I forgot about it and off we went to Lee on Solent.

Yesterday at about 11am we decided that it was a beautiful day and much too nice to be spring cleaning. We gathered up our stuff and got in the car. I started the engine and was just pulling away when a thought hit me. "Where shall we go?"

Obviously the first port of call was the petrol station, which is situated on a busy roundabout next to a supermarket and is a right pain to get out of. So the 2nd decision was easy as well. Everyone and his brother was out enjoying the sun, and most of them were in their cars. The roundabout was just about impossible to get onto unless... Just as someone turned into the supermarket (Why? Why would anyone go shopping on a beautiful spring Bank Holiday Sunday? )it was possible to shoot out and take the first left before you were once again enveloped in traffic. So left it was.

The only trouble was, that road didn't really go anywhere exciting, so eventually I pulled in to a layby that hadn't been closed to stop travellers from camping in it (Yet), dug out Miss Streetpilot. and looked through 'recent finds'. There weren't many places of interest in the recent finds that we hadn't already been to quite recently. In fact the term 'recent finds' was a bit of a misnomer. It's actually a list of places I've searched for in which the oldest entry is pushed off the screen by my most recent search. And there it was, right at the bottom, about to be consigned to infinity. Leigh on Sea. OK, I decided. It's mid day, we're on the open road, and we're wearing sunglasses.

Hit it!

Miss Streetpilot estimates your time of arrival for you. Over the time I owned her it I've calculated that she assumes an average speed of 55mph, and she's... dammit, I can't keep correcting myself. My Satnav has a girl's voice, therefore it's female, OK? No one got any problems with that?

Onwards.

Her estimates have always been surprisingly acurate, so the journey should take us about two and a half hours. The journey went uneventfully until we reached the London Orbital, the infamous M25. The variable speed limit signs were indicating 40. Not that anyone except me and a couple of other drivers were taking any notice. Most of them seemed to be even exceding the madatory 70 limit.

Why do people do that? When the sign says 40 it means "There's a traffic jam ahead". If you cruise up to it at 40 you give it a chance to disipate, if you charge into it at 80 you just contribute to the mess. Hey, I'v seen the computer models, it's actually faster if you stick to the 40 limit. I know it seems crazy but hey, the computer doesn't lie.

Anyway, as a result of these speed geniuses I eventually also got embroiled in their traffic tie-ups, and as I crawled along at sub 10 mph speeds I noticed Miss Streetpilot re-estimating my arrival time. This journey was going to take longer than expected...

Finally the signs declared the traffic jam over and we were back on our way.

For all of 5 minutes.

What had caused this jam then? The roadside signs didn't seem to know anything about it, but it was a bad one. We had to keep actually stopping. Eventually it became clear what the problem was. A car had caught fire in the opposite carriageway, and rubberneckers had been slowing down to have a good gawp.

I don't get it. These people are in such a hurry that they'll risk their lives and licenses to get wherever it is that they're going, but they'll slow down to a crawl to have a gander at a burning car. I can picture them in a burning house and pausing to watch TV on their way out.

Finally we got off the motorway and on to the eastbound arterial, nothing ahead of us now except a nice leasurely drive to the sea. Except that this road was even more crowded than the M25. Cyclists, pedal cyclists were overtaking us and vanishing into the distance. A traffic report came on the radio. "So, Emma. How is it out there?" "Well of course, Frank, it's a wonderful day, and then there's the air-show to take into account..."

Air-show? Why wasn't I warned about this? No wonder there was so much traffic. I'd chosen to go out on a magnificently sunny Bank Holiday Sunday to a seaside destination where they were having an air show. Via the M25.

We arrived over two hours later than estimated, and it was chaos. As far as parking went it was a waste of time. It was anything goes. Bike lanes, yellow lines, disabled driver spots, cars were stopped everywhere. This in turn reduced several roads to single lane traffic so there were frequent stops to allow convoys of about 500 cars past before shooting out and forcing other motorists to wait while I and the 499 vehicles behind me went past them. Stuff this for a game of cricket we decided, and set off along the shore away from the display.

Eventually we agreed that our best plan was to go home by a country route, see some countryside, and avoid the M25 - and of course London. So I consulted the gazetteer and planned a rough route we could take. It was around this point that we both realised that we A/ Were getting a little hungry, and B/ Could really do with a 'relief stop'. Right before us was a sign. It said 'M25'.

OK, here's the new plan. The burnt car will have been cleared long ago, so we'll get onto the motorway and find a service area, then we'll drive off into the country.

We followed the sign and shortly found ourselves back on the orbital. Everything went fine for the first couple of miles, and then, just passed a road junction where we could have got off to continue our countryside quest, traffic came to a standstill. A police car drove past on the hard shoulder. Two ambulances followed a few minutes later. Back to the radio I think... "So, Emma. How is it out there?" "Well Frank, there's been a 7 vehicle pile up..." Great. 7 vehicles have decided to run into each other just as I've driven past the place where I could have turned off. Well how jolly thoughtful that was of them. Don't tell me, they'd been doing 80 in order to catch up with the traffic jam ahead of them, only they hadn't noticed it...

I have no idea what really happened to be honest. In all, three ambulances, two wreckage removal lorries, and two accident investigation crews went by us, and since usually, when the road is completely closed, the support vehicles come down the empty carriageway from the other direction, Heaven knows how many were actually required. What I do know is three quarters of an hour after Emma (Or whoever was on shift by now) told us that the wreckage was being removed and that traffic was starting to move again, we were still stationary. In fact by this time there was a party going on.

So that's how I spent my lovely day out. Almost permanently stuck in traffic. When I'm out in traffic like this I always tend to feel that we're all in it together, and drive accordingly. I think I've just realised that some people think of it as every man for himself.

There's one thing I always do when we go to the seaside, and that's page through all the radio channels on the car radio. The sea is great for carrying radio signals.

So there I was, flipping, and I came across a radio station that we agreed seemed to be playing the perfect music for a hot, sunny, slightly seamisty day. Unfortunately I'd tuned in almost at the end of the record, but before I could mutter "Oh well" and retune, a strangely similar record came on.

After a few minutes of listening whilst we devoured our ice creams (Or 'isis crims' as I will insist upon calling them in homage to The Marx Brothers) it became apparent that this was Radio Similar-Records we were listening to. Every track they played was a basic rhythm section of bass, drums, and electric keyboard. They all had Latin percussion, but it mostly sounded like it was generated electronically either by a machine or a tape loop. Over this there would sometimes be other instruments, like a guitar or another keyboard, and on top of that there'd be something else. Sometimes it would be a sax tootling at random, or a vibraphone tootling at random, or a voice tootling at random. The voice would always be talking in a quiet, relaxed sort of way, but never said very much that made sense, unless the ones who spoke in foreign, which I'm not very fluent in, were making some kind of sense.

The tootler on top was left to do his or her thing, but all the elements providing the background, which was always a repeated riff with just a few of the records having a bit of variation towards the end of the track, being faded in and out by some idiot with a mixing desk and nothing better to do.

After a while it got hypnotic and we got giggly. "The percussion's gone!", "The pecussion's back!", "Yeah, but the drums have gone now..."

Mum thought the station sounded Portugese, I don't think, even with all that water, that a signal could travel that far that well, I also couldn't establish exactly why it sounded Portugese, but what the heck, wherever it came from it kept us entertained just wondering who it could possibly be aimed at. Who'd want to listen to this stuff? As we drove off and the signal quickly vanished we suddenly realised.

It was aimed at us.