Cunts: they’ve got our garage forecourts.

This morning I left the house early because I was on my way to the Frozen North and had to be there by 10am.

I stopped off at the garage at about six thirty in the morning to fill up the car, and I was straightening up to pull in by my pump of choice. As I did so, I was vaguely aware of a white van pulling into the pump on my right.

The next thing I knew, the same white van was on my left and the driver, a short, balding, bespectacled man in maybe his early fifties was leaning out the window, shouting, swearing and waving his arms around. Fists were waved and fingers pointed in my general direction. I gathered that he wanted me to move further to the right so that he could go to the pump on my left, and so I moved over – which was what I was in the middle of doing anyway.

That wasn’t the end of it, though. Readers of Everything Is Electric will be aware that I take a dim view of road rage. I take a particularly dim view of puny, cowardly men who wouldn’t have the balls to pick a fight with a bloke but will happily attempt to bully and intimidate the nearest woman driver, confidently assuming that said woman driver will be far too scared to answer back.

That confidence is sadly misplaced when the female driver in question happens to be me.

As I got out of the car to fill it up, I called across to him, “Excuse me. I don’t know what all that shouting and screaming was about. Would you mind explaining?”

“It was because you wouldn’t fucking well move over, that’s what it was all about. What the fuck did you think you were doing faffing about there?”

“What the fuck I was doing,” I explained, “was getting closer to the pump I’m using, and I think that was fairly obvious. Is there any particular reason why you couldn’t just have waited for me to move? Or perhaps been a little more polite and a little less pointlessly rude?”

“Fuck you.” He turned his back on me.

“Cock,” I said.

“And YOU just told ME to watch my manners!” he retorted triumphantly.

“Yes, I’m sorry about that. If I’d realised what an appalling cock you were I wouldn’t have bothered.”

He opened and shut his mouth a few times, then stomped round his van and disappeared.

In the shop, I realised that he was behind me in the queue. As I put my card in the reader, I turned round and said, “Oh, hello. Tell me, is where I’m standing all right, or would you like me to move forwards or backwards, or do you need me to move to one side really quickly?”

He did that openy-shutty mouth thing again.

“I’m in the plus sized clothes business,” he said, smirking. “I could give you one of my cards.”

“Why on earth would I want to buy my plus sized clothes from you?” I asked.

He blinked.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Did you think that I didn’t know that I’m fat or something?”

“Yeah!” he retorted.

“I DIDN’T,” he added belligerently.

I raised one eyebrow. He stuck his lip out, stared at the floor and jiggled his hands in his pockets.

“That’s the best you can do, is it?” I asked. “Plus sized clothes? It’s like I was saying before. You’re a cock.”

The cashier winked at me and handed me a receipt.

“Good luck with the rest of your day, though,” I added, and left the shop.

The best bit about an encounter like that is playing Snappy Comebacks. That’s the bit where you roar off down the motorway chortling dementedly and thinking about all the other things that you could have said. Some people say this happens to them at two in the morning, but I like to get cracking straight away. A Snappy Comeback will naturally involve some sort of highly offensive comment about the other person’s looks, personality, competence or socioeconomic status. I don’t usually think like this, because I don’t think that looks are terribly important and I don’t really want to hurt anyone, but the nature of a Snappy Comeback is that it’s a response to some cunt who’s decided to pick on your personal attributes for no apparent reason, so the usual rules of polite society are suspended.

By the time I’d gone past Stevenage I’d come up with the following:

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “Sorry. What? Do you think you’ve come across as a great salesman here or something?”

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “Are the clothes as cheap and nasty as your van?”

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “With a gut that size I assume you’re modelling them for us now?”

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “What are you talking about? These jeans are a size two.” (Thank you, Lane Bryant.)

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “Here’s how it is, right? Me: happy, successful, blessed with a multitude of wonderful friends and a bit fat. You: ugly, old, driving a white van. Okay? Okay.”

And then I stopped, because I don’t really approve of gratuitous nastiness about other people’s looks even if – and this is where I reveal myself to be a bit of a sap – even if they have revealed themselves to be cocks of the first order. I don’t really want to be the sort of person who wrecks someone’s self-image over a petty argument about manoeuvring on the garage forecourt, no matter how horrible they’ve been to me. I mean, the most confident (as opposed to arrogant) people that I know are also the ones who would never dream of bringing looks or weight or whatever into an argument, because they don’t have to get their kicks out of putting other people down. So once you descend to the “YOU’RE SO FAT/UGLY” level, what you’re really saying is “I can’t think of anything clever, funny or profound to say. I sense that I have lost this argument, which I should never have started anyway and only got into because I am a cock. I secretly know this and am deeply ashamed of myself. I have therefore regressed to the age of seven. In conclusion, you smell. A LOT.”

So the point of this post is: when you’re fat, there will always be some cock knocking around just waiting to point it out to you. And when they do, the best revenge is to just not be that bothered about it.

Even if they’re really fucking ugly, like this bloke was.

Sorry. But he was. AND HE SMELLED.