A day to forget

What I loosely called “tomorrow’s jaunt down to central London” in my blog posting of this time last week turned into a bit of a nightmare. I set off at 6.15am and by 6.30am was at the back of traffic jam. There I stayed, staring at the back of a Ford Galaxy, for an hour and a half as a lorry fire had shut the A14 in Suffolk in both directions. I ended up diverting north to Ely and left my Mercedes SLK test car at the train station there to head into London. When I got back at about 7pm I’d got a parking ticket (pictured, above, which I’m appealing) and on the drive home my wife phoned to say the oven wasn’t working. Terrific. When I say the road was closed by a lorry fire, that’s not strictly true. It was closed by the local fire chief, who happens to be a good friend of mine. I ribbed him that he’d made me late, to which he replied that two other people had already moaned at him about the same thing! The HGV was apparently carrying car components, including pyrotechnic seat belt pre-tensioners which had started to go off. Part of the truck had actually blown all the way to the far side of the far carriageway, hence the need to close the road in both directions. Why do so many lorries catch fire? In radio traffic reports you hear about it far more regularly than car fires.