Wednesday 20th December 2023

So, for the first two days of my Christmas vacation, I would be spending about six hours each day in a car, with Jen, and the second day with Sylv too.

My fault, I volunteered to go, seemed an OK idea six weeks back, but with the road network bursting at its seams, driving from Dover to Bolton and back in the week before Christmas was asking for trouble, or spending hour upon hour in traffic jams.

No?

Well, not quite.

Jools went to work as normal, giving me an hour to have a shower, breakfast, two coffees and pack before Jen arrived just gone nine.

Now, I'm not the best passenger, and it being Jen's car, she said she would drive until the planned lunch stop at Peterborough Services.

I climbed in the car, adjusted the seats, heating and mirrors, as you do. And Jen takes us off, down the end of the road, to Westcliffe, to the Duke of Yorks and then down Jubilee Way and onto the A20 for the sixty mile run up to the M25.

And, it was pretty uneventful. No traffic, in fact lighter than expected, so in an hour we were turning onto the M25, where there were no queues, so we sailed through into the western bore, and up into Essex.

An easy run to the bottom of the M11, turn north and no worries.

It was a fine and sunny day, though it would turn worse as we got nearer Manchester, that goes without saying.

Jen is old school and had written the roads she needed to take: M20, M25, M11, A14, A1(M), M62, but failed to realise that the A1 wasn't a motorway all the way and that the A1 was, in fact, the same road.

Past Cambridge with traffic I have never seen so light, westward before turning onto the Great North Road, and a half hour run to Peterborough where we had our lunch of pork pies, sandwiches and coffee from a Thermos. No money spent.

I then took over, so we got back onto the A1 and headed north, all the time discussing when "the north" actually started. I decided once we passed Blyth Services, where there used to be a pit, that for me was a northern thing, but when I saw that for the first time I was unaware of mining in Kent.

Which isn't north at all.

Only hold up was just before Pontefract, where traffic went into one lane due to bridge repairs. But we got through that in ten minutes, and soon we were heading west on the M62.

It had already started to drizzle, but it got harder, and mixed with a mist which merged together as the road climbed to the summit on Saddleworth Moor.

Traffic speed slowed to forty, and I sat in the slow lane to be safe, as the motorway descended into Manchester, Rochdale and the other mix of urban and industrial sprawl, all lost in the rain and gathering gloom of a midwinter's dusk.

Jen thought she knew the way from the motorway to Sylv's house, it just two roundabouts of the motorway.

Which motorway, she realised, she did not know. We had to choose between the northern or southern part of the Manchester ring motorway, she chose south.

She chose poorly.

We turned off.

She was lost.

Well, not lost, but just not sure where in Bury, or Bolton, we were.

We followed the signs for Bury, and with each rounadabout Jen declared that we were turning onto the Bury Road, which meant Sylv's was just a few minutes away.

We came to the centre of Bury, past the famous market, getting warmer.

We just had to find the Bury Road, of course at this points, all roads lead to Bury and so were all, in a way, the Bury Road.

We carried on and were almost into Bolton when, suddenly, she knew where we were.

Down Long Lane, past Fred Dibnah's old house, a sharp right, onto a main road, turn left, under a bridge and beside the river was Sylv's place.

Phew.

The last part, the easy part, had taken an hour. It was now dark and raining hard.

Time for a brew.

So, what shall we do for the rest of the evening?

Pub, I said.

And both Jen and Sylv said they would like to come along too. So, out into the rain and wind, along the main road, past the Market Tavern and into the warm light of The Grapes, where a round of: two pints of Old Speckled Hen, a pint of Boddingtons and a pint of Guinness, and a large pack of cheese and onion crisps set me back just over eleven quid.

We had two more rounds, then wandered back to Sylv's flat for supper of pie and mushy peas, and then watch the 1991 Christmas Top of the Pops, followed by the 1980 Les Dawson Christmas "special" and then a review of the career of Mike Yarwood.

Maybe its because humour is more, I don't know, sophisticated now, but Dawson especially was painfully unfunny, the traditional sketches interspersed with scenes from something called "Dawson Control", manned by what were called in the 1970s, Dolly Birds, dressed in fishnets and red lippy, and little else, who other than to be eye candy, served no function.

Different times, I guess.

I gave up and went to bed at ten, listened to the start of a podcast and fell asleep.