March 8: White Van Man

My road is a very compact dead-end of terraced houses painted all sorts of beautiful colours. Some are canary yellow, some baby blue, some hazy pink. Some have two shades – green and orange, or terracotta and burgundy. One of them has a great sunbeam painted across its back wall, which you can see from the park even on rainy days. Of course, the road would have been lovely in Victorian times when donkeys were hip. But now we all drive cars, it is chaos.
There is a turning point three-quarters of the way down, but to use it successfully involves mounting two pavements, scrapping your number plate and front bumper along the kerb, possibly creasing your back bumper on a lamppost, and straining your neck to such a degree you need permanent Osteopathy.
I left my house today at 8pm to get stuck behind an Asda van trying to reverse the entire length of my street, past vans, past cars, past skips and piles of discarded cement, all under the relative non-helpfulness of dim street light. The road is roughly 400 metres long. I timed him. It took 11 minutes to get from my house to the end, something that should take maybe thirty second. Oh, how I tried not to growl at him. Oh, how I failed. There were at least three places where he could have pulled in to let me pass. If I had been reversing - or anyone else with half a brain - I might have thought 'This will take a very long time, clearly there is someone I am holding up who is staring right at me. How about I let them go and at least one of us can along with our lives'. But no, no. He didn’t think of that, did he. He made me wait and watch and endure the whole sorry episode. Nor did he wave an apology when he finally got to the end of the road. I gave him a dirty look and sped past resisting the urge to honk or – at worst – flash him the Vs. Idiot man.