Traffic gods

There are two gods that look over my driving, one that likes me and another that doesn’t.  I get on well with the parking god, always have done, we go way back.  I’ve always been lucky when it comes to finding a parking space.  On Grey Street in Newcastle I can pull up into a spot right outside the very restaurant to which we are going.  At ASDA, a car will pull out of a space in front of me as I arrive, as if I was in the Truman Show.  Even at the Metro Centre I can get a space outside the doors of Marks and Spencer. My wife always says to me as I pull in, ‘You’re dead jammy, the parking god must be smiling down on you’.  Sometimes I think she only stays with me for my parking spaces.

I’m not so lucky with the traffic light god though.  Wherever I go I seem to get stuck on red as if I had some sort of device attached to my car which automatically trips the lights as I approach.  What is worse is that the lights seem to change when I am about fifty metres away, just too far to make it through amber, which means that my time on red is maximised.  The more I am in a rush, the worse it gets.  I used to think that it was the local authority traffic management team monitoring my every move through their various closed circuit television cameras, flicking lights on and off to increase my frustration but now I think I’m just unlucky, at least when it comes to traffic lights that is.

I’m like the tortoise and the hare.  I rush between red lights only to lose my time waiting for them to change.  Perhaps, like the hare I should take a short nap, but I make my time up by slipping slowly into the parking space that is waiting for me when I arrive.

So why is it that I’m smiled upon by one god and grimaced at by another?  Is it a sort of yin yang?  What have I ever done to displease the traffic light god whilst pleasing the parking god?  Perhaps they don’t get on with each other and they sit on their own clouds, wearing peaked caps and hi-visibility jackets, devising ever increasingly complex ways of getting at each other and I am just a pawn in their game.