I love Fridays. Mostly because I usually avoid them. Occasionally you may see my face pop by in the morning but by lunchtime I will have already planned how I’m going to fade out of the scene and start my weekend early, usually without getting the appropriate permission.

Unfortunately things don’t always go my way, and today (or “Friday 29th July 2011″ if it is not ‘today’ when you are reading this) I had to hang around until 4pm. This meant I was able to experience roads at the brunt end of rush hour for the first time in ages. To add a bit more fun, for the first time since what feels like yesterday, it was raining. British roads in the wet are like an old 1960s television trying to work underwater.

What a drag! In the all years (17 of them) I’ve been living in this region, I’ve never actually seen the roads this bad. 16 miles, 8 roads, pretty much all of which was spent in queue. The high-speed motorway took me all the way up to 35mph. At least, if I got bored, I could look out the window and see an increasingly heavy downpour.

Although normally I wouldn’t see any shame in declaring “chaos” purely after my own commute, it’s not just me talking about this. The local radio appeared to be inundated with traffic reports, all the major routes seemed to be affected and the local bus services were struggling to get out on time at all.

I should point out that while I always avoid Friday evenings for exactly this reason, anecdotal evidence suggests that this is one of the worst ones for a while, and as far as I can tell it has been caused entirely by the rain. That’s rain, people. Get used to it. There’ll be more tomorrow.

I write all sorts absolute rubbish. You may like to see some more of it. Or you could go and sit in some traffic.

I write all sorts of absolute tosh. Here’s some more of it.