As I left Reigate the temperature was up at 30C. It was oppressively hot. Sticky and brewing an immense storm. Not that I minded so much, since I seem to thrive in the heat. Dark shades on. Lightest tee-shirt I could find. Primative old iPhone 4S blasting out an upbeat medially.
Sitting in my black car, on black leather seats, with an air conditioning system that cessed to work about a year ago, was a special kind of heat treatment. Windows open. It was like being blown by a powerful hairdryer from two sides. Fortunately for me London’s M25 was moving. Going west. Maybe wiser people than me had made a choice to delay their journey, or not go anywhere at all. In between the eight wheeled trucks, the shafts of sunlight rained down like a Martian death ray.
Grassy embankments that had been lush green earlier in the year were now charred brown. Motorway roadworks that had been bogged down in slimy mud now dust bowls. Colourful heavy earth moving machinery working on its limits. Roadworkers looking as if they would rather be anywhere but where they were. Lucky ones sheltering in the shade.
My journey had not been without basic planning. I knew that the heaviest of storms was slowing making its way west to east across southern England. I got almost a quarter through my trip before the immense thunder clouds loomed off in the distance. The sunlight was slowly changing. Going from perfect clear blue skies, with a little haze, to a brooding caldron of shafts of bright light and rolling off-white clouds, towering up to the stratosphere.
Onto the M3 motorway going west. Through the roadworks. The perpetual roadworks, Where the nation’s highway planners are trying to correct mistakes that they made erecting “smart” motorways. Closing the running hard shoulder to erect new emergency stopping bays.
Still the temperature was shifting up and down around 30C. Would I get to my motorway exist before the downpour that now seemed inevitable? I slowed to let a heavy truck into the nearside lane. We were both keen to get off the gradually slowing motorway.
Almost as if I’d timed the weather and pressed a button for rain, it started on the slip road. Trickles at first. Dark grey skies and indications of what was to come. My car’s dashboard thermometer started to plummet. By the time the traffic lights turned green, and we passed over the M3, visibility was disappearing. In a mishmash of road traffic on that junction there was potential for every kind of accident.
Time to slow down. It doesn’t matter that the duel carriageway signs going north said 40 mph. It would have been foolish to speed beyond that limit. At that moment the monster storm was just getting going. The timing between lightning strikes and thunder was shortening. Still, I had a good 5-miles to go to a sanctuary.
Again, almost as if I’d timed the weather, I exited right to turn into a Sainsbury’s superstore as the dark monster above our heads did its worst. Great pools of water where splattered on the ground with rain falling like millions of tennis balls. It was time to sit out the storm and take a coffee. Already the temperature had dropped ten degrees.
My cosy coffee shop sanctuary was the number one best place to watch shoppers getting soaked as they trudged across the windswept car park. I certainly wasn’t going to be in that kind of hurry. I sat it out. Glad I did.
John Vincent 