The Carbinger of Doom appears about four hundred metres from your home at 06:05. Glimpsing the eerie apparition through the early morning mist it materialises as a set of 3-way temporary traffic lights ‘controlling’ roadworks on a mission critical, half-closed mini-roundabout. The return to work might be all too familiar.

After fantasising for over a year about the sheer joyous freedom of an hour in the car before work begins, that chance to empty your mind of the worries of home via your own personal choice of music and readying the grey matter for the day ahead, you realise the lights don’t seem to be working. Cars are backed up in all directions and 3 minutes and 2% into your long-lost commute you find that you are already late.

LACK OF COMMUTEMENT

It all comes flooding back; it’s a premonition of how truly awful the journey to the client, satellite office or other place you’ve been seconded to, will actually be. And always was. Having woken in the early hours of the morning from a taught, tense nightmare, all too soon you see that the true journey has just begun. This is the return to work.

As well as night sweats and terrors, the Carbinger will bring visions of a surfeit of loyalty points accumulated from filling stations, coffee shops and hotel chains in addition to all the virtual pats on the back when the wanderer returns to their old desk.

Far from binging on that precious time, the Heavy Rock, unselfish use of the single couple holder by the gear stick and as many peanut M&Ms for breakfast as you can take, it’s going to be a bladder-busting haul through what appears to be quite literally a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Everyone’s learning to drive again and the council are butchering the roads.
*Carbinger first appeared in Spit The Dummy And Run – find it on Amazon Books