Magic

It’s a well-known fact that the British love their roundabouts and that most Americans don’t know how to use them. There’s one by the Costco in South Austin and the number of people who simply don’t understand the yielding procedure makes it a miracle every time we get out of there unscathed.

Because I do have some experience with them I thought I could probably deal with roundabouts while we’re over here, although granted not in those first few days when I was ridiculously exhausted and still coming to terms with the other-side-of-the-road thing.

That’s why Corran drove from Cambridge to Milton Keynes so we could go to IKEA and get some much-needed furniture and home items. See, he grew up and learned to drive in Australia, which drives on the same side of the road as the UK and also has plenty of roundabouts. So he figured he’d be just fine.

Yeah.

He was fatigued too so the first few roundabouts on the route were kind of hairy, especially since the GPS on his phone kept snarking at him to take the nth exit but it wasn’t always clear where it started the counting, so more than once we took the wrong exit.

(Sidenote: it’s funny that my car’s GPS back in the US was default set to an irate British lady who constantly gives me passive-aggressive scolding in the form of “ROUTE RECALCULATION” whereas the default voice on Corran’s phone here in the UK is a mildly snarky American lady who wreaks her vengeance upon us by firing out her commands and road numbers so fast that it’d take someone with a PhD in math to figure out what she’s saying except Corran has a PhD in math and still kept going off on the wrong exits.)

Anyway, we were plodding along well enough until we came to this piece of work:

Corran and I actually screamed. As in, a real, “AAAUUGGGHHHH!” type scream. In unison. Nothing brings a marriage together like shared terror.

Here’s what this torture device looks like on a map:

Worse, none of the folks who live around here even knew what Corran and I were talking about when we referred to the horrific triple roundabout near Milton Keynes. It was hard to Google because we couldn’t remember the names from the sign (again, we were screaming in aghast dismay when we should have been reading the sign, which is probably kind of like what happens to people who see signs from gods and probably why all of those people are too loopy to fit into polite society ever again, and now I’m thinking that “loopy like a triple roundabout” should be a new vaguely insulting descriptor for people who have lost their minds due to divine interference and/or British roads). And when I Googled various terms about scary roundabouts, this monstrosity is what kept coming up:

That’s the so-called Magic Roundabout of Swindon and the very name gives the game away: this was clearly designed to fuck with foreigners and despite it having been built in 1972, they knew one day it’d be part of the general British brochure that children here go to schools to learn magic and you need a god-damned flying car to survive both the Whomping Willow and this swirling miasma of The Traffic Engineer Who Shall Not Be Named.

O.o