I’ve joined a community. Well, I’ve really been a member of it for some time but I had never thought about it in this way before. It’s a community of interest, a COI, a collection of individuals brought together by a common interest or purpose. If we were in the phone book you would find us near the beginning under A.
There are quite a few of us in this community. Membership goes up and down but there seems to have been a growth in numbers over the last few weeks. The community is getting more and more popular. We meet every day during the working week, once in the morning and once in the evening and we gather on the A1 just outside Debenhams at the Metro Centre, south bound in the morning and north bound in the evening.
Every day there are guests within the community but the vast majority of us are the same people day in and day out. We arrive in our cars, vans and even lorries and we pull up to a complete stop. The vehicles and faces may be the same but the order in which we arrive is different each time due to fractions of a second lost or gained on the journey to our meeting point. We sit there pretending not to recognise each other but we feel the connection, we feel the shared struggle as we make our way to work. Each of us has their way of coping. Some sing along to the latest hit and others nod their heads in contemplation at the thought for the day. Women do their makeup, men scratch their chins and many of us make that telephone call to the early birds who are either already in the office or who are trapped in a similar predicament. Others tap out a rhythm on the steering wheel while the hungry tuck into whatever they can find in their glove box.
We don’t gather for long, perhaps ten minutes or so but sometimes, if there has been an accident or it has been raining heavily we can meet up for hours. The winter is the worst. It is un-predictable, full of variety but always the same. Only when the schools are off do we ever agree not to meet and those are fleeting days to be savoured and enjoyed. I don’t know why we do it as the other carriageway isn’t much better. Those who live in the north want to be in the south and those below the Tyne want to be above it. Perhaps it would be better if we all swapped our lives and disbanded our asphalt community but that isn’t going to happen.
So I guess I’ll see you all on Monday!
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 