The plan was simple. Leave Saturday midday, by which time the Bank Holiday traffic should have subsided, with the resort hotels bursting to the seams, the beaches tiled with human flesh, and the mountains festooned with entire rosaries of climbers. Had not the Naas dual carriageway from Naas to Clondalkin on Friday night been as thoroughly blocked as Elvis Presley's colon? Had not the State responded to this traffic crisis by deploying a garda to direct cars through Arklow? That sort of decided it, rather, the Arklow garda spending his Saturday afternoon gesturing a hayrick forward here, making way for a donkey cart there, piping the odd little concerto on his whistle to hurry folks along. The alternative was the Naas dual carriageway, the addition of a couple of lanes to which is turning out to be the biggest undertaking in Irish industrial history. The 10-lane, 5,000-mile trans-Canada highway through vast mountain ranges and soaring over raging torrents, in Arctic storm and desert heat, in torrential downpour and burning waste, was constructed in half the time it has taken to half-build a couple of miles of extra lanes outside Dublin.
Roads that don't work
Repeatedly through the length of an average - not a Bank Holiday - journey though the NDC's lower reaches one sees the sign Road Works. That's a lie. It doesn't. A road that works is one that carries traffic, not one that turns it into archaeological artefacts. Nor does one ever see cheerful, whistling navvies industriously wielding spades, nor great earth-moving equipment living up to its name, but only Road Works signs, Road Closed signs, and a border frontier of swooping ribands of red plastic and cones to remind you that This Was Once Roadway, But Isn't Any Longer.
Engineering delegations arrive from Switzerland, Germany, the US to see how we do it; and have to stuff handkerchiefs in their mouths to control their emotions as they observe road-building according to the maxims of the Association of Road-Structural Engineers of Ireland: Maximum Inconvenience For The Longest Duration At The Highest Possible Cost, With No Possible Improvement Of Traffic Flow Afterwards. By these splendid guidelines from ARSE was the M50 built, and when the new lanes for the NDC are completed - at about the same time as the American colony in Jupiter celebrates its 100th anniversary - the road to Naas will be similarly successful.
So, we chose not to spend the August Bank Holiday weekend on the Naas dual carriageway outside Clondalkin, and opted instead to go to Waterford via the coast-road, the lovely, lovely coast road, with the nice garda in Arklow controlling the traffic - what little there would be of it, that is, for we were sure that Dublin, nay Leinster, by midday Saturday would be bled white of cars. If anything, we would have to stop and have a chat with the garda to keep him company, him by himself, all alone. Poor devil.
We set out at noon. Let me tell you here that my theories about the movement of traffic out of Dublin being exhausted fell short of perfection. I can only suppose that the people who had blocked the Naas dual carriageway the evening before had all gone back home at midnight and started out south again, this time down the coast road.
No fighter-bombers
There are no doubt words to describe what followed, but if they are in English I have not heard them; and if there was consolation to be got, it was that we were not being strafed by fighter-bombers, nor picked off by snipers as we edged southwards moving with the speed of continental plates. The kerb was lined with the corpses of drivers from the night before who had in despair done the manly, Roman thing and fallen on their car-jacks. Fathers, driven insane by their children, were performing summary roadside executions, and there was hardly a tree on the route into Ashford which was not neatly decorated with the noosed cadavers of swinging infants.
At Ashford I should have abandoned the quest and gone instead to Hunter's to throw myself on the mercy - and the incomparable sandwiches and raspberry sponge - of Maureen Gilletlie, the great, the good, and then turned round and gone home. But of course, was Hunter's still standing? Might not rampaging mobs of motorists have set fire to the place and be doing nude war-dances around it at this very second? Was anything safe this August Bank Holiday weekend? Probably not. So onwards, south.Ish.
The Arklow garda
Arklow and its spires were a full hour-and-a-half in view before I actually reached the famous Arklow garda, a strenuous fellow of purple complexion who looked as if he was simultaneously conducting the 1812 Overture, Aida and Beethhoven's Ninth, with the aid of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the London Philharmonic, the Spice Girls and a battalion of panzer-grenadiers from Rommel's Afrika Korps. It seemed unlikely that he would welcome a word of encouragement, so we inched past him, rigidly avoiding eye contact.
Five hours - five hours - after leaving Dublin we reached Waterford, a city determined to wrest The Bad Traffic Management Award from Dublin. By Jove, you know, I think they've pipped it.
That lane for turning right only into the railway station, thereby neatly halving the traffic flow over the Suir, is a masterpiece of imbecility. Those who compose the traffic jams for Dublin must ache with envy that such a monstrous stupidity could be encompassed by so little effort, and so little cost. Well done, Waterford; and then onwards south, reaching our destination outside Tramore SIX HOURS, SIX ----ing HOURS after starting.
At least, thank God, we had the promise of perfect weather.