Friday, 23rd January 2009.

Bloodless Freak

Tuesday: the A4130 leading out of the business park. Sweeping past the roadworks that may or may not have been the cause of various power outages over the last couple of months. This road can be a nightmare: the interchange gets clogged by the roundabout, but going out your problem tends to be slow-moving Tesco lorries. Legally they’re not supposed to top forty miles an hour, and most of them don’t. It’s a clear stretch of road, but the white lines that hog the middle forbid overtaking.

So I don’t. That doesn’t stop some of the others. I do not want to get holier-than-thou, because I still can’t parallel park, but the smash that cost me my last car has made me into a more careful driver – and one that’s more intolerant of boy racers. I will swing as close to the speed limit as I feel it’s safe to do so, and very occasionally go a little faster if the area is not built up, but I will not overtake traffic that is going at the legal limit, unless we are on a dual carriageway with a clearly marked overtaking lane, and unless I really am in a hurry.

It’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon and the sky is a deep, rich blue. The traffic is moving at a mean speed of forty because there is a Tesco lorry at the head of the queue, and no one is in any position to overtake. I’m approximately fifty yards from the car in front. The vehicle behind me is a white van. It is frustrated because I am maintaining a safe and reasonable distance, choosing not to tailgate the car like the van is tailgating me. It shunts back and forth, coming closer, retreating, closer, retreating, in a predatory gesture that somehow, absurdly, mimics lovemaking.

It should come as no surprise to you that my track selection for this part of the journey home is typically something loud and up-tempo. Programming the CD player for familiar car journeys is a whole other entry in itself, waiting to be written. For the sake of brevity, I will summarise today by admitting that, on this stretch of road, Glen Frey’s ‘The Heat Is On’ has become a firm favourite, as has ‘Somewhere In My Heart’ and ‘The Whole of the Moon’. Today, however, I have let the score to American Beauty run through and it’s currently playing the title track. This is one of the famous ones. You will know it even if you think you do not, because it’s one of those pieces that has saturated popular culture in that it’s been used as the soundtrack to practically everything, much like ‘O Fortuna’ or most of Play.

There are two distinctive themes running through Thomas Newman’s score: the sparse, tentative marimbas that make up the opening, and then the mournful, elegiac piano theme that cuts in halfway through the film. I can’t remember now, but I believe it accompanies the image of the bag floating in the wind – an image that has frequently been lampooned and ridiculed, not without good reason (Mendes is an established genius, but he’s also a pretentious arsehole and he knows it) but an image that, no matter how many times I see it, never fails to make me cry.

Ordinarily I would be furious with the aggressive, unnecessarily rash behaviour of the white van driver who is endangering my life by driving so close. I do not see the logic in becoming angry because I am keeping my distance: moving a few yards closer than is safe would not in any case allow him to finish his journey any faster, because we will still have to queue when we reach the roundabout. As he pulls back for what appears for just a moment to be a mad dash into the middle of the road, I can see him shouting “Wanker” through my rear view mirror.

The van stays with me for most of the journey home, as does Thomas Newman. And what should have normally frazzled and angered me has in fact left me amused. It’s partly because I refused to yield to him, but perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this, because something loud and fast would normally have flooded me with hormones and adrenaline, and made me angry with him. Normally, I would have arrived home frustrated and wound up and I would have ranted about for a good five minutes on how white van drivers always appear to play up to the stereotypes foisted upon them by society. I should be cross. Instead, I feel extraordinarily calm.