Of Stigmata and Road Rage.

By Tony Philpott

He’s wearing a tweed cap and one of those green quilted waistcoats with the diamond cross stitching.  His neck slightly bulges over the too-tight collar of his shirt and tie. He has a Padre Pio sticker in the back window of his 1989 Opel Astra and he’s driving the car in front of me.

He is Mister Certainty.  And just as surely as he is going fifteen miles an hour in a forty zone, the Irish Press, if it still existed, would be on the empty passenger seat beside him.  I encountered him yesterday, you will encounter him tomorrow, if not this specific Mr Certainty then his spiritual kin.

He is a man whose moral conviction and thirty years as a drapery manager, endows him with the unassailable right to creep up to the traffic lights at just the right snails pace to get him through and leave you stopped by the red.

He was ahead of me in the queue in shop at the Esso station on Grange Road. “Do you know the weights and measures people are supposed to check your pumps every month?” He irately asked the stick of teenaged acne behind the counter. He was greeted with a completely indifferent £4.50 an hour shrug. “The label on the pumps says your last inspection was nine weeks ago?” Minimum wage does not obligate an employee to respond to rhetorical propositions, so Mr Certainty was greeted with another shrug.  “How do I know I’m getting a full litre of petrol for my money?” was greeted with the tolerant sigh of  a twenty-first century teenager who is not in the least intimidated by old farts. Failing to get satisfaction, Mr Certainty paid for his petrol and left - I saw him go back to the pump and take written note of the last weights and measures certification.

Unfortunately,  his car was just in front of me as I exited. As he accelerated from ten to his cruising speed of fifteen miles an hour, I knew I was stuck behind a man whose stock responses to all things that displeased him would include: “I blame television” “None of this would have happened if Archbishop McQuaid were still with us” and the perennial “This country hasn’t had a real singer since John McCormac”. The thing is, he is absolutely, unshakably certain of all of these things. Imagine having such a mind, a mind too small to be occupied by doubt. Imagine such blissful ignorance. I did. Of course, I also imagined myself putting my foot on the accelerator and ramming his Astra all the way up Whitechurch Road.  But let’s leave my twitchy foot for a moment and briefly examine the legacy of this uniquely Irish sub-species.

Like many others, I’ve sat nervously across from his likes during job interviews in the sixties - he was the dour man who didn’t notice your exam results but did note the fact that you didn’t have a character reference from your parish priest.

His was the mindset that almost trapped us in the sociological cul de sac of the 1950’s. His was the mindset that deemed the Ginger Man to be anarchy and which forbade that small expression of human exuberance that was Saturday night dancing. The likes of him could venerate the psychosomatic holes in Padre Pio’s hands but could see no sanctity in the marriage of a Protestant and a Catholic.

I blame his shirt.

Buttoned securely round his neck since 1957 it has obviously cut off the blood supply to his sense of humour - the part of his brain that might have once given him a capacity for whimsy and tolerance has long since calcified. But I do have sympathy for him, just a tinge mind, but sympathy nevertheless. This world and this country have moved on, he lives in a world that has stopped turning. But, hey, isn’t that the world he always wanted?

Even though I was stuck behind him in a funereal crawl, I mellowed. People like him were to be pitied, their beliefs made them victims of their times - of course his driving would make him a victim of road rage - and soon, if the honking of the impatient van driver two cars back was anything to go by. As the cortege snaked along Whitechurch Road I turned up the slope of my driveway, the long trail of traffic behind crept up to fill the small gap I left.

And from the rise of my house I could see Mr Certainty still holding back the flow.