Passata Joke
Life, as I have often observed, is copy. You never know when inspiration might strike. As regular readers will recall, last month it was the drive to school that got me thinking about the changing face of language and where I also found out about the practice of rickrolling.
Oddly, it’s all about driving this month too. Last week was half term so the children were off school. We generally drive up to Towcester to see our cousins and visit Wicksteed Park, a charming amusement park set in acres of rolling countryside. Something always happens to disrupt our journey from Suffolk to Northamptonshire. Often it’s roadworks, sometimes a traffic jam, but you can be sure that we’ll reach our destination tired and crabby, at least an hour after we said we’d be there.
It was just me and the two youngest this time and as we drove north on the A14 (surely the most boring road in England), we were in high spirits. The sun was sinking in the sky, feathery pink clouds enticingly drifting across the firmament, birds flapping lazily home. All was well. On the gantries, a warning flashed up. The A14 was closed between junctions 21 and 24. This sounded pretty bad, but I had no idea if it had anything do with our journey so continued.
Stick with me. There is a reason I’m telling you this.
It was really bad. Just south of Cambridge, big flashing arrows directed us, and about a million lorries[1] into the centre of Huntingdon. There is doubtless much to love about this historic market town in Cambridgeshire, granted its charter by Bad King John in 1205, home of the Huntingdon Elm and a well-preserved medieval bridge and the only known habitat of the marsh dandelion. Had I been planning a day trip, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it very much. In the company of a vast number of articulated lorries, however, all of us squeezing from three lanes down to one, it was no fun at all.
We stayed cheerful for the hour and a half it took to inch our way off the A14, around Huntingdon and back on roughly the right route. We arrived, eventually, at 11.30 at night. As I nodded off to sleep, I wondered what catastrophe could have closed such an enormous section of the A14.
Driving home the next night (light traffic, no roadworks, no hold ups) I pondered writing a blog about the experience. The voice of reason interceded. ‘Ruth, who's going to read a blog about you driving around England?’
And that was that until I arrived home and my husband told me the reason why the A14 was closed.
It seems that two lorries, one carrying a load of olive oil and tomato puree had jack knifed and crashed into each other. You couldn’t make it up. Having ascertained that no-one was injured, I made the joke which forms the title of this blog. That’s because I’m a pizza work[2].
Chortling to myself, I realised that however far-fetched some of my plot lines might be, nothing could compare to the two lorries and their accidental merging. A number of Twitter users pointed out that it was a good thing the collision hadn’t occurred at Spaghetti Junction. The jokes ran and ran.
On Thursday, I was back on the A14 heading into Ipswich for our son’s fifteenth birthday celebrations. I shared the story of the two lorries and their loads with the passengers, eliciting howls of laughter from the back. It was agreed that no-one was safe. At any moment, a lorry containing strawberries could bump into another with a load of granulated sugar, resulting in a terrible traffic jam. This kind of wordplay kept us entertained all the way to the trampoline park and then back again. My son smiled wryly as I took the exit off the highway of doom. ‘I guess this is what you’re writing your blog about, then?’
Looks like it.
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