Why does that happen ?

Wednesdays venture into North Yorkshire brought up one of the eternal road traffic questions - why do traffic jams occur ?

There we were cruising along the A64 York bypass, a steady 70mph on the dual carriageway, fairly light traffic - I've seen busier - when suddenly two miles before the end of the bypass we hit the back of a logjam, well not literally hit it, but stop we did.

And there we stood for forty minutes.

Two miles further up the road is a roundabout and the A64 continues as a normal single carriageway road and so barring roadworks or road accidents you'd imagine that this was the bottleneck, but it wasn't, we reached the roundabout, got into single file and still the queue stretched on and on into the distance.

Crawled for another mile when suddenly the road was free again and off we all went, no accident, no roadworks, nothing at all to cause a backlog of traffic.

Isn't it bloody annoying when that happens ?
The least you'd expect having queued for forty minutes is to see a good car crash.


And so on the way back I decided to take the scenic route using the back lanes that The Great Yorkshire Bike Ride follows every June and very nice it was too including the 40p trip across the old wooden toll bridge at Aldwark and it was while travelling this route that I noticed the village post office up for sale in the small gathering of houses around a green that passes for Bulmer, old house and shop up for lease at the bargain price of £800 a month from the Castle Howard estates office, if I moved there I'd actually be saving money and an income from the shop would be just a bonus, but as the Post Office obviously didn't make any money in the village we'd have to think of something that would.

Ned and I thought long and hard about it this morning in the office and his final suggestion was a drum shop, a shop for drummers in rock bands.

It could be because he is currently looking to purchase a set of drums as he dreams of being the next Ringo Starr - a drummer who will spend his whole life not having to demonstrate any technical skill in the art form that he has chosen but will instead live off the royalties provided by his fellow band members - and I must say that its not a bad lifeplan, its worked for Ringo anyway.

Somehow I think that the tiny village, nay almost hamlet of Bulmer will not support a drum shop, but he was having none of it and swears that by next June and the 2008 Great Yorkshire Bike Ride he'll have the grass verges of Bulmer packed with Premier drum kits in all colours of the rainbow with the old biddies of the village drumming out a welcoming beat with great gusto and enthusiasm to the exhausted and startled cyclists .

I think he may have a point, it could work.
It can't do much worse than the Post Office did anyway.