Good to go

Now, this doesn’t look good.

Brake lights, brake lights, brake lights; a domino topple of red stop lights ripples back from some non-event up ahead. Some idiot blew his nose too abruptly and a Mexican wave of mini traffic lights all went red in neat little pairs.

There are no green lights on a motorway to tell you that you can go. You just go when you can. Another short burst of hemmed in freedom until the next tsunami of ‘stop’ floods the road.

And everyone stops, it’s what you do. Well, not everyone. Occasionally someone will be thinking about a typo in a spreadsheet and end up turning the four cars ahead into a mangled concertina – metal and occupants all whining in harmony.

But no one would deliberately avoid stopping. Even if you were in the darkest cloud of depression, you can still see clearly that this is no way to go.

Go.

We use that word for death. Not Stop. Some elderly relative whose legs have stopped for years and whose heart suddenly stops; everything stops. The relatives breathe a sigh of relief, but it wasn’t time for them to stop; it was obviously time to for them to go.