I like to vary my commute from time to time. It stops me getting bored, and there are at least three routes home that can take about the same amount of time. Twenty minutes on a good run, thirty on a bad.

One of my routes takes me through the village of Bray. It is a nice little village and is home to one of the best restaurants in the world. That is not my opinion. That is fact, determined by people who eat out a lot, and not just take-aways.

At one side of the village there a small road bridge over what I assume to be a Thames contributory. It is only about thirty yards wide, but it is so narrow that only one car can pass at a time. The rules dictate that on my way to work I give way to oncoming traffic, and when going home, they give way to me. Not the same people, that would be an incredible coincidence, or just plain weird.

One night last week I was driving home singing away to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, as I do when I’m trying to relax, and I decided to go through Bray. As I approached the bridge I noticed there was a car coming the other way that didn’t look like stopping.

Well, it was my right of way, so neither was I.

So we both drove the fifteen yards to the centre of the bridge, our headlights obscuring a proper view of each other.

We then sat there for approximately three weeks.

Or about ten seconds, I am not sure.

Someone beeped a horn, it wasn’t one of us. It came from behind me. Then the drivers side door of the car in front of me began to open. Suddenly it occurred to me, what if they thought the beeping horn was me and they were just about to kill me to death with a baseball bat? I have read about road rage, I know what can happen.

Then the figure emerged.

All seventy wizened years of it.

She ambled over to my car and motioned for me to wind down my window. Which I did.

“I’m really sorry, but I wondered if you could move your car?”

“I, err, but…” I began, wondering if berating a septuagenarian means I go straight to Hell without so much as a weekend stay purgatory.

“I know I should move mine, but I can’t go backwards, whenever I do, I seem to crash” she finished.

“err, Ok.”

Old people are my nemesis. I simply cannot express my anger at them, no matter how furious or frustrated I might be on the inside. A moment did pass where I considered asking her to reverse back over the bridge, as was my right, but I thought that her crashing over the side, and the subsequent involvement of Police and Ambulances etc. would probably mean I would be late for the take-away I had just ordered. No amount of old-person bridge-falling hilarity is worth a cold Chinese.

And so backwards I went. Blushing. Perhaps my reputation would have been better served if someone had come at me with a baseball bat?

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