Cornish pasting

I COULDN'T believe it.
For one, strange, unfathomable, reason I actually FORGOT the Gas were playing on Tuesday.
Not all of Tuesday, mind.
It was possibly the first thing I thought of when I got up in the morning.
Rovers.
Away to Plymouth.
Desperately need something from the game after throwing away a couple of points at home to Carlisle on Saturday.
But throughout the day somehow it got pushed out of my thoughts.
There are mitigating circumstances, though, m'lud and members of the Gashead Jury.
And they go like this...
On Tuesday I had to take my wife to her mums, along with my baby daughter.
The mother-in-law just happens to live in Lavenham, a small historic town in the darkest recesses of Suffolk.
The car was a heaving mass of buggies, pillows, toys, quilt covers, suitcases and the like.
We are talking Nissan Micra, not stretch limo.
We were on the road in reasonable time, just after 1pm.
Hitting the M4, everything was going pretty well, apart from a short traffic snarl up just outside Bath because of an accident.
Still, we got through that relatively unscathed and were making good progress when my wife came up with an idea.
"I know, why don't we take a more scenic route and try to get there without using the motorway?" she said.
And that's when it all went a bit Pete Tong.
We came off at Swindon and ambled through picturesque country lanes towards Oxford. So far so good.
Then on to Abingdon and, after a couple of false turns, we seemed to be making decent time.
My wife, via google maps on her I-phone, had found what she believed to be the most direct, simple, route imagineable.
As it got darker we hit Dunstable and suddenly the traffic increased.
For the next two hours we experienced solid London rush-hour traffic.
We had to drive through Luton. Gridlock. Hitchen. More gridlock.
The baby started crying.
We had to stop to feed her and pulled off in the dark at a place called Royston.
Um, perhaps this was the place on which the League of Gentlemen based Royston Veysey.
It was dark, full of strange characters, hoody clad youths smoking mysterious substances, a strange man following us in a car... "You're not from around ere..."
And the five toilets at the local car park were all shut.
So we drove on, a little bit perturbed by our experience.
And on... and on... and on....
It usually takes me four and a half hours at most to drive to Lavenham.
This took over seven hours!
I had no radio to keep me in touch. It was like we have disappeared into a vortex of the space-time continuum.
And it was only when I googled the BBC website on arrival at Lavenham, having changed the baby, put her to bed, unpacked the car and had a desperately needed cup of tea that the message came up...
Pasty-munchers made famous by a car insurance advert 3, Bristol's finest 1.
A perfectly miserable end to a perfectly miserable day.
By all accounts, though, we played pretty well and it was an end-to-end attacking encounter.
And it leaves us in a familiar position.
Not at the top, not at the bottom. Sat right in the middle.
In fact if we had conceded four less goals we would have a claim to possessing the most perfectly boring record in the entire football league.
Won 5, drawn 5, lost 5.
Still, onwards and upwards this weekend. Darlington away in the first-round of the FA Cup.
Wonder how easy it is to get there without using the motorway?