Road warrioring

The last 24 hours have been a reminder of how stressful some aspects of road warrioring can be. Like when you forget to switch the satnav on and you have to find your way from Junction 13 of the M60 to a Premier Inn in Swinton based only on a sketchy, half-remembered sequence of turns and road numbers. Like when, having remembered this time to switch it on, the postcode-guided satnav takes you to the back door of a training venue in the middle of Salford and you then have to take a 2-mile detour to find the front door. And like when you've done a day's work and you've managed to exit Manchester relatively painlessly and you reach that bit of the M6 after Preston where all the traffic suddenly dies down and you think you can relax a bit but then you start to see the weather warnings and then the rain turns to sleet, and then the sleet turns to snow over Shap, and it's more snow on the M74 over Beattock and you're really annoyed because you've got to do all this extra concentrating, and then there's a bloody detour as soon as you join the A702 so it takes twice as long to get to Biggar as it normally would, and the only thing that helps is that you're listening to Mitsuko Uchida playing Beethoven's Opus 109 Piano Sonata and it becomes your new favourite piece of music.