There are no horrors quite like Mercedes Women
Are you thinking what she’s thinking?
Last week in this column, almost as an aside, I wrote that the biggest hooligans in the country weren’t youths on football terraces or gangs roaming weekend city centres. Instead, they were middle- aged, middle- class women with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
a monstrous regiment, who deserve to be feared — especially when Waitrose run out of smoked salmon or lowcalorie Greek yoghurts or their favourite magnums of mum juice, otherwise known as Chardonnay.
My theory was sparked by a night at the opera, when I witnessed a woman in the stalls shouting at the man in front of her because his head was ‘too big’ and, therefore, ‘ruining’ her view and her evening.
then, as if just to prove the point, as if to concrete the foundations of this uncharitable thought, along came Mercedes Woman.
Driving her convertible through the Berkshire lanes this week, the unnamed blonde got caught up in an incident in a narrow tunnel.
Coming towards her, coincidentally in another Mercedes Benz, was an elderly man who failed to give way, or had jumped the traffic lights.
Whatever. Like a pair of stags at rutting time, the two cars met nose-to-nose in Forlease Road, Maidenhead. and neither would give an inch.
the woman, aggrieved by the inconsiderate driving, decided to stand her ground out of principle. He was wrong and she was right.
Refusing to reverse to make room for the other car to pass, her stubborn actions were the catalyst for a stand-off which lasted more than 40 minutes and led to long tailbacks in both directions.
Yes, the gentleman could have reversed too, but he seemed to be having some kind of meltdown inside his car. It was clear that he could not cope with events. I know all this because, of course, someone filmed the entire incident on a smartphone and posted it online.
ADDING to this very British farce were various people trying to mediate, including a man in a high-vis jacket who took it upon himself to march around, shouting and swearing at all involved.
He told the male driver the police would take his licence away. He told the female driver to ‘ grow up, luv’. His every response made the situation worse, not better.
Is it the vest that makes them behave like that, do you think? Or do they get the vest so we know to steer clear of them in any crisis?
Meanwhile, I don’t personally know the blonde woman sitting mulishly at the wheel of her car, but I certainly know her type: posh, entitled, selfish, venal. Quite possibly married to a man who wears red trousers at weekends. a woman who would crunch over your granny’s skull in her LK Bennett courts, just to make sure she was first in the queue of life. a woman who would strangle you with the sleeves of her Boden boucle jacket if she thought your children were getting the places at a local school which she had earmarked for her own brats.
she’s the woman who butts into the conversation you are having with the butcher, telling you both to stop talking because she is in a hurry for her lamb chops. she is the horror who takes up all the overhead luggage space on a plane, then reclines her seat in your face.
she hogs space with her yoga mat in the gym. she will never, ever take her coat off the seat next to her on the train or in the cinema, quite possibly not even at gunpoint. When she was younger, she would mow you down with her baby’s buggy.
throughout our lives, she has always been around; forever ready to pounce and belittle others in her quest to establish dominance.
superior, grand and contemptuous of the little people? Of course. so perhaps it is inevitable that one day she would end up stuck in a tunnel, at the wheel of her flash little car, determined not to give way to a clearly distraught and frightened elderly man. a man who became more distressed as the minutes ticked by.
and I really hope she didn’t think she was making some kind of feminist stand, because all her actions did was make me feel ashamed.
Who was in the wrong and who was in the right? In a way, it is almost irrelevant — but, clearly, she would have had the law on her side. However, sometimes being in the right is not as important as doing the right thing.
Mercedes Woman should have given way, shown a little compassion to someone who was in distress. she should have backed up and let everyone else stuck in the traffic jam get on with their day. For the good of mankind, if not for the good of herself.
What she and so many others like her fail to realise is this: principles are mighty fine things to have, but they are worthless if they come at the expense and inconvenience of others.