I play football every Wednesday after work and I make sure I leave a little bit early so I can arrive 20 minutes before kick-off and get a really good warm-up. I always play better after a good warm-up and it helps reduce my chances of picking up yet another injury to add to the list.

Unfortunately I never seem to arrive early any more.

The drive from work home takes around 40-45 minutes on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday no matter what time I leave at (the football pitch is a further 10 minutes away). But Wednesday throws up something new every week. Today it was an accident in an innocuous section of 30mph road. Of course it involved 20 minutes of crawling at 2mph in a queue of traffic to find out that the road ahead was closed and I’d have to take a surprisingly long detour. I wouldn’t mind but the week before my Christmas holiday some work men decided to put up some traffic lights for one day only that caused several miles of tail backs. The week before it was another accident. And so on.

Those living in a big city won’t be surprised by this sort of thing but I live in the countryside! It shouldn’t be like this. And it definitely shouldn’t happen on a Wednesday – the only day I actually need to be somewhere at a specific time. Next week I’m allowing 90 minutes to get there. And if I’m still late I think I will scream!