There’s a word you see a lot these days, though usually in strategic planning workshops; never at an actual roadblock. For example, yesterday I found myself on a bus stuck behind nine other buses in Gracechurch Street. (Typical eh? You wait half an hour and then 10 come along at once.) So I got off the bus and walked, and when I came to the source of the hold-up – a crane hoisting a heavy object hundreds of feet in the air, dangling over our heads like the sword of Damocles – there was no sign saying ‘Roadblock’, nor even ‘Warning: Metaphorical Scenario Reflecting the Precarious Position of Those in Power’.
There were, however, a couple of builders holding signs saying ‘Stop’, which to me confirmed that instruction is better than description in these situations. I’ll give you another example.
The word roadblock came to mind because my Dad called to say it had taken him an hour and a half to drive home from my house – a journey that usually takes 50 minutes – because the road had been closed and he’d had to take a different route, got lost, started to enjoy the scenery, pottered about a bit, listened to a play on the radio and finally arrived home via a worm hole in the space-time continuum.
In the old days we just use to give each other three rings on the landline to let the other person know we were home safe. Did you do that? Three rings. Don’t pick it up or they’ll have to pay for the call and that could cost 2p, which was the price of a small semi-detached in Croydon in those days. The downside, of course, was that if you had a long journey and forgot to make the call, you left your loved one with no choice but to assume you’d died, and it was only when you called them a couple of weeks later to ask what their plans were for Christmas that they could breathe again.
Anyway, we chatted about roadblocks and discovered that we both have the same response to signs that say ‘Road Ahead Closed’ – that being that we always assume it means a different road to the one we’re taking. Do you do that? Come on, I bet you do. It’s called optimism.
You can’t see any actual roadworks, so you keep driving past the sign, telling yourself it probably means that some side road has been dug up to repair the gas main and you can’t get through to Asda. You don’t want to go to Asda, so on you drive, the absence of roadworks convincing you that you’re right and they can’t possibly have closed your road. I mean, why would they close your road? You can’t close a road like this.
Further and further you go, past fields and trees, eating up the miles, breathing fresh country air through the window and singing along to some song you vowed you’d never sing along to on some easy listening radio station. In the most extreme cases, you stop for a bite to eat, find a place to live, get married, have some kids, change jobs, read a few autobiographies and self-help books, take up yoga and growing your own vegetables and swimming in lakes and standing on one leg because it reduces the chances of falling over in later life, and some people are born and some are lost and you start to contemplate your own mortality and then, bang, there it is. It was your road they closed after all.
Now, if the sign had just said ‘Stop’…
