The London run was a 70 mile drive one-way, so a 140-mile round-trip, plus the 10ish miles on the Tube each way. Amusingly, it took an hour to do the drive, and an hour to do the time on the Tube.

Since then I’ve taken on a new contract, this time working in Luton. The driving time is a bit less – about 2 hours in the morning, 90 minutes in the evening – for a few more miles, about 80 each way all told.

Everybody else insists I must be slightly mad to do the driving I do, but I really don’t mind it. It’s a longer distance sure, but it regularly used to take the same time to travel by bus from home to Oldham when I worked there. It used to take even longer when I was commuting by train between London and Bath, or London and Manchester. (And yeah, those runs were seriously insane)

In general I’m less stressed when it comes to commuting by car than when I’m reliant on public transport – people piss me off too much for me to want to travel with them now when I can avoid them.

I probably still am stupid for driving/commuting as much as I do, but it suits me, so I’m happy with it.

I know I’ve posted one or two ( *ahem* ) pictures in the past of people parking like titbags, but this site is just brilliant. Sterling work.

We’re now living in a little village, and none of the roads that access the village have been gritted/salted. All three roads really only go to the village and that’s it. It’s a cut-through route to other villages, but none of them are apparently important enough to justify gritting even one of the roads. Thanks, local authority.

So travelling in and out of the village is a bit more interesting than usual. Normally you’ve got to deal with mud on the roads, but now it’s snow and ice.

I’ll admit, snowy/icy roads are about the only road conditions that make me a bit nervous. I had my first (and still only) accident on snowy roads, and I’m just not a great fan of driving in those conditions. I still do drive in those conditions, it’s just probably my least favourite situation.

So I’m a) hoping it all fades away pretty soon, and b) thankful that 99% of my current stupid daily commute is on major roads that aren’t going to be a concern on that score.

Personally, I don’t understand the need for HS2 between London and Birmingham. There’s already several ways to do that journey.

To my mind, what’s *really* needed is a cross-country route, rather than another up/down-country route.  For example, at the moment I’m travelling between Bury St Edmunds and Bedford on a daily basis. It takes about 65-75 minutes door-to-door, which is OK.  However, if I were going by train, I would have to go Bury St Edmunds -> Cambridge -> London -> Bedford – around five hours of travelling time. And that’s ridiculous.

We simply don’t (to my understanding) need another ‘length of the country’ high-speed route. We do need one that goes across the country – from Cambridge across to Oxford and on to Bath/Bristol. That would have allowed for far more useful routes and better links, and would probably be better used.

So it’s been a tad “Radio Silence” here – even the upcoming Festering Season hasn’t made much of an impact this year. Commuting has taken a big chunk of my ‘non-work’ time, particularly where I’ve been working in London. Overall, my commuting miles since May ’til the end of this week comes to just over 19,000 miles,and that’s just for commuting. Yes, nineteen thousand miles. I must be barmy.

All told, it’s been an eventful year, what with one thing and another. Work changes (as above) took up a big part of those events, and kept me busy.

Writing in general took a back-seat, and D4D™ in particular. I wonder if it’s coming to the end of its life, to be honest – because I haven’t really missed writing here at all.

2012 is now just round the corner, and it’ll either be a time to re-start, or a time to give up.  And to be honest, I don’t yet know which option will win.

By the end of this contract (at the end of October) I’ll have covered 15,000 miles, just on the commute. And that’s just the driving section – although admittedly the driving part is by far the largest.

12,000 miles is – apparently – the annual mileage for the average driver in the UK, which goes some way to explaining the idiocy of my current commute.

Anyway, one thing that is coming more and more to mind is that I’m probably really pushing my luck when it comes to not having any form of accident involving another vehicle. (Which neatly avoids the time I spagged the car into a fence) I’ve seen the after-effects of plenty, and come damn close to seeing a few happen in front of me, but as yet – touch wood – nothing’s actually happened.

I hope that I can maintain that status through the next month…

A case in point :

This morning, the radio announcements were full of bits about the M11 being slow-moving between Junctions 5 and 4. Really slow, totally rigid, etc. etc. And when I got there? A totally clean run through – not even a delay or a dab of the brakes. Nothing.

It’s totally bizarre, and more than a little bit annoying.