And Then There Was Rapid Flashing….

I needed to take a trip today. Part of this trip, to get me to where I wanted to be, from where I wuzz, meant I had to cross a really, really big river using a really, really big bridge. Surprisingly, you have to pay to cross the bridge. Oh, I'm in a car, by the way.

At the bridge I joined one of the lines of traffic queuing to part with money. I inched forward and finally got to the toll booth whereupon the Legal Highway Robbery lady wished me a cheery good morning. I offered the greeting back at her and handed over the contents of my pockets.

While she was doing stuff with the till and traffic lights, I light-heartedly enquired how many times a day she said ‘good morning’? Legal Highway Robbery lady smiled broadly and said it was probably thousands. I suggested that, to break up the monotony, after midday, she could possibly start saying ’good afternoon’.

I could see in her eyes that the lights were starting to dim and went even dimmer as I raised the thorny issue of when ‘good afternoon’ should officially become ‘good evening’.

And when evening becomes night? That’s when the lights finally blinked out. Just as I started on the strangeness of all these greetings starting with ‘good’ and then, when you get to the end of the day, ‘good night’ becomes a sort of go away thing and you revert to ‘hullo’ or ‘hello’ or ‘Hi’. If you're arriving. Not if your going. If your going, and it’s night, not evening, ‘good night’ works. But I could see I’d totally lost her a while back.

About this time I glanced in my rear view mirror and noted that quite a queue had quite quickly and quietly formed up behind me. There was something quite strange going on with this line of cars. All I could think was it must be another new rule that’d passed me by, like the chainsaw licence deal, and must be a safety requirement before cars proceeded to the bridge, in case of some sort of bridge disaster.

Not wanting to be caught on CCTV not doing what all the cars behind me were doing, and possibly breaking some new law, I just started doing the same as all the cars behind me were doing, and crossed the bridge rapidly and repeatedly flashing my headlights.

I did, however, notice that drivers crossing the bridge in the other direction weren’t flashing their lights, but when they saw me they all started flashing like crazy! I left the bridge with a quiet feeling of pride that I'd reminded a lot of people to obey the new rule and so definitely done my bit for bridge safety.

We all got safely across the bridge so I can only assume rapid flashing works….. {Note to self; check if my 1965 copy of the Highway Code has been up-dated.}

Quote; Tommy Cooper.

“Somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said, `Parking Fine`.”