Traffic Jams

As I write this I’m sitting in a deckchair on the side of the A34. We were stuck in a very long queue of cars and trucks and decided to stop for a while to let the traffic clear. Of course, as soon as we pulled over (and I’d found some bush to go to the loo behind) the traffic got moving, and has been moving ever since. Never mind, the rest won’t do us any harm; it’s very tiring driving at 7 mph for half an hour on end.
We had the same problem this morning, driving to Oxford. The roads were chocker - on our side of the road. People going the other direction were away laughing. Now the people going in the opposite direction - again - are zipping along, and our lot of traffic has just come to a standstill once more. Frustrating way to drive, but I guess you get used to it.
When I came to England for the first time, some forty years ago, my uncle took me and his wife and daughter out on a Sunday afternoon drive. It was lovely on the way to wherever we went, but the return journey consisted of one long traffic jam that crawled along in the same way we’ve just been crawling along. I thought, if this is what a Sunday afternoon drive consists of, I’ll forego the pleasure from now on.
Forty years on and things haven’t changed, except now queues are a permanent feature of travel here. When we came down to Northampton from Norwich last week, we got caught in a long queue - there’d been an accident on one of the roundabouts - and were stuck in it while thunder thundered overhead and lightning flashed.
It’s been fine when we’ve gone on the quieter roads, of course, but our GPS likes to take us on the main roads, having the mistaken idea that they are the quicker roads. She’s refuses to take traffic jams into consideration.