Lost highway

Deep breaths. Swap ‘Hound Dog’ Taylor for Toumanie Diabaté. Wind window down, rest bare arm on sill. Feel warm breeze on bonce. Tell self to overcome anger as only hurting self. Tell self to count blessings, live in moment. Tell self kids back at school next week, after which fewer holidaymakers, traffic less horrendous. Tell self, finally, no need to hurry, film doesn’t start for an hour.

A sharp bend in the road ahead. Our procession goes very slowly round the bend then comes to a dead stop. The combine harvester has caught up with the tail end of a queue of stationary traffic snaking down to the T-junction. I can see police down at the T-junction and a line of cones across the road. The police are telling drivers they can’t turn right, by the look of it. I can see cars wanting to turn right hesitantly heading off left. There must have been a serious accident on the main road into town. With fatalities, judging by the number of police milling about at the junction and their pious body language.

Bloody marvellous. Just my luck. The first time I’m allowed out for a week and some pillock — a holidaymaker, no doubt — goes and has a head-on collision, blocking the main road for hours and making me miss my film. Why do the police have to close the road for so long? They like showing off, that’s all. All that posturing with clipboards and tape measures. All that standing around in the middle of the road just because they can and chatting among themselves like farmers on market day. Why not get the debris shifted, sweep up and ask questions afterwards so we can all get on with our lives?

Twenty-five minutes later it’s my turn to front up at the T-junction and be told I can’t turn right. A special constable. Woman. ‘Accident?’ I say. She closes her eyes and nods ever so slightly. ‘Fiddle my way through?’ I say, meaning should I try the convoluted route via the narrow back lanes. Once again the closed eyes and the almost imperceptible nodding in agreement. Local, esoteric knowledge, the back lanes. Let’s just keep that knowledge between ourselves, she seems to be saying.

But when I arrive at the entrance to the warren of back lanes, indicating right, the lane is full of stationary vehicles. A special constable is standing here, too, urging people like me not to even think about trying it. ‘It’s gridlocked down there,’ he says to me as I slow down and look. ‘Nothing’s moving. You’ll have to carry on.’

I carry on. I’m now driving due south. I want to go due north. But I’m lucky to be moving at all. Oncoming traffic is at a standstill. Drivers are out of their cars and standing in the road. Mums and kids are sitting disconsolately on the grass verge. I have a choice between a 25-mile circuit of narrow, traffic-clogged lanes, after which I’ll probably be too late for the film, or going home. I go home, seething with animosity towards holidaymakers — even dead ones.

That was on the Friday. On Saturday the newsagent had some papers left. On the front page of the Western Morning News the headline ran: ‘Runaway silage bale kills van driver’. One of those big round hay bales had rolled down a steep hillside, bounced through a hedge and dropped 12 feet into the road below. A wide-angle colour photo showed the result. The bale had made a direct hit. The van roof had been crushed down to the dashboard. A heap of loose silage lay on the road in the front of the van. A copper wearing blue surgical gloves was taking notes. The tragic accident had caused ‘massive’ congestion, it said.

What terrible, rotten luck. We must be talking winning lottery ticket odds here. On Monday, further details emerged. He was a local man, name of Mike Edwards. He used to play the cello in the band Electric Light Orchestra. (I can hear his cello in their big hit ‘Roll over Beethoven’, now, in my memory.) After he left ELO he became a Buddhist and changed his name to Deva Pramada. Deva was a single man, aged 62. He was delivering bottled mineral water.

I was shocked. Why him? More than anything, however, I was conscious of the need to expiate a fault — a pettiness, as D.H. Lawrence put it.