A Coventry Carol

Coventry; the name itself has a quaint and vaguely medieval sound, conjuring up images of ancient cathedrals and stone cottages, pristine snow, the smell of wood smoke and bands of rosy-cheeked ragamuffins in floppy scarves singing Christmas carols. I admit this painfully romantic image results from nothing more than the yuletide song “Coventry Carol” (of which I know neither the words nor the tune), but that was enough to promote this midlands town onto the list of mystical cities along with (though somewhere below) Paris, Blackpool and Timbuktu.

I visited Coventry yesterday; just a drive-thru (actually, it was a ride-thru, as I wasn’t driving). We were three hours into a normally three and a half hour journey home from Birmingham; we have travelled only 20 miles and were no closer to our destination than when we started. We didn’t mean to go there, we had no choice; it was the only place in England where traffic was moving.

The events that led us there began, unbeknown to us, during the afternoon while we were meeting with clients. When the day ended, we headed to the motor way (the UK equivalent of Interstate highways, except they don’t have states here and calling them Intershires would sound a bit pretentious and wouldn’t be fair to Devon, Suffolk and all the other shire-less counties) and found they had closed Britain. The reason: wind.

Now, I'm a big fan of England, but I am coming to the conclusion that it doesn't require much to bring the British Empire to its knees. Mainly, all you need is weather; any kind will do. Too cold and the roads ice up, too hot, they buckle, too wet, they disappear into a quagmire, and, now, too windy and things, well, fall over, including big trucks. Keeping in mind that a well-timed auto accident can make three-quarters of the population late for dinner, you'll appreciate that it doesn't require a major disruption of the traffic infrastructure to bring the entire country to a standstill.

To try to visualize the ensuing chaos, imagine New Jersey at rush hour with the Garden State Parkway, the New Jersey Turnpike and, just for added spice, sections of I-287 and the Lincoln Tunnel closed. Now imagine this Gordon Knot of snarled traffic spread over an area the size of, well, New Jersey.

We sat stock-still in traffic for over an hour, then decided travelling north would be a better option (even though we needed to go south) because it offered the off-chance of movement and access to a service station (to provide sustenance for our thirsty vehicle). We did, eventually, find a gas station, but stationary traffic forced us to do some off-roading in order to reach it.

Having arrived at a semi-decongested area, we stocked up for a long drive and reconnoitered an alternate route home; one that took us through Coventry. I decided to look forward to that as an alternative to exploring the suddenly alluring adventure of suicide by means of my tongue and the car’s dashboard cigarette lighter.

So we went to Coventry.

(Aside: during the standard research I did for this article – which involves telling my wife about it and hoping she has some pithy observations to contribute – I learned about being Sent to Coventry, as opposed to simply ending up there accidentally, as we did.)

Now, these were clearly not the best of circumstances for sightseeing, so I’m not saying Coventry isn’t a lovely place, but to me, it simply looked wet, grey and dreary. There were no quaint buildings or cherub-faced children or fresh fallen snow (it is the middle of January, for pity’s sake). The only glitter I saw involved streetlights reflecting off the rain-slicked concrete.

As everyone else in a 150-mile radius remained trapped in the traffic cluster-fuck surrounding Birmingham, we made it through the city center in a remarkably short time and were soon heading happily southward on the M-40.

Until we hit yet another traffic jam.

By now, it was nearly 9 PM. With nothing but stationary traffic to look forward to, I sipped some water, looked out the window at the dark and sodden countryside and tried not to think about the cigarette lighter.