Let’s be honest, this wasn’t just a delay. It was a lifestyle choice forced upon thousands of unwilling participants. I saw a bloke in a van eating a full, hot breakfast from a tupperware box, using his dashboard as a table. That’s not traffic; that’s survival mode.
Meanwhile, the digital signs above the lanes flickered with cheery, unhelpful messages like “Delay 90 Minutes.” You read that and realize your meeting is about to start without you, and that “urgent” email you sent? It’s now a novelty item. It’s the kind of chaos where you start bonding with strangers via angry hand gestures and shared eye-rolls.
The Escape Attempt (And Failure)
Now, here’s the comedy of errors: every single driver thought, “I’ll just nip off at the next junction.” But guess what? The slip road was a parking lot, too. I saw a man in an Audi try a clever U-turn on the hard shoulder. The universe immediately punished him with a 30-minute wait for the Highways Agency to have a word.
It’s like a bizarre, real-life video game where all the exits are locked. You’re stuck in the long, slow crawl, watching the fuel gauge drop from “fine” to “please locate the nearest petrol station immediately.” You start calculating if you have enough petrol to idle for another hour, or if you’ll be that person pushing a car in a business suit.
M25 crash RECAP: Motorway traffic at standstill as collision sparks
“Ah, look,” I said to my passenger, pointing at a hare running across the central reservation. “He’s making better time than us.” That’s the level of desperation we’re talking about. You start appreciating local wildlife because it’s moving faster than your BMW.
