Saturday January 5th 2013

My neck has locked in, I'm getting tension headaches, and I'm feeling far too fatigued. It's clear what the cause is: it's time to go back to work. I'm loathe to moan too much about going back to work, since it's already January 5th, and I remember only too well working at pubs and clubs and suchlike, having to work straight through the holiday season without a break, and being intensely nettled when a customer both moaned about having to go back to work, and, at the same time, sneered at me because they assumed, wrongly, that I'd just had a week off. On the other hand, this happened so often that I guess I don't feel so bad about whining that I had to go back to work today. It was painful.

Apart from anything else, I ended up having to cycle in driving sleet. That's the problem with this time of year; the weather is still dreadful, but you no longer have Christmas to look forward to. I was getting close to my destination when a car stopped, a friend got out, and offered me a lift. I ended up declining, because I really was so close to where I was going, but I was struck by the two acts of kindness. The first act of kindness was, obviously, the offer of a lift, but the second act was the fact that she took time to overtake me slightly, come to a stop, and get out of her car to attract my attention. You know, as opposed to what most anybody else would've done, which would have been to inch the car very close to my bicycle, and then suddenly hit the car horn, thereby almost making me veer off into the ditch. I've genuinely lost count of how many times this has happened. I know people are just trying to say hello (at least, I hope they are, the possibility that they're deliberately attempting to drive me off the road isn't one that I'm really willing to contemplate right now), but I wish they wouldn't, or at least find a more effective method that driving up really close, and then suddenly hitting their horn. It's really rather scary. Since car horns are meant to signify a sudden and immediate risk of danger, it is, to say the very least, somewhat startling to have one blaring in your ear without warning while you're cycling along.

Of course, the car horn is very rarely used for its original purpose any more. More usually, it's used to signify anger when the driver doesn't agree with the way another road user has used the road, to bully the car in front when it's taken longer than 1.6 seconds to react to the traffic lights changing, or, oddly, as a replacement for the words 'hello' or 'goodbye'. I don't get this. It's bad enough when someone parks their car outside a house a hits the horn to alert their friend, and therefore everyone else in the street, that they've arrived, but the thing I've never been able to understand is when somebody hits their horn in farewell, making a big BEEP sound as they drive away. It makes no sense , since it seems to suggest that, as they left the house, they simply forgot to say 'goodbye': you know, that they were day chatting with their family in the lounge, when they suddenly got up wordlessly, walked out of the house, got into the car, and finally looked up to the window at the front of the house to see the confused faces of their loved ones peering questioningly at them. Of course, they think. I knew there was something I'd forgotten. There's no point in going all the way back in now, of course: rather than bothering to vocalise a farewell, they hit the car horn. This is obviously the only rational explanation for their actions.