Finishing Off!

Someone famous said, "I love it when a plan comes together."  I don't profess to know who it was, but he (she?) was certainly right.  A number of small things have 'come together' this week the way I planned, which gives me that hinted feeling of satisfaction.  More importantly, they're things that I can cross off my 'to do' list.

I often make lists these days, to make sure nothing gets missed.  In fact someone I was talking to recently claimed to make 'lists of lists' but I'm not sure exactly how that works ... unless, by subdividing a list, when everything on a sub-list is crossed off, that's a whole list finished, and possibly gives a higher sense of satisfaction?

Tuesday evening brought echoes for me of my former working life, as I drove down the A1 past a succession of signs saying alternately, "A14 closed 30-31" (which didn't bother me) and "A1 closed from J14" (which did!).  This meant that what had, up to that point, been a smooth and satisfying journey home was about to become a frustrating game of 'find the road that's open' and, although I had left my cousin's in good time, I would now be considerably later getting home than I'd planned.

Since my retirement, now I'm no longer using the road system as frequently as I did, I find I've forgotten some of the routes and numbers that were so familiar as to be 'second nature' and I suffered some moments of panic as I struggled to remember what diversion would get me home soonest in this new circumstance.  Eventually I remembered that, long before the A14 would reach the 'fatal' junction 30, it would get me to the A1198, a road formerly known as Ermine Street or 'the Old North Road'.  This would take me, without further ado, to Royston and a very familiar final leg home.

Incidentally, the junction of the A14 and the A1198 at Huntingdon, which I then used, has an interesting history.  Before the roads in this area were changed and re-numbered about 30 years ago, the Old North Road was known as A14; at that time the main east-west route was A45 and it was this that was modified and improved and eventually became the A14 trunk road that we know today.  Thus that junction carries the new east-west road called A14 over what had been a north-south road with the same number (now given the new identity A1198)!  I've often wondered - inconclusively - whether there are other similar examples around the country.

As I drove down this ancient highway, I passed a roundabout flanked by a modern filling station and an even more modern McDonald's.  It's on the site of an equally ancient crossroads known as Caxton Gibbet; on the verge just south of the roundabout can be seen an old wooden structure believed to be the remains of the gibbet itself.  This was a macabre place where the bodies of criminals were displayed (if not actually executed there) as an example to the passing populace.  I'm not sure whether the feature presently preserved by the roadside is actually authentic or whether its authenticity is subject to historic maintenance, as in the apocryphal tale of 'great-great-grandfather's shovel', which, apart from two new blades and four new handles down the years, is the very one that he used to bury his grandfather nearly three centuries ago.

So it was, then, that I arrived home at bedtime - too late to do those chores I'd intended to fit in before retiring.  I peeled my intentions back to the very essential, and quickly scribbled a LIST of all the little things that I'd postponed.  A couple more items came to mind when I got up and were hastily added to the list; it then gave me a great sense of completion to cross off the last of these just after lunch on Wednesday afternoon.

I'm now working my way down a similar list hastily compiled after breakfast this morning before I left for my present voluntary job which on Fridays requires me to be about half a mile from home, ready to leave with two others on a van at 8.30 am.