If you think you're hard enough...

This week I discovered something quite liberating. I've become immune to the little ways British people let each other know they are stepping out of line. The Look, the Tut, the Headlight Flash, or the Eye Roll, no longer make me blush to the roots of my hair. Nothing scares little me anymore.

After spending years almost constantly engaged in warring with people, through the medium of car horns, customer services call centres (I wonder how many of my calls to Crédit Lyonnais were used for training purposes?), weirdos on buses, employers who refused to pay up or issue contracts, the Mairie de Levallois which once informed me that my son did not exist (that's another post), barnacle-like insurance companies who refuse to accept that I no longer require their services (when will I ever get rid of MAAF?), it takes a hell of a lot to impress me.

This was brought home to me while parking the family Ford Fiesta (we have gone down in the world, in car terms, since moving) in the market square of the Oxfordshire town of V, town not of my birth but of my adolescence. As I eased my way into one of the coveted slots just in front of Woolies, my light was blocked by an imposing Range Rover which pulled up alongside. Its lady driver made a gesture to me, and if that gesture had a voice, it would have said, 'Shove alorrng now, member of the lower orders. I require more space to reverse in behind you. Skitter!' I declined the order with a shrug (not a Gallic one mind, a sheepish one).

Mrs Range Rover revved up her engines and did a remarkable job of parallel parking, at speed, in behind me. She didn't quite scrape me, but I could tell she wanted to. She shut her car door more forcefully than was strictly necessary (can you feel me quaking?), flounced past me, still sitting in my Fiesta, and then pointedly turned, and delivered a .... Look.

For the first time on British soil, I used my favourite tactic to deal with irate Parisian taxi drivers (while safely behind the wheel of my car). I blew a kiss. She stomped off, leaving me doubled up over the steering wheel with not very mature laughter.

With impeccable timing, we arrived back at our cars simultaneously, and there was a hilarious kind of 'tum-ti-tum, I'm ignoring you while wanting to tear you limb from limb', moment while we fumbled with our keys, got into our cars, and drove off in perfect unison, her Range Rover breathing unpleasantly down my neck. It was sooo nice not to have to fumble for my angry French vocabularly, for had we been in France, that would have undoubtably merited a slanging match.

I must own up though. After I got out of my car, I clocked the fact that there was about a metre of free space in front of me, and I could have legally budged up after all. But I decided to deploy another tactic I learned across the Channel.

Never apologise.