A Tight Squeeze
A sat-nav does not always mean a quick journey
I’ve been doing my taxes this week. I always leave it till January. I’m organised like that. I’m also extremely sarcastic.
In all seriousness though, there’s something enticing about the feeling of being in a long and arduous situation that you know will end at some point, but needs to have time take over it.
Just me? That’s okay.
But the euphoria when the situation is over is very addictive.
Not so much when it’s something somewhat out of your control.
Let me take you back to late 2008. I’m on a panto tour of schools with a company for whom I’m a regular performer at this point. I don’t recall exactly where we were at this point, but we’ve performed our morning show and we’re making the lunchtime drive to our afternoon performance. I’m not driving, but I’m up front with gaffa tape on my jeans and the best facial hair I’ve ever had.
We have our trusty sat-nav set up and we should be arriving with plenty of time to arrive, set up and potentially even get to eat something without any rushing.
Our route is along a few country lanes, but mostly main roads. But we arrive at a road out of a medium size country road. To our left and right is a main road. The sat-nav tells us we need to go straight across to the road ahead.
“There doesn’t appear to be a road there”, I say to the driver, our tour manager. I say this as there appears to be no road, just a house with a driveway next to it.
“There must be, it’s telling us there is” he responds.
I should point out that I can’t remember verbatim what was said — it was 13 years ago.
After some team discussion and looking at the route ahead, the decision is made to go where the sat-nav says. A decision we soon regretted.
We go past the house onto the driveway, and I am wrong — it is not a driveway. However, the road ends up being no wider than the average driveway. In fact it ends up being no wider than the van we were in.
We cruised along at about 2mph, while the surrounding bushes, branches and leaves scraped each side of the van with a squeal that seemed to suggest we wouldn’t be getting our van damage retainer back. I’m not someone that suffers from claustrophobia, but this road was getting me close to it. What would happen if we were to have an engine issue? What if someone was coming from the other direction?! All these worries circulated our collective mind for what felt like the longest journey ever undertaken by a van full of panto costumes.
After what seemed to be hours, but actually was around ten minutes, we finally found ourselves clearing out of the tight terrain and onto the welcome sight of a main road.
The same main road we could, nay should, have turned left into.
It’s an odd thing to remember out of the many things that happened to me on so many tours, but I suppose this experience was like a literal version of that feeling I described earlier. It could even be likened to other issues people go through on a daily basis. The situation you find yourself in that feels like it’s squeezing the life out of you, that the feeling won’t ever stop, until finally the end is finally in sight and you emerge with just a few scratches to remind you of what you went through.
If you took anything like from today’s story and it helped, fantastic.
If not, no worries. I just hope you enjoyed the story.
Oh, and we got our retainers back. There wasn’t a scratch in sight.
