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I know that road pretty well from the time I worked in Argyll and Bute. It's a good road, but you need to take care: there are only a few places where it's safe to overtake. I always think of the A82 as the Islay road: drive long enough and you'll get to Kennacraig and the ferry home. But only if you're careful.
Fridays on the Loch Lomond Road are especially tricky, with lots of people heading off for the weekend back home in Argyll and lots of people who've been working in Argyll all week desperate to get home to Glasgow and points east.
My two worst ever journeys were the time I had to drive a guest speaker to Queen Street to get the train to Edinburgh. Just what you want on a Friday afternoon: drive from Lochgilphead to Glasgow and then a wee trip into the centre of the city. She was totally wound up after her day's work and didn't seem to notice we were driving through torrential rain all the way down Loch Lomondside. While I tried to keep the car on the road, she talked...and talked...and talked.
The other trip I remember was behind a transit van towing another transit van. At a steady 25mph in a 60 zone. All the way from Inveraray to the Helensburgh turnoff.
The best trips on the A82 are when you're tucked in behind a bus. Buses have a schedule to keep to. Bus drivers are calm and just jog on.
But I digress...this Friday was the start of the Easter holidays for schools. Children get ferried pretty big distances in places like Argyll. I also remembered a terrible accident on that road, when a colleague of a colleague almost lost her life.
I decided to look on twitter to see what was happening. Honestly, if there's another place to look for news of Argyll, apart from twitter, Calmac and Traffic Scotland, let me know.
It didn't take me long to find out on twitter that all traffic near Luss seemed to be at a standstill as of about 14.45. And that, I'm afraid, is where the news ended. There was plenty of twitter chat after that but it was all, frankly, shite. One man had filmed on his phone all the emergency vehicles flying past. Good to know that the incident was being dealt with. But no: on twitter, people accused him of using his phone illegally, despite the fact he was stuck in miles of stationary traffic. Various TV stations wanted to use his footage. There were also wild accusations that he'd filmed this while people were lying seriously hurt. How would people know that?
Twitter to me is the very epitome of how tinternet is being abused. Anyone can say anything. No one is ever called to account for the mince they post. All opinions are equal.
Except that all opinions are not equal. The opinions of people who know the facts must count for more, surely? I've been called out twice this week on Facebook for - well, I'm not sure what - lying? In both cases, I was stating facts:
Firstly, a lot of the funding sent to the EU from the UK comes back to the UK : "In 2017 the UK government paid £13 billion to the EU budget, and EU spending on the UK was forecast to be £4 billion. So the UK's 'net contribution' was estimated at nearly £9 billion. Each year the UK gets a discount on its contributions to the EU—the 'rebate'—worth about £5.6 billion last year."
Then, MEPs have a constituency - MEPs don't just sit around the EU Parliament waiting to pick up their expenses - so Nigel Farage is an MEP for the South East of England and should represent the people who live and work there. Farage is on the EU fisheries committee because there are fishermen in his constituency, but he has attended only 2 meetings out of 32.
This is maybe all part of what that wee shite Gove called people being fed up with experts. That's fine, but refusing to take the word of experts on a whole range of issues is going to lead us into deep trouble: in climate terms, we're already in trouble. Brexit is leading us into another disaster.
Maybe it's time to stop accepting that just because we see it on tinternet it must be true.
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