The Brixham Mystery

Brixham is the smallest of the 3 towns that makes up Torbay. The road out of Brixham runs for about 3 miles between the old Toll Gate at Monks Bridge to Windy Corner and to day it was full of cars all heading for somewhere other than Brixham. Going into Brixham this morning at about 11:00 was easy. There was no traffic going into Brixham, it was all heading out. So you know it is going to be a long haul back to Paignton. It usually takes 20 minutes but as I drove past all the stationary traffic pointing the other way I knew that I was going to be late for my lunch, which today I was scheduled to take in Paignton at 11:43. Fat chance. My problem with all these cars leaving Brixham isn’t that they are leaving Brixham or that the are all leaving Brixham at the same time like some vast flash flood of machinery (used to flash floods, see Monday) but where in Brixham they have all spent the night. There just isn’t room in Brixham for that many cars. And they can’t have got there by some other route; there isn’t any other route. One road into and out of Brixham. Do they all drive in, take one look and drive out again? Is it the lack of places to park in Brixham? We have the Park and Ride for that problem. So what is it that causes the road to turn into a 3 mile long 10 foot wide car park? If you were there this morning; or any of the other mornings when a couple of thousand cars all queue up to get through the lights at Windy Corner in a bid to escape from the site of the last successful foreign invasion of British soil (William of Orange) could you tell me why you were doing it. I am sure it was just to make me, and most other 12/12A/12B drivers late for their lunch. I got to Paignton at 12:10 by the way and I should have taken over an other bus at 12:28. That was 20 minutes late as well so no rushed sandwiches followed by indigestion.

A leaflet appeared at work today entitled Annual Performance May 2006 to April 2007. It seems we carried 23.6 million passengers compared with 19.2 million the year before and 18.3 million the year before that. Don't we work hard?