New year

Well, I don’t know about anybody else but the past few new years I have had have always been a little bit disappointing and a non-event. Usually festivities have involved a house party of some description and much booze and the final midnight countdown and post midnight celebrations have always been a little, well, vanilla. Don’t get me wrong mind, for those of you that have been there, it has been good catching up with people and seeing friends etc. but the big event was never as ‘big’ as I was generally hoping for.

So, this new year I we did something a bit different. But I will come to that shortly…

My brother was moving house on new years eve, from Reading to St Albans. And I was helping out. Everything was proceeding fine before our merry jaunt down the M4 ground to a very sudden and complete halt. At which point our little convoy of a van and two cars finds out via the radio that the motorway has been shut, with us on it, due to a large accident and according to the radio; ‘nothing moving very soon’ which left everyone a little despondent to say the least.

This was made doubly irritating by us being at the very back of the queue, literally there were four cars behind us and then the motorway was closed and nothing further was coming. If we had been moments later onto the motorway we would have missed the whole thing. So we sit, and wait, and wait. Meanwhile Nick sees new years eve turning into an evening on the M4.

However, a police car turned up and sat at the back of traffic. Initialy I thought this was to ensure no law breaking jaunts by rogue elements taking a backwards trip along the hard shoulder (or the whole motorway to be honest because nothing was coming). However as it transpired after a short wait the police car got cars to do a U-turn and escorted us back the wrong way up the (non-functioning) motorway and off the wrong way off the entry ramp at Slough Central. And of course, as we were at the back of the queue, we were first off and sneaked past all the traffic queuing off the motorway onto local roads. So pleased with that and thank you to Thames Valley Police.

Anyway, moving of brother was sorted, albeit a little later than planned and involving a collision of van with car, oops, nothing too serious mind.

So back to Maidenhead in time to meet Claire where we were staging our evening in, avoiding chaos in town and on transport, with a nice meal and cocktails.

At midnight a bottle of champagne was popped from the balcony to the tune of multiple fireworks going off across the town which we had a fantastic view of.

And, do you know what, going back to the reason I started this post, it was one of the best new years I can remember, at least since that year with the three zeros.

Here’s hoping everyone else had a good new year too and wishing you the best for the year to come, it, for me at least should be an interesting one… (maybe more details on that as events transpire).