Road rage — grrr... it’s so infuriating

IHAVE become a very dull driver. Friends tell me that the car has an accelerator.

Where I live, there are a lot of country roads with an 80kph limit and plenty of farm machinery crawling along.

Frankly, anyone who drives at 80 should be horsewhipped.

I am a very calm person, in the car, and occasionally I do see smoke coming out of people’s ears, such is their desire to pass me and be the car in front of me at the ring road roundabout instead of behind me, thereby saving a full two seconds.

Their stupidity makes my blood pressure go up a bit, but on the road rage graph, I am a zero.

Which made it all the more horrifying to watch some madness up close in a French village during the summer.

There is a 30kph limit and cars crawl most of the time, particularly on market day.

Motorbikes and scooters weave in and out of the traffic, but usually they are as slow as a push bike.

A man in an Austrian-registered car with two children in the back seat clearly was not in holiday mood. A middle-aged French couple on a beautifully kept Honda tourer bike were making their way slowly, and carefully, through the traffic jam. They were experienced bikers, I could tell. They also wore all the hi-vis and protection gear.

They pulled up beside the Austrian car, did not go within a mile of touching him, when all of a sudden, he went ballistic.

Apparently this was his territory. He put down his window and shouted at the shocked couple while his children watched.

The French couple just nodded and stayed put as there was nowhere to go. Then he started pushing their front wheel with his car door as he ranted.

The biker stayed upright and did his best to move back a foot or two which was not easy in traffic with a passenger. Next, the driver got out of the car, still shouting, and began pushing the bike so that the rider had to plant his feet firmly to stay upright.

The people watching, including me, were finally picking up the courage to intervene. Fortunately the traffic began to move and all returned to normal. Someone would probably have been hit.

A friend of mine had her wing mirror smashed on her way to work by a respectably dressed cyclist who felt she had invaded his ‘territory’. Luckily, he damaged the car and not the driver.

And, like in the case I witnessed, she was too shocked to even be sure what had happened. In France, we all stood transfixed. Not one of us wrote down the car number or took a photo.

This type of aggressive behaviour is sadly almost always carried out by males. Worldwide, the figure is about 97pc, not something for us testosterone-filled creatures to be proud of.