Tiny Flirt and I got caught in a traffic jam this afternoon.

It happens in York. The road network is so appalling that it has to have been designed by local government. The usual combination of crass incompetence, well-meaning but ultimately damaging attempts to make life easier for people, and that strange obsession with trying to persuade folk to use public transport by filling the roads with obstructions has resulted in a road network that just doesn’t work.

And we live so close to the centre of the city that wherever we are, the fastest route home is to head straight for the Minster. And the city planners don’t want anyone to do that. (Why would anybody want to do that? The fact that we live a short stroll from the place just isn’t a good enough reason…)

The jam was only a mile long, but it took us an hour to travel through it. I listened to Radio 4. (Apparently Sinn Fein have declared peace again, and America’s most unreliable and incompetent government agency has managed to get one of its rustbuckets to make contact with another a few hundred miles above the atmosphere.) Tiny Flirt opened his window…

Did you ever see that advert for Wrigley’s gum, in the 1980s, where some impossibly cool guy in a convertible offers a stick of gum to a girl stuck facing the other way in a traffic jam? Compared with my ginger son and his small, stuffed iguana, that guy was a repulsive geek. The Ginger Schmoozer managed a good couple of minutes of what Jane Austen would have called “making love” with every single occupant of every car heading out of York. He pulled enough totty to wear down a squad of marines. Women left their husbands, daughters renounced their families, happily married fathers came out. Not one of them stood a chance.