Behind you... the villain of the highway

8:28am Tuesday 13th May 2008

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Some people shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel of a car. No, scratch that; most people shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel of a car. Okay, almost all people shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel of a car, except possibly me. Think of the benefits: quieter roads, me getting to where I need to go much quicker, lower CO2 emissions. It makes sense.

One person who shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel of a car is the bloke who was behind me on the way into work yesterday morning.

For a start, his unneccessarily oversized car (compensating for something there, dear?) sported a personalised number plate. This always immediately gets my gander up. What purpose, exactly, do personalised number plates serve? To tell complete strangers what your initials are? And the rest of the world cares about this why, exactly? Or is it to tell the world how much money you've got: "Look, I am so rich that rather than have a number plate which is a list of meaningless numbers and letters, I can afford my very own list of numbers and letters, which, granted, will be as meaningless to anyone else as the ones the DVLA would choose for me, but I will rest easy in the knowledge that they are my meaningless letters and numbers and I paid for them."

On its own, a personalised number plate wouldn't have raised my ire levels so much. But the next thing that happened was that we reached some traffic lights. They were on green, but the traffic ahead was moving slowly. I waited, and managed to cross the junction just as the lights changed. The guy in the car behind also took a punt and crossed, but as there wasn't enough room he pulled up alongside me rather than behind me. What, like I'm just going to smile indulgently and say: "Oh, I insist, you first. After all, you have a personalised number plate."

Then, to add insult to injury, he appeared to recognise the woman who was then filtered behind me by the traffic signals, and wound his window down to have a conversation with her while everyone else was trying to move along.

After he'd finished chatting he then must have got the taste for a bit of conversation, because over the course of the next two miles he carried out no less than three different conversations with his mobile phone clamped to his left ear, and either gesticulating wildly with his right hand or using it to put his sunglasses on or take them off, scrutinising his reflection in the rear-view mirror every time he did so.

By the time I got into Bradford I was a positively seething mess of wire-wool rage. Despite my pointed stares at him through my own rear view mirror, and a hand-signal you won't find in the Highway Code through my open window when he did come a tad too close at one point, he seemed happily oblivious.

I doubt this chap is the sort of person who would even realise he had been so annoying on the road. He probably drives like that all the time.

I suppose there's not much chance that he'd be moved by this if he read it, but I hope that he might recognise himself and feel a bit ashamed. Thing is, if he is reading this, he's probably doing so while driving through Bradford, so if he's behind you, watch out.