TAKING A BREAK
I’m quite disappointed with my holidays.
Well… one of them anyway. It’s not that I don’t like where I’ve gone, because aside from a few visits to the hospital, I haven’t gone far from home. In fact, the main thing I’ve done during the past two and a half months is stay in bed waiting for my broken leg to heal while other people have attended to my needs.
That’s given me breaks from shopping, cooking and many other household and gardening chores, but none of those are the holiday I’m talking about. No, I’m disappointed with my holiday from driving. And the reason for that is because I was hoping that break would help me become more tolerant of other drivers when I got back on the road.
But even though I haven’t resumed driving yet, I know that hasn’t happened. You see, since I’ve been able to get to the car more easily, I’ve started sitting in the passenger seat occasionally while other people drive. And on one of those trips, I verbally abused a driver who refused to make room for one of my daughters while she was driving her sister to the airport. It was just like old times.
Before I tell you more about that incident, I should explain many roads over here in England are barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, so when there are parked cars to deal with as well, things can get very tight. And sometimes drivers have to pass a line of vehicles parked on their side of the road when they can’t see if anyone is coming the other way.
That’s what my daughter was doing when the git who pissed me off came flying around the bend. Tess couldn’t get completely into her lane, but she was pretty close, and there was a shoulder for the oncoming driver to use... but he didn’t. Instead, he held to his lane as much as possible without hitting us, and the nasty expression on his face indicated he was angry at my daughter for trying to get around an obstacle he would have to deal with on his return journey.
So, I exploded and started calling him various body-part slang names I normally avoid using when I am with my kids. It was embarrassing. It was also lame considering, by the letter of the law, he had the right of way. But his lack of consideration and apparent ignorance of the realities of driving on narrow winding roads gave me a severe dose of road rage.
Right… so the reason I’ve told you this tale is that my return to the roads has me questioning the value of holidays. Do they really make the stresses of everyday life easier to handle? My break from being in a car hasn’t made me more tolerant; it’s just made me more aware that I don’t like the way I, or many other people, behave while driving on crowed roads.
Of course, I could be looking at this all wrong. Maybe I have been enjoying my driving holiday after all.
If that’s the case, the best thing for everyone might be for me to simply stay off the roads.