You may have read last week that road rage is a psychiatric illness. I can vouch for that, having recently been at the receiving end of a deranged lunatic's ire in the middle of a Dublin street, writes Kilian Doyle
I was driving to work early one Sunday morning. The roads were almost deserted.
As I came to a halt at a set of traffic lights, the gobdaw in a Porsche Cayenne who'd been driving four inches behind my rear bumper for a mile pulled up alongside me in the right-turn-only lane. Naively, I presumed he was turning right. Lights went green, I took off.
A car was parked just ahead of me. I checked my wing mirror to move out. What did I see but my soon-to-be-tormentor tearing past, cutting across the bend on the wrong side of the unbroken white line to get ahead of me.
He nearly clipped my driver's side wing as he yanked his Egowagon sideways to avoid careening headlong into an oncoming bread van. An extra few coats of paint on his rear bumper and it would've been Auf Wiedersehen to the Bavarian Princess. I jammed on the horn. He jammed on the brakes. Oh dear.
He hopped out. Expression like a slightly melted waxwork of Wayne Rooney getting a prostate examination. Shaved head, signet rings, open-necked shirt revealing massive blinged-up gold chain and smudged tattoos. All this in a package that was a smidgeon over five feet tall.
His was a textbook case of small man syndrome, fuelled no doubt by a youth spent picking fights with lanky gits like me, just to prove a point.
"Whoareye f***in' beepin' ah?" he barked in my window, spitting bile, gesticulating furiously and trying to pull open my door. "Gerrouadat f***in' car so I can bate de head off ye, ye stupah bleedin' f***."
Small though he was, he looked angry and dangerous enough to happily pluck my limbs off one by one on the spot.
I wasn't going to provoke him. I didn't fancy being found in a bloated mess floating face-down in a canal just for the satisfaction of delivering a withering put-down about little men in big cars.
I just sat my ground inside the Princess. I wasn't going to try and placate him by apologising. Why should I? He'd nearly killed me, all because he couldn't stand the idea of someone else being in front of him, least of all someone in a 16-year-old Beemer. He didn't hand over €150,000 of hard-earned drug money to end up stuck behind a car worth less than his trousers.
I opted for the stonewall approach. "You're blocking traffic. There are people waiting to get past," I said calmly, subtly pointing out the growing number of witnesses in case it occurred to him to garrotte me there and then.
"F*** dem. An' f*** you an' all." "You're blocking traffic," I repeated in a mantraesque monotone. Again and again. Eventually, he got fed up, frustrated I wasn't giving him an excuse to dismember me. "Learn to f***in' drive, ye f***in' b****x!" he yelled, veins bulging with apoplexy, before storming off.
"Thanks very much. I'll do that. Straight away. See you now," I said to the festering mass of fury as he clambered, with some difficulty it must be said, back into his thugmobile.
Half a mile down the road, I pulled up beside him at another set of lights. I considered blowing him a kiss. For the laugh. But I desisted.
I was thinking of you, dear readers. Have you ever read something typed with broken fingers?