Ingrida and I live on Queen Street in Edinburgh.
Queen Street is a major thoroughfare in Edinburgh, the only road of any size connecting the east side to the west side now that the City Council has closed off George, Rose, Young and Princes Streets.
This means constant traffic at all times, day and night. This is irritating enough in and of itself, but the council didn't stop there. No, they dug up part of the road in front of our flat and put two large metal plates over the whole. Then they went on strike.
So now there's constant traffic and each time a car passes over the plates, we get two large bangs like a gun going off. This happens constantly. And the City Council is on strike, so there isn't even anyone to complain about them not fixing it, but it's illegal to do anything ourselves.
So this morning I went and stood on the plates in oncoming traffic to force the cars to go around me so Ingrida could get some sleep. Some drivers were baffled, some were filled with moral outrage and more than one tried to get as close to me as possible. One actually hit me, at very low speed, a BMW driver - I gently folded his wing mirror closed for him, an act of kindness to which he responded with trembling rage. But he didn't get out of his car, possibly because it seemed unwise, perhaps because he was in too much of a hurry.
Either way, at least Ingrida got about forty-five minutes of sleep before I went to work.
