It was a long day yesterday. We visited Mom last night – she was great and in fine form – and we were set to be home at a fairly reasonable time, around 10pm.
On our way down we’d seen an accident on the M42 that had just happened. One lorry had stopped, a car was on the central reservation facing the wrong way, and the traffic hadn’t started to back-up yet.
By the time we were on our way back, it seemed this relatively minor incident had been cleared. But the gantries were saying the M42 was closed after J13. (Not strictly the M42, more the A42(M).)
As the gantries are so often late being updated, and as there was no cordon across the motorway at J13, we assumed this related to the accident we’d seen earlier that was now cleared, but the gantries hadn’t been updated yet.
No.
Apparently, there was someone on a bridge threatening to jump and the motorway had been stopped both ways.
Now, I’ve not seen anything to corroborate this, other than a Tweet or two on Twitter last night. And there was a similar incident on the same stretch of road in September. But the way the traffic was at a standstill for 2 hours or more, it’s possible it was true.
Anyway, we started to move and cars started to come down the opposite carriageway, and we thought perhaps the police had started to turn us around.
Again, no.
In fact, someone had driven through some permanent pole bollards in the central reservation, smashing several of them to pieces and leaving others scattered across the southbound carriageway, and other drivers were following them – some coming back down the third lane of the northbound carriageway towards us!
In the end, we too cut across this gap in the central reservation, turned around and drove back to Junction 13, taking the back roads behind Calke Abbey so we could get onto the M1 further up.
We made it home at around midnight, a very late night for us midweek.
If there was someone threatening to jump, then we really hope they were talked down. We’re also grateful that we have never been driven to such a desperate measure. But as I can’t find anything on the news, I’m hoping either they were talked down or, more to the point, that this isn’t actually what happened.
(EDIT: It was true, and they talked him down.)
This morning, the poet’s alarm didn’t go off, so he was late getting up and off to work. And then I slept-in way past my usual getting-up time. But first job, once I’d cleared some admin, was once again my NaNo project.
I have now completed Act I. I have 2 sequences and 10 scenes, all at first draft stage. I’ve decided that my new world villain is also my old world villain, just 25 years older. And I’ve raised the stakes considerably in my new world, making it a life-or-death situation for my modern characters.
With this I am very happy, even if I am also very tired.
