journey

You leave the airport, alone and slightly choked. The snowflakes register. The car is cold as it glides down the multi-storey spiral but thawing by the time your ticket opens the exit barrier and warm by the time you hit the motorway. You manage to take the right combination of roads, none of the usual detours. The snowflakes register again, more insistently. You continue.
Your phone beeps. Snow on runway, I try take pic! x
The Hoover building looks different in the light, white on white. As usual you think it would make a lovely theatre and how much would it cost but it might be awful and no-one would come all that way to see things. It’s wasted on Tesco.
The road twists and turns and roundabouts and suddenly you can’t see the markings on the road to know which lane you are in, or which lane the car in front is in. The only white lines you can see are the horizontal ones being flicked towards your windscreen. White lines, running through the sky. Your car has eight windscreen wiper settings but they all either squeak against the snowflakes or don’t clear quick enough. You can’t work out the tipping point.
It feels like you are about to die, not in a melodramatic way, just a factual one. The car moving in the same direction as the way you turn the steering wheel starts to seem more like an occasional happy coincidence than any result of design or engineering; slowing down is a version of Russian roulette.
A large four wheel drive sloshes past, spitting in your face. You think uncharitable thoughts. Yeah, so your car is actually useful in the city for a few days of the year, well done you.
Your world reduces to the imaginary lane you are staying in. You concentrate, rely on your senses and responses, not your instinct, or God, who you briefly consider as an option currently as rational as science. There is a constant tension, your hands clenched, your thighs tight. Breath held. Your teeth gritted where the roads aren’t.
Your phone beeps, you don’t check it.
You start singing Christmas songs to yourself as the radio isn’t working and the sat-nav lady isn’t feeling chatty. Driving Home for Christmas, Let It Snow, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. You adapt a verse of Jingle Bells: Driving through the snow, in a 3-door purple Ford, o’er the North Circular we go, thirty all the way. It doesn’t rhyme, or scan. You try and improve the wording, or the scanning; it doesn’t get any better.
You go past Ikea, strange to see something familiar and so ordinary. Past the McDonald’s arches, fancy a skid-through?
Slow again and a car pulls off the main road and into a driveway. You notice a row of houses that have never registered more than peripherally before. Grey houses, never restful, made beautiful this ugly evening. For the first time on this journey you recall that palliative aesthetic effect, snow the great leveller. Tomorrow all will be clean and footprints and walks in the park. For now, keep gritting.