Dear Santa, How are you? Getting ready for the big day, I'm guessing. Me, I'm fine. You know yourself. Actually, scrub that. Enough nonsense. I'm not fine at all. I'm fuming.
The truth is, I'm reciting this into a dictaphone as I sit in my car trying to get home from work. Now, don't go getting all Kilian Doyle and sanctimonious on me, I'm not posing a danger to anyone. I'm on the M50, which means I'm moving about as fast as a park bench. That probably means nothing to you. I forgot you don't use roads. I'll explain.
The M50 is a massive semi-circular car park orbiting Citadel Dublin. The M stands for maddening. Or misery. Or mayhem. And the 50 is for how many minutes it takes to drive a mile. It's making my life, and the lives of thousands of my fellow-commuter drones, intolerable. It was supposedly going to make everyone's life hunky-dory. Supposedly. Instead, it's turned into a moat full of snarling 18-wheeled articulated crocodiles, convertible piranhas and hatchback sharks all tearing lumps off each other as they travel endlessly up and down in a state of perpetual rage and frustration.
Bad enough, but these poor unfortunates also have to negotiate the drawbridge of doom, otherwise known as the Westlink bridge, whereon resides the Toll Plaza, aka the Gates of Hell.
Why am I telling you this, you ask? I'm not after a job, although the thought did cross my mind. Elf work sounds pretty sweet - jovial boss, lengthy holidays, satisfaction guaranteed. But I look rubbish dressed as an elf. The tights are so unflattering.
Instead, I'm just asking you for help. I've tried lobbying the Government. All I got back were fatuous letters filled with meaningless gobbledygook like "greatest infrastructural investment in the history of the State" or "we are thinking outside the box, and going forward for progress into the future".
So then I tried God. He wrote back saying he couldn't be bothered as he was busy creating a new planet. He's written this one off as a valiant but doomed attempt, washed his hands of it and decided to let us fight it out amongst ourselves. Eerily, he described his new project as the"greatest infrastructural investment in the history of the Universe" and said he was "thinking outside the box and going forward for progress into the future". You'd swear they had the same PR company.
That leaves you. You're far more popular than politicians or God these days anyway.
I'm a good man. I love my family, pay my taxes, punt a bit to charity. So why do I have to spend more of my life queuing to pay a toll at the Westlink than I do with my kids? Is that living? When I'm on my deathbed, do you think I'll be wishing I'd spent more time stuck behind a lorry on a sliproad near Blanchardstown? No. I'll be wishing I did something about it.
And that's where you come in. Come Christmas Eve, once you've unloaded all your pressies, would you mind taking a little something with you as you're leaving? It's the Westlink Toll Plaza. You needn't take it all the way home. Just dump it overboard once you're over the Atlantic. If you have room and inclination to condemn any other toll plazas you come across on the way to the same watery fate, be my guest. The more the merrier. It'd be the best Christmas pressie I, or anyone else who drives a car into, out of or around Dublin, could ever receive.
Thanks,
A. Commuter.
(In case you're wondering what's in it for you, just imagine having to make an emergency landing in your sleigh in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve on a motorway chock-full of furious motorists still stuck in traffic after their last minute shopping in the city centre. They'd tear you and the reindeer limb from limb. Just letting you know. . .)
