Driving without seeing

Yesterday should have been a good day, I started off at one of my favourite hotels, The Newport Holiday Inn  and got home before 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The hotel is always nice, decent food, friendly staff and (important for me) a quiet pool to have a swim in on the evening you arrive. I left the hotel at 8 o'clock, drove up into the hills near Merthyr to see a customer and about 90 mins later set off home. This should have been a good day but unfortunately I knew what I was coming home to. My cat, my friend, my rock, had a brain haemmorage on Tuesday night and thirty minutes after I got back home, he died.

I did around 290 miles yesterday and though I know the route I must have travelled, I would struggle to tell you a thing about it. I know I must have gone over the Severn Bridge and admired the view. I suspect I drove along the motorway past Gloucester and whinged about the roadworks. Its fairly likely I stopped at services near Birmingham for a sandwich and then carried on through the Midlands and into Yorkshire and home. I must have done all these things, but my mind was elsewhere and instinct was doing it's job. Its frightening that you can drive so far and see so little, that your hands, feet and eyes can do their job independant of your conscious thought. that you can rely so much on luck and routine to get you through, but it happens and it happened. My cat died yesterday and all that matters is that I got home and was there at the end.