Going through the motions........

There are days when it can be a struggle to commute a long distance to work but generally the last 16 years of doing the same old round trip of seventy miles a day has not really taken the toll that it should....indeed, I actually enjoy the drive. It gives me a chance to wind-down from work, think about it and then forget it by the time I am home. And then there are the adventures......I have a particular little cut through that I use that misses out Chorleywood and Rickmansworth and the queues for the M25 and 'dumps' me (appropriate....read on) just near Amersham....a beautiful country lane surrounded by woods and fields, bluebells and barley. You do have to have your wits about you though as it is very narrow with passing places, floods regularly and deeply and attracts the attentions of fly-tippers which means you have to negotiate all manner of society's flotsam and jetsam left in the road, from mattresses to sofas and..... piles of logs - to which I shall return later. 
This evening I followed a small car along the lane for a mile or so before noticing a flatbed van driving very fast towards us through what I assumed were puddles because liquid was spraying either side of it. As it got closer the bloke in front pulled over in the 'passing' place and the van veered at high speed to negotiate the newly-created slalom - it was then I realised it was carrying two portaloos, one of which 'slipped its moorings' and tipped over the side of the van in a full somersault, landing half in the road and half on the bank, on its side and spilling its contents in a wide arc over the road just ahead of the car in front. Now I'm not an expert on portaloos, but shouldn't they be emptied first before being transported?Anyway, the smell was enough to shrivel the enamel on your teeth in an instant and a slurry of human ordure and 'Richards' (the Thirds) oozed slowly downhill past our two cars like something from a 1950s horror B movie. Normally I would stop to help but this time the bloke was driving like an idiot, particularly considering his precious and precarious cargo, and should have secured it more tightly. It did occur to me afterwards that they may have been stolen...which may have explained his haste.....but anyway, we drove, windows wound-up, carefully past. It also did occur to me that had I been the car in front and a matter of seconds earlier, I'd have had, at best, the entire contents of a portaloo emptied on my lap, or at worst been struck by the thing at speed. Now what an, perhaps appropriate, end to an eventful life that would have been....the Earlybirder: Rest in Piss........