Drive slow homie.

Drive slow homie, drive slow homie

Ya never know homey might meet some hoes, homie

Ya need to pump your brakes and drive slow, homie

I’m amazed I have to point this out in this day and age where everyone on the road should have already passed a driving test to get their licence but THE RIGHT LANE IS FOR PASSING.

OK, have we got that? 

Good.

See, what gets me mad, and by mad I don’t mean that very English kind of mad where you kinda make a clicking noise with your tongue against your teeth and raise your eyebrows a little, I mean a proper apoplectic screaming all consuming jihad of a rage, what gets me boiling and seething and stewing and thanking all that is holy (and otherwise) that we have gun control in this country which prevents me from going fully postal and wiping out significant numbers of my fellow man daily, that produces foul eruptions of hate and bile and torrents of murderous rage is mongtard drivers who are in some way afraid of the little pedal on the right hand side we, and by “we” I mean people who are actually competent to drive a motor vehicle, the pedal we call “the accelerator”.  OK, maybe I overstate my case here, but let’s just say they tick me off and cause me to shake my head somewhat.   

There are two behaviours of the terminally transportationally timid which push my buttons.  I’m not bothered too much by people who drive at 35-40 on an open country road because everyone should drive at the speed they feel safe at.  What gets my goat is the “blocking tactics” which many of these losers employ against those of us who actually have somewhere else to be, and don’t get their kicks by wasting an extra 90 minutes a day dawdling along in a daze listening to Radio 2.

Don't drive too fast Doris.

Example Behaviour One:  “Thou Shalt Not Pass”

Dual carriageway and motorway blocking.  This is not the same as the “middle lane Moron”, the guy who doesn’t pull left after passing but sits there in the middle lane at 65 all day, this is those people who for reasons I cannot comprehend insist on riding their Ford Focus side by side with whatever might be in the left lane.  Occasionally they may speed it up a little so they are travelling like 0.01 miles per hour faster than the car to the left to give some feint but misguided hope to the guy stuck behind that soon, one day, they will complete their passing manoeuvre and pull left so that he can get past. Oh no, this is just a cruel bit of psychological torture. Like making a dog beg and jump for an off cut of steak at the dinner table you always yank away at the last moment so his jaws close with a snap in fresh air, these bastards have no intention of you ever passing them.  They just raise your hopes a little so that they can dash them cruelly:  Oh no, they are going to sit there at 31.25 MPH in a 50 right alongside their team mate for all eternity.   People have died through this behaviour, in fact I sometimes suspect that maybe some of these rolling roadblocks aren’t actually idiots, but the corpses of those who have died of boredom stuck behind some other jerk and rigor mortis sat in with their foot on the gas just enough to keep rollin’ at a steady 31 MPH for ever until eventually all turns to dust...

And so we return to the elements which made us.

On a motorway or on an A road you will find that this behaviour is generally how the drivers of long haul trucks get their kicks on boring runs now that CB radio seems to have waned.  Vans, busses, horseboxes, caravans, old people and others join in also.  I suspect that they organise themselves via text messages or maybe they have a Facebook group or something.  Either way I am beginning to suspect that they have my house under surveillance. 

“Foxtrot 2 to Red Leader 1, I have a silver Vauxhall leaving the premises now and it appears he may be running late for a meeting in South Yorkshire area”

“Foxtrot 2 this is Red Leader 1, copy that, will deploy a tanker load of molasses, a curtain-sider and two container trucks at Trowell Service area with a handover to a dangerously loaded car transporter, two box vans and a low loader with concrete drain pipes taking over from Tibshelf”

THIS REALLY HAPPENS. 

This is the real agenda Dr. Beeching had when he closed the branch railways in the 1960s.   It is all just to give high blood pressure to those of us who use Britain’s roads in a vain attempt to get somewhere else in a reasonable amount of time.  He was a doctor, he has shares in some company which makes drugs to control blood pressure, don’t tell me that’s not the obvious logical conclusion.

Beeching, you bastard...

By comparison the folks who form rolling blockades on the ring road and other urban multi-lane roads are rank amateurs, but obviously enthusiasts in their chosen hobby of making life a misery for people with actual lives to live and other places to be.  They are annoyance-opportunists in economy hatchbacks.  Travelling in pairs or occasionally hunting in small packs they spot a fellow motorist attempting to make progress and they form a simple “two lane tango” the like of which I have already laid to text above.

