Always the tortoise...

Posterity fails to record whether the hare added the taking of shortcuts to his repertoire of foolish behaviours on his ego-crushing rout at the hands of the smug tortoise. But the wise money says odds on that he did. For there is no more sure-fire way to be even later than you expected than by taking the quick way.

Nothing ahead but stationary tail lights. Nothing to hear but grinding engines and drifts of deaf-wishing music from the rolled down windows of cars with metallic finishes. Nothing to read but number plates and those peculiar symbols on the backs of lorries that should make some sort of sense but never do. Nothing to pass except the ticking of the clock and the shrivelling seconds of your carefully planned journey time. And then, hallelujah, praise the knees of the bees, for there to the left is an unexpected slip road offering the by-way of enlightenment and the diesel fugged entrance to clear driving nirvana.

Gripped by indecision, your brain cramps with the effort of juggling conflicting odds. You know this route but it's gridded more firmly than a crossword. You haven't gone precisely the other way before but... You know it's foolish, you know it's reckless, but it might - might! - just get you there in time. Your foot hovers over the clutch, leaden with the choice of diversion aversion. The traffic's creeping forward inch by inch, the open gateway of highway freedom growing smaller second by second. Take your chance or take the wait: your call. Oh the heady heady seduction of it all.

You stamp on the clutch, bullet the accelerator, yank the wheel through ninety degrees just as the last white chevrons of the slip road are disappearing under your feverish tyres and off you go. Your choice is made, the die is cast. This time, captain, it might just work...

Of course, it never does. Shortcuts rarely do. You've simply swapped a jam on the road that you know for one on a road that you don't, thus creating a fruity concoction of congestion with a side order of navigation. Blase now, you follow your nose and hurl the car randomly at what you think is (more or less) the right direction. Forty five minutes later, you find yourself approaching a familiar road bridge but at a novel oblique angle. When you arrive, as surely you must eventually, you will be thirty minutes late.

You will also find that the unfeasibly thin and somewhat scatty minded white haired professor who set off at the same time and from the same place as you has been sitting in a comfortable chair eating sandwiches from the communal lunch time buffet for half an hour.