Mile-a-minute thrill ride

A bloke I used to work with bought a house on a major arterial route in the south of England - the same road that half of my office used to get to work. The house was on a long straight bit of road between two towns, in the middle of nowhere. Just a big fuckoff house with no neighbours next to a big fuckoff road.

This bloke - let's call him Barney (partly because it's a good story name, but mainly because that was his actual name) - was a nice enough fella, liked to play a prank, and had a missus who got irrationally angry over the smallest of things.

So, Beep Barney was born.

We worked shifts - so every half five (in the morning or in the evening), it became customary to give a little toot-toot when heading past the house at 60mph. Barney himself found it quite entertaining, but his missus started to grumble after the second or third week.

So, to add a bit of flavour and razzmatazz, we started playing a little ditty on the way past. A handful of cars in the early morning or early evening putting out a toot-toot-toot-toot-toot, or maybe a tooot-tooot-toottoottoot-tooot-tooot-toooot-tooot-toottoot, or even drop a toottoottoot-tooooooot-toooooot-toooooot-toottoottoot banger like you're getting a text message in 2002. This started to bemuse Barney, but the rage was brewing in his missus, who complained to Barney, who then complained to us.

Our assumption was that she was complaining that we just weren't beeping enough, so it became customary to hold down the horn from the moment Barney's house came in to view, to the moment it disappeared from the rear view mirror, in a beautiful example of doppler-toooooooOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooot.

Barney's missus was furious, and threatened to leave him if we didn't shut the fuck up.

I never knew what happened. He moved teams and thus, the legend of Beep Barney was forgotten.

Happier times.