Example Behaviour Two:  “At a crossroads in your life” or “crossroads become veryangryroads”

Tell me this is not a familiar scenario to you:  You are approaching a traffic light controlled junction.  There are two lanes, both for straight ahead.  The light is on red.  In the left lane there is a queue of obviously slow moving stuff like busses, heavy trucks, Honda Accords, etc. as you approach you see the right lane appears to be clear, you position to take the right lane happy that on the green you will be able to pull away smartly (not fast, not like some boy racer, not daft, just smartly, normally, like someone who has somewhere to get to would do) and so safely pass the slow moving traffic with minimal fuss and in complete safety.

As you get into the right lane you see there is one single car already there at the line waiting.  Undaunted you carry on as you know that so long as the one car up in front pulls away smartly on the green light you will both have plenty of time and space to pass the lead vehicle in the left hand lane (probably a tractor or some such thing).

However when the light turns green one of two things will occur:

1.      The car in front will put on its right turn signal and not move off the line until sufficient cars have passed you on the left that you are now further back in the queue than you started.

2.      The car in front will pull away from the lights so slowly that the tractor/bus/learner on the left will keep pace.  This practice is best employed where the road narrows back into 1 lane after 200 or 300 yards because now you have to get your left signal on and hope someone will be kind enough to let you back in. Usually this does not happen until you are further back in the queue than you started.

My arch nemesis in the traffic light sabotage game is a small silver hatchback, usually a Peugeot 206 or some other pitiful French thing.  I have noticed however that some of the proponents of this manoeuvre now favour a large German car like a BMW 7 series or Mercedes S class.  You think as you pull up behind them that you are safe, that this type of car are also likely to be driven by employed people, people going about their business and as such will leave the line in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable pace.  Only as you come to a halt at its back bumper do your eyes catch sight of something that means you know instantly that you are doomed.  Your blood runs cold. 

OH MY GOD IT’S A DIESEL! 

A 730D or S320D! The absolute work of The Devil, or at least his subcontracted automotive design inspiration division.  I’m not suggesting each and every one of these Teutonic barges is actually hand crafted in hell by Lucifer himself, despite all appearance which may support that conjecture, all I can say with any certainty is that these are the sort of executive car bought by people who  - despite being able to afford to buy a horrifically expensive luxury car - can’t afford to run said executive car so they get one with a tractor engine in it and proceed to try and drive it without every actually touching the accelerator pedal.  You look ahead trying to catch sight of the driver, but you can’t because it’s some little old shrunken-prune-person who can hardly see over the steering wheel and is completely obscured from your view by the giant padded leather armchair.  The light goes green and even the kids on skate boards are overtaking you.  You are in my own personal hell.  Crank your tunes; this is going to be a long slow boring journey.

At least there's cool tat to ogle in this traffic jam.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect every road user to be leaving the stop line like John Force on a championship title run, and while the thought of little old ladies and school run mums warming up their tyres with a series of pre-emptive burnouts and judging the best launch time against the orange light does fill me with some amusement I do appreciate that it isn’t practical.  The very fact that people buy cars like the Kia Picanto or Hyundai Atoz does rather prove that many people have no interest in driving cars at all, let alone driving them well or enjoying the experience.  In fact I have come to the conclusion that the only reason that people buy a Atoz is because they are in some way ethically opposed to owning a car and a Atoz is the closest you can come to not actually owning a car while actually having the use of a form of rain-resistant personal transport.  I suspect there is also an added layer of reflected self loathing and self inflicted punishment, kinda like monks who used to self flagellate, it’s a sort of purification ritual of the modern era which is born out in the choice of the small Hyundai.

Women multi-task better than men.  

No, all I ask is that other road users show a little common courtesy.  OK, you have the right to potter along in your wibbly-wobbly little world of your own, fine, but there are people with an equal right to travel at their own speed (where safe and legal to do so folks!).  Try shaking yourself out that stupor, using your mirrors, engaging a couple of brain cells and getting out the damn way occasionally. 

Either that or we legalise car mounted rocket launchers and let me take care of the problem in my own way.

You may also like to check out www.howmotorwayswork.co.uk