Confessions of a motorist raging against the lights

There’s someone I would know well who is relatively mild-mannered – until they sit behind the wheel of a car and turn into an obnoxious git.

Our friend, in fairness, isn’t up there with Jeremy Clarkson – either behind the wheel or if he was looking for a late steak for his hotel dinner – but there’s a testosterone trigger that rears its head as soon as he lands in the driver’s seat of an ordinary family car.

It mortifies the rest of the family and in truth doesn’t make him feel all that great either – but there’s a Pavlovian gene deep inside that forces itself to the surface like a form of Tourette’s every time someone does something on the road that annoys him.

He takes these misdemeanours personally as though the Road Safety Authority has appointed him as a sort of undercover watchdog on the rules of the road.

Slow drivers, mummies in their urban tractor who pull up in the middle of the road to drop off their little darlings for school; people who don’t anticipate the green light at junctions; kind motorists who let a succession of other road users out from side roads ahead of them – they’ve all wondered who the lunatic is that’s having a mild fit behind them.

Our friend has even made hand gestures at people he knows – obviously he didn’t know that when he gesticulated and then he has to try and make it seem like a fist was actually a sort of a friendly wave.

There is no logic to any of this, and in the cold light of day he himself hate road rage drivers as much as the next man – but in fairness he’s equally not the first or last man to be transformed into a nut job as soon as they sit into the driver seat.

It doesn’t happen every day, and he does let others out ahead of him because he also depends on fellow drivers to extend him that courtesy in turn or he’d never get out of his side street.

He makes a point of letting people cross the road in front of him and he’s always watching out for children jig-acting on the footpath for fear they’d lose their balance and tumble onto the road.

But if others try to edge out ahead of him or stop for no reason in the middle of the road or spend more than five seconds responding to the traffic lights going to green, a red mist can descend in seconds.

In defence of my acquaintance, I should point out that this form of bad behaviour doesn’t involve breaking the rules of the road – indeed it is partly down to his self-appointed role as a guardian of those rules, a sort of younger version of Gay Byrne, in the first place.

He sees someone on a mobile phone and signals wildly to them that they are breaking the law; it’s not his job of course because he’s not a member of the Garda Siochana, but then the sight of a middle-aged man waving wildly can often have an even greater effect on a phone user than the boys in blue at a checkpoint.

If our driver has the right of way at a junction and someone else tries to sneak out, they will get a blast of the horn and a dagger look – a response that gives our friend some degree of misguided satisfaction that lasts for all of ten seconds at most.

He isn’t aggressive in real life but all that changes when the driver’s door closes – now he’s the king of the road and any challenge to his title will be treated with the sort of response with which Robert Mugabe used to crush domestic uprisings against him.

Our man is not alone in his role as a monitor of the motorway because he too has been on the receiving end of clenched fist or elevated digits from drivers in other cars for what they perceive as motoring mistakes on his part.

He has never got out of the car to engage with other drivers – which may be down to two reasons, the first one being that this sort of thing can quickly escalate into an incident which ends up in the District Court. The second reason is that fundamentally – and for all of the bravado behind the safety of a driver’s door – he would admit that he’s a coward at heart who would no more fight a fellow driver than he’d attempt to wrestle a lion in his lair.

In his further defence, he doesn’t get involved in speed races because that is wrong and dangerous….and anyway he doesn’t own a particularly fast car.

Perhaps back in the days of our relative youth, life was one long road rally – but safety concerns (and speed cameras) have taken that need for speed out of his arsenal.

And rightly so. It couldn’t be said that he’s a dangerous driver and he knows deep down that he shouldn’t be an aggressive one either – but there must be a Neanderthal gene still embedded deep within that rises to the surface as soon as the engine ticks over. T

hey do say that acknowledging the problem is the first step to solving it but our pal has long known that bad behaviour has no place on our roads and still this driver aggression manifests itself.

I can only try and convince him of the error of his way – and I’ll be sure to see him the next time I look into the mirror.