A bit of a grunt

Disclaimer: this blog post contains strong language, situations of peril and if I can work them in somehow, sexual references. You should wait until after the nine o'clock watershed to read it.

As I was cycling into work on Wednesday I got badly cut up by a yellow van driver. There is nothing particularly news worthy about this, this sort of piss poor driving happens daily across the Capital. I often get cut up by cars and vans when cycling, but because by cutting me up he'd pushed me into the side of a stationary lorry I was sufficiently pissed off to give him the finger. This wikipedia article will explain the meaning of this slang if you are unfamiliar with what I did (it even lists some famous examples of this hand gesture).

I merely hoped that by flipping him off that he would pause to reflect on the error of his ways and that perhaps in future he'd give cyclists a bit more space. Instead he screeched to a halt in the middle of the carriage way. I reversed out of the side of the lorry and began to cycle around the driver's side of the van to continue my journey. No such luck: he opened the door in front of me and jumped into the road, with an almost impressive amount of arm gesticulation.

"Oi! Have you got something to say to me? Do you want to say something?" he shouted as I came to a stop in front of him.

Fortuitously the answer to his questions was "yes", I did indeed have something to say. So I told him that he hadn't given me enough room and that he had dangerously cut me up.

"Of course I didn't give you any room" he shouted back. I noted that he was still doing the arm gesticulation thing, but this time he was almost in my face. "You don't pay road tax and I do. You don't deserve to get space on the road".

Seriously, what the fuck? I'm rarely speechless, but this really threw me. I should have asked him about pedestrians, does he try to mow them down because they don't pay road tax? I should have asked him does he give cars who pay less road tax less room? I should have asked him whether he thinks children who have never made national insurance contributions should get treated on this NHS. And really, would he ever explain to a parent that they lost their child in a road traffic accident because they were quite legally cycling along, but didn't deserve space on the road because they didn't pay road tax? Seriously, what the fuck?

"Next time, keep your fingers to yourself, otherwise I'll break the little fuckers off" he told me. [Note to readers: by "fuckers", he in fact meant my fingers. I guess he was just conscious to avoid repeating the same noun in the same sentence.] By now an impressive queue of traffic had formed behind us and some of them had even started beeping. I wasn't sure if this was out of appreciation for the impromptu vignette of human drama playing out in front of them, or whether they thought that using their horn would get this guy out of my face.

He concluded by calling me something I didn't quite catch. I know it started with c, but maybe his enunciation wasn't up to scratch because it just sounded like a bit of a grunt. Don't worry, I think the same of you mate.