I had to visit Leicester for work today, which involved driving all the way there (about 140-150 miles) and back again.    To make matters worse, my colleague who was going with me had a doctor’s appointment so we could not leave until about 10:00am.   This added a lot of stress to the day because my choice would have been to go early and hope to have time to go round meeting and catching up with colleagues who I don’t see very often.  Instead I was acutely aware that one accident or traffic jam in the wrong place and we risked getting there late and missing the meeeting.There was also the prospect of traffic on the way back making us return really late, when we only had the car hired until 6pm.

In the end it all went very smoothly and coming back only took about two-and-a-half hours.  Very good considering we stopped at a services to take on some food and then encountered a heavy snow storm on the M1.

Even so, the ratio of time spent driving to time spent working was appalling. Athough the long-term gains of the meeting should make up for it, it still felt like a waste of a day.

It does not help that I do not really enjoy driving much and had to do all the driving since my colleague keeps ‘forgetting’ to get her licence registered with HR so she is not allowed to drive company pool cars or hire cars.

Just to put the cherry on the cake, no sooner had I got home and had something to eat than I was off out to spend two hours at a constituency AGM, which is as exciting as it sounds.