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The stress may be getting to me, but not sure if it’s the workload or the loss of a friend that is playing on my mind. I keep waking up at 4am even though the children are sleeping soundly and today surprised myself with an unnecessary bit of, if not road-rage, then maybe road-more-annoyance-than-was-justified.
I’d driven to Hitchin to drop off a car key to James Bollings my tour manager so that Chris Evans (not that one) can drive all the show stuff and cameras up to Glasgow tomorrow. I happened to see James walking up the road so pulled over on to the pavement to hand over the goods. I then had to pull back into busy traffic, but as it was static about ten feet in front of me I assumed that wouldn’t be a problem. I indicated and one car went past, like a selfish dick. The next one had surely seen me though and had practically nowhere and wasn’t moving fast so I started pulling out. The driver beeped me and that made me a bit cross. What did they have to gain?
I stopped pulling out and wound down my window to berate them, finding myself to be a bit angrier than I needed to be and swearing a bit. I looked up and saw the driver was a mother with a child in the seat next to her. And there I was effing and jeffing. She indicated that I should pull out, with a bit of a pompous look on her face, but I carried on complaining about her lack of politeness. Which had a degree of irony that I perhaps did not appreciate at the time.
I was properly wound up though and much more of a dick than I had needed to be. It struck me that as I was fairly local that there was every chance that this might be a mum that I knew or that she might recognise me from my appearance on Channel 5’s Celebrity Games Night and be appalled to see the nice drunk man who elbowed Denise Van Outen in the face was so unpleasant in real life.
It took me ages to calm down. I wasn’t raging, just had a bit of a shit in my pocket about this rather mild infraction. Possibly she hadn’t been paying attention to the road ahead of her and so hadn’t seen me indicating and then had been surprised by me pulling out. I was already feeling contrite in spite of my raised blood pressure and wanting to apologise for my boorish behaviour and for swearing (although probably inaudibly) in front of her youngster(s).
So I will apologise now. Too late. I am not always the hero of my own story. But still, let people pull out if you’re already in static traffic you fucking idiots.
And I wondered why I had gone 0 too 60 (metaphorically) so quickly and cut myself a bit of a break, as I think it was probably more to do with the emotional journey I am, preparing for my valediction for Tony. It’s obvious enough, of course, but people who blow up over tiny things like this are obviously generally dealing with something else. They just need a little spark to get the powder exploding. I think maybe the trouble sleeping might be explained by this as well.
Let’s cut each other a bit of slack. Lucky for me that the blow up moment didn’t come when the car beeping me was driven by some even more wound up man with a crowbar in his glove compartment.
