Detour

Normally it would take me twenty minutes to walk into town, but an inner ring road must have appeared when I wasn't looking.

I had some pretty major dental surgery this morning, which at present is causing me even more pain. Argh. I was told I needed to take my borrowed work boots back to the agency in town, so I set off, dosed up with antibiotics, pain killers and a few swigs of gin to numb the pain.

I could see the area I needed to get to, but it seemed that builders had been busy closing every through-road. I walked by the side of the building works over the brow of the hill, seeing that the works went on even further. Road after road was closed, but I was sure it couldn't be much longer. It turned out to be over half a mile. The throbbing in my face was getting a bit much by this point, but I was nearly there anyway.

Derby always seems to have roadworks going on. A friend mentioned that they'd seen the plans for the inner ring road and said they were alarmed at the number of roads that will be turned into dead ends. At least these routes should be accessible on foot when the works are finished, but I don't know what driving will be like with the new system in place. I'm tempted to say it would be better to leave Derby's roads alone, but I suppose that traffic will benefit in the long term. I won't talk about the one-way systems that are already in place because it would put off anyone thinking that a visit to Derby is a good idea...

Anyway, I walked up to the desk at the agency with five minutes to spare and proudly announced that I was returning the boots as requested. The guy had a word with his colleague and then handed the boots back to me, saying, "It's cool; you can keep them."

Twenty-twenty vision hindsight tells me that I could perhaps have phoned them to check about the boots before embarking on what turned out to be a sixty-minute round trip (due partially to hobbling around in a pain-dazed state). At least I got a free pair of steel toe-cap boots out of it :)

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