I moved offices three weeks ago now. Rather than a 20 minute walk through downtown Portsmouth, mainly through sidestreets, to one of those buildings that looks like the one in The Office, I now have a 35-40 minute walk up the leafy Copnor Road that ends with an inevitable encounter with traffic to which there is no obvious answer.
If I still drove a car it would be a bit pathetic to drive it two miles there and back each day. Yesterday I tried the bus which was great to get there but awful coming back. Getting back on a bike would be more dangerous than walking.
So it looks like I'll be walking 20 miles a week which should at least please the blood pressure lady. It will either cure me or finish me off.
But, from this 'new' building, I can, if I care to, glimpse through a distant window the traffic on the M27 above that on the Hilsea roundabout below. It is mindlessly hypnotic and endless. White van, grey car, grey car, bus, lorry, bus, white van, grey car. This is on the outskirts of a not particularly big, or significant, city on the south coast of England. It's not Spaghetti Junction, Manchester, Glasgow or London.
And that's just our tiny island. It's not the rest of Europe, Mumbai, Asia, all those vast Chinese cities you've never heard of. I once took a boat ride and saw how far Istanbul sprawls. It's not Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, or even Los Angeles and I understand that there is more to the USA than that.
So, how much petrol is there left in the world, then. I thought it was running out as quickly as the fish are being drained from the oceans. Apparently not, apparently there are several gallons still left.
We look back at how things used to be- outside toilets, belief in witchcraft, rationing, pardoners, slavery, Tony Blair and things like that- and wonder how it could ever have been so but we don't notice the things that informed future readers of classic texts of our time, like Jeremy Clarkson's thought-provoking dissertations, are likely to question. They might speculate on where all those motor vehicles were going and how we ever arrived at a time when it was no longer required for somebody to walk in front of each of them waving a flag. Because they might have arrived at a time in which nearly everybody can stay where they are and do everything they need to do there. Of course, it might be necessary for a few trips to be made from Gloucester to Cheltenham, Inverness to Elgin or Liverpool to Manchester but it should be possible to do that safely even though the countryside in between is wild with wolves and bears, hawks, jaguars and lots of other things in Ted Hughes poems.
But, as usual, it's my fault in some way. Every book I buy these days, every record and several other things, need to be delivered and there's not much chance I can find very many of the ones I want in Waterstones or a record shop, if the High Street still has any of those. Somewhere in one of those vans are books coming to my house, the inappropriately described 'walking shoes' from Cotton Traders that don't look like they're going to stand up to very much walking, or one day, when I land a proper gamble, the Opera Omnia, the Complete Works of Buxtehude. But apart from that, it's like those films set to Philip Glass music, like Koyaanisqatsi, which means 'life out of balance'.
On the other hand, one might ask if there was ever a time when it was 'in balance' and, if so, why did it all go wrong. Those motor vehicles are going to be going round that roundabout for much longer than it will be a trouble to me.