Mr Green Toyota Corolla - you suck!

I have never tooted my horn at anyone (except one time someone cut in front of me at the supermarket and Cassie was in the passenger seat and reached across and did it for me.... I was mortified and said, 'Cass - I don't toot!'). But I understood the mentally of getting road rage after a tiny incident on my beloved State Highway 1.

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I had purposely waited until Monday afternoon to drive home, thinking the weekend traffic might have thinned out with people returning to the first day back at work. It hadn't really.

The whole way my little Silver Mazda Familia was part of a long snake of traffic, moving at a frustrating 90ks with no real sign of break-away chances in sight. I didn't bother trying to overtake anyone until I got past Paraparaumu. There was a camper-van in front of me most of the early part of the journey, but to its credit it wasn't holding anything up.

This is when I got angry whilst driving home from LVN. I had just been through both sets of lights in Waikanae and was at the point where the two lanes merge back into one. I was letting a second camper-van from the other lane go in front of me (as you do - one from each lane, having turns), and was leaving a little room for it, but obviously not enough for two cars to jump in front of me.... (on a day of slow traffic why would I want to do that?).

I was already resenting all the traffic that had gone in the right-hand-lane - it looked like all the impatient drivers and they were just trying to sneak a few places in front of me.

When the car behind the camper-van accelerated and decided to push in.... at which point I accelerated too, thinking 'Oh no you don't, cheeky bugger!'... at which point he accelerated more. I had to let him go in front or crash into him.

I said many expletives very loudly and gave the back of his car the evils for a long time. It went something like this, 'Merge like a zip, you stupid f*****!' Even one of my struggling sixth form students in English had understood the concept (and had the nouse to point out it is a simile).

I caught up with him at the Paraparaumu lights (fat lot of good his pushy driving had done for him!). I peered across to see who this inconsiderate b******* was. It was a normal looking man in his 40s, with what looked like two young daughters in the car.

It irks me that a normal looking person made me angry while driving. He ruined the mood of my Paul Simon Anthology CD. I see driving on the highway in times of thick traffic as a kind of team sport - like that road racing they do on bicycles. If you are the lead car you should do your job of keeping a good pace, and then drop off if someone else could do it better or you're holding up the team..... I like the comradery of it. We should all be resigned to being in it together. It's not any one car's fault that we're not doing 100ks. So passing any one car isn't going to achieve much. It strikes me as arrogance. It turns the group activity into a competitive one where every car is out for themself.

Mr Green Car ruined my team spirit.