April 30, 2007
Road rage
Have you ever been stuck behind a slow-moving car on a two-lane road, and you really, absolutely can't miss your plane?
Twenty-five miles per hour. On a derestricted national road. That’s how fast the little Peugeot was going. Queen Victoria would have called it slow. There were tribes in pre-human Ethiopia that would have called it slow. On the Beaufort scale, twenty-five miles per hour isn’t even classified as a light breeze.
Naturally, there was a huge snake in the Peugeot’s wake. Trucks. Vans. Bicycles. Oxen. People going to work. And me, on my way to Birmingham airport. If I’d known I was going to be travelling so slowly I’d have used a horse.
To begin with I was mildly irritated, mostly by my children in the back who wondered out loud and quite often if we were going to miss the plane. “Miss the plane?” I sneered. “At this rate we’ll probably miss the end of the world.”
But after 15 minutes the irritation had become rage. “Why,” I shouted, “doesn’t he just commit suicide.”
After half an hour I was incandescent. If I’d had a knife and fork I’d have forced his car to the side of the road and eaten him.
Finally we reached the motorway, and as I tore past I noted he was a hundred and forty twelve, a walnut-faced osteoporotic and grey shadow of his former self. I should have felt remorse that I’d harboured such unkind thoughts about a man who’d served his country in the Crimea and in the Spanish war of succession, and probably at Hastings too. But instead I gave serious consideration to ramming his Peugeot into a bridge parapet.
Gawd, I love the way Jeremy Clarkson writes. And the best part is this is just the beginning of a review of the Mitsubishi Evo IX FQ-360.
He loves the car, if you're interested.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 30, 2007 12:07 PM
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