I seem to have spent a lot of time driving between NW3 and N8 in the early hours of the morning, and this poem attempts to capture my observations as i traverse North London in my dull family car in the moonlight. The growth of traffic calming humps in this neighbourhood has reached pandemic proportions, and the grumpy old man in me takes a swipe at this modern pestilence. 

The Speedbumps Of My Heart

I ascend from your basement and fire up the Passat,

Your pastel stucco square moonlit at midnight,

There’s thirty seven speedbumps en route to my flat,

A sleeping policeman steeplechase in glimmering twilight.

The dashboard informs me it's zero zero twenty-two,

That my windscreen wash is low, that a service is due,

So I lurch and I plunge o’er Tarmac molehills,

Past Gwyneth and Chris, then by Parliament Hill,

Sheepish urban foxes glance round at my beams,

This nightly speedbump odyssey back to Crouch End dreams,

But I'm weary of these humps, the rain glistened streets,

The traffic calming hillocks that repeat and repeat,

I'm weary of this road-trip, I feel like road-kill,

Maybe I'll quit surfing the speedbumps from Primrose Hill.