Greasy Truckers, Me-old-Muckers, Forward-thinking Motherfuckers,

It’s 7 minutes to midnight on the Queen Mum’s 100th birthday, and I’m listening to Mainliner on headphones in deepest Wessex darkness. Locals are clamouring for the covering of the Silbury Hole, while torrential rain on Folly Hill yesterday swamped our car and sent the big dig at Beckhampton Avenue scurrying.
Me, I’m preparing for a summer holiday soon after being the judge in the girls’ school sports day. It got me out of the Fathers’ Race and taught me something important. Loads of mothers told me I had to be judge of the winners because they were too compassionate and were better at saying: “Well done, no, you didn’t come third and get a prize but you were so close. Well done, well done!” They said they needed someone dispassionate, a man, he must be male. Me, dispassionate! So I stood at the finishing line all puffed up and determined and I judged like a man. And if it was too close, I’d pick my winner and the loser be damned. And the great Matriarchal flock behind me would fuss and pet and tell the other children how close they’d come. And now the Avebury kids see the Patriarch as a longhair in an MC5 cap and urban camouflage, so I’ve softened it a bit for them. But those mothers, man. So loving. So full of healing actions and words. And so willing to fudge the score line to appease the pre-teens!

Meanwhile, Stoney Blur and the Man Prescott have announced more underachievement in the form of their Roads Policy. Prescott wants to build an extra lane on all the motorways like an errant buffoon whose pea brain can’t grasp the basic fact that traffic expands to fill the road it is given. Stick British motorists in a queue for impending contraflow 600 yards ahead, and they will try to get in so early that it actively adds to the jam. Me, I drive to the front Oddlike and up-winding. Told Dorian, I’m gonna write a pamphlet called Keltic Defensive Driving. Just for Drudes and Forward-thinking Mofos, who need to be in the car as little as possible. She raised her eyes heavenwards.
But we’ve gotta be roads scholars to get through this 1st new century, and being dead won’t teach people a thing. Hate the car and hate roads but Know your enemy, and Know that car culture is just Human Nature taken to its furthest conclusion. Fuel yourself with the Knowledge that obsessional human behaviour from Chariot Cultures of the Iron Age should probably have forewarned us of these present Human road conditions.
Prescott’s new roads are just a continuation of the Newbury fiasco-operative of big business and internationalism. Newbury Bypass was sold to locals as a local road and a local remedy, but it wasn’t. It was a part of the Euroroute network bringing containers from the north to Southampton docks. The present A55 is being built across Anglesey under the guise of being help for locals choked by traffic on its way down the A5 to Holyhead. But look at a European map and the proposed new road is a Motherfucking Euroroute to Ireland. It will cross the legendary Malltraeth Plain on concrete legs dual-carriageway thick! But, as Merrick told me, not a place to protest or get a local’s crowbar across your skull.

I know this is a long address, but it’s past the witching hour and I’ve had things on my mind. I was brought up a Royalist but they royally screwed up. I’m a drude not a loyalist and I’m ultimately clued up. Freaked out that we can’t as a people feel good, by getting our asses kicked over & over, in all kinds of every international sport. So if it’s gonna be that the nation’s gotta be buoyed up by an old woman’s centenary instead, then so be it. Don’t dread it, we need it. We obviously need it.

They won the battle, but we’ll win the war.

Love on y’all,

Mr Drude