19 January - Traffic & Countdowns

Genius. The traffic lights in Chennai and Bangalore all have a LDC countdown! How cool is that? No more fretting, you can switch the engine off knowing you have 55 seconds to go before it turns green again. Use the phone, put lipstick on. Read front page of newspaper. Why can’t we have that in London? And why do I care? Why is it that as tourists we focus on stuff that is totally by the by in our regular life? Would we find traffic in Bradford endlessly interesting? Certainly not. Actually a visiting man from Chennai would find it fascinating. He could sit at a bus shelter marvelling at the soundlessness of it all: just a hum of tires on the tarmac, no ferocious honking (see the top tip re. Earplugs at all times) roads smooth, no holes, no bikes hardly, every vehicle shiny, not dented or damaged or faded. Ok make that Milton Keynes, not Bradford. Drivers keeping to their lanes, no inside overtaking wildly and the black cabs would seem to him as stylishly uniform as we think their old cream Lincolns are.
Then he’d marvel at the price of petrol in the UK, treble of what he pays back home, and that would make him want to reach for a freshly fried 5p samosa only to be left…wanting it really badly, but there is none to be had by a shack on the side of the/any road. Not freshly fried and soft and crispy squishing out peas, carrots and potatoes with every bite. He would also be getting wet and cold by this point…