SOME old moustache-bristler was having a good old harrumph the other day about how rude we all are to each other these days. How no one holds the door open any more, gives up their seat on the bus or says thank you.

O,h how true. And nowhere does it manifest itself more than behind the wheel of a car. How many of us can tell stories about the times we’ve been cut up, carved up, or stitched up by fellow motorists? All of us, I bet.

The worst perpetrators are boy-racing petrol heads in souped-up Saxos, middle-of-the-road middle-aged men driving middle-aged cars and young women in pink jalopies with big shiny headlights.

Young lads behind the wheel – have you noticed that they’re usually dead skinny with pustule-covered necks? – are the ones who whip up behind you, flash their headlights while trying to launch their car into your boot, then as soon as there’s an inch of free road in front of them, hurtle past your offside rear bumper in a frenzy of penile posturing. If you get the opportunity to pull up alongside them at the next set of traffic lights, I’ve found that calmly showing them your thumb and forefinger positioned close together with perhaps an inch of space between them usually gets the message across.

Those middle-aged men are another ire-provoking hazard. Imagine driving down a street with parked vehicles on one side so that you have to hang back to give way for oncoming motorists. Most are so blind to anything other than the bumper in front of them that as they pass they don’t acknowledge your presence. Some, though, might give a barely perceptible nod of the head in thanks. But the ones who raise an imperious forefinger from the top of the steering wheel in some aloof gesture of acknowledgement come across as so supercilious that you wonder why they’re driving in the first place rather than sitting behind a chauffeur.

As for the dolly daydream yacketty-yaks in their go faster girly cars, they’re a mobile menace. Because, invariably, they’re on their phone in either talk or text mode, and as a result they scare the stuff out of me. People who still persist in using their mobiles while driving are as wilful, irresponsible and downright dangerous as those tanked-up drinkers who think it’s in order to get behind the wheel after a booze-fest with their mates. Apart from the obvious dangers of such automobile antics it all boils down to bad manners and lack of courtesy in the end. So the moustache-bristler was right – time to start being nicer to each other and minding our please and thank-yous. Which means the next time I’m waiting patiently at the till to be served by some vacuous doh!-brain while she completes her inanities with her equally vapid mate, I’ll refrain from screaming at her what a fatuous empty headed fluffball she is, and please can she engage what little brain she has to serving customers, but merely sigh and roll my eyes. Ever so politely.


* WHAT A flu-rore over throwing a sickie! Some small-minded jobsworth supposedly representing small businesses has thrown the sweets out of his corner shop because of a tongue-in-cheek website giving people guidance on how to convince the boss you're not fit enough to come to work. As if such guidance was needed! If truth be known, we’re all masters at it and don’t need a website to tell us how to croak the voice, lower it an octave and pitifully gasp gory details about how ill we feel or how many times we’ve been throwing up at one end and evacuating the other.

Such mastery is a prerequisite of office life and crikey, have I seen some masters at it in my time. They should be shimmying down the red carpet at the Oscars such is their over-the-phone deathbed talent. And before anyone says anything, I run a small business, so have been known to drag myself into my office chair and hunch over my laptop because if the job isn’t done you don’t get paid. But in my corporate days I certainly didn’t welcome those who “heroically” dragged themselves into the office only to shower-sneeze or bark their germs over their workmates – not to mention my computer.