How kind of you to tell me!

“For some reason it hit some kind of nerve.” This was Robert de Niro talking about one of his early iconic films. And it came to mind when travelling in the car to dear old Tesco’s for some tomatoes and other requisites for the perfect salad for dinner.

I have learned to curb my responses to the criminal selfishness that characterises the parking and driving characteristics of a significant minority of customers in supermarket car parks. I can now witness cars parked on double yellow lines, on hatched spaces, on motorcycle spaces, in disabled spaces, blocking entrances, across two spaces, non indicating, speeding, and ignoring other road users, motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, etc. with some degree of equanimity. I have become, you see, a much more balanced person since the daily grind came to an end.

But, isn’t there always a ‘but’? But there are still some very little things which manage to penetrate underneath the excluding defences of my toleration.

The clue is in the driving: no, not the use of mobile phones when driving; non indication; speeding; cutting people up; wearing baseball hats in the car; not wearing seat belts; smoking when driving; drivers whose heads are lower than the top of the steering wheel; lane switching; incorrect indication at roundabouts – none of these are the true irritant.

I have never liked signs on the back window of cars as I have taken the somewhat naïf view that in vehicles windows are quite useful for seeing out of, given the fact that drivers are surrounded by homicidal maniacs in fast moving metallic killing machines called cars. So, anything which obstructs the view is, as it were, counter productive and stupid.

There was also the one-upmanship of telling the world that you had “seen the lions at Longleat” before anyone else. Then the little triangular signs expanded to include foreign locations so the one-upmanship was taken to a higher level and some rear windows looked more like badly completed jigsaw puzzles than an essential viewing opportunity to preserve life and limb on the ever perilous roads of our fair country.

At the other end of the car the fluffy dice syndrome handing from the rear view mirror has the same degree of opprobrium for me.

So the large yellow (why yellow?) signs in the rear window which proclaim to all and sundry that the driver has active and potent sperm is something which does not command my immediate regard. Presumably the sign is there to inform, “Baby on Board”; but inform who, what? How is the driver’s behaviour supposed to change because of the information that there might be a child on board the car in front? Does it mean that the normal suicidal way in which a person usually drives will automatically reform itself because of the glimpse of a yellow sign? You think to yourself, “Usually I would drive straight into the car in front, but, as I see by the yellow sign that there might be a baby in the car I will be characteristically restrained and not try to destroy the car by forcefully smashing into it!”

This attitude is difficult to sustain when the little yellow sign reads, “Princess on Board.” I then have an almost overwhelming desire to stop my car and phone some sort of Child Protection Agency and have any defenceless infant which might be in the car taken into care away from such wilfully deluded parents who can so shamelessly and publically flaunt a sign with such an absurd message.

The signs which read, “Naughty Person on Board” are more interesting and point the way to more specific designations. Why stop there? Why not be more accurate: “Depressed misfit looking for Death” or “Last Night Drunk Dreading Work” or “Shopper with Attitude” or “I Make Yellow Signs” or something.

My favourite though would have to be the little yellow sign which said, “Baby on Board. Thanks for your patience.” I was amazed at the complexity of implied interaction with the driver following that the second part of the sign indicated. Was it some sort of Cathar-like apology for procreation? An ironic twist by a disciple of Jean Paul Sartre? Existentialism with a sense of humour? A sincere apology for the havoc that the future behaviour of the spoilt brat in the car was going to demand from an unsuspecting world? Who knows? Too complex for me.

I think I will have a sunny sign in my car which says, “I don’t like little yellow signs.”

I think that has a nice post modernist twist.