Suzy Says

OK, so England has a real traffic problem. Although it’s pretty much the size of Pennsylvania, it takes a million years to get anywhere. That’s probably why the Empire, once one quarter of the globe, has shrunk to the size of, well, Pennylvania. It took them too damn long to get to wherever they were supposed to be defending the Empire.

It seems to work one of two ways to a girl used to the wide open spaces of the US of A.

1. The quaint country lanes, winding their way through the beautiful English countryside. These are something in the nature of the gorgeous girl who looks so great at first but then turns out to be a psycho or deeply stupid, thereby completely negating what were formerly irresistible charms. The lanes, too, look great, and you think, “How nice and relaxing to drive on these lanes which have been here for centuries instead of on a soulless freeway.”

But the lanes have these really high hedges on both sides which make it impossible to see what is around the corner. So you have to drive sloooooowly. It’s like driving in football time. You know how the clock in football says 20 minutes left in the game, and two hours later it says 15 minutes left? Same thing. Signpost says 5 miles to the destination, and it takes you an hour to get there, assuming that signpost wasn’t something put up to confuse potential invaders in WWII and left there either out of an evil sense of humor to mess with those tourists who shouldn’t be there in the first place, or because they just forgot about it and never changed it, in the same way that the letter of the law still says you can be hanged, drawn, and quartered Braveheart style for damaging the Great Wall of York, though hardly anyone ever is. And assuming that the signpost doesn’t say Exeter in every possible direction.

I had a revelation on Saturday that Lewis Carroll really wasn’t all that clever in making up that part in “Through the Looking Glass” where the road Alice is following keeps coming back to the same place and not where she was trying to go. He just observed it, he didn’t invent it.

2. The parking lots that are supposed to be freeways, or some form of highway. These would be your motorways or A roads. You get stuck on them as long as the country lanes, though unlike the country lanes, which give you the illusion of getting somewhere, you sit there endlessly and get nowhere. Probably one of the well-known rooms in hell. Really, really surprising that the murder rate isn’t higher, though come to think of it, that may be why they banned guns here in the first place. They wouldn’t be drive by shootings, they’d be canned hunts.